It didn’t occur to me that what he was doing might be a kind of vengeance. It didn’t feel that way. I’d had boyfriends before, but this was different. It was the first time sex really made sense. That was the night I understood it wasn’t all about awkwardness and risk, and whether you looked all right and were any good at it, and whether his body was going to do what it was supposed to do and whether yours would too.

Mark showed me that it was about being with someone. Really being with them. And forgetting everything else.

Afterwards, when he said he thought the condom had split, I did a swift but vague calculation of the odds and said, ‘Oh, never mind. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

‘You sure? I wouldn’t want you to be worrying about it,’ he said.

‘I’m not worried.’

He pulled a face to say that in that case, he wasn’t worried either. ‘Apparently it’s a lot more difficult to get pregnant than people realise.’

‘You seem to know an awful lot about it,’ I said, with a smile to show that I was teasing him.

‘What I do know,’ he said seriously, ‘is that right here, right now, I’m happy. With you.’

And then he took me in his arms again and kissed me. And there I was, drowsy and lucky and warm, all wrapped up in the cocoon of the moment as if neither us nor time would ever be going anywhere. And it really did feel as if nothing could go wrong.

Sixteen

Paula

Someone once said that those whom the gods want to drive nuts, they give what they want. I had wanted a baby more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life (including my husband, not that I was going to tell him that). But living with Daisy turned out to be very different to longing for her.

All the awful bits of motherhood (childbirth, lack of sleep) were so much worse than anyone let on, and the good bits (peaceful, milky cuddles, admiring the baby when she finally slept) were satisfying in their way, but took a lot more slogging to get to than I’d imagined.

I began to have a sneaky sympathy for my mother’s concerted selfishness throughout my childhood. After all, she’d been through all this with me. No wonder she thought she deserved to enjoy herself.

My daughter finally arrived after a twenty-four-hour labour that ended with a caesarean section. The whole thing felt like being bombed from the inside, and then trying to make a new life in the rubble. For a long time I couldn’t see beyond the next sleep, the next feed. I knew I couldn’t really complain. After all, I’d asked for it. And who would I have complained to? Not Mark, who clearly wasn’t entirely loving it either, but at least got to disappear off to work once in a while. Not my mother, who would just have said, ‘I told you so.’ And not my friends, who would have thought there was something wrong with me.