What they don’t envisage, however, is my next move. I’ve had fucking enough of this I say to Jenny as I head outside to the green. The kids are with their friends and I can hear the laughter of children at play and rather than stand there and relish the sound, I start shouting my head off. I tell not just Mikey and Joey and Maeve that they don’t do enough around the house to help me, but I tell their friends. I can see how their friends are beginning to look at me as if I’ve lost my mind or I’m a bit crazy and right at that moment I simply don’t care. I tell the kids to get inside and to tidy up their rooms.

I am seething and I come back inside and the clatter of nervous feet, young nervous feet, follows me. And I feel their confusion because they know that their rooms are messy but they don’t really know where to begin. I bark at them to get started and for a moment I feel that some order will prevail and I feel a semblance of hope.

But it doesn’t last. I am tired. Why do I have to cook? I feel like something has snapped, some realization has just washed over me that I do pretty much everything around the house. I cook and I do the laundry and I work in an office that I detest. There is not a single person in the office that I would naturally gravitate towards in any other situation. Not one of them.

The least she can do is touch me. The least she can do is want me. She is concentrating so hard and her features are so becoming in this light that I find it difficult to be angry with her. She is all I have. The way she tucks her legs up underneath her knees, the way she chews the end of her paintbrush as she is deciding where to place her brush strokes. The way she smiles when I bring her a cup of tea while she consults her Hockney book. It’s hard when you start to feel uncertain about someone’s love for you. You doubt things that you once held to be true.