She wondered whether the shock might be mitigated by the news that the triplets were boys. She had suspected that Matthew had been secretly hoping for a boy – there had been those references to rugby and to the possibility of acquiring the baby a debenture seat at Murrayfield, strong clues by any standards, but there had also been the use of the male pronoun, another clue, perhaps. But even if Matthew was hoping for a son, one could not, by extension, assume that he was contemplating three. Three, as Oscar Wilde might have remarked, sounds rather like carelessness.

For her part, Elspeth had been hoping for a daughter. One daughter, to start with, and then perhaps another, with a son somewhere along the way as well. Girls were undoubtedly easier than boys … The conventional wisdom was certainly that girls were less physically demanding than boys, as they played happily with their dolls and dolls’ houses, re-enacting domestic events in apparently complete contentment, for hours, whereas boys seemed to have an endless appetite for physical activity. Matthew, she remembered, had a friend with three boys, each an unremitting dynamo of activity. ‘Such nice boys,’ he said, ‘but when they were small I saw his moustache droop further and further from sheer exhaustion. It’s picked up again, though, now that the boys are older and less physically rumbustious.’

She stopped. It was so easy to be caught up with stereotypes. Were girls really easier, or was that just the way we thought of them? She did a mental roll-call of the children she had taught at the Steiner School – Bertie, Hiawatha, Pansy, Tofu, Olive … Olive gave her pause for thought. What a manipulative little piece of work she had been, with her constant playing off of one classmate against another. And poor Bertie, who only wanted to be left in peace, being ruthlessly hounded by Olive at every turn. It really was too much. Bertie, of course, being the boy that he was, tolerated it, but for Elspeth Harmony it had eventually proved insupportable and she had pinched Olive sharply on the ear, thereby bringing her career as a teacher to a premature end.

That, of course, was utterly unfair, and, as the taxi turned the corner at East Preston Street and began to trundle down South Clerk Street, she smarted at the memory. Teachers put up with constant, unremitting provocation and were expected to have the patience of saints. Well, they were human, and if every so often their human tempers showed then the self-same parents who had produced such ill-behaved offspring would launch a tirade of self-righteous complaints. What were teachers to do? Well, she had resigned – admittedly before she was pushed – and many others were thinking of doing exactly the same thing. Which meant the schools would become worse, with not very well-trained teachers taking over from those with more experience. Thus the culture spiralled downwards …