Dermot, who had gone to the kitchen when the phone rang, came back through, and put his arms around her, holding her warmly against him. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart,’ he soothed comfortingly, and although he had no idea what Shona had said, as she had spoken in Bangla, he added, ‘Bravo for standing up to her.’ The phone began to ring again, and he felt Shona’s heart thumping faster and faster, anticipating her mother’s shrieking rebuttal on the answering machine. He got up, and eased the phone cord out of the socket gently. ‘Give yourself a break, eh? We don’t want you getting upset, not in your condition. I’ll make you some camomile tea, and then we’ll try and get back to sleep. What do you think?’

Shona nodded dumbly. She wondered when she was going to summon up the courage to tell her mother that on top of all her other sins, this adulterous harlot, this bad wife and bad mother who had raised a faggot and an overdosing drug-abuser, had also managed, miraculously, after years of sterility, to get pregnant.

Shona still didn’t quite believe it herself. Her periods were never completely reliable, and after three months without one, her natural thought had been that she was prematurely menopausal. When the doctor suggested a pregnancy test, she had almost refused out of sheer embarrassment, and was shocked to see an incontrovertibly positive result. She had told Dermot straight away, unsure of his reaction, and his excitement had worried her even more. Shona was sure it was a false alarm but she was sent for a dating scan immediately, as the doctors thought she might already be quite far along. They were right; she was fourteen weeks pregnant.

She saw the baby moving in the ultrasound picture,whilst Dermot held her hand tightly, and she still didn’t quite believe it. All the dedicated preparation she’d done for her twins - the special diets, the folic acid, the not-drinking, the exercise, the medication’- it had taken years of work to conceive. And yet now, with no preparation or warning at all, this child had come from nowhere. It was tempting to romanticize and say that the child had come from love alone. She was forty-three, and she was having a baby. She had to look at the scan picture every once in a while, just to prove to herself that it wasn’t some phantom daydream.

It was in the rosy glow of her unexpected achievement that Shona finally managed to succeed in that other test she had expected to fail. Despite what seemed an appalling drive on her long-awaited driving test, her examiner had passed her, chiding her indulgently to check her mirrors more often while he wrote out her certificate.