It was just nature’s savage little practical joke, and I was on the receiving end. There was nobody to take it out on… and nobody to blame but myself.

I was completely cured of baby hunger – I couldn’t even imagine being broody ever again. My figure, which I’d once been vain about, was wrecked: I was suddenly soft and saggy where I’d once been firm and supple, and it would have taken a much more rigorous campaign of exercise than I had time for to restore it. And then, as the broken nights took their toll, my looks began to go, too.

As for my libido… that had pretty much disappeared, or was it that Mark had stopped fancying me? It was hard to tell. We managed to have sex occasionally, but it wasn’t what it had been, and since it was the one part of our life together that could be relied upon to smooth out everything else, I was aware that I ought to make a bit more of an effort. But somehow I couldn’t summon up the energy.

It wasn’t just that I wasn’t wild with lust for Mark; I wasn’t wild with lust for anybody. I couldn’t even imagine having a crush. The feelings I’d had for Lewis, my long-ago colleague, seemed to belong to another life.

I was actually glad that brief infatuation had never been consummated, and had never moved beyond a little drunken handholding, for all the trouble it had caused. I’d never seen Lewis naked, or found out what he was like in bed, or whether he snored and hogged the duvet and was moody in the morning – in some ways, I’d never really got to know him at all. All I was left with was a vivid memory of his warm brown eyes and the knowledge that, for a little while, he had really, really liked me, and I had really liked him too – which wasn’t nothing, given that even in my twenties, when I didn’t look knackered and harassed all the time, I had never been the kind of woman men made a beeline for.

With Mark, I’d made most of the running – I’d pursued him, not obviously, of course, but strategically. With Lewis, there had been no strategy; it had just been something that happened. An accident. With hindsight, it was obvious that I shouldn’t have told Mark about it. If I’d waited, it would have died a death of natural causes. Instead of which Mark had moved out for a couple of weeks, and I’d had to change jobs to persuade him there was really no risk of anything ever happening, and then had spent months, if not years, making it up to him. Right up until the point where we’d had Daisy.

And now I wasn’t capable of making anything up to him any more.

At least I’d learned the useful lesson that you didn’t have to tell your husband everything. It didn’t even occur to me to try to talk to him about how gruelling I was finding motherhood. After all, it was pretty obvious, if only he chose to see it. And I really didn’t want to have to listen to him telling me that he felt the same way about fatherhood. It just would have been too infuriating, given that I was the one who looked after Daisy most of the time. And there was absolutely no point in me explaining how much I resented him for sleeping peacefully while I struggled to settle her during the nights. He was the one who was working and earning, and I wasn’t. I would just have to keep going, and wait for things to change.