On my way back to Amy’s, I went by a park at the peak of the hill and stopped to look down at the city, at my life for the last fifteen years as a distant sparkle on the horizon beyond Canary Wharf. I typed the château’s postcode into Google Maps – twelve miles away as the crow flies. An hour and ten minutes’ cycle, an hour and twenty by public transport. If I moved here I would hardly ever go back again, and I wouldn’t meet the same sort of people when I went out, the earnestly cool people, the anxiously fashionable young who were as optimistic and decent and vain and self-obsessed as any other people and who I condescended to only out of my worst instincts. The people I talked to when I smoked outside bars, those who I liked much more than I disliked. How much older would I become without them around me? Amy’s theory was that exactly these people would move here, and open cafés and bars and bike shops, and we’d sell the flat to them for a decent profit, doing our little bit to make the city expensive for them and survivable for us. But when I looked at these interwar terraces squatting sullenly, I saw what a long-term project this might be, longer than my lifetime. The most sensible young people would abandon London for the west and the north, this country for Berlin and Lisbon and Athens, if they still could, long before they colonised this far. Start again. Declare the place finished. Even London could not be entirely gentrified. People in my position should have taken heart from this but we were conflicted. The wall had been low enough for us to look over at the enemy; a part of us wanted to climb over and forgive them if they promised not to set the dogs on us.

*

Amy was on her own when I got back.

‘Where’s he gone?’ I said.

‘He’s gone to meet a friend for a couple of hours.’

‘You haven’t fallen out already, have you?’

‘No. He was always going to do that. There’s nothing romantic happening,’ she warned me.

‘Do you want there to be?’

‘In this state?’

‘Well, it is his baby. Doesn’t mean there can’t be romance.’

‘I’m not thinking any further than this.’ She put her hands on her stomach. ‘Now tell me about the flats.’

I told her about them. We looked again at the one I liked online, and then I rang the estate agent to make an offer, at a price dictated by Amy, who would go round and see the place for herself the next day. The estate agent said she’d get back to me.