I got sick of hearing why everybody was useless, and ghastly, and talentless, and awful, and how they didn’t deserve anything good that had happened to them, and they completely deserved anything bad that had happened to them, but this evening I long for the old David—I miss him like one might miss a scar, or a wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic. You knew where you were with the old David. And I never felt any embarrassment, ever. Weary despair, sure, the occasional nasty taste in the mouth, certainly, flashes of irritation almost constantly, but never any embarrassment. I had become comfortable with his cynicism, and in any case, we’re all cynical now, although it’s only this evening that I recognize this properly. Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I’m not fluent in it—I like too many things, and I am not envious of enough people—I know enough to get by. And in any case it is not possible to avoid cynicism and the sneer completely. Any conversation about, say, the London mayoral contest, or Demi Moore, or Posh and Becks and Brooklyn, and you are obliged to be sour, simply to prove that you are a fully functioning and reflective metropolitan person.

I no longer understand very much about the man I live with, but I understand enough to know that this evening is almost bound to throw up a decisive moment, a moment where David’s new-found earnestness, his desire to love and understand even the most wayward of God’s creatures, will be met with blank incomprehension. As it turns out, the wayward creature turns out to be the outgoing President of the United States, and it is Cam, not Andrew, who is on the receiving end of David’s terrifying sincerity. We’re talking—as best we can, from a position of almost fathomless ignorance—about the US primaries, and Cam says that she doesn’t really care about who the next president is as long as he keeps his thing in his trousers and doesn’t monster young interns, and David shifts in his seat and eventually wonders, with a patent reluctance, who we are to judge, and Cam laughs at him.

‘I mean it,’ says David. ‘I no longer want to condemn people whose lives I know nothing about.’

‘But… that’s the basis for all conversation!’ says Andrew.

‘I’m tired of it,’ says David. ‘We don’t know anything about him.’

‘We know more than we want to.’

‘What do you know?’ David asks him.

‘We know he puts it about.’

‘Do we? And even if he does, do we know why?’

‘What?’ says Cam. ‘Society is to blame? Or Hillary? I don’t believe this, David.’

‘What don’t you believe?’

‘You’re sticking up for Clinton.’

‘I’m not sticking up for him. I’m just sick of all the poison. The drip drip drip of slagging off and cheap cracks and judgements of people we don’t know and the endless nastiness of it all. It makes me want to have a bath.’

‘Be our guest,’ says Andrew. ‘There’s a clean towel up there.’

‘But Bill Clinton!’ says Cam. ‘I mean, if you can’t be rude about him, who can you be rude about?’

‘I don’t know the facts. You don’t know the facts.’

‘The facts? The most powerful man in the world—the most powerful married man in the world—gets a blow-job off a twenty-something-year-old and lies about it afterwards.’

‘I think he must have been a very troubled and unhappy man,’ says David.

‘I don’t believe this,’ says Andrew. ‘You used to e-mail me filthy Clinton and Lewinsky jokes all the time.’

‘I wish I hadn’t,’ David says with a vehemence that causes visible bafflement on a couple of the faces round the table. We all concentrate very hard on our tricolore.

I venture an entirely positive opinion on our hosts’ newly renovated kitchen, and we are happy for a while, but it clearly occurs to all of us simultaneously that there are very few subjects which offer that kind of harmony, and every now and again one of the three of us slips up, as if we are suffering from cultural Tourette’s. I make a disparaging remark about Jeffrey Archer’s literary ability (a passing observation—not even an observation, more a simile—buried in the middle of an otherwise unexceptionable exchange about a TV programme) and David tells me that I have no conception of how hard it is to write a book. Cam makes a joke about a politician who has recently been jailed for embezzlement, a man who has become a byword for untrustworthiness, and David makes a plea for forgiveness. Andrew has a little sneer about Ginger Spice’s role with the UN and David says it is better to do something than nothing.

In other words, it is impossible: we cannot function properly, and the evening ends in confusion and awkwardness, and very early. There is a consensus in our particular postal district that people like Ginger Spice and Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Archer are beyond the pale, and if someone goes around sticking up for them then that consensus fails, and all is anarchy. Is it possible to want to divorce a man simply because he doesn’t want to be rude about Ginger Spice? I rather fear it might be.

9

The party invitations have been sent out, and most evenings now David and GoodNews lock themselves away in David’s study to finesse their plan of attack. I attempted to use that phrase humorously the other day, but the generals concerned just looked at me blankly—not just because they react to most attempts at humour in that way, but because they really do see this as a military campaign, a crusade in the original, eleventh-century sense. Our neighbours have become infidels, barbarians; GoodNews and David are going to batter their doors down with the heads of the homeless.

‘Can’t you just enjoy it as a party?’ David says at breakfast, when I have complained once too often. ‘You like parties. Ignore the other bit.’

‘Ignore the bit where you harangue our friends and neighbours in my kitchen about the homeless?’

‘First, it’s our kitchen. Second, I’m not haranguing them—I’m talking to them, making suggestions about how we can create a better society in our street. And third, I’m going to do it in the living room, standing on a chair.’

‘You’ve completely turned me around,’ I say. ‘What can I do to help?’

‘We’re making cheese straws,’ says Molly. ‘You could do the sandwiches.’

‘I’m not making cheese straws,’ says Tom.

‘Why not?’ Molly is genuinely amazed that anyone could be this truculent when there is so much fun to be had.

‘Stupid.’

‘What do you want to make, then?’

‘I don’t want to make anything. I don’t want this party.’

‘Dad, Tom says he doesn’t want this party.’ She adds a little incredulous chuckle to the end of her report.

‘Not all of us feel the same way about things, Molly,’ says David.

‘You going to give anyone any more of my stuff?’

‘This thing isn’t about that,’ says David, somehow managing to imply that there might be another thing, later on, which is.

GoodNews comes in just as we’re all about to leave for work and school. He gets up at five-thirty but never comes downstairs until after half-past eight; I don’t know what he does up there for three hours, but I suspect that it’s something that even the most spiritual of us wouldn’t do for more than a few minutes. Molly and David greet him warmly, I nod, Tom glowers at him.

‘What’s up? What’s the word?’

‘Yeah, good,’ says David.

‘I’m going to make cheese straws,’ says Molly.

‘That’s great,’ says GoodNews, to whom everything is good news. ‘I’ve been thinking. What about some kind of medal? For those who volunteer on the spot?’

I don’t want to hear about medals. I don’t want to hear about parties or cheese straws, and I fantasize about spending the evening of the party in a cocktail bar with a girlfriend, drinking Slow Comfortable Screws or some other equally vulgar and anti-homeless concoction, hopefully at seven pounds a throw. I say goodbye to my children, but not to my husband or to GoodNews, and go to work.