‘This is normal,’ says the assistant. ‘By eighteen months she’ll be able to do it.’

‘Does she babble?’ says the clinician.

‘Babble?’ says Dean. ‘Oh yes – she talks.’

She sure as hell didn’t get her brains from him.

‘Talks?’

‘Gabber-gabber-gabber,’ says Dean. ‘Mum-mum-mum.’

The assistant smiles.

‘Is she walking yet?’ says the clinician.

I shake my head. ‘She crawls a lot more than this normally,’ I say, as the assistant holds out a toy to her, arm’s length away. ‘She’s a bit tired from yesterday is all.’

Cara crawls towards the toy. The clinician seems satisfied and touches the screen on her device. ‘We don’t record brain activity this time,’ she says. ‘Just run basic checks.’

She taps her keypad and a Perspex box to our right emits a high-frequency sound. Cara turns towards it and a puppet waves at her. She laughs. The clinician repeats the task several times, different frequencies and different directions. Then with no sound, just the puppets waving.

The assistant passes Cara a pen. Cara pincers her fingers. ‘Good.’ Into her device she says: ‘T33. NA.’

‘We’ll see you again at fifteen months,’ says the clinician. She consults her screen. ‘Which will be some time in June.’

Cara stares at my T-shirt and starts to form a shape with her mouth. I scrunch up the shirt and zip up my jacket.

Back in the anteroom she’s weighed and measured, her stats plotted on a graph – reassuringly unexceptional for her age – and then we are free to go.

We walk home. From her buggy Cara says, ‘I liked the puppets.’ And then she falls asleep.

We take the path by the nature reserve. The daffodils are out.

‘We got away with it,’ says Dean. ‘For how much longer, though?’

At home, I put Cara to bed to sleep off the cough syrup.

Over dinner I say, ‘I wonder if we just don’t talk in front of her.’

‘We can’t keep her with us for ever,’ he says.

*

At Wednesday baby group she’s spotted. By one of the other mums, newish. Her child’s well dressed. New spring trousers already, rolled up at the cuff. Woollen waistcoat and brown leather boots, though he’s hardly walking. One of those.

Cara’s sitting in the toy kitchen, stirring some play food round and round in a pan.

‘She’s a clever little thing, isn’t she?’ Harsh-eyed.

I laugh. ‘Is she? Saves it all up for when we go out then.’

‘What you got there, Cara?’ says the woman.

‘Egg,’ says Cara.

The woman purses her mouth and says nothing more, eyes hard with satisfaction. Cara abandons her saucepan and crawls to the bookcase, clambering up it and pulling down picture books much too old for her. I read them to her to quieten her down but I know that the woman can see me, peering over from her place at the sand table.