“Stop it.” She put her hands over her ears. “Stop it.”

“Sin. The only sin that’s being committed here is your inability to care for your children, or to be my wife. Fagus is desperately ill, and I get a call from the housekeeper telling me you’re throwing away his medicine and tying him to a chair.” He became still, suddenly, a cigarette half way to his mouth. “You’ve got that book.”

It had been getting dusty under the bed. She’d taken to leaving it in his toy basket, hidden under the largest soft rabbit. She stood up. “Don’t.”

“It was a long time ago, Enid. You can’t think it had any seriousness.”

“You seemed to think it was pretty serious when it gave you time alone with me. You said it was the future.”

“It’s nonsense. You know that. It’s madness.” He was already out in the hall, his hand on the bannister rail, his foot on the first stair.

She grabbed his jacket. “You don’t know anything. You believed it too. We both did. There are no accidents. Illness is a sign of sin. Christ heals.”

“No one’s going to heal him, Enid. There’s nothing anyone of us can do.”

“But we can. I can. He’s getting better.”

He reached the first landing. “They don’t let you use medicine, do they? They tell you to throw it away.”

“I’m healing him, Douglas.” She wasn’t as fast, couldn’t take the stairs two at a time. He reached the top floor before she did, and by the time she got to the nursery he had the light on and was turning picture books out of the shelf.

Fagus woke up. “Daddy?”

Douglas said, “Go back to sleep.”

But how could he with Douglas crouched on the floor using the hobbyhorse like a minesweeper under the bed? Enid turned out the light. Douglas turned it on again, picked up the toy basket, and tipped it out. Science and Health fell to the floor amongst knitted rabbits and soft teddy bears. He held it up. “You’ve lost your mind.”

That was all, just that. Almost the last time he looked her in the eye.

Enid, 1922

13

Enid, 1922

There were so many people in her house these days. Douglas hanging about, midwives, neighbours all taking advantage of Everett’s tea. A doctor because her mother had insisted. New techniques, she’d shouted down her newly-installed telephone, as if the study of midwifery was all she’d done since autumn. I’ll really be fine, Enid had shouted back. You’ll be fine, her mother had spat, when I say so.