The word sent a hot, raw red creeping up her neck. I said, “And that was putting a strain on you both.”

“Yeah. Having no money … it’s awful. I said that to Fiona once, but she didn’t get it. She was all, ‘So what? Sooner or later, one of you’ll get another job. Till then, you’re not starving, you’ve got plenty of clothes, the kids don’t even know the difference. You’ll be fine.’ I mean, maybe to her and her arty friends, money isn’t a big deal, but to most of us out here in the real world, it actually does make a difference. To actual real things.”

Jenny flashed me a defiant look, like she didn’t expect the old guy to get it. I said, “What kind of things?”

“Everything. Everything. Like, before, we used to have people over for dinner parties, or barbecues in the summer—but you can’t do that if all you can afford to give them is tea and Aldi biscuits. Maybe Fiona would, but I’d’ve died of embarrassment. Some of the people we know, they can be total bitches—they’d have been like, ‘Oh my God, did you see the label on the wine? Did you see, the SUV’s gone? Did you see she was wearing last year’s stuff? Next time we come over, they’ll be in shiny tracksuits, living on McDonald’s.’ Even the ones who wouldn’t have been like that, they’d have felt sorry for us, and I wasn’t going to take that. If we couldn’t do it right, I wasn’t going to do it at all. We just didn’t invite people around any more.”

That hot red had filled up her face, turning it swollen-looking and tender. “And it wasn’t like we could afford to go out, either. So we basically stopped ringing people—it was humiliating, having this nice normal chat with someone and then, when they’d say, ‘So when do you want to meet up?’ having to come up with some excuse about Jack having the flu. And after a few rounds of excuses, people stopped ringing us, too. Which I was actually glad about—it made things way easier—but all the same …”

I said, “It must have been lonely.”

The red deepened, as if that was something shameful too. She tucked her head down so that a haze of hair hid her face. “It was, yeah. Really lonely. If we’d been in town then I could’ve met other mums at the park, stuff like that, but out there … Sometimes I went a whole week without saying a word to another adult except Pat, only ‘Thanks’ at the shop. Back when we first got married we were going out three, four nights a week, our weekends were always packed, we were popular; and now here we were, staring at each other like a pair of no-friends losers.”

Her voice was speeding up. “We were starting to bitch at each other about little things, stupid things—how I folded the washing, or how loud he had the telly. And every single thing turned into a fight about money—I don’t even know how, but it always did. So I figured that had to be what was bothering Pat. All that stuff.”