‘So, there’s this young man and this young woman. They meet and fall in love. They are both materially successful people, they have always worked hard and they have good careers. They own their own flats and are used to a certain kind of lifestyle; they take good holidays and buy fancy things. They can indulge their whims. And then comes the time for settling down. They sell their flats and buy a house further out and have a small but tasteful wedding. For a long time they are very busy with their important careers and they are no longer quite so young when they decide that it is the right time to start a family. But life has other plans and it turns out that she’s got a problem with her tubes – his sperm is fine – and that conceiving will not be easy. They start to obsess about it. Well, she does, he doesn’t, because let’s face it, he’s OK and he’s got all the time in the world, but her clock is running out. She really wants this baby and will do anything to get pregnant, from headstands to two rounds of IVF. It’s expensive and unpleasant. She injects herself daily and gets fat, something she hates, something she really hates. And then bingo! The white stick says Yes, You’re a normal woman now! She’s pregnant. They’re elated; she cannot believe it.

‘But she is terrified something will go wrong during the pregnancy. She knows all the risks, she cuts down on her workload, she eats all the right food, takes all the right supplements, and she grows this baby as if it were a pearl inside her. But they don’t buy any clothes or paint the nursery room because they’re so scared that they’ll jinx it somehow. The birth is utterly awful but it turns out that they are the luckiest couple in the world and they leave the hospital with this beautiful baby girl in their arms. She’s perfect. She’s exactly what they dreamed of. She’s just beautiful . . .’

Dr. R pauses, licks her lips and takes another sip of the water from the plastic cup. ‘Even the woman’s mother can find no fault with this baby. And they’re so happy. The woman is already exhausted, of course, because she barely slept for the last few months of the pregnancy, which was then followed by a forty-eight-hour labour, an emergency caesarean and chronic mastitis. But the woman is on a high and she daren’t complain because most of womankind has gone through this before her and because this is exactly what she wanted.