‘Look – there’s something I’d better add,’ said Jake. ‘If we don’t have a child together it won’t be the end of the world to me. What would, is if Laura’s age didn’t account for it. The reason I want her to get a check-up is if something is seriously wrong with her, the sooner it’s dealt with the better.’

Jake got up to gaze through the window and Marianne sensed that he did not want her to see his expression. There was too in his final words something that bespoke a painful significance for him.

The late afternoon had slipped into twilight, but Marianne could not bring herself to switch on the lamps, such was the atmosphere.

It was she who broke the silence. ‘If you want me to talk sense to Laura, Jake, I will. But that would require my telling her that you’ve confided in me.’

He turned and said, his heart in his voice, ‘Marianne, I don’t give a damn what you have to tell her. All I’m concerned with is trying to ensure that she doesn’t die on me—’

After Jake’s departure, Marianne made herself some tea and a cheese sandwich, and took her frugal supper into her study. More frugal than usual, since it was matzo, not bread.

She could not but be troubled by what she had learned, and on more than one count. Laura was very dear to her. More like the daughter denied to Marianne than a young cousin.

Nor would she wish on Laura her own experience of trying to have another child. The waiting between one operation and the next. The anxiety. And the final loss of hope.

Though the treatment of infertility nowadays could not be compared to that before new ground was broken, the accompanying tension until you knew, one way or the other, had to be the same. And meanwhile your life revolved around it. Your husband’s too, but not twenty-four hours a day. It was your body, not his, upon which all was centred.

Like birth itself, when even if he was there beside you, as modern husbands chose to be, he could not share with you what giving birth meant to a woman.

Marianne’s reading of Jake was that he would not choose to be there. But that didn’t mean that Laura wasn’t precious to him. On the contrary, fear of losing her seemed to be obsessing him. Had another man said what he finally did, Marianne would have told him not to be melodramatic. The emotion Jake had displayed could not be mistaken for melodrama.