I had explained to her – smiling, touching my hair – the triumphant sense of having, for years, successfully thrown a party that required nothing to be made, almost no preparation, barely any tidying up. The message was clear: I am a terrible hostess! And also: I am the best hostess, the one who has overcome all the shoddy manacles of domestic enslavement. I take little care, and everything turns out perfectly. Her lines, in response, were meant to be a generalized compliment, one that acknowledged all I had achieved without even trying.

I should have known right then: at the exact moment when I held the bone of self-­deprecation out to her, dangled it in the air. This was an offering, an agreement between women that she should, however falsely, take into her mouth. But she spat it out.

Oh, she said, her mouth rising in the small way that conceals repulsion. Right. The mouth again, the briefest nod of the head. I made an excuse:

I’ve got to check on something . . .

And moved away, seeing as I did the way Vanessa turned to her husband, pointed to a book on the shelf, one of Jake’s. The Development of Superior Species Characteristics, perhaps.

Such an interesting . . . I had walked away before I could hear the rest of her sentence, poured myself another glass of mulled wine in the kitchen, let its warmth flood through me like pleasure.

Now, I asked Ted to help me get four packets of mince pies down from the shelf, knowing that the assignment of a task would lower the chances of a frenzied performance of lack, the unleashing of animal instincts all over the shop floor. No matter if every young child behaved like this: these explosions always carried a sense of particular failure, of personal motherly insufficiency.

There were countries in the world, I had been told, where they loved children, appreciated their very presence in restaur­ants, in shops and cafes. As soon as I heard that, I knew I didn’t live in one. Ever since giving birth, I had walked through a tunnel of public expectation and disapproval, a place with particular lighting, filters that showed up every possible fault. I had become accustomed to the posture I needed to assume within the tunnel: a certain straightness of back, an avoidance of eye contact. As we packed our bags, I kept speaking to Ted, keeping my eyes trained carefully on him, or the cashier. Looking up was a mistake, I had learned: it invited comment.

I loaded the shopping into my basket, held Ted’s hand as he stepped delicately across the low wall of the supermarket, lifted him into his bike seat. As we cycled past the postbox I saw someone I recognized; I prepared to smile-­and-­cycle-­on, perhaps to raise my hand from the handlebar in a quick greeting. But she called out my name, stepped forwards slightly towards the bike. Mary.