Muster’s Puppets – it was all because she’d found that bloody brochure. She’d got puppets on the brain. They had taken the children on a journey to the moon, but they’d taken the adults, too. She’d sat in the darkness, rolling Richard’s pram back and forth, an instinctual rhythm, and watched the puppeteers manoeuvre their spotlit characters into a rocket, then lift them into the air, light as paper, while projected stars wheeled across the back of the stage. Amazing, the capacity to efface themselves, to draw the whole crowd into the story, which was a simple one, of course: of boredom at home, then travel, then adventure that outstripped their appetites for it – the moon puppets looming, their limbs lit blue – and then, at last, the relieved return, and the moon reduced to what it had previously been, just a picture in the sky.

There had been questions, too. One of the puppets, the red one, had asked her friends, the children watching, even and especially the creatures on the moon, what happiness was. The question had obsessed her throughout the show, and the answers changed – of course – depending on who she asked. Her friends said a wonderful book, or a new adventure. The children said it was a tingly feeling, or a sense of being warm. The moon-men responded in a warbling language that she couldn’t understand. And when they finally returned, after the moon-men had chased them off, after they had managed to repair their rocket and then to land it again without crashing, they had kissed the ground like demonstrative Americans, and the red puppet had announced that happiness was home.

Joan had not thought of this for years, the papier-mâché moon, and the cheap little tear that had come to her eye, which she’d refused to feel ashamed of, though one of the mothers had smiled at her, slightly condescendingly, when the lights came up. Claire had tried to recreate the red puppet, Joan remembered. That was the point of Suzanne. And something else, too: something Claire had said, that had prompted the confiscation. Joan had marched Claire out of the breakfast room, where she was, it was true, bothering the guests at breakfast, asking silly questions in Suzanne’s silly voice – asking them, maybe, what they thought happiness was – and she’d told Claire that if she didn’t stop it there was going to be trouble. But Claire hadn’t yielded. She’d looked at Suzanne, and Suzanne had looked at Joan, its eyes goggling, and said, ‘You don’t have any happiness. It doesn’t want to live with you.’