Jimmy would not be marking these extra units of booze on the list stuck to the fridge. It was his little secret, the only one he kept from his wife. She was breastfeeding, she had to watch her intake for fear of damaging Lillie's brain cells, but Jimmy wasn't. He could bash his liver for six and drink himself into a coma and Lillie's little brain would remain unaffected, and so, while maintaining the fiction of solidarity with his wife's enforced semi-discipline, he allowed himself many a sneaky swig when she wasn't looking.

Besides, he was celebrating. Drinking to the first glimmer of hope that had appeared on his horizon in a long time. True, it was not exactly a triumph to go two million pounds into debt to a couple of your oldest friends. Not something to be proud of or something he would ever have dreamed of considering even six months earlier. But these were unique times, capitalism's uncharted waters, and the rules were changing day by day. Jimmy knew, he absolutely knew, that if he could just get through this period without the whole thing imploding, his assets would regain their value and all would be well. Like millions of other guys across the world in early 2009, all he needed was a bridging loan, something which the banks were no longer prepared to offer. But Jimmy had friends, he had contacts. Why not use them? That was how it worked. It was how life had worked since the dawn of time. Family, friends, tribe, loyalty. That was what counted. A girl he knew from Sussex was going to help him out, that was all. He would have done the same for her, unquestionably.

Jimmy had always been generous with his cash. He had once given an entire day's personal profit to Comic Relief. A whole day. That was serious money.

Cressida was beginning to purr gently . . . Was she going down? Jimmy could scarcely dare to hope. It was only just past one. Gently he drew to a halt, and still Cressida remained unmoved. He had to try the ultimate test: could he sit down? Hovering over a chair, he slowly bent his knees. No good! He'd tried to rush it, she'd only been half gone, her altimeter was still taking readings. Instantly the bomb went off, but before she could ramp up the volume Jimmy was moving again. Slickly, smoothly, without a pause or a jolt, he straightened his back and was off again, moving, singing, patting and cooing.

She might not be asleep yet but he had at least prevented her from screaming blue murder and waking Monica. That was what mattered.

Then disaster struck. A huge, terrible, jarring noise ripped through the peace of the kitchen, so that the very fish in the wall looked up and took notice. Jimmy almost dropped Cressida as the high-pitched voice tore at his eardrums and ripped into his brain: 'London Bridge is falling down, Falling down, falling down.

London Bridge is falling down, My fair lady.'

It was that stuffed Pokemon toy. It had caught him many times in the past but not for several weeks. Now, however, consumed in thoughts about how best to distribute Lizzie and Robson's millions to avoid the money getting sucked into paying off non-essential debts, Jimmy had strayed from his path a fraction and fallen victim to one of the numerous electronic noise traps that littered their basement floor.

Since being forced to take a hand in the raising of his children Jimmy had learned that in the modern age no toy is silent, every single one emits endlessly repeated, mind-numbingly unforgettable, ball-crunchingly irritating tunes and jingles. And the big furry yellow Pokemon was the worst because its song was so loud, so high and so stupidly speeded up.

Cressida started crying instantly, and moments later Jimmy could hear her baby sister reciprocating upstairs. Monica and Lillie were two floors up, but when the Japanese created an irritating Pokemon toy they wanted the world to know. Inevitably, the next thing Jimmy heard was Monica. She had pushed the intercom button on their fiendishly complex internal phone system and her voice, metallic and desperate, emanated from the conference speaker.

'I had just half closed my eyes,' she said.

'Sorry,' Jimmy replied to the wall-mounted unit.

'I was dreaming that everything was going to be all right.'

'Everything is going to be all right.'

'Good. 'Night.'

''Night.'

Cressida finally fell asleep at 2.40am, after which (having sat with her for five minutes to make absolutely sure) Jimmy gently took her upstairs and began the infinitely slow process of lowering her into her cot. Fading out his song and gently disengaging first one hand and then the other before straightening up and slowly retreating as the last whispered chorus disappeared into silence. No Danger UXB technician in the Second World War ever approached an unexploded bomb with more care than Jimmy did the process of detaching himself from his sleeping daughter.

Lillie for once wasn't feeding but was sleeping peacefully in her Moses basket while Monica snored gently under the duvet. Toby was asleep next door. Incredibly, four out of five members of his family were asleep at the same moment. Jimmy wondered whether this could be the first time that had happened since Jodie. He almost felt like getting out the video camera.

The situation was so unusual that Jimmy thought about going through to the spare room to avoid any possibility of spoiling the peace. He often slept in the spare room, on those nights when Lillie simply would not give up the boob and Monica was half demented with exhaustion and he had to go to the site in the morning. But he didn't like doing it. It made the evidence too clear that they were no longer a man and woman in the true and proper sense of the words, just two jaded careworkers who happened to share shifts. When he had been rich he had never once gone to the spare room, even when Mon had been feeding Toby and Cressida. They had so much help both night and day that, tired though he was, he had always known he could sleep because Monica would in extremis express the milk and hand the baby over to the night nanny. For Lillie there were no such luxuries, which made Jimmy all the more determined to remain in his marital bed as often as possible. His disastrous career collapse had felt like castration enough without him giving up on sleeping in the same bed as his wife.

He decided to risk it and so undressed very slowly and in absolute silence, constantly vigilant for any electronic toys and beeping teddies that might be lurking underfoot. Approaching the bed, Jimmy gingerly lifted what was left of his side of the covers, debating in his mind whether Monica had left him enough to sleep under. Her habit of wrapping herself in 90 per cent of the duvet and then being extremely grumpy when Jimmy attempted to tug a little back was something that he had learned to live with. Of course Monica was convinced that she never had more than her fair share and if anything it was he who stole the duvet. It was an issue on which they could only agree to differ.

Determined not to disturb her, Jimmy decided that he could probably get by with what she had left him and so he lay down on the bed beside her and closed his eyes.

He had feared that it would be one of those nights on which he was too tired to sleep. When he would lie there, desperate, shivering under a half-covering of duvet, his eyelids twitching in a kind of hysterical half-wakefulness. In this dizzying state his mind tormented him with the urgent necessity of getting to sleep because of the mountain of shit that was waiting for him in the morning. Nights when he knew that if he didn't get to sleep he would be completely and terminally unfit to work the following day, and equally certain that it was only the knowledge that he needed to get to sleep that was keeping him awake.

On this night, however, Jimmy did not suffer this terrible condition. Perhaps it was because for the first night in so many awful nights he was hopeful. Hopeful of a solution to the maelstrom of circumstances that was sucking him and his family under. Perhaps it was because, all in all, he had drunk more than a bottle of wine plus a little Scotch. Perhaps it was because, despite all the hell that he was going through, he still had the love of his wife and children to sustain him and having all four of them sleeping peacefully so close by filled him with happiness. For whatever reason, on this particular night Jimmy slipped effortlessly into the arms of Morpheus before the clock radio on his bedside table had flicked from 2.59 to 3.00.

At 3.15 the phone rang.

A worm in the Big Apple Maybe the five doormen noticed something was wrong. Maybe they didn't.

Of course no building really needs five doormen, but then the Castle Tower apartment building in New York City was never about utility, it was always about excess. The sort of people with apartments in the Castle liked to see a lot of staff about the place.

Maybe the half-dozen members of the concierge department spotted a new, more sombre mood in Lew Bronski as he emerged from the elevator and strode through the vast cathedral-like foyer, past the phalanx of uniformed lift boys towards the great glass revolving doors. Maybe the guys who saluted him as he stepped out of the building and into his armoured stretch limo waiting on Fifth Avenue noticed a change in Lew that day. A little tension in the jaw? A falter in the walk?

Maybe they didn't. A lifetime in high finance had taught Lew Bronski to keep a poker face at all times and he was maintaining one now at this supremely challenging moment in his life. This moment of complete and utter ruin.

Lew Bronski. Mr Wall Street. Genuine New York royalty. Chair of just about every high-end Jewish charity on the East Coast. Money guru to the stars. The guy who couldn't walk through his own country club without people throwing money at him to invest. King Midas himself. Lucky Lew the Lucky Jew was about to turn himself in to the New York City Police Department as a prelude to what he knew would be the rest of his life behind bars.

Late call Before the second ring had finished crashing around the room and bouncing off the walls and the inside of Jimmy's skull, both babies were screaming and Monica had sprung up like a corpse popping out of the ground in The Night of the Living Dead. She yelped, she jerked, she looked wildly this way and that and then fell out of bed. There she scrabbled around on the floor, both awake and in a deep, deep sleep at the same time, attempting in her semi-conscious state to breast-feed Cressida's teddy bear, which immediately began to broadcast its pre-recorded version of 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic'.

Jimmy was in a marginally better state. He had been asleep for only a quarter of an hour so the telephone had not summoned him from quite such a faraway place as it had Monica. Nonetheless he had been fully immersed in the unconscious free fall of exhaustion and now he was twanging back like a man on the end of a bungee rope. One arm had gone to sleep and he flailed about with the other in an effort to find the phone and stop the terrible noise. All he did was knock the clock, his watch and his glass of water off the bedside table, in the process soaking the book he never got round to reading.

Through the ringing he heard Toby calling from the other room and, distracted though he was, it hurt him to the heart that in his sleepiness the boy was calling for Jodie. Jimmy hoped that Monica had not heard.

Finally he located the telephone, but at first he put the mouthpiece to his ear.

'Hello? Hello?' he blathered into the ear end of the phone.

'Yes, yes?' Monica was saying from the floor on the other side of the bed.

As if sensing the opportunity to make a bad situation worse, Cressida cranked up the volume a notch and began rattling the bars of her cot. She had a toddler's unerring ability to do and say the wrong things at the most brilliantly effective time. Her first words had been 'Poo poo' and she had said them loudly fourteen times during a rather solemn church service when Lizzie and Robson had restated their vows. Lizzie had been sweet about it but Monica could see she thought Monica should have taken Cressida out.

'Please, Cressida,' Jimmy pleaded, 'Daddy's trying to hear.'

'Jimmy?' a voice said on the other end of the line.

'What?' Jimmy replied.

'It's Lizzie.'

'Who?' Jimmy shouted back, hoping that he had misheard.

'Tell them to fuck off!' Monica called from the floor where she was on her knees between Cressida's cot and Lillie's Moses basket, trying to comfort them both at the same time.

'There there, Lillie! Mummy's here. Look, booby booby. Booby booby. Jimmy, you have to pick Cressie up!'

'I can't, I'm on the phone.'

'Who the hell is it? It's three fifteen in the morning! Just tell them to fuck off!'

'I can't hear who it is with Cressie and Lillie screaming. Hang on,' he shouted into the phone, before throwing it down and staggering round the bed to gather up his other screaming daughter and begin an urgent chorus of 'Morningtown Ride'.

'Yes?' He grabbed the phone once more, in the hope of squeezing in a conversation between the verse about the driver at the engine and the verse about how maybe it would be raining. 'Sorry? Who's that?'

'Jimmy,' the rich, warm voice said. 'It's Lizzie.'

Jimmy felt himself go cold. Suddenly the screaming children seemed far away as he listened to Lizzie's lovely honeyed voice.

'Look, I'm sorry to ring you up at this stupid time,' she was saying, 'but I just had to speak you. You and Mon.'

It was like she was actually in the room and had punched him in the stomach. The wind was knocked out of him, the joy cruelly extinguished.

She and Robson were going to jack. Renege. Blow him out. Royally shaft him. That was it. Done deal. Done and dusted. Lifeline withdrawn. Why else would she phone at such an hour?

They wanted to get it over with. They'd talked and decided that lending money wasn't a good thing for 'mates' to do and they hadn't been able to sleep till they withdrew their offer. That was it. Had to be. Jimmy understood it all in a second. Once more he was buggered.

'Look, Liz,' he said, trying not to sound pathetic, 'it doesn't matter about the time. I'd love to talk. Really. We need to talk. I'm going to take it downstairs.'

He put the phone down and turned to Monica, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor with Lillie on her breast.

'It's Liz,' he said. 'She must be having second thoughts. Christ Almighty!'

'But she promised . . .'

'Not in bloody writing. I should have gone round the minute she said it. This'll be about "friendship", about "mates", I know it will. Some bollocks about debt destroying it. Fuck.'

Jimmy was already out of the door, staggering slightly, still woozy from the booze. Monica stared at him like some undead creature who had risen from the lagoon.

'She's still on the line. I don't know, maybe I can talk her round,' Jimmy went on. 'I'll have to leave Cressida with you.'

He put Cressida down and she immediately started screaming again.

Still Monica did not reply, her eyes half rolled backwards in an agony of worry and sleeplessness. In the half-light of the room her pale skin was almost translucent and there were tears on her cheek. Jimmy longed to take her burdens from her but he had to get on to this. He had to turn Lizzie around. Otherwise the babies would still be screaming and they'd also be starving.

He would ask to talk to Robson. That was the way; Robbo took a simple view of life. He wouldn't be worrying about the future of their fucking friendship. He would see that a friend was in trouble now and if that friend's friends did not help he wouldn't have a future in which to be friends.

This rather complex and rambling argument was forming in Jimmy's mind at break-neck speed as he rushed towards the stairs, and perhaps because of that distraction he did something he had not done for months. He forgot the stair gate.

He went over it head first, catching a foot between the bars of the collapsing barrier and falling with a terrible crash, ending up at full stretch down the first nine stairs with his feet still caught at the top and his head halfway to the bottom. Luckily he had taken the weight of the fall on his arms and by a miracle they had not shattered. It was a hell of a fall and a less fit, heavier man could easily have broken his back, but Jimmy was trim and in good shape so he ended up merely bruised and winded. Of course, being still half pissed helped to deaden the impact. A drunk man falls easy.

'Oh my God!' he heard Monica calling from above him. She had heard the crash and was now standing at the top of the stairs with Lillie in one arm and Cressida in the other. Toby was also there, his eyes filling with fear and sleepy bewilderment.

'Are you all right, Dad?'

'I'm fine! I'm OK,' Jimmy gasped back.

In considerable pain, Jimmy got up and staggered down the rest of the stairs to the ground floor and on down the stairs with the one remaining working bulb and across the basement room to the bench where the landline phone sat. Sinking to the floor, he reached up and pulled the phone cradle down by its wire.

'Hello, Lizzie. Are you still there?'

'Yes,' he heard his old friend's voice saying, 'I'm still here.'

'I'm really sorry about the delay,' Jimmy said, trying to calm down and prepare himself to make his pitch, a pitch more delicate and more crucial than any he had ever made during his days on the trading floor. 'Kids and all that. All three went off at once and then I fell down the stairs.'

'Oh God, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have rung.'

'No, please, Lizzie. Don't say that, I don't mind at all, we should talk. We need to talk.'

'Has Henry called? Did he tell you?' Lizzie's voice sounded almost relieved.

'Sorry? No, Henry hasn't called. Why what's up?'

'Oh Jimmy.' Quite suddenly the beautiful silky voice broke with despair. 'Robbo's dead.'

The price of praise Monica and Jimmy honeymooned in the States, doing the whole of Route 66 in a vintage Cadillac.

'Just let Henry try and tell me I'm not Rock 'n' Roll now,' Jimmy boasted, relishing the feel of the huge, shiny gas guzzler. Enjoying its lazy, soggy suspension, the satisfying roar of the big V8 under the hood. Stretching back on its padded bench seat which he and Monica re-christened whenever they passed a state line or a really exciting road sign covered with cool American destinations straight out of the song book of Rock, like Buffalo or Detroit.

They ended their trip in Las Vegas, where they reconfirmed their vows in the Elvis chapel and Monica bought Jimmy a skull ring to prove that although he was married he was still Rock 'n' Roll. Then, at the end of the most glorious month imaginable, they returned to Britain first class out of LAX to begin their married life together. But the honeymoon wasn't over by a long chalk. It was to stretch out in front of them for years ahead.

Jimmy's good fortune just wouldn't let up. Every year he made more money and every year he seemed to love Monica even more. Other men might torture themselves with thoughts of other women and some might even act upon those thoughts, but Jimmy never did. He was attracted to girls, of course, and on one occasion developed a horribly uncomfortable crush on one with variably coloured hair and nose rings who worked in the company PR department while waiting to become a rock star. He made the mistake one day of complimenting her on her amazing sense of style as they passed in the corridor.

'No shoes too high, no hair too big,' she said without breaking her stride and Jimmy had been smitten. He had gritted his teeth, however, and ridden it out.

Jim's mum was delighted with the change Monica seemed almost overnight to have brought about in her son. Suddenly he was clean and fit-looking. His hair was nicely cut and that awful constant sniffing appeared to have abated, which was a great relief.

Shortly before Monica's advent Nora had begun to worry seriously about Jimmy, who was sweating a lot and grinding his teeth. Nora wondered if he might be developing some terrible allergy.

'That's what it's all about these days. Allergies. It's because of the chemicals they're putting in the chickens. I mean whoever would have thought peanuts would need a health warning?'

Derek Corby read the Sunday papers and had a pretty good idea what Jimmy's symptoms were about, but he didn't want to worry Nora so he kept his own counsel.

And now all that had changed anyway.

'Whatever he had, she's cured him of it,' Nora said. 'It's like he was a little boy and now suddenly he's a man.'

Jimmy's dad agreed. Slaving away each day running his branch of the National City Bank for a salary that wouldn't have paid for even one of Jimmy and Monica's holidays that year, Derek conceded that in Monica, Jimmy had made the one truly clever decision of his life. 'And poor Monica made her silliest,' he would add grumpily, but his wife always assured Monica that he didn't really mean it.

It was Derek and Nora who helped the young couple to move into their first proper marital home, a small riverside cottage in Richmond. Monica's parents were old hippies who had sold up their pine-furniture business and gone off around the world in a boat, so they were pretty useless. Derek and Nora, on the other hand, were complete homebodies, thrilled and anxious to get involved. Fortunately, Monica loved them both.

'I always secretly longed to have straight parents,' Monica said as she unwrapped coffee mugs. 'When Mum used to pick me up at the school gates dressed entirely in purple with no bra and her bloody nipples showing, I used to die. Dad sometimes came in this terrible old minibus he used for work and which made more noise than all the other parents' cars put together. One time I had my bike with me and he opened the back to put it in and there was a mattress and duvet laid out for all to see, with empty wine bottles clanging around. It was mortifying. From that day on I was the girl whose parents had a shaggin' wagon. It was horrible.'

'Well, you can't get much straighter than my mum and dad,' Jimmy said, holding an Allen key and struggling to decipher the Swedish cartoons that were supposed to show him how to assemble his new shelf unit. 'They are the proverbial shortest distance between two points.'

At that moment Nora came down from upstairs, where she had been stocking the linen cupboard.

'Lovely fluffy white towels, Monica,' she said. 'Were they a wedding present?'

'Yes. Lizzie and Robbo. Lizzie designed them herself.'

'How do you design a white towel?' Nora enquired.

'Mum, it's 1996,' Jimmy said gently. 'I think you're going to find the twenty-first century very difficult.'

'I don't think I'll bother with it actually, dear,' Nora replied. 'I'll just carry on with this one and keep adding years to it.'

She went to help Monica with the crockery.

'I noticed there's a super little room right next to yours and Jimmy's, Monica,' she said archly. 'What could that possibly be for, I wonder?'