‘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.’

Ida nodded, squeezed her hand quickly, put it back under the table again. The woman turned away and put her face on the window for a while, shuddering out the occasional sob.

‘The other thing you need to be prepared for is the way it will come back on you,’ Ida said, after a pause. ‘Some months away, maybe even years, you can think it’s fine. You might have stopped remembering it every day, you might have moved on. And then you’ll see something on telly, or maybe your body will do something, and it can hit you all over again. Often in the worst places. When you’re at work. When you’re waiting in the queue at the post office. Whenever your brain is running low on energy and has nothing to distract itself. Now that, that does get better over the years. It’s the sort of thing a silly old woman would say, but time really is a great healer in this case. I want you to know that too.’