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we got a fire going with the magazines I had brought with me as my going-away luxury. I crumpled up yesterday’s newspaper, which I had planned to keep as a historic memento of our last day as British residents, and added it to the pathetic flames. We had found two rickety chairs in the back of the house, so we burned the chairs and sat on the floor. Suddenly the fire was roaring. It might have been the varnish, or the glossy magazines.
    Matt and I sat up and stared into the leaping flames, while Alice slept, curled in her sleeping bag at the head of the lilo. Every time I took a gulp of wine, he refilled my plastic cup. I had no idea how much I was drinking. Usually I knew exactly how much I had had, because getting drunk was one of the things I did not do. Today, even with a stomach full of pasta and pesto, I felt dangerously light-headed.
    The fire had finally warmed the room. I looked around, at the plaster which had fallen off the walls and was lying in heaps on the cracked tiles. At the floor tiles themselves, which were brown, cream and yellow checks. We were going to replace them with terracotta. We needed a new heating system, new electrics, new plumbing. This, I realised with a sinking heart, was an enormous project. When we had made the offer on the house, we had imagined ourselves cleaning it up, replastering some walls, and painting it all bright white. We had thought we might do it all for about ten thousand pounds. We were wrong.
    I knocked back the contents of my cup, and Matt instantly leaned over with the wine bottle.
    ‘Are you getting me drunk?’ I asked him. We had been talking about everything except the huge truth that was staring at us. We chatted about details: about what we would do in the morning, whether Alice would get a place at the nursery class of the village school, when our furniture might arrive. We were both relentlessly and falsely optimistic; neither of us mentioned the fact that the house needed tearing down and rebuilding, nor that we had clearly made a gargantuan mistake. If I spoke about it, I felt that everything might tumble down.
    ‘It’s the least I can do,’ said Matt, downing his own wine. ‘You need it. We both do. Come on, drink up.’
    I drunk up.
    ‘What’s the difference between having a drinking problem and being an alcoholic?’ I asked, for something to talk about. ‘I’ve always wondered. Is there a difference or is it a presentational thing?’
    ‘I think it goes like this,’ he said. ‘ I have a drinking problem. You are an alcoholic.’
    ‘Or maybe I like a drink, you have a drinking problem, he is an alcoholic.’
    Matt nodded. ‘ I like a drink. You have a drinking problem. He is an alcoholic. We know how to party. You guys should give it a break. They are a bunch of no-hoper loser pissheads.’
    I laughed. ‘That’s why English is a difficult language to learn. All those irregular conjugations.’
    ‘But sweetheart,’ he said, suddenly serious, ‘you don’t have a drinking problem. You are not an alcoholic. I realise I am stating the obvious. Getting a teeny bit pissed under these circumstances –’ he looked around with wide eyes – ‘is not going to make the sky come crashing down.’ We both looked anxiously at the ceiling. This seemed to be tempting fate most unwisely. I snuggled into his shoulder for protection. ‘I love you the way you are,’ he continued, once we had established that this particular disaster was not imminent, ‘but you can join me for more than two glasses of wine occasionally, specially now we’re out here. Christ, you probably wouldn’t even get drunk at your own wedding.’
    I looked at him, trying not to smile. ‘What did you just say?’
    He blushed slightly. ‘Nothing. Just a figure of speech.’
    I let it go. His words, and the wine, had given me a warm glow. Matt and Alice were my entire world, and that was what mattered wherever we were. I decided that I could be fairly certain that Matt was coming