'Oh God, really?' Jimmy said, unable to disguise the fear in his voice. 'Do we have to? I've got an interview with the bakery at Brent Cross Tesco tomorrow and I really don't need the extra stress.'

'It's time. We have to get Lillie to put herself down. Otherwise we'll be sitting outside her hotel room on her wedding night singing "Morningtown Ride" till she goes to sleep.'

They both knew the theory: babies would never settle down to sleep alone as long as they knew that by crying they could draw their parents back to lull them to sleep with endless hours of soothing stories and songs. Thus ensuring that the parent had no life. The only way to break this crushingly debilitating and time-consuming cycle was to leave the baby to cry.

That was the theory. Wait outside, no matter how long it took, no matter how heartbreaking the screams. Just tough the little bastards out.

Jodie, the nanny without whom one could not do, had done the dreadful deed with Toby, and on the night it was done Monica had had to leave the house.

'He's dying, Jodie!' she had shouted as Toby did his brilliant impression of a baby choking himself to death with tears and snot. 'We have to go to him.'

'He's not dying,' Jodie had replied in a voice as calm and steady as Toby's was glass-shatteringly alarming. 'He's crying because he thinks we'll come, and when he finds out we won't, he'll stop.'

'He'll stop because he's dead!'

'Then I guess I go to prison for neglect. It's a risk I'm prepared to take. Now why don't you just go and join Jim at the pub with Robbo. Give me two hours and when you come back we'll have broken the little swine!'

That had been seven years before.

A few years after that, Jodie had done Cressida as well. But now Jimmy and Monica had only each other to look to for help. It was up to them and them alone to gain control of their younger daughter and regain control of their lives.

'We have to do this,' Monica said firmly. 'It says so in The Big Happy Baby Book.'

'The only way that book is ever going to get Lillie to go to sleep on her own is if we whack her over the head with it.'

'Jim, we can't just give up! Otherwise we'll never get to sleep or have sex again.'

'Yes. You're right. I know you're right,' Jimmy admitted, already numb at the idea of the hours of horror ahead, before adding, 'Are we ever going to have sex again?'

The idea had taken him by surprise. After all, it had been quite a long time. It wasn't that they hadn't had any since the day he had been chucked out of the Bell End of the Dildo with a squeezed BlackBerry, but it had been rare. A combination of the never-ending demands of a breastfeeding baby, a curious toddler and a life that was imploding into a black hole of catastrophe had somewhat taken the lead out of Jimmy's pencil and the bite out of his mustard.

'Well . . . aren't we?' Monica asked in a small voice. 'Or are my stretch marks too hideous?'

'Mon, please! You know it's not that. It's . . . well, blimey, darling, you know what it is. We've lost everything.'

'Poor people have sex too, you know,' Monica said. 'In fact from the scrum of kids at Toby's school gate, I think some of them have rather a lot of sex.'

'Right,' Jimmy replied with renewed resolve, 'controlcrying. Let's get at it.'

'Yes, let's,' Monica said. 'And we're going to get her off the final night feed at the same time. The bar's closed.'

'But . . .' Jimmy struggled for an excuse to avoid the all-night misery that awaited them. 'Have you thought about the expense of weaning her? As long as she's on the breast she eats for free!'

'The government won't let us die. We'll apply for emergency formula.'

Monica dug into the pocket of her dressing gown and drew out two sets of earplugs.

Jimmy knew that further protest was pointless. He put his arms around her and hugged her long and hard, as if he were a soldier preparing to go to war, which was pretty much how he felt.

First they put Toby to bed in his little room, warning him to expect a lot of crying, then they put Cressida and Lillie down in theirs, read a couple of stories to them, sang a few rounds of 'Morningtown Ride' after which Cressie was asleep and left them.

One second later the screaming began.

It went on for ten minutes. Then twenty, then an hour. During this time both Jimmy and Monica suffered agonies. They loved their children, they loved them at least as much as they loved each other and certainly more than they loved themselves, and they could not bear to hear one of them in such distress. Screaming with longing and fear, choking with the terror of loneliness and separation. Drowning, it seemed, in tears and snot.

But they did not break. Jimmy probably would have done but Monica would not let him.

'We have to get our lives back,' she said, with tears in her eyes, 'for their sake as much as ours.'

And so the long evening wore on. Another hour passed and then ten minutes more . . . and then, long, long after they'd both given up hope, Lillie stopped crying. She was simply too exhausted to continue.

For a moment the silence was too oppressive for them to speak.

'She may be dead,' said Jimmy. 'We need to check.'

'No!' Monica insisted. 'We might wake her up.'

She ran to the baby listener and turned it on. It had not been on before; the last thing they had wanted to do was amplify the nightmare, but now they needed to listen. She had placed the other radio unit on a shelf between Lillie's cot and Cressida's bed. She turned it up to full volume.

Sure enough, they could hear them, breathing, gurgling. Sleeping. They were both asleep. Lillie had fallen asleep in the absence of her parents.

And it had taken only two hours and ten minutes.

Jimmy and Monica embraced. The embrace turned into a passionate kiss and before they knew it they were making love.

Later that night the whole family slept through. Lillie, utterly exhausted by crying herself to sleep, did not wake up for her usual night feed. She closed the bar voluntarily.

All in all, it was a very good night.

Too sad to care It was when Lizzie put her coffee mug down that Jimmy truly realized how fragile she'd become. Because she put it down directly on the polished surface of her beautiful dining table without a coaster. Jimmy had never, ever seen her do that in all the nearly twenty years he'd known her.

Lizzie hated rings.

She could spot potential mug or glass marks from across a crowded room. She could sense them. Her ears would prick up, her eyes widen in alarm and she would dash from one room to another, holding out an exquisite Chinese lacquered coaster in her hand, arriving miraculously at exactly the point when some thoughtless guest was about to place the wet bottom of their wine glass on to the gorgeous inlaid wooden lid of her eighteenth-century harpsichord. It was like a superpower. Like one of the X-Men. Lizzie was Coaster Girl, and there was no potential ring on furniture that she could not prevent.

Of course, Robbo himself had been the worst ringmaker of all. For a while Lizzie had called him Bilbo Baggins because wherever he went, a ring would be found. She used to follow him round at parties with a cloth and a stack of amusing little laminated squares depicting bloated British holidaymakers on Spanish beaches (from Lizzie's Coaster Brava range) or lovely plastic discs with the face of a rock star on them (from her Rock 'n' Roller Coaster range).

But that had been when Robbo was alive. Now he was dead and Lizzie, beautiful, full-lipped, full-figured, raven-haired goddess of all things lovely, was thin and drawn and grey-streaked and putting her mug down without a coaster.

Jimmy knew that if she didn't care about leaving a ring any more, she didn't care about anything any more.

'Sometimes I'm just not sure I can face the day,' she told him. 'Honestly, I wish I'd been sitting beside him in the car when he . . . when he . . .'

Killed himself?

Was that what had happened? Lizzie had made it clear at the funeral that she did not believe it and would never believe it. Jimmy didn't believe it either, although at the back of his mind he recognized that it was a possibility.

'Wigan and Wigan are contesting my life-insurance claim,' Lizzie said, as if reading Jimmy's thoughts. 'That awful man Andrew Tanner has written saying they're withholding payment and are prepared to test the claim in court.'

Jimmy could believe it. He used Wigan and Wigan himself, having done so on Robbo and Lizzie's recommendation. He was now behind on all his premiums and the firm had proved one of his more vociferous Webb Street creditors.

'They don't stand a chance, Liz,' Jimmy said. 'They'll have to pay in the end and we'll nail them for the interest too.'

But Jimmy was not entirely sure.

The police had established that although Robbo was certainly over the limit when he crashed he had not been spectacularly drunk, and the CCTV footage of the incident offered no clue as to why the car had swerved so violently. As far as it was possible to establish, it appeared that up until moments before the crash Robbo had been driving normally.

The coroner's verdict remained open.

'But Lizzie,' Jim went on gently, 'currently you're broke, really, really broke, and you have a great many liabilities.' He had come round to help Lizzie with her accounting. 'We need to make a plan for you,' he continued, knowing that it was his father's wisdom he was imparting, not his own.

'I don't need a plan,' Lizzie said in a voice as leaden as it had once been golden. 'The kids are going to be OK. Amanda has managed to squeeze them on to her school bursaries programme, and that's all that matters. It's so kind of her because I know how oversubscribed it is.'

'OK, Lizzie, so the kids have schools to go to. We have to start thinking about you.'

'I don't want to think about me,' Lizzie said, her voice beginning to crack. 'I don't care about me. I deserve this.'

'Why? Why?' Jimmy asked. 'Why do you deserve this?'

Now the tears came in earnest. She looked so washed out, Jimmy wondered where she was still finding them.

'Oh Jimmy, supposing he did mean to do it? I mean just for a moment, for one insane, distraught moment, and then it was too late? Supposing I didn't love him well enough for him to know that I wouldn't have minded about him losing all the money. If in all those years I hadn't shown him that he could trust me to support him through anything . . .'

'No, Lizzie. That's madness. Don't go there,' Jimmy said. 'He was going to get some fags. He lost concentration.'

'What if he left me, Jim?' Lizzie said, openly weeping. 'What if the insurance man is right and Robbo left me? If he cared more about his shame and his failure than he did about me? About living for me! Because if that were true then I don't care enough about me either! I don't care enough to bother about anything at all.'

'Liz,' Jim protested, 'it was an accident and it's time to pull yourself together. You're not like me, busted flat with nothing to offer. You're Lizzie of Lizzie Food, your name's still good. You can get out there and make money. Just think of something beautiful and sell it.'

'I don't think I will find anything beautiful ever again,' said Lizzie.

Art imitating life In a blinding moment of inspiration, the solution to Jimmy and Monica's mounting fiscal problems dawned upon them both.

They would become novelists.

The precedents were extremely encouraging.

'Look at Jeffrey Archer,' Jimmy said. 'He was broke, wasn't he? So he wrote Kane and Abel. Brilliant. Simple as that, he had a problem, he fixed it.'

'And J. K. Rowling,' Monica said.

'Exactly. Another classic case. Broke. Single mum. Eking out coffees in an Edinburgh cafe. Writes Harry Potter. Problem solved. Bloody obvious when you think about it. That's what we need to do.'

'Of course it is. We'll start tonight.'

And so after they'd put the children to bed they made a pot of coffee, allowed themselves a small plate of digestive biscuits and sat down to think.

Within an hour the ideas were taking shape.

Monica decided to write a children's book that adults would enjoy. She wanted it to contain lots of adventure and magic and dragons and dark forces. But (and this was terribly important) it would be very different from Harry Potter. That was essential.

She planned to set her story in a pre-human world which was populated by trolls (although in her mind they looked more like pixies than trolls). It would be a sort of medieval society, but with trolls instead of people. The story would take place at the court of the great Troll King. Here, a lowly but feisty troll girl working in the scullery would suddenly discover that she had magic powers! She would be the unwitting inheritor of dark secrets and ancient sorcery.

'There'll be a wonderful scene when she first works it out,' Monica explained. 'She'll spill all the food on the floor and be heading for a terrible beating when all of a sudden she'll make it right again! Just by wishing it! The spilt jugs full, the ruined pies back in their dishes. She doesn't know how it happens but it does happen. Anyway, the great Troll Wizard hears about it and, recognizing that the girl is special, takes her on as one of his apprentices, but the evil Wraith Goddess from the Dark Side also hears about the girl and vows to steal her power. What do you think?' said Monica with great excitement.

'It's Harry Potter,' said Jimmy.

'What! Don't be ridiculous!' Monica snapped. 'It's about trolls and the hero's a girl.'

'Yes. It's about a troll girl Harry Potter who goes to magic school.'

'She doesn't go to magic school, she's apprenticed to a wizard.'

'Having previously been put upon and bullied.'

'Of course.'

'Will she make friends with some of the other apprentices?'

'Well, obviously.'

'A bookish one and a geek?'

'No! Absolutely not,' Monica replied angrily. 'You're being totally negative. I don't think the two stories are remotely similar.'

'They aren't remotely similar, Mon,' Jimmy said, smiling, 'they're very, very similar.'

'But my story is about trolls.'

Jimmy shrugged and returned to his laptop. He had been typing furiously when Monica interrupted him with her troll idea.

'All right then,' Monica said huffily, 'what have you got?'

'Do you want to hear?' Jimmy sounded rather smug.

'Of course I want to hear.'

'It's going to blow you away.'

'Don't be so sure.'

'Us,' Jimmy said happily.

'What do you mean, "us"?'

'I'm going to write a story about us,' he said. 'At least about us up to a point when it gets a bit dark.'

Monica looked suspicious.