She breathed out a laugh. “No, not really.” She turned to look at him. “Anyway, besides being unmarried and without the burden of children, I think you’re probably the wrong age and the wrong sex to understand my problem.”

Stephen laughed. “I don’t know. I’ve always felt that I’ve been quite in touch with my feminine side.” His remark did not even register a spark of humour on Jackie’s face. “Things are a bit difficult at home, are they?”

“Just a little,” Jackie murmured. She rested an elbow on the arm of the chair, and closing her eyes, she began to rub a thumb and forefinger up and down the bridge of her nose. “For some reason, it was so much easier to cope with Dan losing his job when it first happened. He was so . . . vulnerable and lost. But now he seems to be so complacent about it all, even happy, and it infuriates me. I don’t think that he’s making any effort at all to find another job.”

“What’s he doing at the minute?”

“Not a lot. He does a bit of housework, he takes the dogs for a walk, and most days, he has lunch with one of his friends in the pub. He’s also got heavily into cooking, which entails a great deal of watching Jamie Oliver on the television and serving up weird concoctions to me and the kids.”

“Well, at least he’s doing that. Surely if you were both working, you’d be having to pay someone to look after the house.”

“Yes, but you can’t count that as a job. Dan was earning close on two hundred thousand pounds a year in the City. That’s a pretty expensive housekeeper, wouldn’t you say?”

Stephen spread out his hands along the windowsill. “So you are now the family’s sole breadwinner.”

“Yes, in rather a large nutshell.”

“Well, in that case,” Stephen said, “I would have thought that the way you’re feeling is pretty natural. All your married life, he’s been the security for your family—the provider. And now you’ve had to take over that role. Maybe . . .”—he paused momentarily, being caught in two minds as to whether he should continue—“maybe you’ve just lost some of your respect for him.”

Jackie shot him a steely glance that told him he had overstepped the mark. He immediately tried to backtrack. “Not that you can’t rebuild that.”

“Damn you.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”