‘I dunno, really,’ I said. ‘I just want some time out.’

‘Time out of what?’

Time out of our marriage, I should have said. Because that, really, is what it comes down to. That’s all there is left, when you take away working hours and family suppers and family breakfasts: the time I get on my own is the time I would have spent being a wife, rather than being a mother or a doctor. (And God, how frightening, that those are the only options available. The only times when I am not performing one of those three roles is when I am in the bathroom.) But of course I didn’t say that either; I just waved a hand airily at what I hoped he would see was a decaying, wartorn planet that didn’t have enough oxygen to support complex life forms.

‘Please don’t go,’ he said, but I couldn’t hear any conviction or desperation in his voice. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough.

‘Why don’t you want me to go?’ I asked him. ‘What difference will it make to you?’

And there was a long, thoughtful, fatal pause before he said anything, a pause that allowed me first to ignore and then to forget what it was he eventually cobbled together.

Janet’s bedsit is at the top of a large terraced house on Taymor Road, which runs parallel to Webster Road. The terrace is weird, because it’s actually very beautiful, but was allowed to decay. Now the houses are being recovered, one by one, and I’m in the middle of a row of the last three tatty houses left.

There are three flats underneath me, and I now know and like the inhabitants of all of them. Gretchen, who works in PR and has promised me all sorts of free samples, lives in the garden flat, the biggest of the four; and above her is Marie, who teaches philosophy at the University of North London and goes home to Glasgow at weekends, and above Marie is Dick, a quiet, very nervous guy who works in a local record shop.

It’s fun here. We make decisions together, decisions about how to live our lives, and where responsibilities lie, and what would be for the greatest possible good. Last week, for example, Gretchen hosted a house meeting, and we voted to get a bigger letter box: Marie orders a lot of books from Amazon and the postman can’t put them through the door, so he has taken to leaving them out on the front step, where they get wet. Do you hear that, David? Letter box sizes! Those are the things we can change! (Probably—although we haven’t yet got a quote, and we’re not sure who instals letter boxes, or how to find out.) It was an entirely satisfactory discussion, short, logical, harmonious and just: Marie will pay two thirds of the installation costs, and I will pay nothing. And we drank wine, and listened to Air, who are French, and play mostly instrumentals that sound as if they are best heard in lifts. Air are my new favourite group, although Dick is a bit snooty about them, in his quiet, nervous way. He says there’s much better ambient French pop than this, and he could do us a tape if we wanted.

But to me Air sound modern and childless and single, compared to, say, Dylan, who sounds old and married and burdened—who sounds like home. If Air are Conran, then Dylan is the greengrocers. Mushrooms, lettuce and tomato, home to cook bolognese and prepare a salad, and how does it feeeeeel? To be on your oowwwn? Except I never am whenever Bob is singing. This, I can’t help feeling, is what communal living should be about: cool music and white wine and letter boxes and a closed door when you need it. Next time we’re going to talk about whether we need a table in the hall for post, and I’m looking forward to it. (My feeling is that we do, although I’m prepared to listen to those who disagree.)

Everyone is single here, and I like that, too. None of them want to be single, I suspect; even the other night there were lots of very forced, very self-deprecating and very well-rehearsed jokes about their romantic status, and I would surmise that if the subject came up during a house meeting about letter boxes—Gretchen wondered whether the size of the slot was responsible for the poor show on Valentine’s Day, and we all laughed dutifully and mock-sorrowfully—it would come up in a discussion about anything at all. And though I’m sorry for them, if they are sorry for themselves, it suits my purposes that none of them should be in relationships, because it adds to that in-between, Empire-Strikes-Back atmosphere; it feels as though I have just started a fresh sheet on someone else’s drawing pad. Mine got used up, every corner filled in, and I didn’t like what I had done.

I don’t think about how long I can live like this. Janet will be back in a few weeks, but already I have wondered whether Marie will be using her flat during the summer, and whether I could afford my own bedsit as well as the mortgage and two children and a husband and GoodNews and the homeless. And all this without considering whether this is a life worth living—whether these couple of hours every night, either on my own, or listening to Air with Dick and Marie and Gretchen and talking about letter box capacity, would do me for the next forty-odd years. At the moment it feels as though it would, but I’d probably be unwise to sign a forty-year lease on anything just yet.

But, bloody hell, I’m happy, for those precious two hours. I’m happier than I’ve been for years and years. I think. I watch Janet’s tiny TV. I have even been reading the review pages of newspapers, and in the two weeks I’ve been here, I have got through seventy-nine pages of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. I pay for it during the night, I hasten to add. Those two hours cost me. On my first night here I woke up covered in sweat after a nightmare, and realized where I was, and where I wasn’t. And I got dressed, and walked home and back, just so that I could hear the kids breathing. I have woken most nights since then at 2.25 a.m. precisely, feeling bereft and lonely and guilty and frantic with worry and fear, and it takes me ages to get back to sleep. And yet I still wake up in the morning feeling refreshed.

At the beginning of my third week in Janet’s flat, I come home to find Tom watching TV with a new friend. The new friend is a little fat child with a boil near his nose and a boy-band fringe that only serves to accentuate, or perhaps even poke fun at, his almost startling unattractiveness. ‘You know the kind of faces I’m usually found on?’ the fringe seems to be saying. ‘Well, have a look at this one!’ Tom’s friends don’t look like this. They look handsome and cool. Cool is very important to Tom; fat and boils (and fluffy brown-and-white sweaters) are usually of even less interest to him than they are to anyone else.

‘Hello,’ I say brightly. ‘Who’s this?’

The new friend looks at me, and then looks around the room, head wobbling, to try to locate the stranger in our midst. Heartbreakingly, given his other disadvantages, he doesn’t appear to be very bright; even after having ascertained that there is no one else with us, he declines to answer my question, presumably on the assumption that he would get it wrong.

‘Christopher,’ mumbles Tom.

‘Hello, Christopher.’

‘Hello.’

‘Are you staying for tea?’

He stares at me again. Nope. He’s not going to risk getting caught out on that one.

‘She’s asking you if you’re staying for tea,’ shouts Tom.

I am suddenly stricken with remorse and embarrassment. ‘Is Christopher deaf?’

‘No,’ says Tom contemptuously. ‘Just thick.’

Christopher turns his head to look at Tom, and then pushes him in the chest, feebly. Tom looks at me and shakes his head in what I can only interpret as disbelief.

‘Where’s your father?’

‘In GoodNews’s room.’

‘Molly?’

‘Upstairs. She’s got a friend round, too.’

Molly is in her room with what appears to be the eight-year-old female equivalent of Christopher. Molly’s new friend is tiny, grey-skinned, bespectacled and unambiguously malodorous—Molly’s bedroom has never smelt like this before. The air in the room is a witch’s brew of farts, body odour and socks.