With children and animals

The author of The Miniaturist is shown up by a four-year-old and in the doghouse with Jeremy Paxman

I’M IN MY MID-30S and at that time of my life when I’m surrounded by babies, none of them mine. Being given the responsibility of looking after one of these miniature people is daunting. Nevertheless, Alice, my oldest friend, trusts me with her four-year-old, Flo, my god-daughter. ‘All you have to do,’ she says, ‘is pick her up from the childminder, take her home, give her a bath and a bedtime story.’ Bath, story, bed: my dream combination. What’s there to worry about?

Flo and I meander home. ‘Jessie, what’s lotion?’ she asks. ‘It’s a sort of… cream?’ I say, ruing the day I switched off in Year 9 chemistry. She frowns. ‘Jessie, why is that man driving on the pavement?’ she asks as we are nearly run down by a mobility scooter. I explain he probably has something wrong with his legs. ‘Why?’ she asks. I say that sometimes some people’s legs do not work, so machines help them to get around. ‘How do they make the machines?’ she asks. I realise I am a stupid person.

This is confirmed for me when we reach Flo’s house and discover that while I did remember to pick up the child from the childminder, I have forgotten to pick up the keys. I have failed in my duty of care. Flo stares at me with pity. We go back to mine and eat lemon ice cream. Her mother is forgiving.

THE ONLY SMALL THING I am always responsible for is my cat, Margot. She is disdainful, comedic and ineluctably beautiful, with her grey-and-white markings and powder-pink nose. ‘Did you name her for Fonteyn?’ I am often asked. ‘No!’ I reply. ‘For Leadbetter.’ (She does indeed remind me of Margo from The Good Life, regularly evincing Penelope Keith’s patrician sauciness.)

One morning, my boyfriend is too tired to get out of bed. ‘What happened?’ I say. ‘Margot turned on the TV,’ he says. ‘At 4am.’ He discovered her with one paw on the remote control, sitting upright, watching a rerun of Cash in the Attic. ‘Did you join her?’ I ask.

It turns out no. Margot is not a huge fan of men, and often gets out her claws if they come too near. However, she is forever outwitted by a beleaguered frog with which she has constant battles in the garden. Often it has to pretend to be dead, and makes an astonishing squeaking sound when she pats it. I am proud of the frog: he never lets her win, and sometimes I think Margot needs that.

I AM ON Marylebone High Street enjoying the sunshine with a cup of tea when I spot Jeremy Paxman and his dog, looking relaxed and happy on the other side of the road. I’m a fan, having grown up a devotee of University Challenge, and I take a picture and post it to my Instagram stories, describing the dog (not Paxman) as a ‘very old spaniel’. Fateful decision.

Somehow, to my astonishment, it gets back to him. He contacts my agent to suggest this is defamation. I wish to die. Derek, he informs me, is not ‘very old’, but is in fact aged only one. It is the shortness of his legs that makes him walk so… sedately. Neither is Derek a spaniel, but a proud Battersea mongrel.

I write back and apologise, explaining that I clearly need glasses, and I wished to defame neither a well-known dog nor an anonymous one. My entire family hails from Battersea before it got posh, so I express deep solidarity with Derek. Paxman is gracious. Privately, I vow never to post a picture of a human or a dog again. But here I am, in a national newspaper! So Derek, if you’re reading this: your legs are beautiful. The Restless Girls, Jessie Burton’s first children’s book, illustrated by Angela Barrett, is out now (Bloomsbury, £14.99)

I spot Jeremy Paxman and his dog, looking relaxed and happy on the other side of the road