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the world’s most infuriating, and pointless, question, one that gets asked at births, at weddings, at divorces and deaths, as well as at every intervening crisis point. Mostly there is nothing anyone can do, but asking makes the asker, if not the askee, feel better. I tried to bemore practical, concentrating on detail. ‘Did you get your stuff out? Can I help with that? I don’t have much space – I couldn’t take furniture – but if you’ve got boxes or bags I could find a corner to keep them in. Or if—’ I didn’t want to say, if all your worldly possessions went up in flames , so I revised. ‘If you need to borrow anything, kitchen pots and pans, or bathroom things, or whatever, let me know.’ I scribbled my name and number on a napkin and passed it across the counter.
    Mo took my hand. I’d forgotten how touchy-feely she was, but it went with the plait and the outfits: it’s always reassuring when stereotypes hold. ‘Everyone has been so kind.’ She brushed her fringe out of her eyes, and in that gesture I could see again how tired she was.
    I wasn’t being kind. If I had been, I would have offered Steve and Mike the sofa bed in my spare room. But my spare room wasn’t a spare room, it was my office, even though I had a real office which – I looked at my watch – I needed to get to. I started to speak and then closed my mouth. If they didn’t find a place to stay in a couple of days, I’d offer them the sofa bed, I decided. But God, I hoped that I wouldn’t have to. When I first moved to London, I lived in my flat with three friends. Then it had been me and Peter for a long time. And after Peter and I had split up, it had been just me, and I discovered I loved the solitude. Since Jake and I had been together, I had got used to another person being in the flat again, but his strange hours, and the fact that he didn’t officially live with me – he still had his own flat across town – meant that for a lot of the time I still felt like I lived alone. I didn’t much want to return to flat-sharing, but if I had to, short term, I knew from experience that it was do-able.With luck, Steve and Mike would find somewhere else, and I could make the offer knowing it would be refused. The best of both worlds: I would look like a nice person without having to be a nice person.
    And with that rather uncomfortable thought I headed to the Tube. Intermittently through the day, as I worked – I sat in meetings, I emailed back and forth as I negotiated with agents, I had an editorial session with an author, I wrote cover copy for book jackets, did the mathematical juggling on a profit-and-loss sheet to see if I could afford to acquire an impressive, but expensive, book without bankrupting the company – as I worked, I thought about it. I wanted to look like a nice person without having to be one. Was that such a bad thing? Or even unusual? Maybe, I thought hopefully, maybe everyone wanted to appear to be nice without having to act nicely. But I felt itchy, as if a soft, warm layer of self-delusion had been ripped away, and a hard, cold layer of reality had been exposed to the air for the first time.
    I didn’t like it, and it wasn’t helped by a frustrating hour spent dealing with a particularly obtuse agent, who refused to understand you couldn’t sell some rights to a book and still keep one hundred per cent of them.
    In between my increasingly irritated emails pointing out this harsh fact, I emptied out my in-tray, searching for something to keep me occupied while I waited for the next attempt to make ninety per cent plus twenty per cent still equal one hundred. I needed something mindless. At home, ironing is my occupation of choice for mindless occupation, but ironing boards are rarely to be found in publishing offices. My gaze swept over the piles of paperthat snow-drifted across my desk and caught on a half-buried envelope. Exactly what I needed. My passport was about to expire, and the renewal form