‘No there aren’t,’ she said. She had risen from her dressing table stool and had come over to where I stood. She pressed her full weight against me and wrapped her arms about my neck. ‘They’re all the same. I bet I could persuade you to stay if I promised to tell you everything I did at that party, if I gave you all the tiniest details.’ She brought my face close to hers and put her lips to my ear. Only the words that came out were not those I expected and, yes, yes, wanted to hear. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she told me, instead of who had done what to her how many times and where.

The news enabled me, at least, to pull away. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘And because you were so busy while all the other wives were watching The Battleship Potemkin you don’t know who the father is?’

‘I’m more than five days pregnant,’ she assured me.

‘That narrows the field, does it?’

‘There is no field, it’s yours.’

‘How do you know it’s not Fitz’s?’

Sharon shrugged. ‘I just know,’ she said. I had to accept that there were some things that women just knew. And there was something else that I had to accept also. ‘I’ve told Fitz,’ she added.

‘Why did you tell him if it’s mine?’

‘Barney, Fitz noticed.’ She patted her stomach. I was meant to understand that she’d put on twenty stone. ‘He asked.’

‘And what does he say?’

‘He’s very pleased for me. He wants me to have it.’

‘That’s nice of him. Does he know that it might be mine.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Of course of course. That would make it even better for him, wouldn’t it? I’d forgotten how he hankers after other men’s offspring. I suppose it would break his heart if it turned out to be his own. I’m assuming that he’s offered to stand by you if I proposed that we abort it or sell it or just give it away.’

Sharon looked at me stonily without saying anything. She struck me as having a maternal air. Already I was feeling nostalgic, missing the good old days when she used to get about in a little leather space-suit and would roll around the floor with strange men, oblivious to the discomfort of the satsuma pips beneath her. There was something in that for me. But there was nothing that I cared for in the idea of her as a mother. ‘And I suppose you’ll call it Tommy if it’s a boy,’ I said, mirthlessly.