Mary screams throughout the delivery, and Edwin’s terror appears to amuse the doctor. “All perfectly normal,” he tells Edwin. “Seen it a hundred times,” but it doesn’t seem possible to Edwin that the very first act of every single person he sees on the street, the milkman, the beggar, the lord, and the lady, is to produce a searing pain in the one who’ll love them most.

The baby comes and Edwin’s allowed to tiptoe into a room smelling of blood and kiss them both briefly. Then he’s shooed outside so that everyone can clean up. He steps out into the icy garden. His terrors have melted away. He’s a father. He’s a father!

He looks about him to see what’s changed, now that he has a father’s eyes. There is the horizon of chimneys, all streaming with smoke, the thin, bare branches of trees, three rosebushes cut to their ugly stumps, two large crows fluffing their feathers, Mary’s muddy boots, a path of white stones with old bits of snow melting at the edges, a gray scrim of clouds. The world seems very full, not a patch neglected, not a space left blank. It’s incredible really, the work, the detail, God put into His creation. Edwin thought he’d come outside to smoke his pipe. Instead, he cups the cold bowl in his hand and sobs with exhaustion and relief and gratitude and awe.

He spends the dark afternoon writing letters by gaslight, interrupted twice by the baby’s cry, a sound never heard in this world before. To his mother he writes that Mary is safe, but weakened. To his friend Tom Hicks, the painter, Edwin says that he won’t tell him the sex, but if he paints the baby using nothing but red and makes it not a boy, he will just about hit the mark. I am right mad with joy, he writes to everyone.

Mary sees what a terrible mistake she made in wishing for a son. What a narrow escape she’s had! They name the baby Edwina. (Did you ever hear the like?! Asia says, unmoved by mutual motherhood.)

—

Before Edwin left, he could scarcely be bothered with the war. Safely abroad, he and Mary are desperate for every bit of war news they can find. He has friends on the battlefields. He carries his poor broken country in his heart.