‘So eat the fruit bars,’ I say, playing my trump card. I fumble for them in the backpack and wave them in front of her face.

‘Nooooo,’ she wails.

I nip at the wrapper with my teeth. ‘Come on, it’s good, what’s wrong with it?’ I tear off the end strip and chew determinedly. ‘Yum, yum, see how delicious?’

‘It’s disgusting.’

She’s quite right, of course. It’s filthy. Nevertheless I hold it irresistibly close to her nose, hoping that some olfactory instinct will snap into action and send a signal to her mouth to open. Instead she knocks it to the ground and stamps on it. ‘I’ll die before I eat that. Die, do you hear?’

‘Die then, brat,’ says Jack, nudging at a stone with his trainers.

Emmy drops to the base of the cottonwood and adopts a squat position. Her favoured form of protest is 1960s university student and she does it really well, refusing to be bulldozed by threats or moved by entreaty. Only total capitulation to her petition of human rights will normally shift her. Still I go through the motions.

‘Emmy, if you don’t get up, I’ll have to leave you here.’

‘Leave me then.’ Her voice begins to rise and screech like a string quartet warming up. ‘Just leave me here to die – to die, d’you hear, because I’m starving to death. STARVING TO DEATH.’

I look at her helplessly. My job as a landscape designer has allowed me to spend most of my children’s lives studiously avoiding the drudgery of childcare, calling on impossible work deadlines, meetings of vital importance, phone calls that simply couldn’t be delayed, all in order to back up my case for not having to give in to the tedium of pushing-swings-in-park duties. I know there are some parents who can make space stations from toenail clippings and igloos out of potato peelings and I wish I were one of them, truly I do, but the patience and imagination required for that kind of activity simply never made it through to my gene pool. Now, as realization slaps me in the face that I have committed myself to an extended period of au pair/babysitter/nanny-free single parenting, I am tempted to fall into a heap of quivering motherhood.

‘Look, Emmy.’ I squat down. ‘This is my fault, so I’ll make you a deal. You stop making a fuss right now and you can eat whatever you want for a whole week.’

The snivelling stops and a look of true cunning passes over her face. ‘Anything?’

‘Well, okay, obviously not anything—’

‘You said anything,’ Jack reminds me coolly.

‘Well obviously you can’t just eat chocolate all day long, but you can choose any meal you want for a whole week and I promise I will give in without a fight.’

‘Me too?’ Jack asks.

‘Both of you, okay?’