Everett had knocked on the nursery door and ignored Enid’s shouts to leave the tray outside, she’d get it. Fagus hadn’t wanted to get out of bed and Enid was sick of pregnancy. The soup had stained the walls.

She drew the blue thread through another hole. “Perhaps Everett would do better looking after the house than gossiping about me.”

“Goddamn it, Enid.” Douglas slammed his hand on the table, the medicine bottles jumped and fell over, cracked and smashed and little corks flew embedded in glass. They’d been so hard to remove. Every time she’d got one out and tipped the contents of the bottle down the WC she’d thrown the corks in the fire even though she knew cork didn’t burn, but it didn’t sink either. She’d tried reassembling the bottles instead. Better to shove the corks back in and hide them under the bed until she could dump them. She’d made three trips already to the woods and these before her, jumping and crashing, were due for disposal tomorrow. Out there, beyond the garden and the pipes of her house, she’d imagined little minnows getting frantic on Sleepy Sickness pills in the river. She’d gone to see if she could see any thrashing about, and but it was impossible to count out the possibility of those discoveries too, now that she sat here, now that he shook his head and shouted.

He refilled his glass, the syphon cannoned soda into whisky. “What are you doing?”

She kept her gaze steady. “You should know.”

“I need you to tell me what you think you’re doing. What you’ve been doing, with his medicine – with him. Why haven’t you been giving it to him?”

“It’s against the law.”

“What law?”

“As I said, Douglas. You should know.”

“This isn’t a game.”

“Well, one of us was lying, and it certainly wasn’t me. Filling him with pills for an illness he doesn’t have, so that you can avoid the truth: he was born with sin, and I know what that sin was. This,” she waved her hand in the direction of the nursery, the needle in her fingers, the blue thread, a line from hand to lap, “this thing that’s happened to him, it was always going to happen. I took no notice. I pretended my actions had no consequence. He smashed his head and now he can’t see and he has hardly strength to stand up. Pills aren’t going to make any difference. He needs Christ.”

Douglas came over to the fire, sat heavily and put his head in his hands. When he raised his head again it was as if he’d forgotten her. “You need help.”

“I gave him my sin.”

“It’s the pregnancy. You’re exhausted.”

“Everything I did was wrong. I gave it to him.”

“Have you seen the doctor?”