‘He’s a wee star that way,’ Stephen reflected with a smile. ‘Night and day’s difference from his big sister.’

Annie had been murder. It was probably exacerbated by their stumbling incompetence as first-time parents, but they just could not get that wee lassie to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, or stop crying for even a quarter of that, until she was about three months. She was hardly the most passive-natured wean even now, which had undoubtedly been a factor in the four-year gap before they had another. Stephen had often worried that a second child would get short shrift, Annie having eaten substantially into her sibling’s allocation of parental patience before he got there.

Charlie, however, was the kind of baby that probably made other first-timers convince themselves they were parenting geniuses. He went off to sleep easily, stayed zonked out for hours at a time, and sat there contentedly when he was awake. Stephen would have said Charlie was happy to just watch the world go by if it wasn’t that he knew his visual acuity was insufficiently developed for him to see much more than blurred blobs, but damn if those blurred blobs didn’t seem to hold his attention.

Eilidh had breastfed him in the car before going into the restaurant, their hope being that he would nod off shortly afterwards and allow them to enjoy their dinner together in peace. Instead, he had lain there in his carrycot on the floor by their table, gazing in quiet fascination at whatever his little eyes were making out, before finally dropping off sometime around dessert.

‘What did we do to get such a contented baby?’ Eilidh asked, settling back into the seat, her elbow resting on the open window.

‘Maybe we were due it as compensation after the last one. I mean, I love her more than life itself, she’s the apple of my eye, but there’s no denying she’s a hard shift.’

‘The more complex and high-functioning the machine, the more maintenance it needs,’ Eilidh replied. ‘That’s what I tell myself anyway. If it turns out she’s a wee dafty, I’ll be feeling very short-changed.’

‘I’ll be feeling astonished. She’s as smart as she is argumentative. Remember that time we were out for a walk and you pointed out a horse, and she was insistent that it was called a cow.’

‘She was about eighteen months,’ Eilidh recalled, laughing. ‘She’d got confused because they were on facing pages on that picture book I used to read with her, but there was just no way she was backing down.’

‘She’s going to be a lawyer, that one,’ Stephen said. ‘Either that or the dictator of some small Central American republic.’

‘And what about her wee brother?’

‘Charlie’s in no apparent hurry. He’s watching very carefully before he makes any decisions.’