Fifteen years later and Joyce would still challenge anyone to show her a happier marriage than hers. Three more children had followed Joshua: Benjamin (fourteen), Jack (twelve) and Oscar (six), bouncy, curly-haired boys, all articulate and amusing. The Inner Life of Houseplants (1984) and a college chair for Marcus had seen them through the eighties boom and bust, financing an extra bathroom, a conservatory and life’s pleasures: old cheese, good wine, winters in Florence. Now there were two new works-in-progress: The Secret Passions of the Climbing Rose and Transgenic Mice: A Study of the Inherent Limitations of DNA Microinjection (Gordon and Ruddle, 1981) in Comparison with Embryonic Stem (ES) Cell-mediated Gene Transfer (Gossler et al., 1986). Marcus was also working on a ‘pop science’ book, against his better judgement, a collaboration with a novelist that he hoped would finance at least the first two children well into their university years. Joshua was a star maths pupil, Benjamin wanted to be a geneticist just like his father, Jack’s passion was psychiatry, and Oscar could checkmate his father’s king in fifteen moves. And all this despite the fact that the Chalfens had sent their kids to Glenard Oak, daring to take the ideological gamble their peers guiltily avoided, those nervous liberals who shrugged their shoulders and coughed up the cash for a private education. And not only were they bright children, they were happy, not hot-housed in any way. Their only after-school activity (they despised sport) was the individual therapy five times a week at the hands of an old-fashioned Freudian called Marjorie who did Joyce and Marcus (separately) on weekends. It might appear extreme to non-Chalfens, but Marcus had been brought up with a strong respect for therapy (in his family therapy had long supplanted Judaism) and there was no arguing with the result. Every Chalfen proclaimed themselves mentally healthy and emotionally stable. The children had their oedipal complexes early and in the right order, they were all fiercely heterosexual, they adored their mother and admired their father, and, unusually, this feeling only increased as they reached adolescence. Rows were rare, playful and only ever over political or intellectual topics (the importance of anarchy, the need for higher taxes, the problem of South Africa, the soul/body dichotomy), upon which they all agreed anyway.

The Chalfens had no friends. They interacted mainly with the Chalfen extended family (the good genes which were so often referred to: two scientists, one mathematician, three psychiatrists and a young cousin working for the Labour Party). Under sufferance and on public holidays, they visited Joyce’s long-rejected lineage, the Connor clan, Daily Mail letter-writers who even now could not disguise their distaste for Joyce’s Israelite love-match. Bottom line: the Chalfens didn’t need other people. They referred to themselves as nouns, verbs and occasionally adjectives: It’s the Chalfen way, And then he came out with a real Chalfenism, He’s Chalfening again, We need to be a bit more Chalfenist about this. Joyce challenged anyone to show her a happier family, a more Chalfenist family than theirs.

And yet, and yet… Joyce pined for the golden age when she was the linchpin of the Chalfen family. When people couldn’t eat without her. When people couldn’t dress without her assistance. Now even Oscar could make himself a snack. Sometimes there seemed nothing to improve, nothing to cultivate; recently she found herself pruning the dead sections from her rambling rose, wishing she could find some fault of Joshua’s worthy of attention, some secret trauma of Jack’s or Benjamin’s, a perversion in Oscar. But they were all perfect. Sometimes, when the Chalfens sat round their Sunday dinner, tearing apart a chicken until there was nothing left but a tattered ribcage, gobbling silently, speaking only to retrieve the salt or the pepper – the boredom was palpable. The century was drawing to a close and the Chalfens were bored. Like clones of each other, their dinner table was an exercise in mirrored perfection, Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself infinitely, bouncing from Oscar to Joyce, Joyce to Joshua, Joshua to Marcus, Marcus to Benjamin, Benjamin to Jack ad nauseam across the meat and veg. They were still the same remarkable family they always had been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers – judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers, actors and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at – there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed passengers of The Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. They were bored, and none more than Joyce.

To fill long days left alone in the house (Marcus commuted to his college), Joyce’s boredom often drove her to flick through the Chalfens’ enormous supply of delivered magazines (New Marxism, Living Marxism, New Scientist, Oxfam Report, Third World Action, Anarchist’s Journal) and feel a yearning for the bald Romanians or beautiful pot-bellied Ethiopians – yes, she knew it was awful, but there it was – children crying out from glossy paper, needing her. She needed to be needed. She’d be the first to admit it. She hated it, for example, when one after the other her children, pop-eyed addicts of breast milk, finally kicked the habit. She usually stretched it to two or three years, and, in the case of Joshua, four, but though the supply never ended, the demand did. She lived in dread of the inevitable moment when they moved from soft drugs to hard, the switch from calcium to the sugared delights of Ribena. It was when she finished breast-feeding Oscar that she threw herself back into gardening, back into the warm mulch where tiny things relied on her.

Then one fine day Millat Iqbal and Irie Jones walked reluctantly into her life. She was in the back garden at the time, tearfully examining her Garter Knight delphiniums (heliotrope and cobalt-blue with a jet-black centre, like a bullet hole in the sky) for signs of thrip – a nasty pest that had already butchered her bocconia. The doorbell rang. Tilting her head back, Joyce waited till she could hear the slippered feet of Marcus running down the stairs from his study and then, satisfied that he would answer it, delved back into the thick. With raised eyebrow she inspected the mouthy double blooms which stood to attention along the delphinium’s eight-foot spine. Thrip, she said to herself out loud, acknowledging the dog-eared mutation on every other flower; thrip, she repeated, not without pleasure, for it would need seeing to now, and might even give rise to a book or at least a chapter; thrip. Joyce knew a thing or two about thrip:

Thrips, common name for minute insects that feed on a wide range of plants, enjoying in particular the warm atmosphere required for an indoor or exotic plant. Most species are no more than 1.5 mm (0.06 inch) long as adults; some are wingless, but others have two pairs of short wings fringed with hairs. Both adults and nymphs have sucking, piercing mouth parts. Although thrips pollinate some plants and also eat some insect pests, they are both boon and bane for the modern gardener and are generally considered pests to be controlled with insecticides, such as Lindex. Scientific classification: thrips make up the order Thysanoptera.

– Joyce Chalfen, The Inner Life of Houseplants, from the index on pests and parasites

Yes. Thrips have good instincts: essentially they are charitable, productive organisms which help the plant in its development. Thrips mean well, but thrips go too far, thrips go beyond pollinating and eating pests; thrips begin to eat the plant itself, to eat it from within. Thrip will infect generation after generation of delphiniums if you let it. What can one do about thrip if, as in this case, the Lindex hadn’t worked? What can you do but prune hard, prune ruthlessly and begin from the beginning? Joyce took a deep breath. She was doing this for the delphinium. She was doing this because without her the delphinium had no chance. Joyce slipped the huge garden scissors out of her apron pocket, grabbed the screaming orange handles firmly and placed the exposed throat of a blue delphinium bloom between two slices of silver. Tough love.