Waiting for real life to start?

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jan 12, 2008 

He lived in the flat above a friend of mine, 20 or more years ago. It was a block of serviced flats in South Kensington, London, one of those lonely, colourless buildings with a maroon-suited man on the desk, a cold lump of sculpture in the lobby and a lift which whisked you soundlessly from floor to floor.

It wasn't the kind of place where real people lived and my friend, who was beginning to be a successful documentary maker but really only wanted to get married and have a load of babies, swore she wasn't staying long. But she did stay, because it was that kind of place: a place where people accidentally spent years waiting for their real lives to start. Some died waiting. One evening as we ate supper we both watched through the window as a black van drew up, collected a human shaped, zipped-up bag, then drove away again. It was hard to carry on with our paella after that.

Actually, nothing in that place seemed to thrive. Down in the vast airless lobby, yuccas went brown and crisp at the edges, placed too close to shrill, hot lights. My friend complained that the service charges were exorbitant and she really resented being forced to shell out for a new lobby carpet before the old one had begun to wear out. I asked why she didn't move somewhere cheaper and more normal - a one-bedroom flat in a regular house, for instance. "That's the trouble," she sighed, "you get used to someone always on the desk. It's just too convenient here."

But wasn't it lonely? She didn't know a soul in the building, after all. "The guys on the desk are very nice," she said. I told her that was only because they didn't actually live there; you could sense the chaos and warmth of real family life lurking beneath their uniforms. "Anyway," said my friend, "just the other day I had quite a long chat with Tony from upstairs. He's quite interesting, actually."

Tony. So that was his name. The man from the flat above whom I'd sometimes smiled at in the lift. His hair was grey but his face was young. He couldn't be more than 30. "He's a rare-book dealer," my friend said. "I think he deals from his flat. I hear his television a lot. I swear he watches until two or three in the morning."

My friend kept on trying to invite Tony round for a drink after that but he was always busy, or else away on business, or his mother was coming round. Finally, she told me he'd invited us for dinner. "Us?"

"He says he's seen you lots of times around the place. Anyway, you've got to come; it would be way too strange to go on my own."

It was pretty strange with two of us as well. We half-expected Tony to have invited other people but he hadn't. It was just us. We arrived at 8pm and he asked if we'd like to see round his flat. We said yes, partly out of politeness and partly out of genuine curiosity. It was a slightly bigger version of my friend's flat below but it felt smaller because it was filled with so much sombre, dark antique furniture. And books. Piles and piles of them. "They're great company," he said and I could tell he was only half joking.

In the sitting room, dinner lay under a pink cloth. "I hope you're OK with poached salmon," Tony said as he eased the cork out of a bottle of champagne, "only my lady thought that, given the weather, it would be all right to do something cold."

Lady? Tony explained that he had a woman who came in at 8am to do his breakfast, then went away and returned to make dinner. I stared. This man was young. Could he really not get his own breakfast? Tony tried to laugh. "I do sometimes squeeze myself some fresh orange," he said. "But I don't like rinsing the juicer afterwards. It's so sticky."

Over dinner Tony told us about his mother, who was wheelchair-bound and lived around the corner, about his early childhood in Malaysia, about his father, who had never liked him much. He said he would love to find a nice woman and settle down and have a family but he didn't see it happening any time soon. He had his mother to think of, for a start.

"I think he's gay," my friend whispered to me after we'd finally said goodnight and were in the lift.

"Or lonely," I said and then we burst out laughing all over again about the sticky orange juicer he was incapable of rinsing.

I met Tony once more after that. I think my friend had a drinks party and Tony's mother had recently died and he and I stood in a corner and argued about some TV programme. And it was a couple of years after that - after my friend had married her farmer and moved out of London - that we heard the shocking news. One night Tony had drunk a bottle of Scotch and gone up on to the roof of the building and jumped.

His body had been found in the morning by the poor man on the desk. No one had a clue why he'd done it. He left no note. But maybe only because there was no one to write one to.