Shall we look at the animals now? you say, but your daughter says, No. She likes the animals, but she likes these pages even better. Over a whole double-page spread, the mean and bad people are doing mean and bad things: pulling each other’s hair and laughing, aiming slingshots and catapults at each other, gurning and scowling and spitting 115and stamping their feet. You point at each of them in turn, naming their misdemeanours, and your daughter makes extravagant faces and laughs with delight.

Ok, let’s look at the animals, you say firmly, and turn the page, but your daughter throws back her head and wails.

I’m sorry, you say to the man sitting next to you – the man who has the misfortune to be sitting next to you, for the remaining seven hours and thirty-six minutes of this flight; the only, admittedly small, consolation being it’s a whole half-hour shorter than on the way there.

No problem, he says, and he starts to say, again, and unnecessarily, because he’s already been too kind to you, lifting your bags up into the overhead locker and fetching beakers and bunnies and bribes of white chocolate buttons and finally the book from the stuffed chaotic tote at your feet, even getting up to ask the stewardess to rinse out a bottle for you in the galley, that he understands, has children himself, two sons – but the pitch of your daughter’s cry is rising. You grimace an apology at him, and he smiles back then looks tactfully away, as if there’s nothing to see at all.

Please, you say to your daughter, red-faced now and howling, Please, come on, Matilda, shh, and you suppress the urge to shake her, or start howling yourself, and you turn back and take a deep breath and begin again: All the people were mean and bad.

There is one page in the book that you like: a page of blue, just blue, with a tiny Ark in the very top right-hand corner. 116No words, nothing, just the sudden giddy perspective; the weight of all the fallen rain. It is, you think, the only truthful picture in the whole story.

Your daughter wriggles and cries for the whole ascent; but as the plane reaches cruising altitude, and the seat-belt sign pings off, and the in-flight cabin service begins, she finally falls asleep on your chest and you hold her, heavy and warm and limp and sprawling, and as her breathing shudders and lengthens you let your own eyes close. Seven hours and three minutes left. Just a little over three thousand miles. It seems more than time and distance you’re traversing. It is a lifetime ago that you left London. And it will be one of the longest stretches you and your husband have ever been apart; by far the longest he’s not seen Tilly.