So I blurted out ‘I’ll have it,’ as I dropped off some of Ceci’s old clothes, even some Ralph Lauren ones it was a wrench to part with, but Ralph looked unconvinced. He must know we were quite happy with having just Ceci. Pierre couldn’t wait for me to stop fussing and fiddling over Ceci so I could resume my wifely duties and attend to him. And I didn’t mean it about having Mimi and Ralph’s baby and it was, I recognize, the wrong thing to say.

For this got Ralph going on the subject of the battle of the sexes, and he started talking about how men had such a ‘poor hand’, and that they work and commute and work and commute until they die but, at least in the old days, their wife would warm their slippers and attend to their every need, and they had status. In their own households. But now it was all about women finding themselves and something called self-actualization, whatever that is, and no one ever even mentioned men at all, let alone appreciated the daily sacrifice they made for their families.

I listened to all this with some surprise. I didn’t think for a second that Ralph was a warrior in the gender wars. In fact, the last time the topic had come up, Ralph said that going out to work and bringing home the bacon till they dropped dead of heart attacks was ‘what chaps do’. This time it was more as if he were trying to convince himself of something, that he had grounds for objection.

‘If women are doing it all, at least they have their relationships with each other and their children, and we don’t,’ he said, glumly. ‘We men have lost whatever it was we were supposed to have once had.’

And then I put my foot in it again. ‘Well, as the saying goes, there’s never a good time to have a baby,’ I said, remembering with an almost physical rush how adorable Ceci was when she was a toddler and how she wore little matching knickerbockers underneath her dresses, hoping that this obvious truism might smooth things over, but it didn’t.