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After a cursory warm-up – Neil is a quick knee-bend, spit on the ground and off we go man – they begin to jog, no faster than a brisk walk at first, heading left down Main Street.
‘Job in Surbiton,’ Neil says once they hit their stride. ‘Loft, kitchen extension, then, get this, they want all the internal walls on the ground floor taken down. All of them. No walls at all, just the staircase. No hallway, nothing.’
‘Can you do that? I mean, I know you can, but in a domestic dwelling?’
‘Structural engineer’s looking at it.’
‘Johnnie?’
‘God, no.’ He spits again, as if for emphasis. ‘Some guy lives up in Sunbury, seems like a good bloke actually. Thorough, you know?’
Matt nods. ‘So he thinks he can do it?’
Neil sniffs, the deft head-flick of a footballer, a third spit into the gutter. ‘Can’t see why not. Enough steels will hold anything up. Just can’t understand why they don’t want a hallway. I mean, where are they going to put all the crap, the coats and shoes and all that?’
‘You can go too minimalist, I suppose,’ Matt offers.
‘Too right. It’s a house not a bloody art gallery. And it’s Surbiton, not New York, know what I mean? All a bit marble floor in a council flat if you ask me.’
The residential part of the main road recedes; a bus rumbles past the scattered shopfronts, the Indian takeaway, a chippy, a nail bar and two pubs – almost the sum total of Hampton Wick village. Out on the street, it’s dead, the only evidence of life a group of four old men smoking roll-ups outside the Woodcutter. Matt and Neil continue, tacitly agreeing to head under the railway bridge and back up Thameside. Any further and they’ll have to cross Kingston Bridge and run up the riverbank. Which means crossing by Teddington Lock.
And that’s not an option.
‘We need to have you guys round,’ Matt says, out of habit. ‘Maybe a takeaway on Friday?’
‘I’ll check with Bel. Work’s been mad.’
No, then. As usual. ‘So you said.’
‘How’s your work going anyway?’
‘Good. Busy.’
‘You still doing that place in Kensington?’
‘Almost finished. Looks good. I’ll send you some pics.’
‘What did you end up doing?’
Neil’s interest is real. When they were at school, he used to joke that he was all good in practice; Matt all good in theory. This, in fact, has manifested itself exactly – Neil on the building side, Matt a city architect – something that amuses them both. But Matt is thankful that he’s not a domestic architect. He loves Neil, he does, but Neil doesn’t like being told what to do by anyone, let alone his best mate, so it would have pushed things had they worked together. As it is, they can keep their professional lives apart without any awkwardness.
It was Ava who pointed out to Matt that Neil’s authority issues might stem from never having known his father, from being the man of the house since he was old enough to remember, although Matt has never spoken about this with him. Certainly it is this independent spirit more than anything that has spurred him on to work so hard and start his own business. He is – has always been – frank about wanting to be his own boss and to earn as much money as he possibly can. By twenty-eight, when Matt was barely qualified, Neil had installed his mother in a new-build riverside flat, for which he paid cash by borrowing against the mortgage he took out on the former family home. By contrast, Matt’s parents sold their house to him at a ridiculously competitive price when they moved back north and helped him substantially with the deposit. As it stands, neither of them could possibly afford to move to the street they live on now had they not lived there since childhood.
‘The front is all that’s left of the original,’ Matt says against the hum of a passing car and the whiff of stale alcohol from Neil’s deepening breaths. ‘The entire front is Victorian, London brick, then you go in and boom! Glass, clean lines, white colour palette; you’d think it was a brand-new building. Which it is. Apart from the front. You have to go inside to realise it’s all a facade.’
‘Wicked. Sounds awesome. So will that help you with the directorship?’
‘Hopefully. We’ll have to see. Bidding for a cool project in the East End right now, an old brewery, so we’ll see if that comes through.’
Eight kilometres later, up and around Twickenham and back down again, they duck back along Thameside Lane, past the playing fields, and finally right into Riverside Drive. The Lovegoods’ larger detached house stands at the end, its freshly laid York stone driveway not yet greened, its newly planted beds for the moment free from weeds. The paintwork is immaculate.
A few more strides and they’re outside Matt and Ava’s semi.
Matt wipes his forehead with the back of his hand and nods towards the Lovegoods’ pristine house. ‘Did you get the invite for their housewarming?’
Neil is panting, hands on his hips. He too looks at the house, back to Matt. ‘Yeah.’
‘You going?’
