She goes quiet for a while, as we inch out of the hospital car park, and wait in line to put the ticket in the machine that will lift the barrier. She does not speak again until we are through.

‘It was at this point that I began to feel as if my whole life was slipping from me, Rose. Here I was, a married mother of three, a former national newspaper journalist, standing in slippers and surgical gown, carrying my home clothes and some industrial-sized sanitary pads in a plastic sack saying “NHS property” on it. Can you imagine?’

‘So hard,’ I murmur. I know what Mimi is actually saying, which is that no married woman, who loves her children, ever expects to be where she was today.

I don’t voice my thought, then we unfortunately get stuck behind a laundry van, and then I have to turn left by the Chinese place that sells filled hot dumplings and has a sign underneath the Chinese lettering that says ‘Hot Asian Buns’, a translation we usually point out to each other and then laugh, because it sounds so ridiculous, like the title of a Richard Desmond magazine. But not today, obviously. ‘What happened next?’ I ask. ‘Did you have to wait ages?’

‘No, not really. I went upstairs to a ward, where there were big blue armchairs in rows, telly on, tuned to Fern Britton and Philip Schofield, all rather cosy, so we sat and watched daytime TV, we even watched the ads for distraction, even though watching them was a bit, you know’ – she searches for the right word – ‘birdsongy.’

‘What do you mean, Mimi?’ I ask, carefully.

‘You know, birdsong at the Somme, that Auden poem about the picture of Icarus, life going on, that sentiment.’

I thought the Somme was a bit strong; the ward I had glimpsed when picking her up had seemed pleasant and clean enough to me, but I didn’t say so.

‘Then I had this odd sense that we women, we have the so-called show going on, which is school run, you know, work, looking after our houses and our children, but all the time too, there’s also this play within the play, which is the drama of female fertility.’

‘Go on.’

‘… babies and childbirth and IVF and miscarriage and all of that, and that goes on too, only in silence, and… we women seem tuned into this show, so much more than men, and while we experience the drama, we live it, it’s ours. They only witness it at one remove. It’s as if our wombs are little screens – like the screens on the Teletubbies’ tummies – on which a quite separate, quite private narrative, can be played, to an audience of one. Does that make any sense?’