It’s 9 in the morning. I’m at my desk, coffee in hand and about to start a tedious Teams meeting, when my phone rings to tell me that I have a WhatsApp message.
‘Hello darling! Would you like to have lunch today? There’s a cute new place on the High Street I’m dying to try!’ It’s from my friend Liz, who texts me from bed as usual and seems to have forgotten that I have a job.
But of course, his life is very different from mine.
Although, like me, she is only 60 years old, she has been gloriously retired for ten years, since inheriting the earnings of a large house and a lucrative stock portfolio from her late father. While I’m in meetings, worrying about how the hell I’ll be able to help my son with college expenses and dreading the MOT on my bad car, she likes to spend the day wandering around the chi-chi shops of our affluent suburb, combing her hair. and nails done, doing Pilates with your personal trainer or planning another vacation.
To add to my sadness, another message appears in a group chat. Alison wants our opinion on a house in France she is considering as a second home – “so lovely for a little retreat” – after inheriting a similar amount of cash from her mother two years ago.
The joy of pretending to be calm with the new wealth of friends, before continuing with dinners and the occasional trip to the theater, drains the credit card.
I love my friends. But, I admit, I also have a heartbreaking, soul-destroying envy of them. And I’m afraid it’s starting to sour our friendships.
You see, until a few years ago, we were all pretty much in the same boat, financially. None of us were particularly successful, we had attended public schools, most of us had gone to college, which is where I met Liz and Alison, and we were lucky enough to find interesting, if not terribly lucrative, middle-class jobs. .
My friends worked variously in publishing, as graphic designers, and in charity fundraising. Ironically, of all of us, I probably had the most important career. I was working in advertising at a large agency when my daughter, my second daughter, now in her twenties, was born with additional needs. Deciding to be self-employed made sense for my family, if not financially, and in addition to payroll, it also meant goodbye to my last salary pension.
When we were younger, my friends, like me, lived in modest houses and were more likely to spend their holidays in Wales in a damp cabin than in the Mediterranean. I felt like we were more or less in the same boat.
What I hadn’t counted on was that they were born into the middle class and I, frankly, wasn’t. I grew up poor on a municipal farm. My parents separated when I was a teenager and my father moved in with his father in their council house and my mother stayed in our flat, where she still lives.
My husband also grew up on a council estate and moved from Manchester to London to pursue a music career. When that didn’t take off, he lost all ambition and worked part-time giving music lessons to children. This seemed fine when I earned a good salary and our friends thought he was wonderful. But it’s just another factor in our current depressing financial situation.
So I’ll keep going, making excuses when I can’t afford things, trying to swallow the bile and hoping they don’t notice.
As the years passed, more and more of us sadly lost our parents. I was one of the first. My father suffered a heart attack when I was 44 years old. He limped on for a while, then succumbed to complications, leaving me with a house full of two generations of treasured tattoos and, oddly enough, enough savings to cover his funeral.
Liz’s widowed father passed away, a year after her mother. We all joined together, just as my friends had joined me. But I confess that I thought at least his grief had a positive side. Liz’s father had worked in finance and now, as an only child, Liz was so rich she would never need to work again, so she didn’t.
Then my friend Alison’s divorced mother passed away, leaving her estate to Alison and her brother. She didn’t look rich, but the value of her London house, bought with a teacher’s salary in the 1970s, was now worth a couple of million.
Even though the inheritance tax affected the estate, Alison was still set for life. But what has hurt even more is the way another friend, Helen, has been able to prepare her children for life.
Helen’s father separated from her mother when she was young, and we often commiserated about being the children of divorced, warring parents. He settled in America with his younger lover and rarely saw his daughter, so I never realized how rich he was until he died.
A year ago, over tea in her perfectly normal kitchen, Helen mentioned that, although she had left her money to share with her four children, there would still be enough, she said cheerfully, to ensure that her three adult children could now buy flats. own.
Don’t get me wrong, all the guys are smart, decent and successful, and I shouldn’t begrudge them an advantage in this real estate market. But I couldn’t help but compare their good fortune to the situation of my own children. My daughter, who still lives with us, will need lifelong care which means we cannot sell our house in Kent and downsize. And there is no other way I could dream of giving property to our son.
When Helen complained at length about how long it was taking her to unravel her father’s affairs in America, my tea turned to ashes in my mouth. I made my excuses, left and didn’t return his texts. I know it’s terribly unreasonable. She hasn’t done anything wrong, but I’m struggling to deal with my resentment.
What has been truly disheartening is realizing that my belief that I had “leveled up” and become as middle class as my friends was just an illusion. Or should I say, an illusion. When we complained together about our mortgages and bills, they always had a comforting buffer against poverty in old age that I wouldn’t have. I realize that I was always middle class in the most superficial and precarious way. And, frankly, it’s eating me alive.
I pretend to be okay with their newfound wealth and they don’t realize that keeping up with dinners and the occasional trip to the races or the theater has maxed out my credit card. But recently Alison said something that made me realize that she and Liz discuss their investments together, something they never do in front of me. I guess they’re being sensitive, but again, it makes me feel like I don’t belong in their gang anymore.
I also wonder if they pity me. Alison is willing to tell me that I can visit the house in France “whenever I want,” which is undeniably nice, but it makes me feel like a poor relation in a Jane Austen novel. And Liz announces more and more ‘I’ll invite you!’ when he suggests we go out, which, again, is incredibly kind of him, but it just emphasizes how different our lives are now.
Since I need to work while they are comfortably retired, they can get together when I can’t. I’m so terrified of my future that I try not to think about it. Because the state pension is so miserable, I have to work until the lid of my coffin is nailed down. But I worry that we’re losing jobs due to age discrimination, and I know that’s probably only going to get worse. Do I really want to compete with bright young people in their 30s when I’m close to 70?
I started to think I might apply to work on the cash register at our local Waitrose in a couple of years. What stops me is thinking about the awkwardness of scanning Helen’s champagne and Charlie Bingham’s dinner parties.
My other worry about how poor I will be when I can no longer work is that if I can’t keep up with my lifestyles, will the gap between us become a chasm?
I tell myself that they have paid a high price for their money, having lost one or both parents (while I still have my increasingly fragile mother), that there are many people who are much worse off than me and that no one has the right to an inheritance. . But it doesn’t really work. Sometimes I think about being honest about my feelings, but I’d hate to make them feel guilty or uncomfortable or even think I’m looking for a handout, which would be completely humiliating. So I’ll keep going, making excuses when I can’t afford things, trying to swallow the bile and hoping they don’t notice.
The names have been changed.