‘Of course not. Only the bit of the diagnosis which he couldn’t handle if he knew about it. All Jake need know is that I have a nice bunch of fibroids,’ Laura said whimsically. ‘As for the rest – well, the abortion I mentioned was botched. By the guy who made it necessary. He was a medical student. And a real stud.’

A flash of the old Laura, thought Marianne.

‘I was desperate enough to let him deal with it,’ she went on. ‘Where would I have got the money for a proper job? – except by asking Mum. I’d already put her through enough, hadn’t I?’

A ward orderly came to take Laura’s flowers to put them in water and said, admiring the profusion of red roses, ‘Somebody loves you!’

But Jake Bornstein’s love, warm and kindly though he was, could be likened to a moral straitjacket. And Laura’s situation to that of an idol on a pedestal, albeit in Jake’s eyes slightly chipped, but that he had brought himself to overlook. How long would it be before his idol toppled off?

‘You could have come to me for the money,’ Marianne resumed the conversation when the cheerful black woman had departed the bedside.

‘I couldn’t have looked you in the face, Marianne, and told you I wanted an abortion for my own selfish reasons. How else could it have seemed to you? Like why I had Bessie, only this time it suited me to get rid of a baby.’

Laura fingered the lace trimming on her eau-de-nil satin nightgown, and Marianne reflected that a wealthy woman’s finding herself in a National Health gynaecological ward might serve to bring her down to the basics. All women were equipped with the same plumbing – and the other patients on this ward hadn’t got their nighties from Harrods.

‘That was when I realized what I’d done to Bessie,’ Laura revealed. ‘That because I’d wanted a child, but not a man complicating my life, she would never know her father.’

Marianne said after a pause, ‘Is it too late to put that right?’

‘It sure is, and on more counts than one. The guy who begat her – and he wasn’t even a good lay – is an Israeli egghead I selected for the purpose when I did the pictures for a magazine article on him.’

‘Did you keep copies of the pictures?’

‘Certainly not, since I approached the fathering of my child clinically.’

‘You certainly did!’

‘How I looked at it was that telling the kid who its father was would lead to its eventually wanting to meet him, with resultant effects on my life. Not to mention on his. He flew back to his wife and kids the next day, taking it for granted that the wild oat he’d sowed the night before wouldn’t sprout. How was he to know I’d deliberately taken myself off the pill?’