‘A bit,’ says Tom grudgingly. ‘But not as much as a whole computer.’

‘Let’s go and see them,’ says David. ‘Then you can tell them that. You can say you want to help them a bit and then ask for your computer back.’

‘David, this is outrageous.’

‘Why?’

‘You can’t blackmail your own children like that.’

I’m beginning to feel better. I was struggling for a while back there, pinned back by the moral force of David’s arguments, but now I can see that he’s gone mad, that he wants to humiliate us all. How could I have forgotten that this is what always happens with zealots? They go too far, they lose all sense of appropriateness and logic, and ultimately they are interested in nobody but themselves, nothing but their own piousness.

David drums his fingers on the table and thinks furiously.

‘No, I’m sorry, you’re right. It is outrageous. I’ve overstepped the mark. Please forgive me.’

Shit.

It is a fractious family dinner. Somehow David has managed to recruit Molly to the cause—possibly because she has spotted an opportunity to taunt Tom, possibly because Molly has never been able to see her father as anything less than a perfect and perfectly reasonable man, possibly because the computer David gave away was in Tom’s bedroom rather than hers, although the one we have left has now been placed in the neutral territory of the spare bedroom. Tom, however, is clinging stubbornly to his deeply held Western materialist beliefs.

‘You’re just being selfish, Tom. Isn’t he, Dad?’

David refuses to be drawn.

‘There are children there who don’t have anything,’ she continues. ‘And you’ve got lots.’

‘I haven’t got anything now. He’s given it all away.’

‘What are all those things in the bedroom, then?’ asks David gently.

‘And you’ve got half a computer.’

‘Can I get down?’ Tom has hardly eaten anything, but he’s clearly had his fill of the great steaming bowls of sanctimony being pushed at him from all directions, and I can’t say I blame him.

‘Finish your dinner,’ says David. He opens his mouth to say something else—almost certainly something about how fortunate Tom is to have a plate of lukewarm spaghetti bolognese in front of him given the plight of blah blah blah—but he catches my eye and thinks better of it.

‘Do you really not want anything else?’ I ask Tom.

‘I want to go on the computer before she gets it.’

‘Go on, then.’ Tom shoots off.

‘You shouldn’t have let him, Mummy. He’ll think he never has to eat his dinner now.’

‘Molly, shut up.’

‘She’s right.’

‘Oh, you shut up, too.’

I need to think. I need guidance. I’m a good person, I’m a doctor, and here I am championing greed over selflessness, cheering on the haves against the have-nots. Except I’m not really championing anything, am I? I am not, after all, standing up to my unbearably smug husband and—now—my unbearably smug eight-year-old daughter and saying, ‘Now look here, we worked jolly hard to pay for that computer, and if some women are daft enough to shack up with men who beat them, that’s hardly our fault, is it?’ That would be championing. All I’m doing is thinking unworthy thoughts that nobody can hear, and then sniping about unfinished spaghetti bolognese. If I had any real conviction, I’d be passing on some offensive piece of homespun wisdom about how the Good Samaritan could only afford to be the Good Samaritan because he held on to his old computers and… and… gave them to a charity shop when they were knackered. Something like that, anyway.

So what do I believe? Nothing much, apparently. I believe that there shouldn’t be homelessness, and I’d definitely be prepared to argue with anyone who says otherwise. Ditto battered women. Ditto, I don’t know, racism, poverty and sexism. I believe that the National Health Service is underfunded, and that Red-Nose Day is a sort of OK thing, although slightly annoying, I grant you, when young men dressed as Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous come up to you in Waitrose and wave buckets in your face. And, finally, I am of the reasonably firm conviction that Tom’s Christmas presents are his, and shouldn’t be given away. There you are. That is my manifesto. Vote for me.

Three days later the children seem to have forgotten that they ever needed two computers—Molly has lost the little interest she had in the first place, and Tom is spending most of his time on Pokémon—and we receive a letter from the women’s refuge telling us that we have made an enormous difference to some very unhappy young lives. I still believe the other things, though, the things about poverty and Health Service underfunding. You won’t shake me on those—unless, that is, you have any sort of persuasive evidence at all to the contrary.

David has abandoned his novel, now, as well as his column. ‘No longer appropriate’—like just about everything else he ever thought or did or wanted to do. During the day, as far as I can tell, he sits in his office reading; late afternoons he cooks, he plays, he helps with homework, he wants to talk about the days that everyone has had… in short, he is a model husband and father. I described him as such to Becca the other day, and a picture of a model husband and father came unbidden into my head: this particular model, however, is made of plastic and has his features moulded into a permanent expression of concern and consideration. David has become a sort of happy-clappy right-on Christian version of Barbie’s Ken, except without Ken’s rugged good looks and contoured body.

And I don’t think that David has become a Christian, although it is hard to fathom precisely what he has become. Asking him directly doesn’t really clarify things. The evening after we get the letter from the women’s refuge, Tom asks—mournfully but rather percipiently, I thought—whether we are all going to have to start going to church.

‘Church?’ says David—but gently, not with the explosion of anger and disdain that would have accompanied that word in any context just a few weeks ago. ‘Of course not. Why? Do you want to go to church?’

‘No.’

‘So why did you ask?’

‘Dunno,’ Tom says. ‘Just, I thought, that’s what we’d have to do now.’

‘Why now?’

‘Because we give things away. That’s what they do in church, isn’t it?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

And that’s the end of it; Tom’s fears are assuaged. Later, though, when David and I are on our own, I make my own enquiries.

‘That was funny, wasn’t it? Tom thinking we’d have to go to church now?’

‘I didn’t understand where all that came from. Just because we gave a computer to someone.’

‘I don’t think it’s just that.’

‘What else is there?’

‘They both know about you giving the money away. And anyway, it’s… You asked me if I’d noticed a change of atmosphere. Well, I think they have, too. And they sort of associate it with church, somehow.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose… You do give off the air of someone who has undergone a religious conversion.’

‘Well, I haven’t.’

‘You haven’t become a Christian?’

‘No.’

‘What are you, then?’

‘What am I?’

‘Yes, what are you? You know, Buddhist or, or…’ I try to think of other world religions that might fit the bill, and fail. Moslem doesn’t seem right, nor Hindu… Maybe a Hare Krishna offshoot, or something involving self-denial and some podgy guru driving around in an Alfa Romeo?

‘I’m nothing. I’ve just seen sense.’

‘But what does that mean?’

‘We’ve all been living the wrong life, and I want to put that right.’

‘I don’t feel I’ve been living the wrong life.’

‘I disagree.’

‘Oh, is that right?’

‘You live the right life during the working week, I suppose. But the rest of the time…’

‘What?’

‘There’s your sexual conduct, for a start.’