‘It may be that our options will be a bit more limited in the near future,’ I said. ‘Mark and I are having a baby. I’m due in the spring.’

‘Oh! I did wonder.’ She got to her feet and came over and draped her arms lightly around me, embraced me, then detached herself and withdrew to her seat. ‘I thought you looked a little tired. Have you been very sick?’

‘Not at all, actually.’

‘It must be a boy. Girls make you terribly sick. I felt awful for the first three months when I was carrying you. Then I felt brilliant, and never looked back. How’s Mark coping?’

‘He’s absolutely thrilled.’

She raised one eyebrow. She plucked them very carefully, and then went over them with a pencil the exact same colour as her hair. ‘Really?’

‘Yes, why wouldn’t he be?’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘Well, because Mark’s Mark, isn’t he? A place for everything, and everything in its place. Does his mother know yet?’

Mum and Ingrid did not see eye to eye. They had engaged in a spectacular battle of the hats at our wedding: Mum had sported a multicoloured turban adorned with feathers and painted beads, while Ingrid had gone for a brim so wide it had been impossible to stand anywhere near her. They’d had very little contact since. Ingrid always asked politely about Mum, but with an expression that suggested she wouldn’t mind hearing that something unpleasant had happened to her. Mum was downright rude about Ingrid and only just managed to restrain herself if Mark was in earshot.

‘No. We’re going to tell her next.’

Mum looked pleased. ‘I don’t suppose she’ll be very happy about being second. Don’t be surprised if she tries to take over. Women are always funny about their sons. They never seem to be able to let them go. Of course some women are like that with their daughters, too. But I’ve always taken the attitude that the best way to motivate you to make the most of your life is for me to make the most of mine.’

I could have told her then and there that we’d already decided to sell our garden flat in Stoke Newington and buy a house in Oxford, or as near as we could afford, which would be much closer to Ingrid than it would be to her. But I decided not to. It would keep, and she might as well enjoy feeling that she’d beaten Ingrid for a little bit longer.

Oxford was where Mark and I had met, when I was working in my first job in publishing and Mark was in the first year of the PhD he’d never finished. It was where we’d fallen in love, where he’d proposed, and where we’d had our registry office wedding. And it was where our baby had been conceived. We’d always wanted to live there, and now that Mark was earning good money and was travelling all over the country for his job, it finally made sense as a base – as long as I didn’t go back to my job in London after maternity leave. But I was ready to move on, anyway. I certainly wasn’t going to gain anything by staying put.