The atmosphere of the place was dense and solemn with history – all creaky stairs and heavy drapes and shadowy corners – but it didn’t have a dampening effect. We reacted to it by turning as skittish as a pair of teenagers. It was one of those nights when there’s a kind of wildness in the air and you don’t feel at all like yourself, the sensible, professional you who knows the last three debits that went out from your bank account and remembers your colleagues’ birthdays and cleans out all your cupboards once a year.

After dinner we didn’t even make it to the four-poster bed; we ended up making love on the floor in front of the fire.

That was the thing about Mark. The only time he ever really loosened up was when we were having sex. All that pent-up energy, that frustration, that uptightness: he let it all go. And I was the beneficiary. It was the one way we could always connect. It was like magic: it seemed to bring us back into focus, and made the minor irritations and fault-finding, the slow grind of compromises that made up day-to-day life, not matter.

If you want a satisfying lover, look no further than someone who has something to lose. Or who is afraid of what he might lose, which comes out as the same thing in the end. That’s who Mark was: he went through life as if it would all go to pieces if he stopped concentrating for a minute, but every once in a while he let himself off the leash. And that was when you realised how much he was holding back.

He was the only lover I’d ever had. I’d never wanted anybody else. I couldn’t imagine that anybody else could begin to match up. He’d had a few other girls, before we got together: ‘Practice runs before I met you’ was how he’d always described them. No one who mattered. We were both quite clear that there was nobody out there, nobody at all, who could hold a candle for the other.

But as we lay side by side on the hearth rug in our oh-so-romantic room in that country house hotel, I wasn’t really thinking about him at all.

I was thinking about the baby I wanted. More than wanted: had to have. If I couldn’t… If I didn’t… That was an unbearable prospect. Truly unbearable. I knew it would drive me out of my mind.

He was naked, and I still had my dress on, unbuttoned to the waist and rolled up to my hips; there was a candle burning above the blocked-up fireplace and I knew I’d look good in the light. I propped myself up on one elbow and said, ‘You know, once we’ve been trying for two years we could think about IVF.’

It was as if I’d broken a spell. He sat up straight away and gave me that look of his, the one I always dreaded: that cold, glassy, uncompromising look that was almost as if he wasn’t really seeing me, as if I’d become someone it was necessary to keep his distance from. It was the kind of look you might see on the face of a judge about to pass sentence. It wasn’t the way you want your husband to look at you ever, let alone just after sex when you’re desperate to have his baby.