‘But didn’t you start off in the US?’

‘Yes, we did. How clever of you to remember!’ said Verity. ‘We did several rounds over there, with a surrogate from Minneapolis, of all places. But the embryo transfers just kept failing for some reason. They never worked out why.’

‘The embryo transfers? I don’t know anything about it. How do they work?’

‘Jonty and I flew over to a clinic in Miami,’ said Verity with all the enthusiasm of the obsessive. ‘And I stayed out there while I went through egg collection before the transfer.’

‘Gosh, how does that work?’

‘Oh,’ Verity waved. ‘It goes on for ever, and everyone has slightly different protocols. It’s a nightmare. For example, our clinic made me take the pill – just an ordinary contraceptive one – for the month before I travelled out to the US, so that they knew exactly where I was in my cycle. Then once your period starts, they check to make sure your body is doing roughly the right thing and then you have lots of injections of FSH – that’s follicle-stimulating hormone – to make you produce lots of eggs. You’d normally only produce one a month, you see.’

‘How long does that go on for?’ Miranda winced.

‘They keep scanning you to see how the eggs are developing,’ Verity rattled on. Bored and bright, thought Miranda. It led to encyclopedic levels of knowledge. ‘And eventually you have a trigger shot, usually hCG – that stands for human chorionic gonadotrophin’ – Verity was showing off now, Miranda thought – ‘and then exactly thirty-six hours later, they do the egg collection. Legs up in stirrups; none of it is glamorous, Miranda, I tell you.’

‘Amazing.’

‘And then the eggs are mixed up with Jonty’s – well – contribution.’ Verity blew her thick blonde fringe out of her eyes, ‘And, fingers crossed, some of them are fertilised. And there’s your embryo.’

‘The science is extraordinary.’

‘So then’ – Verity was ticking off options on her fingers – ‘you either have one or two popped straight back in after a couple of days, or you freeze them. With standard IVF, they often freeze them anyway now because they think there is a slightly better chance of implantation after your body has had a month off to recover from all the drugs. Or you might freeze embryos while you are waiting to find a surrogate.’

‘Because that can take a while?’

‘That’ – Verity looked suddenly bleak – ‘can take a lifetime.’

‘And then how do you get them back . . . in . . .?’