‘You don’t know what it is like.’ Vivienne’s eyes were dull. ‘Your life divides into segments. Two weeks of misery, because it hasn’t happened, yet again. Then two weeks of slow-growing hope. Convincing yourself that this is the month. Then that despair, crushing, again. Another month gone, another month older. It’s the same circle, again and again. Because a month is just enough for the whole trajectory. From hope to despair and back again. That’s one of the things you learn. Hope and despair, and hope and despair. And everywhere you look, there are pregnant women, and babies. Even calves and lambs, for God’s sake. On every street corner, in every magazine, in every single conversation. Because everyone can do it, except you. It starts to feel like some terrible sentence, for a crime you haven’t committed. A sentence that gets a month longer, and then a month longer, every single time. And every month is worse. And one day, you realise that it’s never going to end. That you’re just going to be sad, for ever.’

‘And what happened’ – Miranda brought her back – ‘out in Bangladesh?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Vivienne, and they could see she was telling the truth. ‘I didn’t want to know, not really. We had frozen embryos already, of course. They had been made in Harley Street, months earlier. Always seemed like a strange thing, that my first act as a mother was to have those embryos shoved into a freezer.’

Casey thought of those little half-lives, in test tubes, trapped in ice, stashed in long metal rows.

‘I suppose the embryos were flown out to Bangladesh,’ said Vivienne. ‘God knows how they organised that. They must have found a way. And a few weeks later, Dr Greystone told us that the surrogate was pregnant. And I remember the feeling when we got to twelve weeks . . . The glory . . . The absolute wonder . . . That was when I started believing it might actually work. That it might happen.’

‘And then you flew out to Bangladesh?’ Casey tried to imagine Vivienne in the sprawl of Dhaka. The endless traffic, the tuk-tuks everywhere, the beggars at the lights.

You get to know them. Casey’s fixer had turned to her once, gesturing. That had been in Gulshan, at a particularly chaotic junction, five roads tangling like wool. This girl here, you see her? Cleaning the windscreens. I have been seeing her at this crossing since she was a baby. She’s always here, at this junction. And she’ll always be here. Unless she is hit by a car, of course. That happens. That happens a lot.

Vivienne glanced around her sitting room, at the silver glowing in the cabinet in the corner, and a painting of a stern Edwardian lady over a crammed bookshelf. Next to the Edwardian matron there was a watercolour of Vivienne, hopeful at twenty, untouchable behind glass.