‘You didn’t make a mess of everything.’ Her voice sounded slightly strangulated, and her eyes were suddenly awash with tears.

I shook my head. ‘I should have told you the truth years ago. The only reason I didn’t was that I was afraid of what you would say.’

The next minute she was crying and I had my arms around her. It was the first time I’d held her like that for years – the first time for years that she’d let me. She felt so small and delicate, as light-boned and fragile as a bird.

It took me right back to holding her as a newborn. That little bundle of restless life, the sleepy face contorting in sudden dismay and the tiny hands feeling for something to hold onto, and the shock of knowing it was down to me to protect her.

Twelve

Paula

I had to work very, very hard at not hating Mark after that conversation about IVF. I had to work very hard at not hating any woman with a bump, or a pushchair or a child walking along with her, holding her hand.

People had been asking when, or if, we were going to have babies for as long as we’d been married. Sometimes they were direct about it, sometimes they were more tactful, but they always seemed to want to know. Since we’d been trying for a baby the questions had stopped being merely embarrassing and intrusive. By this stage, they really hurt me.

There was the pregnant neighbour who said, ‘It’ll be your turn next…’ and the proud new mum, a former colleague who came back into work to show off her baby, openly eyeing me up as I held her offspring, as if she was speculating about why I didn’t yet have one of my own.

Thankfully, her baby started crying a minute later, and I was able to hand it back. But still, I was furious with her, and my feelings were hard to hide. We were all standing around her in an admiring circle, and everybody noticed. Nobody said anything, but I caught them looking at me askance.

Worst of all, there was my mother. I’d bitten her head off once or twice when she mentioned the subject directly. She probably thought she was doing a good job of avoiding it. But tact was not her strong point, and every now and then she’d remark on how some acquaintance or other barely had a life of her own now that she kept on getting called upon to babysit her grandchildren. Or she’d ask me how work was going, and then say something like: ‘It must be so liberating, being able to forge ahead without being held back by worrying about childcare.’

I wasn’t really forging ahead at all – I’d been in the same job for years; it was hard to summon up ambition, or the energy for a change of direction, when all I really wanted was to sail off on maternity leave. I was stuck. Impotent. Humiliated. Somehow I carried on going through the motions, getting up and going to work, being married. But I had no idea how much longer I was going to be able to bear it.