‘I’m pregnant,’ I told him.

His jaw dropped. He gazed at me in pure astonishment, and then in awe, and then he shot up out of his chair and rushed towards me, and I stood too and we embraced so tightly it was as if nothing and nobody would ever be able to come between us.

Right then, I felt myself turning into someone else: not the vamp in black silk underwear, but the carrier of children. The mother. The worker of Mark’s little miracle: the woman he’d never, ever want to let go.

Eight

Paula

Months, seasons, then a whole year went by. Still nothing.

I didn’t tell anybody we were trying. When I met my remaining childfree friends, we talked warily, each eyeing up what the other was drinking or not drinking. You couldn’t make assumptions about anybody. We’d talk about jobs, holiday plans, moving house, other people we knew. If the friend was still single we talked about who she was dating. If the friend was in a settled relationship we talked about other things, apart from minor gripes about our other halves that could be used for comedy value. That was the real difference between being married (or equivalent) or not: the married did not discuss their private lives.

But it was a strain.

I didn’t talk about it with Mark. I was waiting for the right time. I knew I had to choose carefully. Otherwise he’d just go into full-on defensive mode. He might even say he didn’t want to carry on trying. I knew how afraid he was of having something wrong with him. It wasn’t entirely surprising that he should feel that way. If there was one lesson his family history might have taught him, it was how vulnerable you were in the hands of doctors.

Understanding didn’t make it easy. But like I said, I’m a slow-burn kind of person. Patient. Made for distances, not for sprinting. I’m the tortoise who gets there in the end, long after the hares have even forgotten there’s a race going on.

It’s petty of me, I know, but there’s some satisfaction in that. Vindication. Showing the lot of them. My goodness, it’s her! She’s still going! Such terrific surprise. What did they expect? Didn’t they realise that absolutely nothing was going to stop me from getting what I wanted? The right moment always presents itself eventually, whatever it is you’re waiting for.

Mark always organised our holidays, and usually he booked places that were sleek and modern and sexy, but for our eleventh wedding anniversary he took me to a country house hotel near Oxford that was about as traditional and romantic as you could get.

We had an enormous four-poster bed in an oak-beamed room with mullioned windows and a view over an Elizabethan knot garden. I was very taken with it, and struck by the concession he’d made to my taste, which he usually disparaged. And that got me thinking: Maybe here… maybe tonight could be my chance.