Pete and Nancy, who’d been at Goldsmiths College with Banjo, were both on the dole. Pete had been made redundant from his job in a schools music unit. Nancy wanted to be a singer. She had a beautiful voice, clear and high, and Banjo often used her on the tapes he put together. They would sit for hours in his basement studio in the house in Clapham, singing, sampling, harmonising. A couple of years ago Banjo had had one huge hit and he still got royalties; all the equipment in the basement had been bought because he’d composed ‘Till I Die’ for an unknown pop group who’d suddenly had a massive hit with it all over the world. Molly knew he sometimes rued the day he’d given it to them, and not to his own small group, but he seemed happy enough, chuntering along, doing occasional gigs, composing. Before he’d written ‘Till I Die’ he’d often been on the dole; once when times were very difficult he’d played his saxophone in Piccadilly Circus underground station. Something in his eyes that night: he wouldn’t discuss it with Molly, but he wouldn’t go back.

Banjo and Pete and Nancy got more and more stoned, lay back on the sofa giggling. Molly knew she was quite drunk, wine on top of the Harrods champagne. Sam slept peaceably in Pete’s arms.

Later Molly excused herself. ‘We don’t rehearse any more,’ she complained, ‘we just have to do it, I have to learn lines in a vacuum, I’m learning a sex scene and I don’t even know who I’ll be in bed with!’ The others laughed.

‘Lovely to see you all,’ said Molly, ‘come again soon. See you asleep Banjo.’

In her study she, literally, held her heart, rocking backwards and forwards on her chair.

This was the third baby among Banjo’s ex-student friends, they were all in their thirties now, all having babies. Except Banjo. She had seen how he stared longingly at Sam, looked curiously at his tiny fingers.

That grey, depressed day long ago, wheeling Portia’s pram with Pauline, passing the waiting mothers as it got dark in the November afternoon, still haunted Molly. She knew it had to do with her mother and herself; knew it was obviously somehow connected with her decision, not finally made, but always there in the background, not to have children. All through the long affair with Anthony, which had dragged on desperately and miserably for another year after they left Birmingham; through countless other affairs with men, married and unmarried; as she became successful and was able to buy this house in Clapham (taking the same phone number with her, she remembered in shame even now, in case Anthony phoned); all that time she had thought she simply never wanted children.