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time was right. This evening, with a ham boiling and the kitchen’s electric light yellow against the grey descending night outside, things are uncommonly content between them. She looks at him, her big man sat at the table. He is saying something else about the fodder beet. His black hair – long and curly – is wet from the rain. She never thought she’d have a big man like that of her own. And she suspects he never thought he’d have a woman for himself. And the achievement, for both of them, is a bolster in a world that seemed to have overlooked them. Like they’d planted their flag in the ground, just like other people. And now this news. She is bringing plates to the table and smiling to herself. She is rich with new information. And everything around her seems new, too: the table she’s laying; their kitchen, which only this morning seemed all worn out. She’s cleared away her tools – she knows how it annoys him, her wiring – because she wants nothing to spoil the moment. Ever since she’d found out, she’d been rehearsing how she’d tell him and his lines too, adjusting them until he said just the things she wanted.
    ‘It’s just a nightmare, is October,’ he says over her thoughts. ‘And this rain’s not making anything easier.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Is that from Alan Tench?’ he says, peering up into the pan on the stove.
    He might look at her differently, once he knows. He might touch her differently. With reverence. She’s fizzing with it. Because the tingling was something – not just an idea in her imagination. A real thing had happened. And big things – things that changed the course of your life – well, they hardly ever happened.
    ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘He brought it round yesterday.’ She strokes a hand across his shoulder as she turns back towards the stove and he looks up, surprised.
    ‘Looks nice and pink,’ he says.
    ‘It’s a good one,’ she says. ‘It were positive. I did a test today and it were positive.’
    ‘Really?’
    She can see his mind whirring. There’s a slight flicker in his eyeballs, left and right. The news is going in.
    ‘Really?’ he says to her. ‘It were really positive?’
    ‘It was.’ And she waits for him to get up, like he might have done in a film, dance her round the kitchen, his hands on her hips. Or hold her face in his hands and kiss her with a passion he’s never expressed before.
    ‘Well then,’ says Max, and he is smiling, she’ll give him that, but he’s still seated. He has sat up straighter and he begins to pat the table top with the flat of his hand. Pat pat pat. Agitated.
    ‘Well,’ he says again.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I’ll ring dad and tell ’im. They’ll be cock-a-hoop.’
    ‘I’m not three months yet,’ she says. ‘You’re not supposed to tell anyone until you’re three months.’
    ‘Yes, but I’m telling dad.’
    ‘Wait a little bit, will ye? It’s very early.’
    ‘When then?’
    ‘Next month. Tell ’im next month.’
    ‘Alright then. I’m going for a wash.’
    ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Tea’s ten minutes.’
    He stops in the doorway. ‘Prim?’ he says. ‘It’s good in’t it?’
    ‘Yes,’ she says.
    Primrose stands at the counter, sawing slices of bread. The loaf collapses under her hand. He’s pleased, she can see that, and maybe that should be enough – a husband pleased to be having a bairn. She sits down at the kitchen table, her mind readjusting itself. It won’t be quite the together thing, not like she’d thought. And the disappointment soaks in at the base of her, like yard mud. It’ll be a private thing, like all her other private things. This is not us, not really. It’s me. And she closes down, as she has so often before, not in a petulant way, but just practical, so the nerve endings aren’t exposed. Like insulation tape round a wire.
    Some intuitive impulse made her take the test. She’d gone to the chemist in her lunch hour. The shop was deserted and Karen Marshall was looking