Free Confessions of a Sugar Mummy by Emma Tennant

suddenly feeling their age) and he replies, lightly, ‘no, it’s not us—we’re in property’, and looks across the table at me over the grotesque shadow thrown by the candle. I know he waits for me to say what I want to say and he will answer, as in a prewritten and directed script.
    â€˜When I sell my flat’, I say haltingly—and Alain’s face is like stone now, there isn’t a way of telling he’seven listening—’When I sell, I thought I’d split the sale money in half, invest one half in a buy-to-let and live in a flat, somewhere smaller, on the income the other half provides.’
    Alain nods. I wonder if he actually knows what a buy-to-let is. ‘I thought’, I go on, ‘if you look after the renovation of the investment flat …’
    I can hear myself grinding to a halt as a picture of a completely tiled flat, a mini-
riad
(why not add the palms?) swims into my mind.
    â€˜Will I own some of that flat?’ asks Alain.
    So there you are. It turned out we both had the same thing in mind. I outlined the risks involved in accepting my proposition—that all the renovation work (including tiling, of course: I’ve always thought grouting one of its more exhausting aspects) would be done by Alain for no pay. But that on resale of the investment property he would receive twenty-five percent of the profits, this is known as Uplift (I’d taken pains to understand all aspects with my accountant).
    If, of course, there were no profits, Alain would receive nothing. But the market is going up, isn’t it? And surely poor foot-loose Alain would at last be able to place the proverbial foot where it so badly needs to be, on the property ladder.
    On my side of the deal, if there’s a slump I hang on to the flat and let it, selling when prices rise what is basically a developed property without having had to pay for the renovations. Alain would get nothing.
    And I find—as the moon shines imperturbably on and I explain what ‘equity’ means (the money invested in a property)—that I’m veering away from a percentage of possible profits to handing Alain a slice of equity.
    It is, I decide, worth the risk on my part after all.
    I mean, suppose Alain and I were to live together in the investment flat and use the other half of the sale proceeds of Saltram Crescent for having a wonderful time …
    It was Midsummer Night alright. ‘It sounds a good idea’, Alain agrees, and who wouldn’t think that when handed the value of twenty-five percent of a prime area flat? ‘There’s Claire’, he goes on, ‘do you know, we’ve been together for twenty-four years—imagine, she was thirty-four and I was twenty-four when we met …’
    I say nothing, because there really is nothing to say. Am I supposed to house this couple, people I hardly know?
    â€˜We’ll find a compromise’, Alain says, staring past the candle straight into my face.
    The drive back to W9 was over—so it seemed to me at least—in a second or two, with Alain just as cheerful as he had been at dinner and me trying to fight amazement and disappointment together. What had I done? I didn’t want to think about it yet.
    But I wasn’t surprised to hear Howie’s snores when I let myself in (the little red car darted off even before I had clambered painfully up the steps).
    Howie was asleep on the sitting-room sofa. Molly’s kicked-off Oxfam sandals lay on the floor nearby—but, as I knew, this didn’t necessarily mean intimacy had taken place. She and Howie had probably been discussing the huge offer on my flat.
    I can trust no one now. Property is death.

Scam
— is he really after my money?

19
    â€˜It’s the plot of
The Wings of the Dove.
’ Molly lies back on the sofa, sandals still abandoned on the floor, a statement which declares that I, Scarlett, may go out to dinner if I