When Pat - on her second gap year and a source of some worry to her parents is accepted as a new tenant at number 44, she isn't quite sure how long she'll last. Her flat mate Bruce, a rugby-playing chartered surveyor, is impossibly narcissistic, carelessly philandering and infuriatingly handsome. Downstairs lives the gloriously pretentious Irene, whose precocious five-year-old is in therapy after setting fire to his father's copy of the Guardian. And then there is the shrewd, intellectual Domenica Macdonald, mysteriously employed but a sharp-eyed observer of the house's activities in her spare time…