Miriam knew that I had no intention of going, but held my arm reassuringly. “Dear, forget about it—you’ve put all that behind you.”

“One day I might write about the war—it would help to have been there.”

“It won’t. If you don’t go back anything you write will be far more true. When I visit Mother and Dad in Cambridge I look around the house and can’t believe I was ever a child there. It’s like a film set with these two old actors … even they can’t remember the script.”

*   *   *

Later, in bed, when the children were asleep and the old retriever had barked at the moon for the last time, I massaged Miriam’s tired shoulders. Strange scents hovered over her ears and armpits, quickening odours of hormones rising and falling, overrunning each other’s cycles. I touched her tender nipples, damp with some secretion I remembered from her earlier confinements.

“Tasty?” Miriam asked, finishing the glass of wine that helped her to sleep.

I touched my fingers to my lips, savouring the racy flavours, closer to the taste of her vulva than to the milk massing within her breasts.

“Colostrum … in fact, men don’t like the taste of their wives’ milk.”

“Good news for baby. Nature’s way of making sure he gets his share. Have you tried anyone else’s milk?”

“No…” I thought of the pregnant whore at Moose Jaw who had wanted to meet the queen. “Ask your friends at the clinic for a sample.”

“Midwife Bell would love that.”

“Tell her we’re going into the dairy business. Mother’s Pride Milk Products. Slogan: ‘Putting Shepperton’s breasts to work.’”

“‘Butter freshly churned from mother’s milk.’ Oh my God, yoghurts and milk shakes. Jim, think…”

“We’d have a range of cheeses, flavoured by cigarette brand, lipstick, and toothpaste…”

“Policemen’s wives would give a sturdy goat-like cheese.” Miriam loved her flights of fantasy and had a healthy interest in the more wayward possibilities of human anatomy and physiology; she had always seen the mischief and humour in the Surrealists. Shepperton bored her a little, and she liked to provoke its domestic norms. As the secretion from her nipples moistened my hands she extemporised happily: “Vegetarians would make bland and mimsy cheeses, West End actresses overripe Camembert, queens and princesses a high royal Stilton…”

“We’ll stage a cheese-tasting for all our friends…”

“I can just see Peggy Gardner!” Miriam sat up, smothering her laughter in her pillow, abdomen heaving, the baby riding a roller-coaster of snorts and guffaws.

Fifteen minutes later her labour began.

*   *   *

“We’ll make you tidy, dear. We want baby to find a nice bedroom.”