I don’t know why I had to tell them. I hadn’t even plucked up the courage to tell Pekka at that point, although I knew I should have. But as everyone shared their own feelings about pregnancy and motherhood, it suddenly seemed possible. As if something in me had waited for a moment when it was all right to say it, and then it came.

And so on the third occasion I said that our baby’s limbs had grown together like a tail and it wasn’t certain how long it would live. I listed the body parts and organs it lacked.

The other mothers asked how I dared to give birth to a child like that. The mothers asked if we hadn’t had a nuchal translucency scan performed. They said I was really strong and they probably wouldn’t be able to do what I was doing. But I realized they pitied me. Suddenly, the other mothers didn’t want to hear about what kind of baby carrier I was thinking of getting and what I thought of co-sleeping. Suddenly, they were all at pains to make clear that their sit-uations and their babies were totally different from mine. Their babies were normal and ours wasn’t. One woman started crying because she thought the death of a baby was such a terrible thing. Really, you shouldn’t even talk about it, in case you catch the bad luck.

‘Our baby isn’t dead,’ I would have liked to say. ‘It hasn’t been born yet. And not all of them die.’ I didn’t say how many didn’t, but they didn’t ask, either. No one wanted to look at the ultrasound picture and admire the button-nosed sweetie. And when it was time to choose a partner for neck massage, the woman who had said you mustn’t talk about the death of a baby suddenly turned away, as if death could spread from my neck to her hands.

Late autumn is so quiet. The birds, the flies and the leaves have gone. There’s not a sound. Over there I can see a chanterelle poking out, but I leave it – I can’t be bothered to stuff it into my handbag.

Is there no one here?

The ancient Greeks used to lower the gods on to the stage when the plot of a play got into a knot and the characters weren’t able to work it out themselves. Gods in white clothing in their little box, descending creakily to the middle of the stage with the help of a rope. There they could declare judgement. It wasn’t thought to be quite as skilful an ending as one where the characters solved their problems themselves, but it was better than nothing.