So she’d dressed him up, and dressed herself up, and out they’d gone to the Derby to pretend she didn’t care when Douglas bet £10 on a horse that came last, or that her sister was off getting drunk with the worst kind of people and getting away with it. She’d join the living, that’s what she’d sworn, as she’d pulled on her stockings and tried to imagine the day going well. But the noise and the crowds had popped his eyes; in his little white cloth cap he’d sat up and grabbed the blankets about him. Her mother had waved, the horses had thundered, she’d turned her back, there was a scream and there he was, splayed on the walkway, a volcanic red pouring from his nose and a split up the side of his head like someone had taken an axe to it. A course doctor had been found, and said lucky for them it was just a surface wound. “Heads bleed like billy-o,” he’d exclaimed as if it was a joke, something funny. Everyone had laughed and patted Fagus’ head in that vague way that won’t get blood on a silk glove, and commented on how sweet he looked all bandaged up, but Enid had taken him home and he’d slept for a week, hardly moving, almost dead.

After that he was worse. The doctor said it was a matter of confidence, but Enid felt she was living in a madhouse where no one saw what she saw. His head is too big. She’d say it to herself in the mirror, practising, Doctor, his head is too big. I want him taken to a specialist. But then her mother would write and remind her that Fagus was the great white hope, and one day he’d take care of all of them as Ivar should have done if a bullet hadn’t got him, and Enid would lose faith, panic, capitulate, close her eyes and pray. It was easier to belong in a lie than be outcast with the truth. She could push it down the road for another day, delude herself that some miracle would occur, that she’d wake up tomorrow and find it was just a phase, that he’d become a normal little boy, running wild with the others in the village, that the nightmare of his difference was over, and hers too – that she could join the other mothers with a normal shining product of her own.