Soon after the new millennium, our friends started dropping like flies. It wasn’t just the people we knew from university, but the people we worked with, too – the ones who were categorised as my friends or his, colleagues from our past or current jobs. It was like a thirtysomething plague, except they weren’t coming down with fevers and boils and coughs: they were coming down with babies.

We’d see them perhaps once or twice, notice the symptoms, get a breathless email with the news, be given a brief opportunity to greet the newborn… then nothing. They’d disappear.

That was when I started to think about it. Might I be able to persuade Mark to change his mind?

Did I really want to?

We’d met as students and married relatively young, and we’d had to grow up together. We’d survived a wobble, an awful time when I’d developed a painful crush on someone at work. I still felt guilty about that, not because I’d done anything about it – I hadn’t – but because I’d felt it, and I’d told Mark and I’d hurt him and he’d asked me to move out, and then he’d had that funeral to go to, the one we never spoke about, and I hadn’t been there for him.

But we’d got through it.

We’d always agreed that we weren’t bothered about having kids, that the really important thing was each other. So what if I wanted change and he didn’t? What then?

Things came to a head the day our new dining chairs were delivered. They were Mark’s choice: expensive designer things shaped like something from an aristocrat’s chateau in the years before the French Revolution, but made of moulded transparent plastic. I’d have been quite happy with regular wooden chairs that didn’t cost a small fortune, but I hadn’t said so. Mark chose most of our furniture, and this was one of the areas of our marriage where I’d long since learned that it was best to let him have his way.

Isn’t that what it takes, to keep a marriage going? You have to pick your battles. Let go of the things you don’t care about, save your energy for the things that are really worth fighting for. And what could be more worth fighting for than a child?

I was the one who waited in for the chairs to be delivered. Neither of us would have said so directly, or accused the other of thinking it, but when push came to shove, Mark was paid more and that meant his career was more important than mine. Besides, it was easier for me to arrange to work from home.

After the chairs arrived I checked them all over carefully before signing for them – it wouldn’t have done to let some flaw or scratch slip past unnoticed. I knew Mark would be pleased with them, and he was, which made for a good start to the evening. I cooked us a couple of steaks and we shared a bottle of good French red, and over coffee, which I’d made on the hob in the Continental-style pot just the way he liked it, I suggested that we should throw a dinner party. That way we could make use of all six of the new chairs, not just the two we were sitting on.