These were her musings while she sat in the living room with her feet up, waiting for Jake to return with the magazine he had offered to fetch for her from Bessie’s room. A more considerate husband than he would be hard to find. During the anxious period now behind them he had cut down on his business travels, rather than leave Laura to cope alone.

Tomorrow, though, he was off to Hong Kong, and they were enjoying a quiet hour or two with the house to themselves. Jeremy was away with A.P. on the broadening trip that would precede their sheltered interlude at Oxford, and Janis at the theatre with Kurt – a change from the University Jewish Society activities necessary to combat increasing anti-Semitism on too many college campuses.

‘Would you mind coming upstairs, Laura?’ she heard her husband call.

She was halfway there when he added crisply, ‘There’s something in your daughter’s room I’d like you to see.’

Laura stopped short and gripped the banister. The way Jake had put it was as if he had slapped her face, and even more hurtful. To me, Janis and Jeremy and Bessie are our children. Well, she’d just learned it wasn’t like that for Jake.

‘What’s all the fuss about?’ she said coldly when she joined him beside the spilled mound of childish junk on the floor.

Jake brandished a dog-eared exercise book. ‘This,’ he replied. ‘“My Secrets”, your daughter has called her scribblings. Would you care to take a look at them?’

‘No, thanks. And you ought not to’ve invaded Bessie’s privacy.’

Jake laughed brusquely. ‘It’s her mother’s privacy I seem to’ve invaded.’ He opened the exercise book. ‘Allow me to refresh your memory, Laura, by reading something aloud to you: “My mummy had lots of boyfriends, but I only liked the ones who didn’t mind me coming in bed with them for a cuddle.”’

Laura felt the blood ebb from her face, but stood her ground. ‘All right. You didn’t marry an angel, and now you know it.’

‘But I didn’t know it before I married her, did I? She made sure of that.’

‘Perhaps because she knew in her bones that you are in some respects a “Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street”.’

‘And what does that make her?’

‘A bloody fool, for thinking that didn’t matter.’

‘That isn’t how I see it.’ Jake flicked over a page in the exercise book, his expression grim. ‘And what I find equally appalling is what I’m about to read to you: “When I grow up I want to be exactly like my mummy.”’

Laura’s response was, ‘I’m no angel and you’re respectability personified, but I doubt that Jeremy has any desire to become a replica of his father. And I repeat that you had no right to open and read that book.’