Bethany Read Free

that half-wild childhood had never quite left Alex, and having worked hard for ten years in London to buy herself a proper house, she then set about reducing it to a wooden shack, since that was home. So at least I reasoned.
    And yet none of these was the worst thing. The worst thing was so bad that I did not let myself think about it. It was that Alex, having tired, presumably, of playing such small games with her house, had staked it in a property gamble. That had not been the intention, but that was the result.
    She had bought very cheaply, with money borrowed from her father, the freehold of a building in London on which she held a lease. She had intended to do the place up quickly and let it. It was a shrewd idea: the property was in a run-down area which was about to become smart. But a structural flaw requiring work on the foundations was found, and a property boom sent building costs rocketing, and Alex ran short of money. She approached the bank and negotiated a £10,000 loan on very little security. She had a way with bank managers. The money somehow disappeared without very much to show for it, since Alex, in an attempt to get the work done cheaply, had hired some self-employed builders who smoked pot all day and built nothing at all. In the end, having taken the roof off to build an extra storey, Alex found herself without the money to put it back on. Matters were not helped by the fact that the building, listed as being of architectural interest, was such anodd shape that it was unlikely that any design so far produced for the roof would be structurally sound in any case.
    A number of things then happened at once. The property market collapsed, and Alex, attempting to sell the property to recoup, found that nobody wanted to buy a building without a roof. The architect resigned from the job when simultaneously his nerve broke and his wife left him. Alex found a new architect who turned out not only to be incompetent but to have an unhealthy interest in the amount of building materials the job involved, and refused to pay him. He sued. Alex counter-sued. The neighbour sued for damage to his harpsichords. A small-time gangster told Alex that he wanted the building for a pornographic bookshop and blue film club and would buy it at his price, failing which he would cut off her toes, and Alex, too incensed to feel fear, drank him under the table and consulted her young Jewish solicitor, who dialled a few numbers and got the gangster moved on by the local Mafia. Alex subsequently regretted this, since the gangster’s offer was the best she ever got for the building.
    The bank began to press for repayment of the loan, or at least a reduction of the interest, which was mounting alarmingly. Alex had no money, neither did I. The bank asked for Bethany to be offered as security. Alex bluffed, hedged, prevaricated, pretended not to hear, pretended not to understand … and in the end signed a piece of paper. A ghost moved in to live with us.
    As I raked the bean-patch, Alex’s debt to the bank stood at £18,000 give or take a hundred or two. The only way of raising this sum was by sale of the London property which nobody wanted to buy, and in any case the debt probably now exceeded the property’s value. If the money was not found within about a year, the bank would start pressing Alex to sell Bethany. What could I do? The capital sum was so far beyond my reach that it might as well have been a million, while even the weekly compound interest, multiplying like a cancer, was approximately twice my weekly earnings. The only person who couldsave the situation was the person who had caused it, but Alex, who could always see a perplexing number of sides to every question, was paralysed by indecision. Make an effort to get a roof on the building? Advertise it yet again as it stood? Apply for a change in planning permission? Make Bethany over to me, in hope that the bank could not take it? Or just skip the