There was a single moment of shocked silence while his words reverberated around the table. Valentina’s eyes filled with swift hurt. Guy sat forward in his chair.

‘He’s joking,’ Abi said quickly, seeking out Mark’s eyes with her own searching glance, but he picked up his fork, turned it over in his hand as if examining the tines. She wanted to kick him under the table.

Left to explain, Abi went on: ‘It’s a family joke. You see, when Beth was a baby, I went to Vienna on a business trip, and at a dinner on the last night, I ended up sitting next to the husband of one of my Austrian colleagues. He was a child psychiatrist. His patients, he explained, were aged between zero and eighteen. “Zero?” I asked. “Why would a baby need a psychiatrist?” And he gave me a list of problems: crying excessively or not crying at all, refusing to sleep, refusing to feed. But after running through this list, he looked at me with a dry expression, and his words I will never forget. He said: “Of course, it is always the fault of the mother.”’

Guy laughed, a deep chuckle, and Val cried out: ‘But that is ridiculous! And such a typically male response – blaming the woman. You didn’t believe him, I hope?’

‘No, of course not!’

But Abi remembered how, when eventually she’d arrived home to Ireland, the baby had caught a bad cold and developed a furious rash all over her body. Mark had thought it was a reaction to the formula milk, but Abi couldn’t help feeling it was more than that. The baby refused her breast – she wouldn’t even take a bottle from Abi, only Mark, wailing whenever her mother came near.

She’s mad at you, Eva had stated – three years old, sitting at the kitchen table, her hair in bunches, scribbling with her new crayons.

Sometimes Abi felt like Beth was still mad at her. That she’d been mad at her mother ever since.

‘I made the mistake of telling Mark what that psychiatrist had said,’ she explained. ‘And ever since then, it’s become a family joke. It is alveys ze fault of ze mozer,’ she added, with a smile.

But Mark hadn’t used a German accent when he’d said it. He hadn’t smiled sardonically. He hadn’t smiled at all. The look he’d given her was cold, and the words hadn’t sounded funny.