Being spoiled by my rich friend makes me feel like a charity case

. . . so is it my pride – or am I jealous?

WALkING around Westfield shopping centre in West London has never been more surreal. Headlines about inflation and energy bills beep up on my phone as I jostle with shoppers weighed down with glossy bags from Ted Baker, Charlotte Tilbury, Russell & Bromley and the like.

But as I gape at the sheer excess of consumerism being hoofed around, my husband is seeing a whole other aspect. ‘I wonder if all these people are here,’ he muses, his eyes falling on all the families slumped in the seating areas, ‘because they’ve left their unheated houses to come for the free warmth?’

It feels like the stark contrast between rich and poor has never been more evident than it is at the moment. even for those of us who don’t live at the extremes — whose flats aren’t mouldy with damp, or who are wondering whether to take their yacht to Monaco or Antigua — that contrast is ever more obvious in our own social circles.

I’ve reached an age, 54, where the gap between rich and poor is particularly stark. My best friend is a very successful American-born businesswoman and married to an equally successful British businessman. They’ve just sold part of their telecoms company for a packet. Now, as the cost of living crisis deepens, I fret while she floats.

We’ve shared financial ups and downs our whole lives. In our 20s, I was a successful novelist (not rich, but faking it and making it) while she toiled as an advertising copywriter. In our 30s, I was in Hong kong, living high on the hog as a banker’s wife, while she was in London starting a business.

THeN,as we hit our 40s, my husband lost his job and I had to go out to work, while her business was starting to pay dividends. But these were child-rearing years for us both and there’s nothing more levelling than worrying about the MMR jab or getting children to eat peas.

It’s only in the last decade — as our children have grown up and begun to peel off — that I’ve felt the cracks between our two lifestyles widen.

By our 50s, it seems, the die is cast: barring a Lottery win, most of us know roughly how rich or poor we are now going to be. Increasingly, it’s obvious that while my best friend and her husband are flying professionally, we are still muddling along in the middle lane.

The income gap between us has become a gulf and I’m beginning to feel uncomfortable. Do they judge our apparent inability to radically change our balance sheet? Increasingly, I feel that they do.

Their kindness knows no bounds: dinners are subsidised, support is constant. But, in my head, this is starting to feel like charity; like we’re holding them back from what they really want to do, which is to enjoy their hard- earned success with expensive treats and trips. After a lifetime of weaving in and out of my friend’s life, I’m suddenly no longer sure we fit in.

Last summer, this feeling of inadequacy came to a head.

My friend has a holiday house in Spain to which she has always invited us. Her generosity has always been immense, and in the early years I felt I earned my keep by cooking, fetching the bread in the morning, dealing with the kids at the crack of dawn.

Small gestures by me to ‘sing for our supper’, but she was happy, and I was happy. We were both forging our way through the financial choppiness with our usual elan.

In recent years, though, she has hired a housekeeper who cooks and fetches the bread, and is understandably no longer so keen to drink the cheap Rioja that we bring to the party and wants to spread her wings beyond the local tapas bar. All the little tricks we had at home for camouflaging the differences between us — getting them round for supper at ours instead of going out, meeting them for walks instead of for theatre trips, pretending we’re too busy to go on expensive weekends away — were exposed on that holiday.

We’d lost our chance for ‘levelling up’ and that felt wrong, especially when a blundering attempt by me to try to contribute to the running costs was met with an agonised frown from her and the words: ‘Oh, I really thought we were beyond having to talk about money.’

Because, of course, this was toe-curling for her: she was on holiday and just wanted her guests to have a good time.

Suddenly, despite her being the kindest, most generous hostess any of us know, the taboos of money, of talking about money, had intervened between us and I felt that I was getting this all wrong. I felt awful: wrong-footed, no longer equal to her.

Now, when I think ahead to this summer, I confess that I have started dreaming up excuses in my head.

After our years of navigating life together — of her being my family when my own let me down; of me steering her through her traumatic first marriage; of her being there for me in every crisis I’ve ever had; of the simpler moments, like holding each other up in hysterical laughter at some shared joke . . . After all these high points and pinch points, is money really going to break us up?

Amanda Clayman, a financial therapist based in Los Angeles, who helps wealthy people negotiate their relationships with less fortunate friends and family, is having none of it.

‘We have created a society where the hallmark of wealth is frictionless ease,’ she tells me. ‘ Your friend would probably say she simply wants you to share in that ease, while you are trying to show her how hard you’re working to earn your spot there.

‘But it’s like she is speaking French and you’re speaking Spanish and a lot is being lost in translation — including the honesty that has been the touchstone of your long friendship.’

Amanda was one of the earliest practitioners working in financial therapy, having spotted, two decades ago, the need for someone between a financial adviser, who advises on, say, debt management, and a therapist who will deal with issues of anxiety around those debts.

Her clients have one common denominator for their anxiety: a financial mismatch between them and others. Amanda counsels couples working towards a pre-nup, new couples where one is saddled with debts from their previous life, the nearly-adult children of wealthy parents, struggling to launch into a world very different from that of their cloistered upbringing.

ONeof the biggest rises in Google searches in recent years has been the search for the interface between ‘ money’ and ‘ feelings’, Amanda says.

‘ Money has become the proxy for so much in life that is emotional and difficult — the pain point between so many issues of alienation and insecurity. Couple that with the traditional squeamishness around talking about money and that makes it a thorny place. But thorny places are also where true intimacy and connection happen — so there’s our opportunity.’

Amanda sympathises with my agony but is clear that these are my insecurities that are in play, and that it is up to me to grasp the thorn and address that opportunity.

‘You need to communicate your feelings of inadequacy, but not in a way that makes her feel bad,’ she says. ‘ You also need to remind yourself that you may be poorer than her, but you are still her equal. Money is only one currency between you; don’t let it devalue the basic equity between the two of you.’

While writing this article, there have indeed been thorny moments between me and my friend as we confronted not the elephant in the room but the cash cow between us. She has battled to understand why I’d feel so guilty about not being able to keep up — not being able to go to a fancy restaurant or to pay my way on holiday.

With a little help from my friend and from Amanda, I realise my insecurities are rooted in pride and, worse, in a little bit of envy. Luckily, I’m clever enough to know that this is ridiculous and has no place in a friendship.

I am not envious of those Westfield shoppers and their designer flim-flam, so why should I be of my friend’s success? Better to head for the warm spaces of a friendship where money has no currency.