‘Have the baby,’ said Lucy impulsively. She realised, as she said it, how much she was longing for a set of multiplying cells she could be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about, and how much her vote was driven by a wave of sadness about no longer being able to have a child herself, given her uncertain prognosis. ‘As long as I can be a godmother,’ she added. She was going to have to compromise, given that she wasn’t going to be a mother or, for that matter, a god. She watched another bumblebee launch itself, weighted with cargo, into the air. It seemed to be her own atmosphere she was trying to lighten, as much as Olivia’s.

‘Obviously you’d be the godmother,’ said Olivia.

‘Francis is great, you’re great …’ Lucy felt herself getting lost in a complex, hollow mixture of regret and relief. Three years back, Nathan had talked fervently about having a child, wanting to tie down their relationship with the steel cables of parenthood. She had prevaricated, perhaps already knowing that she didn’t ultimately want to stay with him.

‘Francis is great,’ said Olivia, ‘but we haven’t been together for that long, and he doesn’t make a fortune counting nightingales and living in a tied cottage. Nor do I. And I’m attached to my independence – or at least used to it. Attached to being non-attached; it feels like there could be a problem lurking there.’

Lucy didn’t answer immediately. She was thinking about how divided she had always been about having a baby: wanting to give it what she hadn’t had, while fearing she would pass on the worst of what she did have. Recently, she had been thinking more and more about the stresses of her childhood in relation to her illness. It was one of the penalties of her holistic approach, not to allocate blame, but to wonder about the psychosomatic chain, if there was one.

‘Is the adoption thing coming up for you?’ she asked. ‘I mean, Karen didn’t want to have a child when she was pregnant with you.’

‘Sure,’ said Olivia, ‘but I didn’t meet her until I was twenty-six, so she doesn’t play a huge part in my thinking.’

‘Hmm,’ said Lucy, agreeing in a way that implied that it couldn’t be quite so simple, but hurrying on to a more affirmative note. ‘I can so easily picture Francis walking around Howorth with a baby strapped to his chest.’

‘So can I,’ said Olivia.

‘And also,’ said Lucy, in a more practical tone, ‘Hunter has become wild about wilding and is planning to give Francis all sorts of gigs, including wilding his ranch in California, which is huge compared to this place.’

‘I know, that’s exciting,’ said Olivia, ‘and Francis is already halfway through his report on Plein Soleil, but we can’t rely entirely on Hunter to pay for the costs of bringing up a child.’