‘You’ll need to give those up, Amanda.’ Steve was standing in the kitchen with a towel around his middle, dripping on the lino. His skin was paler from the neck down, and the hair on his chest was blacker than the hair on his head. ‘Meant to be bad for you. For your lungs. I read an article in the Herald.’

‘I know. I read the same article.’ She turned back to the yard. ‘You have the odd ciggie yourself.’

‘Let’s pack ’em in together, then.’

‘Since when did you get to be a health fanatic?’

He sat down next to her, holding onto the towel, knees together. It was a squeeze, the two of them side by side on the back step. His skin was damp, soaking through the sleeve of her nightdress. She could see the tracks of the comb through his hair.

‘It can be bad for the baby too, they reckon.’ He watched her crush her cigarette into the ashtray. ‘Bad for the unborn baby.’

‘I didn’t read that part.’

‘It said it can cause the baby to be born too small.’

She looked out at the yard and managed not to say that she thought a small baby sounded better than a big one, from a logistical point of view. ‘I’ll give up if I get pregnant,’ she said. ‘How’s that?’

‘Mandy.’ He reached out and held her hand. ‘You’ll make a great mum, you know.’

She moved her thumb back and forth across the palm of his hand and kept her mouth shut. He didn’t know. He could hope, was all. If she turned out to be anything like her own mother, she’d be a disaster. Mandy had a growing fear, which she would not speak out loud in case it became irreversibly true, that she was very much like her own mother. Her own mother, for example, would have snubbed a kind, well-intentioned gift from Mandy’s father, would have returned it the minute the shops opened. Mandy looked down at the Timex on her wrist and dropped Steve’s hand, hoping he’d go off and get dressed now, leave her alone for a bit.

He didn’t budge.

Steve also didn’t know that Mandy had not yet stopped taking her daily contraceptive pill. Every morning, as she popped the small, white tablet from its foil bubble, she told herself this was a temporary situation. When she was ready for motherhood, she would stop taking the Pill and get herself pregnant and that would be that. The time would come, surely, when she would long for children; she would need to be pregnant and be unable to think of anything else. Louisa next door had told her she’d felt that way before she fell pregnant with Isla. She’d felt ready, and that readiness had been all-consuming. Mandy would have that feeling one of these days, Louisa had told her. But Louisa didn’t know either.

Mandy leaned in against Steve and felt his chin on her head; his good, strong arms around her. She let her head rest against his shoulder. Shoulders like an anvil, her Steve.