I seem to be gazing into a neat and safe world where everything has its place, and where nothing messy between man and wife could ever happen. For this reason I stare at the catalogue for ages, as if it holds the answer to my dilemma.

Meanwhile, Calypso occasionally emits a tiny yelp or snore, and I imagine she is chasing bunny rabbits in her sleep. The children are asleep in their beds upstairs, Mirabel way upstairs in the attic, where I can’t stop her from texting Ceci and Aspen and Spike and listening to her iPod.

I look at Calypso, and something twists in my gut. I put down the catalogue, open on the page featuring the Krups Waffle Maker finished in smart brushed stainless steel with insulated stay-cool handles. When I had her spayed, I took Calypso to the vet in Addison Avenue. She whined piteously and refused to leave the waiting room, as if she knew. Carmichael had to drag her bodily by her lead into his room, and injected her before we could get her on that sacrificial surgical plinth in order to remove from her, as he put it so horribly later, ‘quite a lot of dog’.

I remember how I felt like a murderer. How the children cried, after, about never having a puppy. And how Ralph cried too – and blamed me.

Ralph comes from a background where the children are sent to kennels almost as soon as they are off the breast, but family dogs must be allowed to snooze on sofas and marital beds. I remember how even Calypso cried and shuddered for hours, and howled and strained on her leash if we even so much as passed the vet’s thereafter.

‘But we wouldn’t be getting a puppy,’ I kept saying, in order to justify the spaying, ‘we’d be getting another dog. For me to look after.’

And now I’m having to tell myself exactly the same thing, to stop myself from losing it completely.

I’m not having a baby, I lecture myself, in my Ann-Widdecombe-doing-Question-Time inner voice, which I reserve for moments of crisis. I’m having an adult, a human being to love and cherish, to feed, clothe, nurture, ferry about, educate, and doubtless house, because as we all know it’s impossible for children to climb on to the first rung of the ladder these days. And even when this unutterably dear person is twenty, thirty, forty, even fifty, it won’t make any difference, I will still continue to worry and care about him or her for the rest of my years (which means about another sixty-two years, as I have promised Posy faithfully that, whatever happens, I will make a hundred), so much more than I will ever worry and care about ME.

‘Keep calm, and carry on,’ I say to myself and drag myself up to bed.

This morning, when I wake up, the bed next to me is empty.