'He's not being mean, Mon. It's got nothing to do with him. He's just caught in the middle.'

'Well, it doesn't matter anyway because actually I think I might have some good news.'

Jimmy smiled a weary smile. He couldn't imagine how that could be. There was no prospect of good news ever again. Good news belonged to the era before it had emerged that American banks had been actively persuading penniless itinerants to take out huge mortgages on worthless properties.

'Great,' Jimmy said.

'Lizzie rang today and I ended up telling her how bad things were. I didn't think you'd mind.'

'Mon, she knows. Everybody knows about our cash-flow situation.'

That was how he liked to see their problem, how he lived with it and managed it in his head. It wasn't utter financial ruin, a life-shattering car crash or a cosmic-scale fuck-up. It was just a cash-flow problem. A temporary thing. A money-management challenge to be ridden out. Once their assets regained their proper value, Jimmy would be able to service his debts and begin to rebuild his fortune. The fact that they were almost certain to be declared bankrupt long before that happened was something that Jimmy tried not to acknowledge even to himself.

'I know she knows,' Monica agreed. 'I rather think that was why she rang. She says she and Robson want to help. You know, just with the David thing and the Webb Street development. She hates the idea of all of us mates being in trouble with each other like this.'

'Mon, we don't need fancy sandwiches. I owe David's firm two hundred and fifty thousand in fees already and the same again if we ever complete.'

'She knows, Jim. Laura told her.'

'Laura? Fuck! You mean Dave's wife is trying to get Lizzie to lend us money so we can pay Dave? That is fucked!'

'Why is it fucked? We're all mates, aren't we? Lizzie and Laura were just chatting, that's all, and now Lizzie knows all about it she really wants to help. She says we can put up one of the houses in Webb Street as collateral and pay her back when the recession is over.'

Jimmy looked at Monica. For a moment he wondered if he was hearing right. Whether the tiredness had finally made him unable to understand English.

'You mean she's offering to lend us the money? I mean, a hell of a lot of money?'

'Yes.'

'Unsecured?'

'I suppose so. Whatever that means. Like I say, she says we can put up one of the houses.'

'The houses are all negative equity. That's not a security. They're not properties, just a row of semi-detached debts.'

Monica shrugged. 'She says she'll wait. Till they go back up in value.'

'Until the recession is over?'

'That's what she said.'

Jimmy's initial anger at his old friends discussing his pathetic situation had lasted seconds. Not even that. One second. False pride had never been one of Jimmy's faults.

Now he was elated. Not just elated, ecstatic. He punched the air.

'Yee-ha!' he cried. 'Now that is Rock 'n' Roll!'

One of the symptoms of the extreme exhaustion and stress under which he now lived was that Jimmy found his emotions yo-yoing far more ferociously than they had ever done in his old life. And never so much as at this moment when suddenly he perceived a lifeline to drag him from his troubles. A wave of exhilaration coursed through his body.

'My God, Mon, that would be absolutely brilliant!'

Monica's smile was suddenly as broad as his. She was actually shaking. 'Wouldn't it?'

Jimmy scarcely dared to hope that the situation could be resolved so simply, but of course he knew that it could. Lizzie and her charming but basically useless husband Robson were still rich, very rich. Perhaps she really could help them out, just for a little while. A year.

And it wasn't like he'd be abusing a friendship. And in fact the loan would not be unsecured. He had the security. Of course he had the security. Fuck yes, he had the security. He owned a street. Him and the bank. The fact that the street was currently in negative equity was just a blip. That was all. A blip.

'I'm so glad you're going to let Lizzie and Robson help us, Jim. I'm so sick of this worry.'

'Of course we'll let them help,' Jimmy replied, emptying the rest of the bottle into their glasses before grabbing the phone. 'What's more, in the end we'll make a profit for them on it.'

'Oh Jim. You know Liz and Robbo don't care about money.'

'Yeah,' said Jimmy, 'they can afford not to.'

Lizzie was still rich. Her money was real. Concrete. It was secured by actual concrete stuff. She wasn't like Jimmy. She hadn't built her fortune on the shifting sands of the futures market but on foundations hewn from the solid, timeless rock of people's love of posh things, fabulous design and exquisite nibbles.

Lizzie had parlayed her charm, her good looks, her genuine love of food and her commitment to what she called the 'art of living' into a very substantial lifestyle business. A business that included cookery books, occasional TV appearances, three restaurants and an endless range of beautifully presented Lizzie Food treats. Fortunately for Lizzie and Robbo, despite the deepening financial crisis, there were still enough people left in the world prepared to pay three pounds for a single chilli-soaked olive presented in its own exquisite little box to keep the wolf from the door.

Useless old bugger Lizzie answered the phone herself, of course. In the day she had a full-time PA as well as home helps and a staff of four in the office next door, but her rule was that after six was strictly private time. The staff went home and Lizzie and Robson cosied up and did for themselves. They'd never even had a live-in nanny, just a day girl. Lizzie was proud of the fact that despite a decade of feverish creativity she had never missed a single bedtime.

Of course the fact that Robson was basically a house husband helped. He was nominally a director of Lizzie Food, the company they jointly owned, but everybody knew that dear old Robbo just arsed about a bit and played with the children before shuffling off to the pub or the golf club, where he was an enormously popular figure with his unkempt curly hair, his slight paunch, his ability to make even the most expensively tailored garment look like a sack and his comical ambition to get his handicap down to under forty.

'Good old Robbo,' the members would say to each other as he struggled to find his car keys after a few lunchtime pints. 'Salt of the earth. Do anything for you. Lucky bastard too, catching that wife of his. Gives all of us crap blokes hope.'

Some of the members secretly wondered whether Lizzie might play for the other netball team, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Lizzie loved Robbo deeply and passionately. He was the perfect partner for such a fastidious and restlessly energetic woman, being quite possibly the easiest and most even-tempered man alive. On their famous drunken graduation night it was he who had volunteered to shove the first radish.

It was indeed considered curious that the thing Lizzie loved most in life was the only thing that was not perfectly presented and exquisitely designed. And as the years went by it almost seemed as if Robson was her portrait of Dorian Gray. The more shambolic and shapeless he got, the more utterly perfect everything that Lizzie created seemed to become.

'It's just brilliant genetics,' Jimmy had observed about them on a curry night called to celebrate Lizzie and Robbo's third wedding anniversary, 'like that theory about ugly men marrying beautiful women in order to avoid producing a race of gargoyles.'

'That's not genetics,' Rupert had said, 'that's economics. Beautiful women don't marry poor ugly men.'

'I'm going to!' laughed Jane, an earnest young writer who had recently got engaged to Henry over an unpublished manuscript. Henry tried to smile but it was obvious he didn't find his new girlfriend's joke very funny. Henry was known to be extremely vain about his looks, particularly his splendid mop of blond hair.

'Watch out, Jane,' David observed. 'You don't really know him yet but you'll soon find out that vanity's name is not "woman" but "Henry". In our house in Sussex he spent twice as long in front of the bathroom mirror as any of us, including Lizzie.'

'We live in a shallow media age,' Henry said, trying to sound good-humoured. 'Appearance matters.'

'You're right about the bathroom though, Dave,' Jane said. 'He takes twice as long as me in there too!'

This comment provoked a 'woo-hoo' from the boys as nobody had been quite sure if Jane was yet officially sleeping with Henry. Jane reddened.

'I mean, you know . . . Occasionally,' she said, 'if I've stayed.'

'This is my very point, Jane,' Jimmy insisted, moving swiftly on to cover her embarrassment. 'Nature readjusts, opposites attract. It's Darwinian. If Lizzie and Robbo had married their own types, Lizzie's children would be sad burnouts with OCD and Robbo's children would be good-natured slobs scratching their balls and incapable of feeding themselves or changing the batteries on the TV remote.'

'Isn't that what Robbo is already?' David had asked.

'Guilty as charged!' Robbo volunteered. 'I am one lucky bastard and so I tell anyone who wants to know. The only plea I can offer in mitigation is that I never tried to force myself on her! Not that I wasn't interested, of course. As I recall, we all were. I'll never forget the day you came round, Lizzie, in answer to our ad about a spare room. Ding-dong. Hello! Bin-go! We couldn't believe it.'

'Yes, you did all look rather gob-smacked,' Lizzie said.

'What's this?' Monica asked. 'I thought you lot all moved in together.'

'Not quite,' Jimmy said. 'Us five boys had all been in hall in the first year and when we got a house together in the second year it had a sixth room. We wanted the extra rent so we stuck up an ad. That's when we met Lizzie.'

'God, do you remember?' Henry chipped in. 'First of all we gave the room to that first-year bloke, the guy who didn't want to share the fridge.'

'That's right!' Jimmy said. 'Fuck me, I'd forgotten him. We had to chuck him straight out again, didn't we?'

'We certainly did after Lizzie turned up.' David laughed.

'I'd just split up with my boyfriend, you see,' Lizzie explained to the other girls. 'I mean I wasn't looking to move in with five blokes. I was just desperate.'

'We were bloody desperate!' Robbo exclaimed.

'That first-year chap had to go anyway,' Rupert said firmly. 'What was his name? Graeme?'

'That's right,' Jimmy said. 'Spelt e-m-e at the end, not h-a-m. I can still remember him spelling it out.'

'You see,' Rupert went on, 'that's suspect in itself. Silly bastard kept banging on about Gay Pride too. Like we cared. I told him, I said, listen, mate, gay sex is all very well but I don't want it shoved down my throat!'

'Boom boom!' Robbo shouted.

'So you were the same tolerant, caring, inclusive liberal then as you are today, eh, Rupert?' Monica enquired.

'Well, I thought it was funny anyway,' Rupert said.

'I just remember the bloke was tonto about the fridge,' Jimmy said. 'Bloody idiot wanted to get a ruler and divide it into six separate sections.'

'He did have to go,' David said. 'Lizzie was a bonus.'

'But what a bonus,' Robbo said, raising his glass. 'I was absolutely knocked for six. But as I have already said, I did not pursue her.'

'No, you didn't,' Lizzie chided. 'I had to go after him.'

'Well, what kind of a twat would I have looked trying to get off with a uber-babe like you?' Robson protested. 'Utterly gorgeous, pursued by every rugger bugger on campus. And every bugger in the house. Come on, 'fess up! Rupert, Jimmy, David, Henry, you all had a punt at some point and got nowhere . . .'

'I never knew that,' said Laura, a law graduate who was in the middle of her pupillage and who had been going out with David for about six months.

'Ah, there are more things in heaven, earth and the Radish Club than are dreamt of in your philosophy, darling,' David assured her.

'I didn't get nowhere,' Rupert insisted, grinding out his cigar on an empty raita dish. 'I got a snog.'

'You got a New Year kiss,' Lizzie corrected him, 'and I was very drunk.'

'Well anyway, like I say,' Robbo went on, 'it never would have occurred to me that I stood a chance in hell with Lizzie and I certainly wasn't going to arse around making a fool of myself and getting my heart broken trying to pull totty whose shoes I was clearly not fit to lick. Quite frankly, I'd rather be in the pub getting pissed.'

'And that's where I pulled him,' Lizzie laughed.

'And I don't know about Lizzie,' Robbo shouted, raising his glass, 'but I personally have lived happily ever after! Garcon! More beer!'

'You can get the man out of the pub,' said Jimmy, clinking his glass against Robson's, 'but you will never get the pub out of the man.'

'And confusion on anybody who tries!' Robson shouted, accepting his pint, quaffing half of it and accidentally putting it down on a spoon so that it fell over and the rest of its contents spilt across the table.

'Come on, you, that's your lot,' Lizzie said, as she had said a hundred times before. 'Home time.'

'A nasty lasty, love, surely?' Robbo protested. 'I spilt most of that one.'

'Exactly,' said Liz, 'which might be God's way of telling you you've had enough. Any more and I won't let you drive, and you know how you hate me changing gear on Churchill.'

Churchill was Robbo's big and beloved old Wolseley, a vehicle as comfortable, as shambling, as worn-looking and as terminally unhip as he was, and driving it was (as Robbo was the first to admit) the only thing that Robbo did better than his beloved wife.

'Yes, can't have that.' Robbo got up. 'I shall have to drink your health at home.'

'Come on, Rob!' Jimmy protested. 'You can't go yet, we're celebrating your wedding anniversary.'

'And the reason there's an anniversary to celebrate, mate,' Robbo replied, 'is that I have discovered the secret of a successful marriage. Do what your bloody wife tells you! The bill's on our account. Don't order any malts older than your last girlfriend, Rupert.'

'Lovely!' Rupert beamed. 'An eighteen-year-old Glenfiddich.'

Rupert had been a mature student and was already thirty-three.

'Honestly, Rupert,' David scolded. 'Have you ever dated a girl who's made it to her twenties?'

'Well, I certainly try not to.'

'But what do you find to talk about?' David enquired.

'Talk? We don't fucking talk.'

'Night, all,' Robbo said, leaning over to kiss the ladies goodbye. Inevitably his glasses and fountain pen slipped out of his top pocket and into a half-finished massala.

'Don't put them back in your pocket, Robbo!' Lizzie shrieked. 'Let me wipe them properly.'

But it was too late. Robbo had already scooped up his glasses and having given them a cursory wipe had put them back in his jacket, thus depositing bright-red curry sauce all over it.

'God, Robbo, you are such a klutz!' Lizzie said as if scolding a ten-year-old. 'Don't worry, I shall iron the grease out over brown paper.'

'Actually I wasn't worried,' Robbo said, turning and winking at the lads as Lizzie headed for the door, then adding, 'God! Look behind you, Henry! It's Neil Kinnock!'

Henry fell for it like a sack of spuds. Robbo had grabbed his pint of Kingfisher and sunk half of it before Henry realized he'd been had.

'Got to grab it while I can, Henry,' Robson said. 'When your lot get into power you'll probably ban beer.'

Lovely, lovely things Lizzie was truly a pioneer of the lovely, lovely thing. Without Lizzie and a few others like her, the populations of Notting Hill, Kensington, Primrose Hill and many other not quite so salubrious but rapidly 'improving' areas of London in the late nineties would have had nothing to give each other for Christmas.