I go ahead anyway and waste one of the two sticks but, predictably, all I can detect in the ‘results panel’ is a thick red line telling me I am NOT pregnant instead of two thick red lines.

I feel a flicker of disappointment, then I think – it’s just as well, because I know for a certain fact that Ralph’s world would crumble to dust if it were otherwise.

But then, just as I am wrapping the plastic stick in kitchen towel in order to secrete it in a clotted-cream carton Calypso had been licking, before putting it in the black bag I’ve already bagged up, I notice this other, fainter line in the results window, which I peer at, hard, before stuffing it down in the rubbish.

∗

I don’t breathe a word of this to anyone – least of all Ralph. Though when we were clearing up supper and Ana was having a bath and the children were watching TV I did say, ‘Er, Ralph, can I ask you something?’ in a small, wondering voice.

But he snapped, ‘If it’s something silly, no. I don’t think I could take it. Especially if it’s some New Age green is the new black bollocks.’

It’s a bore, but Ralph is in the middle of doing something utterly incomprehensible and dull to do with work, um, brokering the gas price between the Russians and the Ukrainians, I think, to maintain supplies to Western Europe.

All I know is that it means he’s in a very bad mood and not a little ray of sunshine at all.

So I am keeping my trap shut for the mo, apart from having bravely steeled myself to call the surgery and make an appointment with Dr Ashburton (hunts, v hairy ears), and doubtless all will become clear.

1. I have to accept that Ralph has maintained absolute consistency in his desire not to have further issue, and

2. I feel very silly that I appear to have achieved, despite this, the physical impossibility of being slightly pregnant.

I must call Rose.

Rose

Mimi calls, and asks if I’ll accompany her to the stables to see Gwenda Melplash to sort out riding for the children.

‘Lovely though it always is to see you, but why?’ I ask. ‘Are the stables that dangerous? Can’t you go alone? Does it really require an escort?’

‘I’m desperate to get out of the house,’ Mimi replies in a stage whisper. ‘Ana, the new au pair, Ana from Poland, has a pair of big pink slippers which make her legs look as if they end in a pair of piglets, and she wears them all the time.’

‘I see,’ I say.

‘I know I sound horrible and critical but the slippers have an actual snout face with a smiley on each toe,’ Mimi continues. ‘I’m OK with Ana wearing high heels outside in the mud, but I don’t know if I can take the novelty slippers. Not inside my own house.’