Then Ralph looks at me and I see alarm flare behind his eyes. He is on red alert, tense, a hair-trigger. He starts looking around the room, as if men with nets and stun-guns are going to leap out and bundle him into a waiting vehicle.

‘I saw Ashburton, um, a couple of days ago.’

‘And?’ says Ralph, something flickering across his face, like a cloud crossing over the sun’s reflection in a puddle. My stomach is twisting with worry. Ralph isn’t usually as grim and inhumane as this.

He is still staring at me as if he has never seen me before, as if I have not borne him three healthy children or cooked him supper or washed his socks once in my entire life. As if I am a stranger to him, and an illegal alien in my own kitchen.

‘Well.’ I pause. It is hard getting the words out. Harder than I thought it would be. I am beginning to dread the reaction.

This isn’t going to plan.

‘I’m pregnant. Ashburton did a test.’

There is a silence.

I turn my back on him and crouch down, below his sightline, and pretend to do something with the warming oven of the Aga. I slam the door back shut as if we are in the middle of a dinner during a perfectly normal evening, having a perfectly normal marital exchange about a perfectly normal marital subject, and turn to face Ralph. For a second I toy with adopting a faraway, I-am-with-child expression, but abandon this plan as soon as I see my husband’s face.

Ralph sits at the table in our kitchen, with the dresser hung with Cornishware and random blue and white china behind him, Calypso is snoozing in her Cath Kidston basket next to the Aga, the clock is ticking, the wind is throwing itself against the windows, the fire is crackling next door in the sitting room, where all our furniture from Colville Crescent – Ralph’s beloved tapestries, along with George Smith sofas and a footstool embroidered with the Fleming family motto, ‘Dominus Providebit’ (translation: the Lord will provide) – have all found a cosy new home.

His face is dark, and his blue eyes bore into mine.

‘Is it mine, Imogen?’ he asks.

I stand there, frozen in time and space. How could he say that?