‘Molly. Do you remember when you went to see GoodNews?’

‘Yes. Course.’

‘Do you remember what he said to you? Did he ask you anything?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Did he ask you how you were feeling?’

‘Ummmm. Oh, yes. He asked me if I was feeling sad.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said I felt a bit sad sometimes.’

‘What about?’

‘I’m sad about Grandma Parrot.’ David’s mother, who died last year, so-called because she had a stone parrot on her gatepost.

‘Yes. That was sad.’

‘And Poppy.’ Family cat, killed shortly after Grandma Parrot. Molly’s proximity to these deaths was much closer than we would have wanted, in an ideal world. Grandma Parrot collapsed when she was visiting us, and although she didn’t actually die until later that night, in hospital, it was clear that she wasn’t well when she was taken away; and—foolishly, in retrospect—we organized a search party for the missing Poppy. Molly and I found her up (and in, and all over) the road. I wish she had seen neither casualty.

‘That was sad, too.’

‘And your baby.’

‘My baby?’

‘The baby that died.’

‘Oh. That baby.’

I had a miscarriage, eighteen months or so before I had Tom. A run-of-the-mill, ten-week, first-baby miscarriage, distressing at the time, almost completely forgotten about now; I cannot for the life of me recall telling Molly about it, but clearly I must have done, and she has remembered and mourned, in her own way.

‘Did that make you sad?’

‘Yes. Of course. That was my brother or sister.’

‘Well, kind of.’ I want to tell her that it’s OK really without getting into some huge thing about souls and foetuses and all sorts of other areas that eight-year-olds should be spared for as long as possible. I change the subject. ‘Anything else?’

‘I think I was sad about you and Daddy, too.’

‘Why were you sad about us?’

‘Because you might get divorced. And you’ll definitely die.’

‘Oh, Molly.’

I know there are loads and loads of replies to this, but for a moment they seem fundamentally untruthful, and I can’t bring myself to play the requisite parental consolation game. We might get divorced; we’ll definitely die. This seems, in my suddenly world-weary and bleak frame of mind, a precise and accurate summation of the situation, and I don’t feel like telling Molly anything different. Instead, I reach forward and touch her forehead, like GoodNews might do, in a doomed attempt to draw these thoughts out of her. It feels to me as though this is the only physical contact I can allow myself; anything more would result in an unstoppable torrent of grief and despair.

‘I don’t worry about any of that now,’ says Molly brightly, as if it is her job to console me, rather than the other way around.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Really. GoodNews made it all go away.’

After the kids have gone to bed, I don’t want to join GoodNews and David downstairs, so I sit in the bedroom for a while, and I think. My conversation with Molly has made it impossible for me not to think, even though not-thinking is currently my favourite mode of being. And what I think, I suppose, is this: we live what an awful lot of people would regard as a normal life. There are some—rock singers, novelists, young columnists in the newspapers, those who affect to think of anything involving children and day-jobs and package holidays as a long and agonizing spiritual death—who would regard us as beneath contempt, such has been our wholehearted embrace of some sort of conservative lifestyle ideal. And there are others, and you know who they are, who would regard us as being impossibly lucky, blessed, spoiled by our upbringing and our skin colour and our education and our income. I have no quarrel with the second bunch at all—how could I have? I know what we’ve got, and what we haven’t had to experience. But the other lot… I don’t know. Because it seems to me that normal life, or the kind of ‘normal’ life that these people despise, already has plenty in it that prevents an agonizing spiritual death, and plenty in it that is simply agonizing, and who are these people to judge anyone?

What has happened to Molly in her first eight years? More or less nothing. We have protected her from the world as best we can. She has been brought up in a loving home, she has two parents, she has never been hungry, and she receives an education that will prepare her for the rest of her life; and yet she is sad, and that sadness is not, when you think about it, inappropriate. The state of the relationship between her parents makes her anxious; she has lost a loved one (and a cat); and she has realized that such losses are going to be an unavoidable part of her life in the future. It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don’t need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

And the other thing I think is that I have failed my daughter. Eight years old, and she’s sad… I didn’t want that. When she was born I was certain I could prevent it, and I have been unable to, and even though I see that the task I set myself was unrealistic and unachievable, it doesn’t make any difference: I have still participated in the creation of yet another confused and fearful human being.

I have sat on my own in the dark long enough; it is time to rejoin my normal life. So I go downstairs, to eat with my husband and the live-in guru with the eyebrow-brooches, and to talk about how everyone who lives in our street should invite a homeless kid into their house for a year.

They’re serious; I realize that straight away. Plans are already sufficiently advanced that they have drawn up a list of the houses in the street, with as much information about the inhabitants therein as David possesses. Neither of them take any notice of me as I walk into the kitchen, so I stand behind David and listen and read over his shoulder. The list looks like this:

1. Not known.

3. Not known.

5. Not known.

7. Old lady. (Old man also? No difference, if sharing bed)

9. Not known

11. Richard, Mary, Daniel, Chloe

13. Nice Asian family. (4?)

15. Not known

17. Not known

19. Wendy and Ed

21. Martina

23. Hugh

25. Simon and Richard

27. Not-nice Asian family (6? + Alsatian)

29. Ros and Max

31. Annie and Pete + 2

33. Roger and Mel + 3

35. For sale

And the same for the other side of the street. For a moment, I am distracted by the obvious pattern of our acquaintance—we know who lives next to us, and opposite us, but we know almost nothing of the people who live sixty or seventy yards away—until the sheer lunacy of the conversation draws me back into the room.

‘By my reckoning there are at least forty spare bedrooms in this street,’ David is saying. ‘Isn’t that incredible? Forty spare bedrooms, and thousands of people out there without a bed? I’d never even thought of it in that way before. I mean, when I see empty houses it pisses me off, but empty houses aren’t really the issue, are they? If there are forty spare bedrooms in this street, then our postcode alone should be able to take care of most of the homeless kids out there.’

‘We should be aiming at filling, say, ten of them,’ says GoodNews. ‘I’d be happy with ten.’

‘Really?’ David looks a little disappointed, as if persuading only ten of his neighbours to house someone they didn’t know was the sort of terrible compromise he wasn’t prepared to make. This, then, is what we have come to: the spiritual healer who can’t get along with dishwashers is now the hard-nosed realist in my house, and my husband is the wide-eyed optimist. ‘Wouldn’t ten mean, I don’t know, that we’d lost the argument? ‘Cos it’s pretty unanswerable, surely, if we pitch it right.’