he did , however , give her the name and address of a very good lawyer who had got him an injunction to restrain a firm from publishing a book until the author had removed a passage attacking him for some slander which had been , in fact , a case of privilege . in spite of all the transferred maternity she was endowed with by her patients , poor Serena was an infant-in-arms as a buyer of property . no , not even an infant-in-arms but a new-born babe , a premature piece of frailty in an oxygen-tent of utter innocence . the complexity of that innocence was colossal . it had layer after layer of illusion to be peeled off and replaced with sad knowledgeability . it was a nakedness of nai&quot;vety to be clothed leaf by leaf with the disappointment of experience . her first illusion consisted in the belief that all she need do was to go to an agent , visit half a dozen houses in one day , choose one , make an offer , put it in the hands of a lawyer and go away on her holiday while the whole transaction was put through . at the worst , she could postpone their holiday , if she did n&apos;t find anything she liked at once . August would after all be a little hot for Greece . all that mattered was moving . for quite suddenly she could n&apos;t stand their flat any more . she must come back to something new , even if it meant shortening their trip abroad or taking an extra week off to get settled in . she soon found that Tom Stevens was right about the prices , whatever their cause . the market , moreover , seemed more like one of her graph representations of a psychotic &apos;s dream world than a rational state of affairs carefully calculated by a handful of wicked speculators , though she supposed that these latter might well be the chosen instruments of the city &apos;s collective unconscious . for the prices of houses bore no relation whatsoever to their size , beauty , or convenience , only to some lunatic hierarchy of districts by which any area , however traffic-ridden , that could by any considerable wrench of the imagination be called a Village , was also the most plutocratic in its price-range ; that is , any piece of town with one pretty street , square , corner , stretch of river , bit of heath , common or park , round which lesser , uglier streets clustered hopefully , borrowing the same name for themselves as crescents , gardens , garden-crescents , rises , hills , hill-rises , ways and ends , mewses , lanes , groves and vales , could aspire to and perhaps eventually earn the name of Village . slum terraces and workers &apos; cottages would be bought up , sometimes by enterprising individuals but more often by the wicked speculators for a profitable sale to less enterprising individuals , and one by one the black brick houses would turn white , or pink or blue , with bright yellow doors and flower-boxes in the windows . this street , the agents would say , has n&apos;t quite come . when it did so , and several more around it , the area would at last receive by way of final decoration and of course price-promotion , the name of Village . second to Villages were the best residential areas , where the affluent middle class had always lived , but they were , after all , limited and unexpandable , and now that practically everyone was affluent middle-class , the best residential areas were so much in demand that prices shot up well beyond the range of the affluent middle-class , and only the milk-bar millionaires lived there , expense-account experts , some of the more successful comedians , the odd reckless film-star , and of course the speculators themselves . fortunately , however , the fashion for Victorian architecture which Mr John Betjeman had started several decades before had caught on at last and therefore saved the situation for the affluent middle-class , who now had plenty of lovely-ugly to be coldly elegant in . all this Serena discovered , and more , but in stages . for the first thing she did was to make an offer on a small pink terraced cottage , two beds , two inter-comm rec , mod k and b , sep W.C small back yard , newly dec , near shops and tube in up-and-coming Camden Town Village , &amp;pound;6,000 freehold . the next thing that Serena discovered was that she could not afford to buy a house at all . and this in spite of having at last managed to save the ten percent needed . or so she thought , being then in possession of what seemed to her the princely sum of six hundred pounds . the lawyer said : of course you must count about two hundred for legal charges and stamp duties , maybe less , depending on the price of the house , and whether it has been registered . I take it you have a mortgage lined up , then , Mrs - er - Buttery ? not yet , but the bank would give me a loan , I &apos;m sure . er , yes . you have some securities , then ? well , no . just my work . and my husband &apos;s . no &amp;hellip; life insurance ? Serena had more in common with Stella than she realised , for the word security had meant little to her until now , when she felt this sudden urge to buy property , paying off a mortgage like rent for twenty years and then living free of expense , she thought , when they were old and grey and full of sleep - though she hoped she would never be as psychologically asleep as all that . all she had ever bothered to insure was her conscious self against just such a submerging sleep . she shook her head at Mr Clacton , who seemed asleep enough himself , both in her terms and his , for it was a hot day and his office was stuffed to its low ceiling with undisturbed books , undisturbed files and dust from probably Dickensian times . his aspect was as dusty as his office , with scurf from dusty hair on the dusty shoulders of his black suit , cigarette ash down the front , an ashen face and yellow sleepy dust in the corners of his pale grey eyes . his finger-nails were dirty , though he tried to make up for it by constantly paring them with the finger-nail of the opposite hand . his voice was like his black and pin-stripe , a grey superimposition of respectability over the original colour of his own natural vowels , the result being somehow as ineffective , not just dusty-grey but muddy , slimy even . his digressions too , seemed to have no other purpose than the throwing of dust in his client &apos;s eyes , the dust of fake security , of the fake friend of the family , like the puffs from his Gauloises , which said do n&apos;t you worry your fluffy little head about that , just lull back in the layers of my experience , as he told her how he had saved one of his clients from buying a house in which he somehow owned all the bricks and mortar but not the joists , which had been omitted from the deeds , and how he had learnt from another client who was a greengrocer that all greengrocers cheat the income-tax by a complicated system of unrecorded purchases which has become the norm at Covent Garden . yes , well &amp;hellip; . he judged that she had been sufficiently dazzled and gave a long raucous cough . only cigarettes worth smoking , these . most unhealthy , English ones . well , now , let me see . I think I can put you onto some people who might , I say might , let you have a mortgage on this property &amp;hellip; . but , they &apos;re safe , are they ? I mean , they &apos;re not - money-lenders ? Mrs - er - Buttery , all mortgage companies are money-lenders . that &apos;s rather the point , is n&apos;t it ? no , but I mean - I know what you mean . you may trust me , Mrs Buttery . I think , however , that you might have to revise your ideas about - er - the type of property you intend to purchase . she revised them . the little man from the inter-insular ( British archipelago ) insurance company soon saw to that . he was bald and bouncy , jumping up from her sofa with each explanation , whether because of the sherry she offered him or from a passionate interest in his work she could n&apos;t tell . when he had jumped up some twenty times , talked of premiums , policies , tax exemptions and survey fees , worked out sums rapidly on inter-insular insurance company sheets of paper which he produced from a shiny black brief-case , asked many questions about Rupert &apos;s age , health and income , even his salesman &apos;s patter failed to smooth over the traumatic experience undergone by Serena &apos;s relatively sheltered psyche that afternoon . poor Serena . in spite of the good marks she had brought home from school she had never grasped the implications or practical application of compound interest . she used to solve all the problems set of course , but her conscious mind must have refused to accept the moral shock of it all , so that even now at the age of forty and eleven months , she still assumed that if one borrowed six thousand pounds at six per cent , one paid back , in the end , six thousand plus six per cent of six thousand , that is , six thousand three hundred and sixty pounds . the meaning of the words per annum had somehow got lost with the years . her second shock was the mortgage rating . you see , Mrs Buttery , said the little man rather sadly now , but very fast , like a comic spouting gags , the value of the policy would be worked out entirely according to your husband &apos;s earnings . I &apos;m afraid we can n&apos;t take yours into account at all . it &apos;s a rule of I.I.I . you see , you might stop work to have - well , for all sorts of reasons , or you might leave him . but how utterly extraordinary , said Serena angrily , you must be living in the nineteenth century . oh , but it &apos;s a very general rule , Mrs Buttery , you &apos;ll find that no insurance companies , or building societies , for that matter , will allow for the wife &apos;s earnings . our lawyers - who are your lawyers ? Clacton &apos;s . well , I &apos;m damned . now , let me see , you say your husband earns about &amp;hellip; yes , that would come to &amp;hellip; three , carry seven , six nines are fifty four - of course we &apos;d have to have some sort of proof , you know , it &apos;s very difficult with self-employed persons , carry two . yes . I &apos;m afraid we could n&apos;t raise this loan to more than three thousand three fifty at the most . now you could get quite a nice little semi-detached house in Grimstead for three thousand , that &apos;s where I live , just before the green belt , lovely and modern , you know . I forgot to tell you , we do n&apos;t usually lend any house built earlier than 1918 . but Serena was not easily discouraged . she had , moreover , a reasonable endowment of intelligence and enough analytical training , specialised though it was , to get to grips with the more megalomaniac vagaries of an unfamiliar world . within three days she had worked it all out . it was all quite clear . houses were too expensive , at any rate for poor self-employed individualists like themselves , who nevertheless hankered for respectability and membership of the new and widespread , property-owning , affluent middle-class . therefore they would buy part of a house . the market was flooded with long-lease flats for sale , on one and sometimes two floors of vast Victorian mansions , bought up by speculators and converted with more paint than architecture , a glass door here and there , a vine-leaf or cabbage-rose paper on one of the walls , a stainless steel kitchen-sink with perhaps a &amp;pound;45 waste-disposal unit to send the price up by a couple of hundred more . you see , she propounded to Rupert after her last patient had gone , we can get three thousand three fifty , perhaps a little more if we can cheat your earnings a bit . I &apos;m sure you could raise the rest from one of your publishers , get two books commissioned and write them later . I &apos;ve got a bit owing too . now , I saw some flats in Hendon for four thou , and some in West Hampstead for four two fifty , two beds , two reception , k and b , just think , our own bathroom . much more spacious than that poky little cottage , which was n&apos;t a bit practical really , the reception room was too small when divided and too big when not . 