‘What are you going to call her?’ the midwife had asked.

‘Erica,’ Leonie said, with the sort of smile she imagined most new mothers would have on answering the question, but looking Ursula straight in the eye. The name had been the chip that she exchanged for agreeing to go along with pretending to be her sister. That gave Ursula absolute, irrefutable ownership of the kid.

‘With Bella for a middle name,’ Ursula-masquerading-as-Leonie added, in her guise of doting sister/aunt, ‘our mother’s name is Isabella. So she could go by that, if she chose to.’ Leonie suspects that Bella is also an up-yours to her, an assertion that Ursula may be grateful but she will give no ground. Because what name would gall Leonie more than ‘beauty’, when women judged by their bodies – how they look, what they can do – is everything that she has set her life up to fight against? And that’s leaving aside the ‘Ursula is the pretty one and Leonie is the clever one’ that has dogged and limited them both from the very beginning. The pretty one had been clever enough to get herself out of childlessness and Leonie out of a corner. The clever one hadn’t worked out she was pregnant until it was too late to do anything about it.

Leonie was tired and thoroughly sick of her aching, leaking body. Her breasts were bound, and she had stitches in her perineum, and piles. She’d like to think she would otherwise have the energy to argue with the ‘Bella’. But maybe it was best that she didn’t. She wouldn’t be surprised if Ursula is testing her, making sure that she is going to be as good as her word as far as interfering is concerned.

The midwife had nodded. ‘Erica Bella Woodhouse,’ she said, as though she was approving. Although actually it was none of her business, and neither of them cared at all what a midwife they would never see again thought of the child’s name, at that moment both Ursula and Leonie knew they’d got away with it, smiling at each other in a way that no doubt looked like simple gladness at this new baby.