"The vision. Jonathan Taylor-"

"Conservative," said Niall in a stage whisper. Kat giggled.

"To cut down the stress, to get out of the rat race, to find the confidence to be different, to find out if I can, to kiss goodbye to the Heathrow Express-Oh, come on, I didn't put that."

"Ah, y'see? Typical bloody Tory, ye've changed your mind already."

"Sita Dhanda-"

"Labor, three times, incredibly painful."

"Yes Niall, it was, thank you."

"To adopt a simpler lifestyle with more free time to concentrate on the things that matter. To show our children a nonmaterial world."

"I'm still going with that."

"Hear hear."

"Emmy Hart-"

"Monster Raving Loony."

"Okay, Niall. Joke's over."

"To say thank you for everything you all are to me. To provide Maya with a sense of family. To shout from the rooftops that I am living the life I want."

"Rooftops?" Niall said. "What are you? Mary feckin' Poppins?"

Kat giggled again.

"Niall O'Connor-"

"Wanker," whispered Emmy, to loud cheers.

"To never eat sushi again."

"That's pathetic."

"Even you have got to come up with a higher dream than that."

"There is no higher dream."

"Kat Rice: To get away from aggression and pollution. To give my mind and body the attention I deserve. To spend more quality time with Niall."

"Quality time? With Niall?"

"You've got the wrong bloke."

The shouting and laughter around the table became rowdy enough to draw the children down from upstairs.

"What's so funny?"

"Why are you banging on the table, Dad?"

"Hold on, hold on," Jonathan said. "I haven't finished. I haven't done you lot yet. "Maya Hart: To climb trees. To have a purple bedroom and a dog. To have an adventure."

"Purple, Mum, got that?"

"Jay Taylor: To leave school."

"Prosaic as ever," said Sita, managing to put her hand on her son's head before he ducked and moved away.

"Asha Taylor: To climb bushes. To have a pink bedroom and a rabbit, a guinea pig and a chicken. To have a safe adventure."

"You copied Maya," Jay said.

"No, I didn't."

"Yes, you did."

"Hey, we didn't invite you two in here to argue."

"You didn't invite us at all."

"And you were arguing anyway."

"He started it."

"No, I didn't."

"Yes, you did."

"And finally," shouted Jonathan over the noise. "Let's not forget Lila. This sounds remarkably like her mother to me but it is apparently Lila's intention to stop waking everyone up too early, to learn to sit up unsupported, to feed myself, walk, dress myself, cook, drive, clean."

"Did you write that, Mum?"

"No, Lila did, you pillock," Jay told his sister.

"To the Manifesto," said Jonathan, raising his glass.

Everyone raised their glasses too.

"Is anyone missing sushi yet?" Emmy asked.

"Oh, it's okay," Kat said. "I brought some with me."

2.

It went without saying that asking for sushi was a long-term no-no at the Londis shop in the small south-coast village of Cott, but you wouldn't necessarily be able to pick up directions to Bodinnick there, either.

This was more to do with the store's permanently changing part-time staff than with xenophobia, although flashes of the latter were hardly unknown. On the other hand, if you were lucky enough to stumble across a nonxenophobe who had a grandparent buried in Cott churchyard, they would ask you if you wanted the dower house, the farm or the big house itself.

These separate dwellings had enjoyed their own approaches since the First World War, when all four seventh-generation Trevivian sons had been killed in the space of a year, and their diminutive widowed mother had barricaded herself in the dower house, letting the farm go to her gamekeeper for a song. Bodinnick itself was shuttered, locked and left to grow mold on its windowsills until the old woman died in 1955 and a distant cousin with an eye on an Oxfordshire vicarage, rather than a Cornish manor, felt it was high time such an engaging family home was properly enjoyed.

Emmy's uncle and godfather, Toby Hart, might not have been the kind of family man the broker had in mind, but he nurtured a particular set of reasons for buying Bodinnick. His childhood home in Kent was a house so eerily similar that, as an old man in Cornwall, he often found himself looking for the missing back dairy or wondering how a third window could have been added to the drawing room without him noticing.

But Ledbury belonged to his elder brother, Emmy's father, Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Hart, whose sole purpose on earth seemed to be to provide perfect heirs, which he did with military precision every two years until he had sired his own beautiful regiment. Emmy had been the last and the only female recruit.

Toby's seed was never going to be able to compete, for it was clearly made of different stuff, and when Bodinnick came on the market there was no question that it was meant to be his. Cornwall was six safe counties away and the solution suited everyone well. So well, in fact, that by 2000, no one could remember anyone called Trevivian living at Bodinnick. Bodinnick was where Mr. Hart lived.

All this meant that Emmy and Maya Hart's route to acceptance in the village was already mapped out, but the others would have to prove themselves in other ways. They quickly realized that not asking for sushi at the post office would be a start and that even soy sauce might be pushing it-a risk recognized in the early appearance of a running household joke.

"Excuse me, do you sell shiitake mushrooms?"

"No."

"Fresh udon noodles?"

"No."

"Liquid dashi?"

"No!"

"Chicken Tonight?"

"What flavor, my bird?"

The crack was aimed mainly at Kat, who, a week later, was still having difficulty accepting that Japanese vegetarian cookery had yet to penetrate Cornwall, let alone Cott.

"But Bodinnick was once important enough to warrant its own stone signpost," she argued.

"What's that got to do with the price of bread?" Niall asked.

"That would be the white sliced variety, would it?"

Kat could afford to be sniffy about food. Her cooking skills, learned during her days as an Aspen chalet girl, were undeniable. Much to Emmy's deep annoyance, on the second day, when they had all been too tired to go to the supermarket, she had made a passable meal from a few rusting tins left in Toby's store cupboard. Spanish squid la Campbell's cream of mushroom soup. Nobody had died. In fact, Jonathan hadn't even needed a Rennie, although if there was such a thing as jealousy pills Emmy should have popped a few.

"This isn't London," everyone kept telling Kat when she railed against the lack of choice.

"London? This isn't even bloody Slough."

"Never mind," Niall said. "You've served a week already. Your initial sentence is nearly over."

"A week?" said Emmy, looking up from the newspaper behind which she'd been counting the number of hours if not the minutes before Kat went back. "Is that all? I've lost track of time."

"I knew this would happen," Sita said, coming in with Lila tied in a sling on her hip. Her collarless shirt, which was covered with splashes of previous London-based decorating efforts, had been ironed. She had a paint scraper in one hand and a dirty nappy in the other.

"What have you been doing to that poor baby?" Niall asked.

"What?"

"Paint scraper? Nappy? Oh, never mind."

Sita didn't laugh. She was in a bad mood. "When are we going to take out these units?" she asked, slapping the much-maligned wood-effect melamine worktops. "The sooner the better, quite frankly. And we should take up all the lino, too. I bet there's slate underneath. The stuff in the hall is already coming up at the bottom of the stairs and one of us is going to break a leg on it in a minute."

"Shouldn't we wait for the electrician to finish?"

"Finish? It would be nice to see him start."

"Antsy, are we?" Emmy said, tugging the hem of her friend's shirt as she went by.

"Well, it's not supposed to be a holiday, is it? We're supposed to be getting this place in some kind of order, remember?"

"What do you think those blokes are doing up on the roof, then? Staging a prison protest?"

"They're being paid." With our money, Sita didn't say. "But we can't pay for everything. We're going to have to do some things ourselves. Look around you. The place is falling to pieces."

"Hey, that's my line."

"Well, I'm using it now, because you seemed to have stopped."

"Oooooo," Emmy teased. "You and your bloody work ethic."

"Asian parents." Sita shrugged with her back to everyone. She untied the sling, pulled a few old cushions off the armchair in the corner and plonked Lila in an old dog basket on the floor. "What d'you expect?"

Sita often claimed she couldn't remember school holidays, but that was because, in effect, she'd never really had them. Her father made her and her sister stay in their bedroom studying, while he ran the shop downstairs. "Education can transform your social position," he used to tell them. "You can go up in your status," he'd say. They would imitate him wobbling his head during their lunch breaks and take it in turns to look out for each other so they could listen to music on their Walkmans, or read their secretly bought magazines about boys and makeup. Somehow, she hadn't yet got round to telling him that his son-in-law had become a house husband.

Jonathan came through the door. His hair was covered in flakes of old white gloss paint from scraping the skirting board in their moldy bathroom, and he had on a pair of trainers that he only wore for DIY.

"How come I'm the only one up a ladder around here?"

"At least my dad taught me how to get things done," Sita said defensively, "which is why we can now afford for you to lead a life of leisure."

"Leisure? Married to you? Living here? You've got to be joking."

"And which also goes a long way to explain why Sita, as the daughter of a shopkeeper, is now a GP, and Emmy, the daughter of a colonel, is a waitress," Kat said. Her protestations that she really didn't have a problem with Niall and Emmy's past sometimes appeared a little flimsy.

"Ouch," said Niall. No one else could quite believe she had said it.

"Former waitress," Emmy reminded her. She broke open an orange and piled the scraps of peel on top of each other. That was the thing with Emmy, she never bore a grudge. She was aware enough to know that her own behavior was so often left wanting that her best bet was to forgive almost everyone almost everything. "And future owner of the most successful children's fancy-dress mail-order company the world has ever seen."