‘No, no,’ said Fitzpiers quickly, ‘that was Sarah. You haven’t met Suzi before. We’ve only been going out together since this morning.’

‘Hello anyway,’ I said, doing what I could to conceal my irritation. It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t tell one of Fitzpiers’s girl-friends from another. I experienced a sudden aversion to him. And I wasn’t softened any by the way he hovered devotedly over the baby as if he had known it since it was a little kicking foetus, instead of since breakfast.

The baby was in Sharon’s thoughts too. She cooed over it and tickled its neck and rubbed its nose with hers. She even wondered whether he would like a little bowl of pasta. Suzi, close to tears, said that he wouldn’t and that he was a she. Sharon went on to wonder whether they’d brought a carry cot or whether the baby would like to sleep in a big comfortable bed with an electric blanket and one of Sharon’s own old teddy bears for company.

Fitzpiers looked anxiously at the woman he had loved selflessly for a full eleven hours. ‘If it’s all right with you,’ she answered, ‘I’d like to keep her with me. I believe that babies should be brought into adult life from as early an age as possible.’ It was impossible to tell whether her small piping girlish voice was natural to her or whether she was learning (for Fitzpiers) to imitate the computerized lisp much favoured in the twenty-fifth century. But there was no doubting that she was not to be separated from her baby. She clasped it to the winged lapels of her glittering tunic and darted her eyes around the capsule nervously, alone and far from home and circumscribed by aliens.

Sharon wondered if the baby – it was called Tammy – if Tammy – short for Tamsin – if Tamsin would like anything to drink.

‘I am her mother,’ said Suzi. The word seemed to go through Fitzpiers like an electric shock. ‘I have everything she needs.’

‘Wine?’ I asked.

‘Thank you, but she doesn’t –’

‘I meant for you,’ I explained.

‘No thank you.’ She wasn’t having the distinction. She clung to Tamsin as if there were moves afoot to send them to different Galaxies. ‘I’ll drink Guinness. We’ve brought some with us. It’s better for the milk.’

At the mention of milk – he had already been weakened by the mention of mother – Fitzpiers’s eyes began to water. I believed that I caught him looking across at Sharon and wiping away a tear, as who should say, ‘You, you are the most fascinating of women but she, she is lactescent.’