She was an eager woman who worked ferociously hard when she was in Irene’s chilly first-floor room, as if by sheer dogged effort she could make up for all those years of stumbling through a mist, but that afternoon she seemed downcast and troubled, and at the end of their session Irene asked: ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Fine!’ she said. ‘I’m fine really.’ Her voice slid unsteadily up the scale as she held back her tears.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’ But Irene’s sympathetic tone had undone her. Tears slid down her cheeks. Irene waited as she wiped her face with a tissue and blew her nose.

‘I started this morning. You know …’

‘You started. Ah, you mean…?’

‘We’ve been trying to have a baby for ages. Well, not really ages, but it feels like ages when you’re trying. It gets to be all you think about. So I just feel a bit low today. Sorry.’

She blew her nose again and mopped her eyes. Irene wondered how old she was – late thirties? Or perhaps she was less than that. She had none of the cosseted and expensive youthfulness of the middle-aged well-off. Her husband was unemployed. That she was poor and hardworking showed in the lines in her face, in the roughness of her hands, the cut of her cheap clothes. With a small stab of shame, Irene was freshly struck by the unfairness of life.

‘I never dreamt I wouldn’t be able to. Wesley even started getting the room ready. We even talked about names …’

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Erin. Poppy. Daisy. Jackson. I always wanted to have a boy called Jackson, even when I was just a little girl myself.’

‘It must be hard.’

‘You’ve got children, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘There you are. All my friends do too. They meet up at the weekends and do things together, go on outings. They talk about things like cradle cap and nursery school and they tell me how lucky I am not to feel tired all the time. Lucky! I’d like to feel tired all the time. I’d like to have no spare moment to think about myself. Sometimes I hate them.’

‘Maybe you should tell them you’re trying.’

‘I couldn’t stand the pity.’

Irene nodded and stared out of the window, where the grey sky was clearing over the London roofs. In the park, a woman was bending down to pick up her little son, who’d tripped on the path. She couldn’t hear him, but she could tell by his wide open mouth that he was yelling, and his mother squatted beside him and hugged him.

‘It must terrible.’