‘There. Did you feel that?’

All I could feel was the heat, and I kept thinking of the talc on her thigh. ‘Aren’t you cold like that?’ I asked.

‘Like what?’

‘I just thought you might want to put your dressing gown on.’

‘There!’ she said. ‘Did you feel that?’

There was a pulse beneath my hand. I waited, and then there it was again, something pushing through Kathryn’s skin and into mine.

‘I felt it,’ I said.

‘I knew you would,’ said Kathryn. ‘Eventually.’ She smiled up at me, and I let out a laugh as our baby kicked again.

She brought him home from the hospital wrapped tightly in a yellow crocheted blanket that Mum had kept from when I was a newborn. It was trimmed with satin, soft from so much washing. I worried that the car wouldn’t start in the cold, but I turned the key in the ignition and we were off first time.

We drove home on icy roads. I took each corner very slowly, changing down into second in plenty of time. The sun was out, despite the cold; puffs of steam from the power station cooling towers were full and white as we came into Calcot. Kathryn opened her own coat and folded the bundle of our baby inside, close to her chest. As I drove, I left one hand on the gear stick so Kathryn could hold it.

She carried him into the house. Wrapped in his blanket, he was a bundle of yellow wool with a tiny pink nose sticking out. I kept looking over her shoulder to see his face, but I couldn’t find him in his woollen nest. So I asked her how he was, and that was the first time she put her finger to her lips to shush me. I thought of how I had never seen her do that in the library, even though that’s what librarians are supposed to do. One finger pressed down over both lips so they bulged a little beneath it.

‘Shush, Howard. Baby’s sleeping.’

She held him closer, gathering his blanket around him, and he woke with a yell.

Baby’s sleeping. It became her catchphrase. Be quiet, Howard, baby’s sleeping. I can’t do that, Howard, baby’s sleeping.

He slept in his carrycot next to our bed. Every night I would wake several times to the sight of Kathryn bent over in her nightie, checking on him, and I knew she was resisting the temptation to touch his face, just in case, to listen for his tiny heartbeat, just in case, to bend her head to his mouth so she could feel his breath on her cheek, just in case.

In fact he was a good sleeper, right from the first. He even snored a little, his lower lip gently puffing away, bubbles of spit blooming.

When I looked at him I saw my own mouth, big and unwieldy, pouting back at me. And when I lifted him from Kathryn’s arms as she went to fetch his bottle, it was my mouth I saw open, the lower lip dropping drastically so he looked like a little clown with drawn-on downward lips. His hair swirled at his crown and stuck up in a tuft at the back of his head. ‘Just like a cockatoo,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a cockatoo touch,’ I whispered to him, holding his face to mine and feeling the hot dampness of his cheek as he cried and cried.