'No, I got them yesterday,' she said, meaning the plants. 'I needed some foliage for reference.' She went on to tell me she had been commissioned to design a calendar for a chain of nurseries. 'Four garden pictures, one for each season.'
She told me the name of the chain, but I had never been a gardener and it rang no bells. I assumed Sophie knew the people who owned it, or maybe they were affiliated to one of the dozens of companies with which her father had been associated in his lifetime. Sophie got most of her freelance commissions from friends, but even if she hadn't done, she would have found plenty of buyers. There was always a market for her precious floral doodlings; they went down well with mothers, or aunts, or, in my case, grannies, but for some reason they also went down well with picture editors on the more upmarket magazines. Sophie's idea of illustration was to fiddle away, delineating pernickety little details with a needle-nibbed Rapidograph. When Sophie drew a flower, you could pick out each microscopic grain of pollen. You could make out the hairs on the backs of her leaves.
Up until now, I'd been thinking the flat was all right, but nothing special. The rooms were a decent size, but I would have expected Sophie to have gone for something grander, especially since price wasn't an issue. But as soon as we entered the living-room, I felt like weeping with envy. Now I understood what she saw in the place. The room was magnificently proportioned — parquet flooring, lofty ceilings — and rounded off by a pair of French windows which let the afternoon light stream in. There wasn't just space for a grand piano here; there was room for an entire chamber orchestra.
Even so, there was scope for improvement. The walls, for example, were brown. At first glance, I thought they had been coated with cappuccino paint in line with one of Sophie's La Mia Casa-inspired colour schemes, but on closer inspection it was obvious that Lemmy and Dirk hadn't been anywhere near them. I stretched out a hand and wiped a pale trail across the nearest wall with my fingers.
'Nice,' I said, wrinkling my nose at the smell of the sticky brown deposit on my fingertips.
'Don't mock,' said Sophie. 'It took fifty years of chain-smoking to achieve this subtle shade of tar.'
'Who lived here before? The Marlboro Man? I bet he died of lung cancer.'
'That's probably why the rent's so cheap,' said Sophie.
I turned to see if she was smiling. Cheap was not a word she used often. 'How cheap?'
She told me how much rent she was paying, and it wasn't what you'd call cheap at all, though it might have been a shade less than the going rate. I felt the pang I always felt when life was unfair, which these days seemed to be all too often.
'Look at this place,' I said, trying and failing to keep the resentment out of my voice. 'This room on its own is almost as big as my entire flat. And the location! You know I'd give anything to live round here.'
Sophie shrugged. It never occurred to her that other people couldn't live wherever they pleased. Some of us had to rely on hard-won housing trust accommodation at the unfashionable end of town.
'I'm not here for ever,' she said. 'Miles will sort himself out soon enough, and then maybe you can take over here when I move back.'
'Maybe,' I said, knowing full well I would never be able to afford rent like Sophie's. I couldn't even get on a council list in the area, unlike Dirk, who had inadvertently landed his and Lemmy's flat by passing out in the street after too many Diazepam and waking up to find himself at the head of a mile-long sleeping-bagged queue for high-rise housing.
In the meantime, I was stuck out in Hackney. Not through choice; it just happened to be where I'd ended up, and now I felt as though I'd never escape. Sophie had visited once, arriving with the air of someone who had just negotiated a sniper's alley in Sarajevo, and expressing horror that there wasn't a tube station in the vicinity, even though you probably could have counted on the fingers of one hand the occasions on which Sophie had travelled on the tube.
Getting from Hackney to Notting Hill was trial by public transport. It was a journey I made several times a week, and I had tried all the permutations, and there still wasn't a simple solution. You could go by bus and then tube, or by overland train and then tube, or — if you were feeling bold — by foot, bus and tube. Or you could go by taxi, of course, if you were either very, very rich, or very, very mad.
My obsession with Notting Hill was born on a Saturday night during those precious two years that I'd had to myself, when Sophie was off studying in Florence and I was left to my own devices in London. Freed from her influence for the very first time, I'd begun to make friends of my own, and one of these friends was going out with a man who knew someone who knew someone else who was giving a party one Saturday night, and so we decided to invite ourselves along. It wasn't the first time I'd been to Notting Hill, but it was the first time I realized it was special.
We wandered around the streets, weaving in and out of Portobello Road and Chepstow Villas and Ladbroke Grove and the roads between, laughing and giggling and going round in circles, stopping to gulp down a quick pint in every pub we passed, until finally we arrived, more or less by accident, at our destination.
It was the first truly grown-up non-student party I'd attended. Nobody snogged or danced or drank so much that they passed out in the middle of the floor. The other guests were older and wiser. They all had highly paid creative jobs, and sat around reeking of expensive perfume and smoking dope and discussing films and shows I'd barely heard of, let alone seen. I was introduced to a film-maker, and a couple of painters, and a chef, and a literary agent or two. They were all charming, shared their drugs, and included me in their conversations, but it was obvious I had nothing to say. I drank and smoke and blurted gaffe after gaffe, too drunk and stoned to care, and they were too kind to set me straight. For the first time in my life, I felt at home, I felt like one of them.
It was only afterwards I realized that, for one evening and one evening only, I had been granted a temporary visa to the promised land.
I never saw any of those people again, though they live on in my memory, suspended forever in a dazzling fragment of frozen time in which they will never wither or lose their sheen. Many times, I tried to retrace my footsteps to the house in which the party had taken place. I half-remembered passing a gatepost topped off by a sleeping lion, and pushing through the low-slung branches of an overgrown garden, and I combed every inch of W11, but couldn't find the street, let alone the building.
Then Sophie's father died, and she came back from Italy to join me at art college and we ended up living together in a house in Parson's Green and I started to rely on her again and things went back to the way they'd been before, with me feeling as though she were somehow leaving me behind. It was then, in a last despairing bid for autonomy, that I dredged up the memory of that glittering evening — a memory in which Sophie had played no part — and attempted to rerun what was left of it in my head. By now the tape was warped by the passage of time, and parts of the recording were indistinct, or missing altogether, and I cursed myself for not having been more alert, for not having consciously committed more details to memory, and for having drunk too much, though I knew perfectly well that, had I been sober, I would have spent the entire evening languishing in the kitchen or on the stairs.
But that was how Notting Hill became the yardstick by which I was to judge all other areas of London, not to mention the rest of life. Notting Hill was my Shangri-La and El Dorado, my Mecca and Middle Earth. It gave off a warm glow I could feel all the way across town. It whispered seductively to me, it beckoned and teased, and I knew, just knew, that if only I could move to an address with a W11 postal code, everything in my life would be perfect.