‘I’m sorry if you think I’m being a bit, you know,’ he begins. ‘But when we shook hands… Man, you nearly took my arm off.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Mark, apologetic but understandably surprised: I saw the whole incident, and it seemed like a pretty straightforward handshake to me; at no stage did it look as though anyone would end up with a permanent disability. ‘Did I hurt you?’

‘In here you hurt me.’ GoodNews taps his heart. ‘Because it hurts when I know fellow human beings are in trouble. And if ever a hand was shouting for help it was yours.’

Mark cannot help it: he has a quick look, back and front, to see if there is any evidence of this manual distress.

‘Nah, you won’t see anything there. It’s not a, like a visible thing. I mean, I feel it physically. Ow. You know?’ And he winces and massages his hand, to demonstrate the pain that Mark so recently caused him. ‘But sadness is a right sod for keeping itself hidden away. A right sod. Gotta come out sometime, though, and it’s pouring out of you.’

‘Oh,’ says Mark.

The children munch on relentlessly. It depresses me that they are so accustomed to conversations of this kind that they cannot even be bothered to gape.

‘I’m sure Mark would rather talk about something else,’ I say hopefully.

‘Perhaps he would,’ says GoodNews. ‘But I’m not sure it’d be a good idea. Do you know what you’re sad about, Mark?’

‘Well…’

‘As far as I can tell, it’s mostly in the area of relationships and work,’ says GoodNews, apparently uninterested in anything Mark has to say. ‘And it’s starting to get serious.’

‘How serious?’ says David, concerned.

‘You know,’ says GoodNews, nodding meaningfully at the children.

‘There’s not much point in Mark being here, is there?’ I say. ‘Why don’t you two sort it out between you?’

‘Oh, we can’t do that,’ says GoodNews. ‘In the end, Mark knows more about how unhappy he is than either of us.’

‘Really?’ I use a sarcastic tone of voice, and make a sarcastic face, and I even attempt a sarcastic posture, but it’s no use.

‘Oh, sure. I only get the vaguest sense of the causes.’

‘I’d say work and relationships just about covered it,’ Mark says.

‘Do you want to do anything about it?’ David asks him.

‘Well, yeah, I wouldn’t mind.’

‘GoodNews rubs it out of you,’ Molly says matter-of-factly. ‘His hands go all hot and then you’re not sad any more. I’m not sad about Grandma Parrot, or Poppy, or Mummy’s baby that died.’

Mark nearly chokes. ‘Jesus, Katie…’

‘You should try it, Uncle Mark. It’s great.’

‘Can I have some more ham, Mum?’ says Tom.

‘We could really do a lot for you, Mark,’ says David. ‘You could leave a lot of things behind you here today if you wanted to.’

Mark pushes his chair back and stands up.

‘I’m not listening to this shit,’ he says, and walks out.

Getting married and having a family is like emigrating. I used to live in the same country as my brother, I used to share his values and his tastes and his attitudes, and then I moved away. And even though I didn’t notice it happening, I started to speak with a different accent, and think differently, and even though I remembered my native land fondly, all traces of it had gone from me. Now, though, I want to go home. I can see that I made a big mistake, that the new world isn’t all it was cracked up to be, and the people there are much saner and wiser than the people who live in my adopted nation. I want him to take me back with him. We could go home to Mum and Dad’s. We’d both be happier there. He wasn’t suicidal when he was there, and I wasn’t careworn and guilty. It would be great. We’d fight about what television programmes to watch, probably, but apart from that… And we wouldn’t make the same mistakes as before. We wouldn’t decide that we wanted to get older and live lives of our own. We tried that, and it didn’t work.

I follow him out, and we go and sit in the car for a while.

‘You can’t carry on like that,’ he says.

I shrug.

‘It’s not impossible. What’ll happen to me if I do?’

‘You’ll crack up. You won’t be able to bring the kids up. You won’t be able to work.’

‘Maybe that’s just because I’m pathetic. My husband’s got a new hobby and he’s invited a friend to stay. And OK, the hobby is redeeming souls, but… You know, I should be able to cope with that.’

‘They’re mad.’

‘They’ve done some pretty amazing things. They got the whole street to take in homeless kids.’

‘Yeah, but…’ Mark goes quiet. He can’t think of anything to say. It’s always ‘Yeah, but…’ and then nothing when the homeless are brought into it.

‘And, anyway, what kind of advertisement are you for the other side? Christ. You’re thirty-eight years old, you don’t have a full-time job, you’re depressed and lonely, and you’ve started going to church because you’ve run out of ideas.’

‘I’m not the other side. I’m just… normal.’

I laugh.

‘Yeah. Normal. That’s right. Suicidal and hopeless. The thing is, they’re all mad in there. But I’ve never seen David so happy.’

Later that night, when I’m back cocooned in my bedsit, I read the arts pages of the newspaper, like the rounded adult I am desperately trying to become, and in a book review someone talks about how Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell led a ‘rich, beautiful life’. I follow the phrase right the way up a blind alley. What can it possibly mean? How can one live a rich and beautiful life in Holloway? With David? And GoodNews? And Tom and Molly, and Mrs Cortenza? With twelve hundred patients, and a working day that lasts until seven o’clock in the evening some nights? If we don’t live rich, beautiful lives, does it mean we’ve screwed up? Is it our fault? And when David dies, will someone say that he too lived a rich, beautiful life? Is that the life I want to stop him from leading?

Molly gets the birthday party she wants: the four of us and Hope go swimming, and then we go for hamburgers, and then we go to the cinema to see Chicken Run, which Hope doesn’t really understand. After a little while Molly decides that Hope is to all intents and purposes blind, and begins a running commentary for her benefit, which eventually provokes an irritated complaint from the row behind us.

‘Oi. Shut it.’

‘She’s not very clever,’ Molly retorts, in aggrieved self-defence. ‘And it’s my birthday, and I invited her to my party because she hasn’t got any friends and I felt sorry for her, and I want her to enjoy it, and she can’t if she doesn’t know what’s happening.’

There is an appalled silence—or what I imagine, in my shame, to be an appalled silence—and then the sound of someone making an exaggerated vomiting noise.

‘Why did that man pretend to be sick?’ Molly asks when we have dropped Hope off at her house.

‘Because you made him sick,’ Tom says.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re disgusting.’

‘That’s enough, Tom,’ says David.

‘She is, though. So goody-goody.’

‘And you don’t like her being good?’

‘No. She’s just doing it to show off.’

‘How do you know? And anyway, what difference does it make? The point is that Hope had a nice time for a change. And if that’s because Molly was showing off, that’s fine.’

And Tom is silenced, like everyone is silenced, by the unanswerable righteousness of David’s logic.

‘ “Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up”,’ I say.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You heard me. You two are puffing and vaunting at every available opportunity.’

‘Yeah,’ says Tom darkly. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but he can recognize an aggressive tone when he hears one.

‘Where do you get all that stuff?’ David asks. ‘Where does it come from, the puffing and the vaunting?’

‘The Bible. St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13. They read it out in church on Sunday.’