Fergus pressed himself against her leg, burrowing into her. ‘Mumma,’ he said plaintively.

‘You don’t know her,’ Craig snapped.

‘So you keep telling me! Which is why I wanted to see her, because she has a right to be heard. Because at the end of the day, she is—’ She suddenly became aware of Fergus right there, hot against her thigh, saying, ‘Mumma, Mumma’ at her, and she stopped to scoop him up. ‘This isn’t the right moment,’ she said, holding him in her arms. ‘Yes, lovely, it’s all right,’ she told him quietly.

‘You shouldn’t have gone,’ Craig rebuked her, not seeming to hear. ‘I’m handling this, I know what I’m doing. And I don’t need—’

‘But, Craig, your way of “handling this” seems to mean goading and antagonizing her,’ she retaliated, the words bursting out of her. ‘Not to mention sidelining me at every opportunity, refusing to discuss anything, making me feel like my opinion and input are completely worthless and irrelevant.’ She glared at him. ‘And I’m fed up with it!’

Fergus promptly dissolved into noisy sobs – of shock, probably, because she never usually raised her voice – and she stroked his hair and patted him soothingly. ‘It’s okay, poppet. Nobody’s cross with you. Come on, let’s go in the living room and get the building blocks out,’ she said, before Craig could come back at her and make things any worse.

He followed her in there a few minutes later, when she’d upended the box of wooden bricks and she and Fergus were sorting through them on the rug, calm restored. ‘For what it’s worth,’ Frankie went on, putting green bricks in a pile for Fergus, ‘I don’t think Julia’s remotely prepared for what motherhood entails, or has properly thought it through. But I do think she’s got a right to be taken seriously, and a right to start again with . . .’ She indicated Fergus with her eyebrows, not wanting to alert him to the fact that he was under discussion. ‘And he has that right, too. What we need to do is make that as good a relationship as possible, for his sake. If, in years to come, he finds out you’ve denied him that, he might never forgive you.’

It was quite the longest speech she’d made to Craig on the matter, but Fergus seemed unimpressed by all of this talking, and even less so by the fact that his father was standing there doing nothing, when he could be helping with something important. ‘I am looking,’ he said grandly, ‘for red bricks, Daddy.’

Craig knelt down beside them and began obediently picking out all the red ones. ‘Sorry,’ he said in a gruff voice after a few moments.