‘Just to let this thing carry on dying. I’m just to go about my day, and it will keep dying, and eventually the numbers will tell me that it’s properly dead. I might need antibiotics, to f—. To fight it. Make my body flush it out. Like an infection. I didn’t even know if I wanted it. I was thinking about getting rid of it. And then I was thinking, if it could push its way through my old ovaries and a condom, it must have some force behind it, you know, like maybe it was meant to be. But no. But no. Little – fucking – quitter, eh? Scuse my language.’

Ida waved a hand to brush away the word, brought it down on the table to rest near the woman’s wrist.

‘My last one was at forty-six. I thought it was the change. A nasty little postscript on the end of twenty years.’

‘Your last one?’

‘There were five.’ The woman gulped air. ‘I’m telling you this because in the next few months you’re going to realize that nobody will talk about it with you. At all. It happens to so many women and they all keep it to themselves, buttoned all the way up. Oh, I don’t know why. Maybe we just don’t want to bother people with it. Because it’s about blood, death and, you know, our parts, and nobody wants to think about those. It’s not nice for people. Anyway, you’re going to find the silence around it very hard, my duck. Very hard indeed. At least this way you’re prepared for it.’

‘I can’t imagine coping with five. I can’t imagine coping with this one.’

‘It didn’t get easier; I changed to accommodate it. We changed, my husband and me.’

The woman flinched a little, and Ida thought she wouldn’t ask. She carried on. ‘He wanted it more than me, at first, anyway. He gave up hoping round about the third one, but I was determined to prove I could do it. Needed to have a victory over my body, or God, or fate or something. Silly young fool I was. Should have just accepted it, I told myself later. Adopted, something. The last one broke him.’

She left the space between them, a courtesy. The woman finished her tea and set the cup down.

‘My boyfriend doesn’t know.’

Boyfriend, then.

‘He’s – we had all these conversations about, oh, aren’t we lucky, neither of us want kids, they would just, like, stop us from doing what we want to. Don’t we have this good life. And we do. We do. But I think – I don’t really want to think about this, but if I’m honest, it’s always been there – he’s fourteen years younger than me, you see. And we keep it quiet, because of his family and his fans and all that, load of bullshit. But I think, if it came to it, I think nothing would scare him off faster than a baby shackling him to this. This mess. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times he tells me otherwise, and I’m not asking him for it. I’m not. I’m not one of those needy fucking arseholes – sorry – always nipping away at their men, tell me you love me, tell me you love me. It’s there, though.’