When I turned myself in, Garv almost burst with happiness. ‘What changed your mind?!’

‘I don’t want you becoming one of those women who steal babies from outside a supermarket,’ I said.

‘You won’t regret this, I promise,’ he enthused.

And while I suspected that I probably would, my resentment was defused by the knowledge that he didn’t understand how great my qualms were. That he genuinely thought that once he’d knocked me up, all my trepidation would be washed clean away in a great tide of oestrogen.

‘So will I buy a thing that tells me my temperature and all that?’ I asked.

Garv looked startled. ‘No! Can’t we just…?’

So we just…

The first time we had sex without contraception, I felt as if I’d jumped out of a plane without a parachute, and even though we’d been told it could take between six months and a year, I was still watchful of my body.

But despite the risks we’d taken, my period arrived, and not even the squeezing cramps could dampen my relief. I relaxed a little – I’d bought myself another month. Maybe I’d be one of the women who could take up to a year.

Not a hope. I conceived in the second month; and I knew about it within minutes. I didn’t immediately start demanding peanut butter and wasabi sandwiches, but something in me didn’t feel settled, and when I abruptly took agin Tesco Metro BLTs, I knew.

Mind you, I’d been fairly sure the previous month too, when I hadn’t been. But within days it was clear that this was no neurotic imagining. I really was up the pole. How was I so sure? It might have had something to do with the fact that until after eight in the evening I couldn’t even keep down water. Or if anyone passed within three feet of my boobs I wanted to kill them. Or that I was chalk white. Except for when I was mint green. It was all wrong. When Shelley had been five weeks pregnant, she’d gone on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees (Why, indeed? Your guess is as good as mine), covered ten gruelling miles a day and never once felt lightheaded. Claire hadn’t even known she was pregnant for the first month and was out partying day and night, without recourse to a single bucket.

But I was the sickest person I’d ever met, which was especially hard for me because I didn’t usually get sick often. Even my brain was affected – I couldn’t think straight. Just to make it official, we did a pregnancy test and when the second blue line rose to the surface, Garv cried, in a manly, I’ve-an-eyelash-caught-in-my-eye sort of way. I cried too, but for different reasons.

Sick though I was, I just about managed to keep working –though God only knows how much use I was to them, and the only thing that kept me going was the vision of my bed at the end of the day. By the time I reached home, almost whimpering with relief, I’d make straight for the bedroom. If Garv had got home before me, he’d have already flung back the covers and all I had to do was crawl in between the cool, forgiving sheets. Then Garv would lie beside me and I’d grasp his hand and tell him how much I hated him.

‘I know,’ he crooned, ‘I don’t blame you, but I promise that in a few short weeks you’ll feel better.’

‘Yes,’ I whispered, gratefully. ‘Thank you, yes. And then I’ll kill you.’

Sooner or later, I struggled to sit up and Garv knew the drill. ‘Puke bowl?’ he’d ask solicitously, as we prepared for yet another round of dry retches.

‘Watching the game, having a Bud,’ Garv murmured, as I Whassup’d into the pretty fuchsia basin he’d bought specially for the occasion.

It was after the first month that something began to ripple through me, a sensation so unfamiliar that I couldn’t categorize it.

‘Indigestion?’ Garv suggested. ‘Wind?’

‘No…’ I said, in a daze. ‘I think it might be… excitement.’

Garv cried again.

Call it hormones, call it Mother Nature, call it whatever you want, but to my great surprise I suddenly really wanted the baby. Then, at seven weeks, when we went for the first scan, my love just exploded. The grainy, grey picture showed something tiny, a little blob that was slightly darker than the other blobbiness around it, and it was our baby. Another human being, new and unique. We’d made it and I was carrying it.

‘It’s a miracle,’ I whispered to Garv as we studied it.

‘De murkil’ f new life,’ he agreed solemnly.

In wild, celebratory mode, we took the rest of the day off work and went for lunch at a restaurant that I sometimes went to with clients and consequently had never been able to enjoy before. I even managed half a chicken breast without barfing. Then we wandered around town and he persuaded me to let him buy me a JP Tod’s handbag (the one that Helen now covets). It was so expensive I’d never have been able to buy it for myself, not even out of my Ladies’ Nice Things account. ‘Last time we’ll have the money for this kind of thing,’ he declared skittishly. Then I bought him a CD of some saxophonist whom I knew nothing about but whom he loved. ‘Last time you’ll get the chance to listen to music,’ I declared, also skittishly. It was one of the nicest days of my entire life.

That was when we decided to give Hoppy and Rider to Dermot. He’d become very fond of them, and though we were sad to lose them, we’d decided they’d have to go anyway when the baby arrived. We’d heard enough horror stories about jealous animals attacking babas, and even though Hoppy and Rider had never shown signs of narkiness, we felt we couldn’t take any chances. So, tearfully, we waved them off to Dermot’s, promising to visit them regularly.

Around then, other things changed too. I’d never been mad about my body. I mean, I didn’t hate it enough to starve or cut it, but it had never been something to celebrate. But with my pregnancy came a profound shift; I felt ripe and gorgeous and powerful and – I know this sounds funny – useful Up until then, I’d regarded my womb in the same way as the keyring on my Texier handbag: it was neither decorative nor useful, but it came with the rest of the package, so I was stuck with it.

Another by-product of my pregnancy was that I felt blessedly normal; for so long, my lack of maternal instincts had had me thinking I was almost a freak. For the first time in a long time, I felt in step with the rest of the world.

You’re supposed to wait until after the twelfth week to tell people, and I’m normally very good at keeping secrets, but not in this instance. So on week eight we broke the news to our families, who expressed delight – most of them, anyway. ‘I reckoned you for a Jaffa,’ Helen coldly told Garv.