Both Millie and Nina hurriedly picked up their schoolbags and made a break for the door. “We’d better get off to school, Mum,” Millie said, a sudden urgency in her manner.

“You can’t go yet!” Jackie howled. “What am I going to do with this?”

“You could always leave it for Josh,” Nina suggested as she pushed her sister out of the door in front of her. “He doesn’t mind smelly things.” She giggled. “He is one himself.”

As Jackie stared with abhorrance at the task that faced her, she heard the girls laugh their way along the passageway and slam the front door on their departure from the house. Letting out a choking sob, she dumped her handbag on the work island, threw her coat back over the chair, and went to retrieve the pink rubber gloves, last used by Battersea Gran for a much more pleasant task than the one that faced her.

She was standing with a dumbstruck expression on her face, a cloth held between thumb and forefinger over a bucket filled with dirty brown water, when Dan walked into the kitchen.

“Hi,” he said airily, as he dropped his holdall to the ground. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

He walked towards her with the intention of giving her a kiss, but Jackie backed away from him.

“Don’t you come near me,” she croaked in anger.

Dan stopped in his tracks. “Why? Have you got the flu or something? Come to think of it, you don’t look too good. You’re as white as a sheet.”

Jackie was speechless with rage.

“Look, why not have a seat while I make you a cup of coffee? You shouldn’t be doing housework if you’re not feeling well.”

“Where have you been?” Jackie asked quietly, her teeth clenched.

“Me?” Dan said brightly, filling the kettle up with water. “I’ve been up to Scotland for a couple of days.”

“I know,” Jackie replied in the same tone of voice.

“Oh?” Dan turned, a perplexed expression on his face. “Why ask, then?”

“Because I want to know what the hell you’ve been doing up there?” Her voice crescendoed to a scream.

“All right, all right. What’s all the aggro about?”

Jackie dropped the cloth into the bucket with a splosh and started tugging the rubber gloves off her hand. “Aggro? I’ll tell you what the aggro’s about. I come back here yesterday from Paris, having had an appallingly hard weekend’s worth of business to deal with, only to find your mother looking after the place because you’ve decided on a whim to swan off to Scotland.”

“It wasn’t on a wh—”