'Mon,' he said, not knowing any better way to say it than to just say it, 'Robson's dead. He crashed his car on a bloody fag run and got himself killed.'

Jimmy hadn't expected that he'd be the one to break down first but suddenly he found himself weeping uncontrollably. Shedding more tears in a few moments than he had shed in the previous twenty years. He had not cried once during all their current troubles, even when Monica had been in bits. But he cried now. He cried and cried as he told Monica what he knew about the tragedy that had befallen their friends.

Strangely, astonishingly, Monica did not cry. Later, on reflection, Jimmy concluded that the revelation of a nightmare so close to them but so infinitely worse than the one they were living through themselves gave her strength. Perhaps it put things in perspective for her, perhaps it provided a kind of grim (and unsought) comfort in that it became blindingly clear that in her own life things could be a whole lot worse.

For whatever reason, as Jimmy broke down Monica pulled herself together. She didn't even seem tired any more. Instead she rang Lizzie straight back and said she was coming over.

It was the right thing to do. Monica always understood that kind of thing. Lizzie needed help. She just hadn't wanted to ask.

Monica got up, went downstairs, put a coat on over her stained nightie, grabbed the keys to the Range Rover and was gone.

Half an hour later Jimmy found himself where he had found himself on so many desperate and zombified pre-dawns before stretched out on a bean bag in the family room watching Thomas the Tank Engine with Lillie in his arms, Cressie on her little folding sofa and Toby asleep on another bean bag. Cressida loved Thomas the Tank Engine just as Toby had done before her (and secretly still did), although he was now too old to admit it. His favourite engine was James.

Jimmy, on the other hand, had come to loathe Thomas the Tank Engine because its repetitive style was driving him slowly insane. What was more, Ringo Starr's lugubrious delivery of the narrative, which at first Jimmy had thought rather charming, had long since lost its appeal. He never would have believed he could wish any Beatle to shut up, but after years of Thomas the Tank Engine Jimmy wished Ringo would.

And so, as Thomas and James went up the track (preparatory to coming back down the track), Jimmy lay on his bean bag and thought about Robbo and all the terrible changes that the previous nine months had brought into their lives. How had it happened? How had it all gone so wrong?

The Labour Party is the new Tory Party Jimmy and Monica left Richmond and moved into the first of a series of Notting Hill homes in 1997, the year Labour was returned to power after eighteen years of Conservative government.

With the exception of Jane and Henry (who was a candidate), the whole gang spent election night together among Jimmy and Monica's packing boxes and, like so many other people in Britain that night, got well and truly caught up in the exuberant spirit of the moment. They had all voted Labour except for Rupert and Amanda, and even Rupert had conceded that he had only voted Tory out of duty and had secretly wanted 'our Tone' to win.

'We need a bit of fresh air,' he said as the results rolled in and they celebrated each New Labour victory with vintage champagne and slices of Domino's pizza. 'And after Our Tone went and grovelled to Rupert Murdoch at his summer summit, I knew Labour were well and truly on side and the City was safe.'

For once Rupert spoke for them all.

'I'm happy to still call myself a sort of socialist,' said David between great mouthfuls of pepperoni, 'but nobody wants insane taxes, it's just counter-productive.'

'We just want a fairer society,' David's girlfriend Laura volunteered, opening box after box in search of something vegetarian. 'And I really believe New Labour can deliver. Jimmy, did you only order meat feast?'

'There's a couple of Hawaiians in there.'

'Which have ham in them.'

'Ham isn't really meat, Laura,' Jimmy said firmly, clearly feeling that it was important that new girlfriends understood that the Radish Club made its own rules.

'Be quiet!' David hushed. 'It's Michael Portillo's result! Thatcher's baby is about to get royally stuffed!'

The room cheered as another famous Tory scalp was taken. The general consensus (with Rupert and Amanda once more proving the exceptions) was with David's Laura, believing that they could all now look forward to a fairer and more caring society. And there was the added bonus that they would not personally be expected to pay for it.

'Something for nothing!' Jimmy shouted. 'Love that! No homeless. No getting mugged by the underclass, and all for a top tax rate of 40 per cent. Bargain, I call it.'

'Feel a bit deflated, Rupert?' Laura asked, having given up her search and begun picking bits of ham from a slice of Hawaiian.

'Yes, come on, Rupert,' Monica chipped in, 'you have to admit it. You can be as wry and arch as you like, but your lot are history.'

'A rose by any other name, Monica darling,' Rupert replied, his already somewhat chubby face illuminated by light from the vast booze fridge in which he was fossicking.

'By which you mean?' Laura asked in a voice that was clearly meant to say that she might be new around here but she was not going to be bullied by smug Tories.

'We're all "new" Labour now,' Rupert went on, 'because New Labour are basically slightly liberal Tories, and if you can't see that you're blind. The working class as we used to understand it is gone. The centre of the British economy has irrevocably moved from manufacturing to financial services. Thanks to St Margaret-'

'Boo! Confusion on her!' David shouted drunkenly.

'Oh, do stop pretending you're still a student!' Amanda admonished. 'If you listen to Rupert you might actually learn something.'

'Yes, David. Relax,' Rupert said. 'Whatever Henry and his Blairite chums might have banged on about at the hustings, there are no miners and industrial workers left for anyone to pretend to worry about any more. Your deeply compromised conscience is off the hook. We are the workers now.'

'That's true,' said Monica, spearing strawberries for a melted Mars bar fondue. 'Nobody can say that you boys don't work hard.'

'No, Mon,' Jimmy said, 'I don't work hard at all. I just turn up with my wheelbarrow every morning and shovel money into it. Of course I have to be there, but that's about it.'

'Oh, do shut up with your endless self-deprecation, Jim,' Rupert chided. 'You're worse than your sainted fucking Tony.'

'Can't really say I bust a gut myself,' Robbo conceded.

'Not that you haven't got plenty of gut to bust!' Jimmy shouted, hurling a bit of rolled-up garlic pizza at his old friend so that Robbo upset his beer and Lizzie nearly had apoplexy.

'Don't worry,' said Monica, 'we're tearing up this awful floor covering and sanding the floorboards. Can't imagine what the previous people were thinking.'

'Robbo does work hard, as a matter of fact,' Lizzie protested, mopping at the spilt beer with thick ribbons of kitchen towel. 'We run our business together. In fact we've just set him up with his own office. Haven't we, darling?'

'Robbo's had his own office for years.' Jimmy laughed. 'It's called the Frog and Firkin.'

'They do some very decent beers.' Robbo was grinning good-naturedly.

'When it comes to working hard,' said David, 'none of you know the half of it.'

'Sometimes I worry he'll burn out!' Laura chipped in.

David had finally qualified as an architect and emerged into a building boom of unprecedented proportions. Instantly he found himself working fourteen-hour days, trying to find new ways to make buildings look as if they were made entirely out of sheets of black glass.

'Just as long as you don't pave over any more of the Home Counties,' Amanda observed. 'Pretty soon there'll be nowhere left to hunt south of Birmingham.'

'And a good thing too,' Laura snapped. 'It's unspeakably cruel. That's a good enough reason to vote New Labour in itself. We had dinner with Henry and Jane the other night and he said he's absolutely passionate about banning it. In fact Jane's written a scene about it in her new novel. It sounds amazing, it's the kill seen from the fox's point of view.'

'How on earth would she know? Unless of course the fox is a middle-class townie novelist who thinks belonging to the National Trust gives her an understanding of the countryside,' Amanda snapped back.

'That is totally unfair, Amanda,' Laura retorted. 'Pain is pain and terror is terror.'

'And I doubt that Jane has ever truly experienced either,' Amanda said angrily.

'I don't really get that argument, Mand,' Monica said. 'I mean Tolkien had never been a hobbit or a dark rider, or an elf for that matter. But that doesn't mean he should have been banned from writing books about them, surely?'

'I wish he had been banned,' said Rupert. 'What a lot of childish wank!'

'Look, for fuck's sake let's not have the foxhunting debate,' Jimmy pleaded. 'I am so over it.'

'There's nothing to debate,' said Laura. 'The argument's been won. We live in a democracy and the vast majority of people think it's utterly cruel and obscene.'

'The vast majority also eat McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken and if Colonel Sanders started deep-frying fox nuggets they'd eat them too.'

'Shhh!' Monica shouted. 'It's Henry!'

And together they all watched as their friend Henry, his new wife Jane beside him, achieved his dream of becoming a servant of the people.

They cheered and cheered and by the time the newly elected prime minister appeared on television to declare that Labour had won, everybody was completely drunk.

'We were elected as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour,' said Tony Blair.

'So that's all right then,' said Rupert.

And everyone agreed.

The grandpa project Monica arrived, red-eyed, back at the house to find Jimmy and the children all stretched out asleep on the floor of the basement family room with the final frame of Thomas the Tank Engine still frozen on the big wall-mounted TV screen.

'Jimmy! Jimmy!' Monica cried out. 'Wake up! It's seven thirty!'

Jimmy was on his feet in an instant, exploding from the bean bag and becoming vertical in a single convulsion. As he did so, the TV remote fell from his chest and hit the ground, somehow managing to turn the DVD back on.

According to Ringo Starr, Thomas was still going up the track, preparatory to coming back down the track. Then he would meet James and say hello. For a moment Jimmy felt as if he were in a kind of parental Groundhog Day in which Thomas was always poised to go back up the track. Which of course he was.

'Right! OK! I'm hot to trot!' he blurted.

He was so on edge that he never really slept anyway, not any more. Jimmy believed that his sleep was more like the way a computer sleeps. It looked asleep, with its apparent inertia and gently throbbing electric heartbeat, but one tiny touch of its mouse and everything was back up and ready to go, every relevant document still open, sentences half completed, spell check still hanging on to misspelt words, ready to resume everything that it had been doing at the point of abandonment, without a pause. That was Jimmy, he never really slept. Or so he believed.

'Well, thank God you managed to get a bit of sleep at least. That's good,' Monica said.

Under normal circumstances this simple statement would have brought forth an instant denial from Jimmy, or at best a grudging half-agreement.

'Maybe half an hour,' he would have protested, 'and I wasn't really sleeping. Just dozing.'

He and Monica had been engaged in an unacknowledged sleep battle ever since Jodie had left. Each was absolutely certain that the other was getting more sleep than they were. Each constantly belittled the amount that they themselves had had while never failing to point out when they felt the other had been able to nod off. It was a pointless expenditure of what little emotional and intellectual energy remained to them both. But not this morning. This morning all pettiness was put aside. This morning Jimmy wished he was still asleep because this was the morning he woke up to a world with no Robbo in it.

'How was Lizzie?' he asked.

'She looks dead, Jim,' Monica said. 'That's the honest truth. She looks like she's died too.'

There was silence, except for the fittingly funereal tones of Ringo Starr describing Thomas's progress up and down the track.

'Anyway, we'd better get moving,' Monica said finally. 'We're already pretty late.'

'I thought maybe you'd stay a bit longer with Lizzie, you know, with . . .' He could hardly frame the sentence as the realization flooded in on him once more that his friend of twenty years, good old Robbo, was dead.

'Jimmy, how could I? It's a school morning!' Monica said. 'Laura's with her. She still has a nanny.'

Was it his imagination or were those last words a veiled rebuke? Monica never, ever complained to him about their terrible reduction in circumstances. She was far too sweet and good for that. But the bald statement that Monica could no longer spare the time to comfort her widowed friend because Jimmy was now too poor to pay for a nanny hurt like hell.

'Come on, Jim,' Monica continued, 'we really have to get going.'

'But . . . but,' Jimmy protested, 'can't we just keep Toby home today? I mean . . . Robbo's dead.'

He hadn't even thought about getting his son ready for school. Who cared about school? The founding member and Lord Chief Radish had got pissed and smashed his car into a wall trying to buy fags.

'No, we can't,' Monica replied wearily. 'Toby's missed far too much already. Mr Lombard isn't happy and we're going to need all the good will we can get at that school if we have to delay . . .'

She was right and Jimmy knew it. They were hanging on by a shoestring at Abbey Hall as it was. Quite apart from the fact that they'd had to ask for a 'brief' delay in paying next year's fee, they were also now firmly bracketed with the 'problem' parents because Toby had been marked late or absent so many times. In fact they had recently received a very firm letter.

'God, I miss Jodie,' Monica said for the ten-thousandth time since her departure.

This was the real effect of losing all their money, and never more keenly felt than on school mornings. It wasn't the reduced material expectations, the holidays and the cars. Not really, not any more. They scarcely cared about those things now.

But God, they cared about losing Jodie.

It wasn't that they didn't want to bring up their own children, they wanted to desperately. It was just that they had had no idea what it really entailed. The shock had been terrible.

It had taken them both weeks to begin to understand the basic fact that every aspect of each of their three offspring's lives now required at least one of them to be in attendance all the time. To prepare for it, supervise and police it, get them to it, get them back from it and clean up after it.

The readjustments that they had been forced to make to their routines had been shocking and brutal. It was all the more painful because they realized how pampered and deluded they had previously been. It seemed incredible now, but both of them had actually believed that despite having a full-time nanny and various cleaners they were nonetheless bringing up their children themselves.

'I won't send Toby to boarding school,' Monica had often said. 'I cannot see the point of having children if you're not going to bring them up. I like my children, for heaven's sake. I enjoy their company. Why would I want to send them away?'

Monica still liked her children. She loved them absolutely. But at this stage in their lives she was discovering that she did not always enjoy their company. Their snotty, pooey, shrieking, fighting, weeping, never-endingly demanding company. Sometimes bored, often hysterical, commonly trying to kill themselves with household products and appliances and always in need of attention, they could in fact drive her insane.

'Please,' Monica now begged them on a daily basis, 'just give me one minute to myself! To think!'

With Jodie she'd had all the minutes she wanted. She had her whole life. She hadn't realized it at the time. She thought she was pretty busy with the kids. She had in fact described herself as 'a part-time charity worker and full-time mum'. But now she understood that she had been full-time on her own unbelievably privileged terms. She had always been able to escape, to have a moment to herself. To think. Now she didn't have a minute. Not one minute. Ever.

'And it's not just the bloody school who are on our case either,' Monica said as she started to grab slices of bread in order to make Toby's lunch. 'Mr Lombard says all school registers are scrutinized by the local council. If you have too many unauthorized absences they send round the truant officer.' Monica's eyes welled up. 'For Toby! The truant officer. Can you imagine?'

'Will I have to go to prison, Mummy?' Toby asked.

Jimmy looked down into the tired, anxious face of his little boy, a lad who had once been so jolly and uncomplicated but who was now slowly becoming infected by the constant anxiety he could sense in his parents.

'No, of course not, darling!' Jimmy said, forcing a smile. 'Mummy and I were just having a laugh.'

Jimmy often found himself forcing smiles these days. It was something he had never done before. It just showed that sudden financial ruin could take the twinkle out of the most natural smile.

Monica continued slapping Kraft cheese slices between slabs of Sunblest while Jimmy began searching for clothes.

'Some of the boys laugh at my lunch,' Toby said, rubbing his eyes. 'Gavin says cheese sarnies are for builders.'

Jimmy felt furious, suddenly dizzy with anger. He wanted to tell Toby to tell Gavin that he was a stupid little bastard. He wanted to go up to Gavin himself and tell him that if he bullied Toby he would punch him into next week and then wring his father's neck. But he couldn't, of course. He knew that if he gave in to such emotions it would lead to far greater disasters even than those currently enveloping him.

'Tell Gavin that Winston Churchill swore by cheese sarnies and that an empire was not built on chocolate Muller Corners.'

'Can't I go back to having school lunches?' Toby pleaded.

How could Jimmy tell him? How could he tell his son that he and Monica had decided the twenty pounds a week those lunches cost was an unnecessary expense? He, Jimmy, who only months before had regularly dropped that amount or more into the hands of beggars outside Soho House? But the truth was that he and Monica had only two cards left on which the credit was good. They were only weeks away from actual insolvency. Or, if they were careful, maybe a couple of months. Every penny counted.