‘I’ve just been down to the shops. I was going to make us an omelette. Do you want one as well?’

‘No, I’m fine. I’ll get myself something later.’

‘If you change your mind…’ She set down her shopping and rummaged among the boxes for a frying-pan.

‘What does Miles think about the sale?’

‘I’m not entirely sure that anyone’s told him. He’s not come home yet.’

‘I see.’ Suddenly there was a tremendous banging sound from overhead. It felt as though the ceiling might crumble at any minute. ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘Um.’ Davy pulled a wry face at me. ‘I think that might be Dario and Mick. Asset-stripping.’

‘Christ,’ I said. ‘But at least Dario’s cheered up. He was even boasting about being beaten up, as if it gave him some sort of street cred. Men, eh?’

‘Not this man,’ said Davy, wryly. ‘I’d leg it. Do you want to hear who’s called you today?’

‘Apart from journalists?’

He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘Dr Hal Bradshaw and someone called Rachel Lembas, who’s a clairvoyant.’

‘I’ll pretend you didn’t give me the message.’ I watched as Mel broke two eggs into a bowl and began whisking with a fork. She had managed to create a tranquil domestic space in the mayhem of our crumbling household. There was a another violent bang from overhead, then a rude yell.

I went outside, into the lovely warmth of the evening, and walked into the garden to my vegetable plot. It was ridiculous, but the thing I felt saddest about leaving was this. I thought of the work I’d put into it, in the rain and the cold, and the idea that Miles and Leah would be the only ones to eat my lettuce, my beetroot and my broad beans filled me with sadness. I squatted and started to pull weeds out of the soil. I didn’t hear anyone, and only when a shadow fell over me did I look up and see Miles.

‘Hi,’ I said, and when he didn’t reply, just started gloomily down at me, I went on: ‘These are courgettes. They’re very easy to grow. You just have to keep the soil moist. Miles? Miles!’

‘What?’

‘What’s up?’

He sighed and lowered himself on to the grass beside me, not worrying about his lovely dark suit. He looked hot. Little beads of sweat prickled on his shaved head and there was a moustache of perspiration above his upper lip. ‘What should I do, Astrid?’

‘What should you do?’ I carefully eased a dandelion out of the earth, shaking its roots free of soil. ‘What do you mean, do?’

‘I mean, do. Should I tell everyone it was all a mistake and they can stay after all? Should I evict everyone right now? Should I chuck Dario out, at least, for making my life a nightmare at every turn? Should I tell Leah it’s all over between us? Should Leah and I go away and leave you here, in this house that’s turned into a kind of hell-hole? Should we all just-’

‘Stop there, Miles. Too many choices.’

‘Is it so wrong of me to want to live with just Leah?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Admittedly I’m tired of falling over bags of her stuff in the hall.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Miles. ‘We haven’t decided where to stow it. I’ll tell her to get it out of the way.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘And it’s not wrong.’

‘So what should I have done?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Should I never move on but always stay in some commune of perpetual adolescence?’

‘Is that what we are?’

‘Don’t you agree that the way Pippa, for example, has deliberately -’

‘I don’t want to take sides, Miles. I know that no one’s behaved terribly well. But that includes you. And Leah.’

‘Especially Leah,’ he said.

‘You can’t hide behind her.’

‘I used to love coming home but now I feel everyone hates me,’ he said.

‘I don’t hate you.’

‘Astrid.’ His voice became soft and tender.

‘No. Don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘You know.’

‘This thing with Leah. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.’

‘Then unmake it, if that’s what you want. But don’t involve me. It’s not fair on her.’

‘She doesn’t worry about not being fair to you.’

‘That’s her business.’

‘The things she says about you…’

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘If it wasn’t for Leah, we could go back to the way things were.’

‘For a clever man you really are stupid sometimes. Don’t you see that we can never go back to the way things were? That’s over, safely in the past. And don’t go blaming Leah for everything.’

‘How come you’re so wise and saintly all of a sudden?’

‘I’m not.’

He brushed some grass blades from his trousers. ‘By the way, what’s going on with Owen?’

‘Nothing. Not that it’s any of your business.’

‘I’ve seen the way you look at each other. Have you -’

‘Stop it, Miles.’

‘I don’t want to butt in. When does he get back from his trip, anyway?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, with studied indifference. ‘Thursday, I think.’ I knew very well it was Thursday. I lay in bed at night thinking about him, remembering the feel of his hands on my body, counting the hours to when we’d creep upstairs like thieves in the night and close the door and climb beneath the sheets, our hands over each other’s mouths so no one would hear.

‘He’s not good enough for you.’

‘I’m not doing this, Miles. Either help me pull out the weeds or bugger off.’

The evening of the house sale was warm and muggy, with an occasional heavy raindrop falling from the low grey skies. Dario and Mick had carried out two tables and arranged them in front of the house, and Pippa and Davy had both taken half a day off work to sort stuff out as well. Campbell sent me over to Stockwell in the afternoon and I didn’t get home until twenty to six, by which time it looked as if the entire contents of the house had been disgorged into the front garden. The tables were piled high with junk, and larger items – among which I made out an old bike, a couple of wooden chairs missing slats and a vast armchair with the stuffing spilling out, a nasty metal bookcase, a wooden lampstand, an old mattress, a fold-up canvas camp bed that looked as if it had been used in the First World War, a nasty oil painting whose glass was cracked. They were the desirable objects, I realized, when I saw what Dario and Mick were hauling out of the house now: a flimsy plastic bathtub with a crack running all the way down one side that we’d had in the cellar since we moved in; a roll of chicken wire, a rake whose teeth were almost all missing; a box of spare roof tiles; single wellington boots; half a fishing rod; the guitar Mick had trodden on ages ago and was now just a splintered wooden carcass with a few strings hanging off it.

‘Blimey!’ I said, as Owen staggered out, hauling a stained canvas bag. He’d returned from Italy that morning and when I’d got home from work he was entering into the spirit of the sale with a vigour that surprised me. ‘What’s that?’

‘A tent,’ he said. ‘It leaks. It’s always leaked. It leaks so badly that it’s like sleeping under a gutter.’

‘Right. But you can’t throw away Miles’s shoe rack. He uses it. Where are the shoes that go in it?’

Owen shrugged and tugged his tent past me, scattering bent pegs as he went. But then he stopped and gave me a look that turned my stomach to liquid.

‘Hi, Astrid,’ said Pippa, appearing in the doorway. Her hair was piled messily on top of her head and there was a smudge of dirt on her cheek. She glittered with energy. ‘If you want to get rid of stuff you’d better hurry. People are arriving in fifteen minutes.’

‘Nobody’ll buy any of this.’

‘Want to bet?’

‘Where’s Miles anyway?’

‘I think he and Leah are keeping out of the way.’

‘And Davy?’

‘He’s gone to get beer for all of us.’

I leaned my bike against the wall of the house and went over to the table. There were books (cookery books, novels, biographies, dictionaries, atlases, travel books, books about mathematics and economics, music and law, books that belonged to libraries and even schools); there were kitchen utensils, videos and DVDs, beaded cushions, a rug, a lumpy old duvet, ripped sheets, a mop, a hairdryer in the shape of a duck, a shoebox full of wind chimes, empty biscuit tins, and several packs of cards, which I was almost certain were incomplete.