Soon after, back on the ward, Joni had her first taste of colostrum; she latched on naturally and with ease. Even the midwife was impressed. I marvelled at how here she was, not even an hour old and already she was teaching me how to be a mother. I gazed at the side of her head as she suckled. I had so much to learn from her.

When I looked up, Jason was holding his phone, quietly videoing this tender moment.

‘How do you feel, my beautiful wife and baby mama?’ he asked, still recording.

‘I feel so happy,’ I said looking into the camera. ‘And lucky. How do you feel, to be a daddy?’

He paused for a moment. ‘I feel like the luckiest man on this planet.’ And his eyes welled with tears again.

Chapter Twenty-One

Lucy

Monday 24^th May

The C-section appointment was at 8 a.m., which meant I wanted to leave the house by 7.a.m. – I couldn’t bear the stress of being late. But Oscar was convinced it would only take thirty minutes maximum to drive from Clapham to College Square Hospital.

‘Any earlier, and you’ll have too much time to pace around and get nervous,’ he said, and he did have a point. By 7.15 I was ready, so I tried to calm myself with a cup of camomile tea on the sofa as I read through some WhatsApp messages of luck from everyone in The Baby Group. Everyone except Helen.

Although he was the CEO of one of London’s largest PR companies, Oscar was possibly the least organized person I knew. The result of having a PA for most of your working life. Plus a wife or a girlfriend and a teenage daughter. There was always someone – generally a female – to take care of things for him: his washing, the food in his fridge, his social life and his work diary. But when it came to taking care of me on the morning of the C-section, his disorganization surpassed itself. Although highly attentive to me when he was on the prowl for a blow job, or a home-cooked dinner, Oscar was not a practical guy.

Thankfully, where he struggled, I excelled. I guess that was one of the things that made us a good match. I had fastidiously packed my hospital bag two months ago, just in case the baby tried to catch me out. I had heard that they could come earlier if you were an ‘older’ mother. All I needed to do was collect a few of my toiletries together and I was ready.

But Oscar was still faffing about getting dressed at 7.20, and my blood pressure was beginning to rise.

Neither of us could have envisaged the broken-down lorry causing huge tailbacks on Kennington Road, nor could we have foreseen that a burst water main would prevent any way around it. The traffic chaos meant we didn’t even pull into the car park at the hospital until nearly half past eight. I had called ahead to warn them we were running late, only to be told that we had missed our slot and would now have to be seen at the end of the surgeon’s session, at around midday. We discussed turning back, but who knew what other disasters might befall us, so we ploughed on. Maggie hadn’t covered how to handle stress like this – the stress of almost missing your own baby’s birth.