“Let me see,” she said, and that was when the baby was placed on his mother’s chest, but on his back, arse-to-chin with Lauren so that all she could see were his folded froggy legs, and a tiny arm, flailing in the air. Patrick bent over them both, squinting at the baby, laughing, then crying and pressing his finger into one little palm.

“Can’t you turn him around?” she said, but nobody did. Then she was barely aware of the doctor saying, “push,” again, and another pull. The boy was whisked away and the second one placed there.

This time she could reach up and turn the baby to face her. She held him in a cradle made of her two arms and studied his face, the baby studying her at the same time, his little mouth in a trumpeter’s pout, no white visible in his half-open eyes but a deep thoughtful blue. Although the babies were genetically identical, she and Patrick had expected that there would be slight differences. They’re individuals. Two bonnie boys, she thought with a degree of slightly forced joviality, at the same time as, could I just go to sleep now? Would anyone notice, really?

“Riley,” said Patrick, with one hand gently touching Lauren’s face and one finger stroking the baby’s, “Yes?”

Lauren felt pressured. She thought they might leave naming them for a few days until they got to know them properly. Such a major decision, what if they got it wrong?

“Riley?” she said, “I suppose—”

Patrick had straightened up, his phone in his hand already.

“What about the other one? Rupert?”

Rupert? That wasn’t even on the list. It was like he was trying to get names past her while she was distracted, having been pumped full of drugs and laid out flat, paralysed from the chest down, vulnerable to suggestion. Not fair.

“No,” she said, a little bit too loudly. “He’s called Morgan.”

Patrick’s brow creased. He glanced in the direction of possibly-Morgan, who was being checked over by the paediatrician. “Really?” He put his phone back in his pocket.

* * *

“You can’t stay long,” said the nurse-midwife to Patrick, as the bed finally rolled into place. Sea-green curtains were whisked out of the way. Lauren wanted to protest: she’d hoped there would be some time to properly settle in with the babies before they threw her husband out of the ward.

The trip from theatre to the maternity ward involved hundreds of metres of corridor. Thousands of metres, maybe. Patrick had been wheeling the trolley containing one of the twins, while the nurse drove the bed containing Lauren, who was holding the other one. The small procession clanked wordlessly along the route through the yellow-lit corridors. At first Lauren thought that Patrick could have offered to swap with the nurse and take the heavier burden, but she soon became glad she hadn’t mentioned it. As they approached the ward it was clear the woman knew what she was doing. This nurse, who was half Patrick’s height just about, had used her entire bodyweight to counter-balance as the bed swung around a corner and into the bay, then, impressively, she’d stepped up and ridden it like a sailboard into one of the four empty cubicles, the one by the window. There was a single soft “clang” as the head of the bed gently touched the wall. Patrick would only have crashed them into something expensive.