Still, he’d been frozen in time for me as the man he’d been when I first met him. And then he’d come roaring back into my life as a man in his early forties who was champing at the bit to take on family life and all the contradictions and difficulties involved.

People always talked a lot about how much women wanted babies, how they got broody at a certain age and had ticking biological clocks and all of that, even though it was patently obvious that plenty of them didn’t, and most of the rest of the time, for most of us, suddenly discovering we were pregnant was pretty much the last thing we wanted.

Stitches, mastitis, caring for a young baby who kept you up all night and then going to work the next day… surely any woman who’d been through it would have at least some mixed feelings about the prospect of doing it all again?

Men had so much less skin in the game. It was so much easier for them to want kids. You wouldn’t think it from the way the newspapers talked about these things, but men could get baby hunger just the same way women could, and in some ways, there was less to put them off.

Though sometimes, they came up against a partner who really didn’t want to have children, who was prepared to stop using contraception and see what happened but who wasn’t willing to explore the possibility of fertility treatment. Like Paula. Mark hadn’t spoken about it in any detail – I could tell he felt he ought to make at least some effort to protect her privacy – but he’d told me enough for me to figure out what her attitude had been.

In a way, I could understand where she’d been coming from. They’d had a good life, from what I could make out: a flat in a decent part of London, dinner parties with other couples, lots of foreign holidays. She’d had a career doing something in publishing, Mark had said. Why would you want to swap all that calm and order for the chaos and unpredictability of having children? You couldn’t blame her for having doubts. And if Mark had felt the same way, it would have been fine. But over time, he’d changed his mind. The hunger had got to him. And when it came down to it, she hadn’t been willing to contemplate what might be needed to give him what he wanted.

You couldn’t really blame her for that, either. All those hormone injections, the invasive procedures, handing your body over to the control of doctors… why would any woman begin to put herself through it unless she was longing for the baby she might have at the end of it? You couldn’t do something like that half-heartedly, just because your partner was keen on the idea. You’d have to be passionate about it. Dedicated. Like a hero on a quest.

I hadn’t been like that at all. I’d taken a risk and my body had presented me with a fait accompli… but even so, it hadn’t been a given that I would go through with it.