‘Only if you want fish fingers and baked beans. I’m about to dish up.’

‘My favourite,’ Jake said and followed her inside.

Edie walked away from the door, dragging Archie behind her who was screaming blue murder and was attached to her leg like a snot-nosed limpet. ‘He’s been like this all day,’ she shouted over her shoulder. ‘I’ve given up trying to dislodge him.’

The rest of Edie’s numerous children were sitting at the kitchen table shouting at each other and hitting each other with spoons. The grill pan with a mountain of fish fingers piled on it waited patiently.

‘Keeping Captain Birdseye in business?’ Jake said as he shrugged out of his coat.

‘Yeah. That man’s going to enjoy a prosperous retirement thanks to this lot.’ Edie dragged the screaming Archie across the floor to the cooker. ‘Sit down,’ Edie instructed Jake as if she were speaking to another one of the children. Jake did as he was told. ‘Say hello to Uncle Jake.’

‘Hello to Uncle Jake,’ everyone said, including him.

Daisy sidled round to Jake’s side of the table. ‘When I grow up I’m going to be one of Girlth Aloud.’ She cast a hateful glance at her harried parent whilst performing a dance routine. ‘And then I’ll be able to eat all the ithe cream I want.’

‘Splendid idea,’ Jake said. ‘Except that your management team will want you to stay ridiculously thin if you’re a pop idol and they won’t let you eat ice cream either.’

Daisy frowned.

‘See?’ Edie said. ‘It’s not just Mummy who’s a pain in the bottom. Uncle Jake is too.’ She jiggled the fish fingers under the grill.

Kelly stamped in. ‘I hate this house,’ she shouted. As an afterthought she noticed Jake’s presence. ‘Oh hi, Uncle Jake.’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘I hate everyone here.’

Jake gave her a squeeze. ‘How’s the world’s most beautiful teenager?’

Kelly blushed. She was wearing an unfeasibly short skirt and had unfeasibly long legs and it was frightening to think that only recently she’d been a gawky, coy eleven-year-old schoolgirl with plaits and without breasts. When had she gone from being a child to a hormonal woman? And it scared him to death to think that one day he could have a daughter who looked and behaved exactly like this.

‘Take me home to live with you,’ she said to Jake.

‘You get arrested for that sort of thing these days,’ he said.

Kelly scowled her most fearsome scowl. ‘I’m not allowed to do anything.’

‘You’re not allowed to stay out until two in the morning.’

‘Katy Marchmont is.’

Edie put her fingers in her ears and started to sing in the style of Julie Andrews. ‘You are fifteen, going on thirty-five. I—I am si-ick of you…!’

‘Losers.’ Kelly stamped out again. Daisy slid onto Jake’s knee.