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always been rather proud of but which were currently encased in varicose-vein-suppression stockings that had fallen down around her ankles.
    ‘I was trying to go to the loo!’ was the first thing she said. ‘But Cressida was making such a row I thought she was dying. Take this one, I’m desperate!’
    ‘Love you,’ Jimmy said as he took hold of the buggy.
    ‘Love you,’ Monica replied as she hopped and shuffled towards the open toilet door with Lillie still at her breast.
    Jimmy sighed a deep sigh. Ever since Jodie and the chef had left, Monica had been in a constant state of trying to get to the loo. Before that, neither of them had had any idea that fitting in one’s own bodily functions with the needs of a baby and toddler would present such a never-ending series of challenges.
    ‘The moment you want to go,’ Monica observed, ‘the toddler falls down the stairs and the baby’s sick.’ She was convinced that before they invented Thomas the Tank Engine to hypnotize children, mothers without nannies must have crapped on the carpet.
    Jimmy picked Cressida up out of the buggy and the child began to calm down a little. Usually the buggy would have been enough to shut her up in the first place but tonight, probably sensing that Monica was alone and hence extra-vulnerable to persecution, Cressida had refused to be mollified.
    A few moments later Monica re-emerged.
    ‘Hi,’ he said.
    ‘Hi,’ Monica replied. ‘I have to get a clean nightie, this one’s soaked up half a boob’s worth and now I feel guilty because Lillie won’t get the milk. If you’d been here I could have expressed it. Cressida just wouldn’t let me do a thing.’
    ‘I had to go to Webb Street. I was meeting David.’
    Tired though she was, Monica knew how difficult that must have been. David, like everyone involved in Jimmy’s failed property development, had not been paid. And David was a mate.
    ‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘God, to have Jodie back. Just for a day.’
    Jimmy carried on comforting Cressida. There was nothing to say on that score because there was no chance whatsoever of getting Jodie back, not unless she agreed to work for nothing and bring her own food.
    For a moment they were silent, each holding a child, tiny bombs, either of which, if put down even for an instant, would immediately explode. Jimmy felt himself swaying slightly, fatigue enveloping him. For a moment he thought he was falling over, then he managed to blink himself back into focus.
    ‘How’s Toby?’ he asked.
    ‘Asleep. He misses Jodie.’
    ‘Well, I suppose that’s to be expected. She was with him all his life.’
    Suddenly Monica’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I really do think . . .’ she started, ‘I mean, she might have found a way to . . . I thought she loved him. He feels so deserted.’
    ‘Mon, of course she loved him. In a way. Like a nanny. But what do you expect her to do? We can’t pay her.’
    ‘I know, but . . .’
    But there were no buts. Jodie was as much a victim of the downturn as they were. She had been lucky to be offered a job at half the money (and no board) at a Shepherds Bush backpacker pub and she’d grabbed it.
    ‘If she hadn’t taken that job,’ Jimmy said, ‘she’d have been as stuck as we are.’
    ‘Perhaps not quite as stuck,’ Monica said, and for a moment she couldn’t help smiling.
    Jimmy smiled too.
    After all, Jodie might be poor and having to pull pints for pissed-up surfer dudes doing a year in London plus all the Aussie nannies who hadn’t lost their jobs. But at least she had managed to avoid the added burden of an enormous property portfolio negatively mortgaged to the tune of whatever horror story the Evening Standard was publishing that day.
    Jodie had done her best to soften the blow, ignoring the painful and sudden reduction in her own circumstances and trying to be kind and positive about Jimmy and Monica’s. She had dropped back to see them twice in the first week of separation but