The first inkling that I was pregnant again was signalled by a sudden craving for pickle sandwiches, pedicures and holidays in Paris (well, they’re the pregnancy cravings I get). But how to break the news to my husband? Perhaps the next time I was vomiting and he asked if there was anything he could do, I could simply reply, “Um, how about carry our third child to full-term?” Subtle yet dramatic. And more direct than a sudden declaration that I’d be declining all bungee-jumping invitations for the next nine months. I rehearsed the dialogue in my head but had no doubt that it would be just like the baby in my belly – so easy to conceive, so hard to deliver.

My husband was euphoric at my news. But I just couldn’t get excited. I tried to think of the miracle of life stirring within me. But my spouse had recently washed the dishes without me asking, so I felt I had already witnessed my miracle for the year.

The trouble was that, with a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter, I’d only just got my body back. I didn’t want it to be stolen by aliens once more and replaced with the body of Pavarotti.

I was still reeling from my son’s diagnosis of autism but I wouldn’t even be able to dull the anxiety with alcohol … Mind you, once the baby realised what an exhausted and fraught wreck he or she had for a mother, the poor kid would need a drink. And then there was the thought of another long, arduous labour. I don’t even want to do anything that feels good for 33 hours.

But a month later, when the bleeding started, I felt a deep and unexpected sense of dread. Perhaps it was just “spotting?” Then the cramps took hold.

By midnight, I was bleeding so heavily I was curled into a foetal ball around a hot-water bottle. In hospital the next day, as the doctor dolloped a globule of cold jelly on to my abdomen and ran the scanner over my belly, my mind was as blank as the ultrasound screen. There was a whooshy echo – but no tattoo of tiny heartbeats.

I turned my head. In the bleary black and white of a scratchy prewar newsreel, tenuous images began to emerge. I peered in on the watery world where my baby should have bobbed, buoyant with life. I searched the little black sack for a grainy profile. Empty.

I heard the doctor’s voice from a long way off, telling me, kindly, that one in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage. It was probably a genetic fault.

I told myself how good it would be to have my body back. Not to feel ill. Not to feel sleep-deprived and exhausted for the next two years. “Let’s go out on the town!” I suggested to my sister as we left the hospital. “I’ve only got this cleavage for another few hours. This,” I pointed out my pumped up, hormonal bustline to startled motorists at the traffic lights, “is not a Wonderbra!”

But later, as I sank into the bath, sending tiny waves towards my toes, I was ambushed by unexpected emotion. The heating system in the bathroom is connected by an umbilical cord of pipes. As they shuddered and juddered, pulsing water around the house, it made me think of what the doctor had described as the “uterine material” that had been pulsing within me.

I’d wanted to pretend that it was just a missed period, just a tiny bunch of cells, just a blue line on a bit of blotting paper. I realised I’d qualified for the World Indoor Record for Self-Delusion. There had been a little miracle stirring inside me. A miracle I’d wished away. How callously I’d marked the gift “return to sender”.

Waves of remorse began to replace the waves of nausea I’d felt when I was pregnant. I thought of all the cracks I’d made at the baby’s expense: “Sure, I wouldn’t mind having another child,” I’d said to anyone who asked, “if someone would have it for me.”

I thought of all the glib asides I’d made to my sisters about how the baby would be the only infant on the block wearing black baby clothes. But in truth, I’d secretly started to fantasise about his or her little face. The tiny clenched fist. The mouth puckered at my breast. The hushed excitement of the ultrasound as the doctors discovered the embryo’s sex. The euphoria, post-birth. The friendly invasion of friends and family. Dressing him or her up in kangaroo babygrows with a pouch and pointy ears – photographs that would provide maximum humiliation on a 21st birthday. I had started to think about mother’s day cards glued in macaroni and string.

Guilt began to hammer on my mind’s door. Logic battled emotion.

If women could wish away pregnancy, there would have been no backyard abortions or morning-after pills. I told myself that the foetus had probably been compromised and that losing the baby had been for the best. I am pro-abortion and passionately defend a woman’s right to choose, but the trouble was, I’d spent the last eight weeks secretly adjusting. The hormones had kicked in. Emotions began to tear at my throat.

When my crying finally abated, I pulled out the plug and let the guilt drain away with the water.

Guilt is such a useless emotion. It’s the gift that just keeps on giving. Miscarriage is nature’s way; guilt is purely man-made. The best antidote to the grief of miscarriage is to talk about the experience – just as the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife Priscilla Chan, have chosen to do – so that no woman need ever again feel so alone. Like me, that night, lying in that cold, empty bath.

Kathy Lette’s latest novel, Courting Trouble, is published by Black Swan