My own accommodation was a little different from Emily’s. I lived with a young woman who was not my girlfriend on the Kingsland Road in Dalston, in a place my friends and I named ‘the château’ when we moved in eleven years ago. It’s a two-bedroom flat that during our tenancy has regularly been a three-bedroom and six-person flat. We didn’t need to have so many people living here to afford the place but it always felt selfish to have a living room and kitchen when a friend needed somewhere cheap to live. The happiest times I remember here were those times when we spoke always about how much we hated living here, when I lived with my friends Stuart and Lenny and our girlfriends, Monica, Kate and Anya, queuing in the winter mornings for a shower, the ceiling paint flaking down like snow, or when we crammed into the kitchen to try to make dinner, to find space in the fridge, to locate the milk, Hoover or ironing board, our keys, our hash, a stash of cocaine lost three years ago during a party which we still remained optimistic would one day show up, and one day did, in a secret compartment not one of us remembered hacking out of The Line of Beauty with a razor blade. Monica was the first to leave, when she took what was going to be a two-year job in Melbourne. Stuart and Kate left a year ago to buy a house in Margate; and for a while Lenny and I had rooms to ourselves and the rare luxury of a living room (Anya was staying mostly at her parents’ by then). We had lived together for nearly ten years, earning what money we needed in ways we found convenient; Lenny made it that long as a musician and professional skateboarder before he was eventually defeated by the idea of a ‘career’ when the fear of not having one became magnified out of all proportion by marijuana-smoking. He is back in Coventry at his parents’ now, working as a teaching assistant. When I speak to him on the phone he is happier than he was during those last years in London, those anticlimactic months when we had what we had always thought we wanted: a TV and a sofa in a room designed for TV-watching. It was not enough. ‘For years I was convinced something awful was going to happen to me,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s happened now. It’s much better now I know what it is.’ I hadn’t wanted to replace Lenny in a hurry; it was not urgent on such low rent, and it might have seemed indecent, like marrying again weeks after being widowed; but then I met Mary.