Evelyne shook her head. ‘I’ll call him, but he’s working – and they need the money, I doubt he can leave his shift.’

‘Stay with her,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’ll be okay. Just stay with her – she needs someone.’

Evelyne nodded, squeezed her hand. ‘Okay. Good luck.’

‘Do you want some music?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Music. You can choose from what we have.’ The obstetrician pointed to a record player in the corner of the operating theatre. ‘It’s nice to have some music playing while we operate, and we like to ask the mothers to choose. What do we have today, Amélie?’

The nurse flicked through the stack of records and read out names. ‘Jacques Brel, Johnny Hallyday. Or how about Abba – Mamma Mia!’ She laughed and Sylvia couldn’t help but respond in kind. This was surreal. How did she come to be giving birth to her child in a Swiss hospital? Her baby wouldn’t be Swiss – she knew the country’s citizenship laws didn’t provide for that – but it would be born on Swiss soil. Because she persuaded Roger to send her here. Because she met Anna. Because – she’d finally worked out – the pill must have failed when she’d had food poisoning after a meal at a Chinese restaurant in January.

‘Do you have any Elton John?’ she said, thinking of that hot summer’s day in Hyde Park, Jim’s smile, his eagerness to have her back.

Whatever it takes to make this work, he’d said. We can make this okay, Syl. We can make this a wonderful thing.

She hoped he was right.

‘Lie on your left side please,’ said the anaesthetist, and she winced in pain as the sharp jab of a needle in her spine took her breath away. A rush of fear flooded her veins along with the anaesthetic, worst-case scenarios running through her head.

What if it wasn’t okay? As she lay back on the bed and a screen was placed in front of her face, her thoughts drifted back to Anna. She wished she was here beside her, that she could reach out and take the girl’s hand, tell her that she was scared too.

She heard the angry cry just before the baby was held aloft by the surgeon.

‘Congratulations, you have a baby daughter.’

The nurse wrapped the child in a white towel and placed her in an incubator and wheeled it to Sylvia. She gasped when she saw this creature, this miniature person she had grown inside her, and reached over and touched the child’s tiny red fingers.

‘Hello you,’ she said, and then, more to make herself realise it than for the baby’s sake: ‘I’m your mother.’

AUGUST 2016 Montreux, Switzerland

JESS

I never made it to the exhibition.