And then his heart stopped. He’d been expecting more of them, or more of Eva and her mum, but it wasn’t that. It was a printout of their first ultrasound. He heard Eva swallow. She hadn’t been expecting it either.

‘I didn’t know she’d kept this,’ she said, her voice quiet but even. Perhaps, after what they’d been through, a small picture didn’t have much power to hurt.

She passed it to him, and he took it. His hands were shaking but he made himself look. Hardly recognisable at all, at that stage. But he recognised his daughter the way you do a tune you haven’t heard since childhood.

Eva was standing up. He couldn’t. He just looked up at her from the floor, his eyes pleading.

‘You can keep those,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘I don’t need them any more.’

The pain of it knocked the breath out of his lungs.

Audio log

9 Jan 2016 02:15

I realised something today.

At my interview, back at King’s, the professor thought I was being quiet because I was nervous. He must have thought I idolised him. Actually I thought he was flirting with me and so I wanted to keep my distance. But we were both wrong, I think. Both wrong about each other’s motivations. He imagined he was being encouraging. I was uncomfortable about being spoken to in a way that had simply never occurred to him was wrong.

As we got to know each other it turned out we were rather alike – that is, he was strident, ambitious, brilliant, and I was difficult, calculating and opinionated. When I was directing my own research group, long after my husband had died, he asked me why I always spoke as though I expected a fistfight. I told him I had no idea – so far as I could tell, I was in the middle of a war. He did not ask me to elaborate.

There is no greater patriarchy than London. Who said that? Well, whoever she was, when she spoke those words she was right. It wasn’t easy. I don’t want anyone to think that my life, or my research, was easy.

I did inherit money, though, from my husband. I’m not sure how I’d have continued my work, during his illness or after his death, if it hadn’t been for the money. Even facing prejudice I knew it was privilege that allowed me to be there. And I tried to reach other women, to make my choices available to them. I think we have an obligation to ensure the next generation does not need our levels of privilege to succeed.

But now I am thinking about you. My daughter.

I try not to, most of the time. I talk to you, but I try not to think. To dwell.

What use is it, really? What good does it do?