But he didn’t. It was all dismayingly clear. He wanted to have nothing to do with it. If this was the dawn of time rather than Dorset 2008, he’d have left me in the cave to whelp on my own on a pile of furs while he went off into the distance, an upright figure carrying a spear, running fast in search of bison… I know we’re middle-aged and that Posy would be coming up for nine when the baby’s born and that newborns and teenagers are a hideous combo to manage, I know that money’s tighter since I stopped working, but still. We are a pretty solid couple – well, I’m not saying we have the strongest marriage in showbiz, but we’re as solid as any other married heterosexual couple, at any rate – and we live in a five-bedroomed farmhouse in God’s Own Country, and -

‘Thing is, I really don’t want this to drag on,’ Ralph says, interrupting my private ravings. ‘It won’t get any easier. How many weeks are you?’

‘Around six, I suppose,’ I said.

‘Darling, for your sake, the sooner you… deal with it, the better it will be and we can…’ Ralph pauses as he struggles to find acceptable English alternatives to phrases like ‘move on’ and ‘reach closure’. Then he starts saying he will pay for me to have it done privately and, for some reason, this makes it all much worse because I know how Ralph hates parting with money and the offer makes me realize that he’s being deadly serious. He doesn’t want me to have our baby. I didn’t think he was going to dance a jig at the news, but I never expected this total brick wall.

During this speech I stand up and blindly make my way out of the kitchen, feeling sick to the stomach, and go into the playroom. And my three children are all sitting on the sofa in a row. They are watching March of the Penguins. They are glued to it.

It is getting to the bit where the daddy penguins stand in a freezing circle in minus 80 degrees, for two months, cradling the precious egg on their feet, waiting for the mummy penguins to return from the vast, icy wastes, and then, when the mummies come back they practise passing the egg back to Mummy again, and if it rolls on to the ice for even one second the egg/chick cracks open, frozen solid in a second. I make them budge up so Posy and Cas and Mirabel and I sit together on the sofa in a row. Calypso comes to lie across our feet. Soon, tears are running down all our cheeks. Especially mine, and even Cas’s.