The taxi paid off, Elspeth made her way down the steps to Big Lou’s basement. The rail, she noticed, was as rickety as ever; Matthew had said something, she recalled, about Hugh Mac Diarmid, the poet, having stumbled while descending these steps many years before, and it was here too, she remembered, that Lard O’Connor (RIP), Matthew’s Glasgow friend, had fallen. She steadied herself, the rail moving slightly as she took hold of it. She felt heavy again – much heavier than she had felt before she had been told of the triplets. That was psychological, of course; she could hardly have put on much weight over the last couple of hours. And yet, she would weigh more, surely, than most other pregnant women, because they only had one baby to carry about whereas she had four … no, it was three, wasn’t it?

What if they had made a mistake? What if a fourth boy was hiding in there, having been missed by the scan? She had read in a magazine of people only finding out about twins in the delivery room, but she assumed that this was before ultrasound. It must be impossible nowadays to miss twins, or triplets, with all that sophisticated equipment. And yet mistakes were made in all branches of medicine, because sophisticated equipment had to be operated by mere humans, and mere humans, as everybody knew, were humanly fallible.

No, there would be no surprise fifth, no, fourth, boy. There were few surprises in life today; no babies found in handbags (handbags!) at railway stations; no unexpected triplets; and few, if any, successfully concealed pregnancies. In the past, she thought, children must have been like rain; they were not planned – they simply occurred; no longer, at least in western Europe, where birth rates were plummeting. The same magazine article that had discussed unexpected twins had also commented on the decline in the number of Russians through their declining birth rate. Soon, they said, there would be none left at all, and Russia would return to being a land of vast, frozen forests. Could the same thing happen in Scotland? Don’t look at me, she thought; I’m doing my best to prevent that – not that I intended to.

There was nobody in Big Lou’s, apart from Big Lou, of course, who was cleaning the steam spout of her coffee machine.

‘These things get awfully dirty,’ Big Lou said as she saw Elspeth come in. ‘They build up a crust of white if you aren’t careful. We used to call that sort of thing the coo’s breeks.’

Elspeth eyed the shortbread that Big Lou had laid out on a display plate. ‘Has Matthew been in?’

‘Aye,’ said Big Lou. ‘In and out. Him and Angus, and that dug, of course.’ She glanced at Elspeth. ‘You all right?’