She nodded – she had known what his answer would be before asking him the question. Still, she wanted to delve a little deeper. He seemed different to the other journalists that she’d known over the years. There was something else going on in his head, she was sure of it. She smiled, mischievously, and felt Rosie’s eyes watching her. How often the young imagine they need to protect the old. She reached out again to stroke the warm bump of her great-grandson. He would be able to feel her affection from inside the pouch; it worked both ways, that closeness.

‘Have you ever tried one on?’ she asked, her eyes flicking back to the journalist.

He didn’t reply, but looked horrified. The warmth Holly had felt for him a second ago evaporated, and she withdrew her hand and repositioned the cushion behind her. She remembered the judgement, especially with her first child, the looks certain people had given her. As if she were doing something unnatural. She had even been attacked on the street, once, when her first daughter was still in the pouch, before they’d even chosen the name Daphne. A woman ran right up to her, screaming in her face: ‘It’s not God’s way!’ She was one of the hardliners, the kind of woman who hated other women so much she was against the epidural. It was frightening. Those people had been proved wrong long ago now, of course, but you still met them occasionally – people who thought that women were supposed to feel pain, that the pouch made things too easy. Though whether it was the baby pouch or babies in general that this man disliked she wasn’t sure.

‘I published a series of books on the psychology of childbirth, you know? I wrote the first one after I got my PhD. The last after I retired.’

‘I know.’

‘Hmph.’

So what if he knew about her books. Holly was fairly sure he hadn’t read them. He was just here to write a silly website article. Ha!

She leaned back in her chair and decided that she wasn’t going to make any more conversation. And if he insisted on taking photographs, she was going to have her eyes shut in every single one of them.

Piotr Filipek was uncomfortable. He hadn’t asked for this assignment, and had put off the interview twice already, but Rosie Bhattacharyya’s baby was due to be born tomorrow and, well, you had to have the before as well as the after. Celebrity culture was what it was. There was nothing special about this family, just the fluke of timing and a media desperate to put mediocre people in the spotlight.