No, I couldn’t find it in my heart to hate her, not even when she used a new, solemn voice – as if she were talking about someone else, someone more important than her – whenever she mentioned her psychotherapy training course, the one that she’s doing at the same place as Granville. So I just had to put her out of her misery.

‘Don’t worry about it, Clare,’ I said. ‘Just don’t do it again. Not with my husband, at any rate.’ I didn’t raise her dastardly plan to score another baby off my husband, in order to keep her wondering whether I didn’t know, or better – was quite simply too dignified to mention it.

I have to say, I felt quite proud that I had acted like an upper-caste Fleming – as if messy relationships both sides of the blanket were below my consideration and best not mentioned –rather than true to my low-born, violent, Irish peasant stock. The possibility of my behaving really well – i.e., offering to take Joe if both she and Giddy went under a bus – even lurked offstage as a thoroughly noble gesture that I might make, way beyond the call of duty, during our emotional exchange.

But I did tell Clare that, on the whole, I’d rather keep the fact that my children have a little half-brother they don’t know about quiet. After all, as I revealed to Clare, Posy (if not all the others) thinks that Ralph and I have only got ‘married’ three times, in order to produce her and Cas and Mirabel, and it would totally gross out the others to hear any reproductive details in which their father played a part.

They’re too young.

But what I didn’t tell Clare was this. I was still pregnant. I didn’t tell Clare that I didn’t have the abortion, after all. That I couldn’t. I was in the anteroom to theatre. They scanned me and I saw the heart of the little scrap, shaped like a paisley bud, beating for all it was worth, and I couldn’t. They were so kind.

But I did have to tell Ralph why I now weigh ten and a half stone. I bit the bullet after we got back from the Haybarn, where I noticed Lulu giving my new fuller shape narrow looks. Obviously, Ralph has been trained never to mention my weight, but I have to admit I was surprised that not even Rose, who always notices everything, has mentioned it outright. (Mirabel, of course, my harshest critic, commented sharply that I was getting ‘porky’ but I just said that, because we still didn’t have central heating, I was merely taking the sensible precaution of ‘laying down fat for winter’.)