Charlie dug the holes then, two spits deep, and she unwrapped the plants from their hessian and newspaper wrappings, untied the strings and loosened the tangled roots, shaking out pieces of the still-damp soil of the nursery from which they had come. He put in a little muck at the base of the hole, as recommended in Sanders’ Encyclopaedia, and then she knelt and bent over her big belly and spread the roots across the broken soil and filled back in with a trowel. Then to the next, Rosa mundi to Charles de Mills. One after another, they planted the roses all that late winter’s afternoon. The day was one of those sudden mild ones, and they had noticed how the light lasted, how spring was on its way. As the sun lowered it caught the yellow patch of aconites beside the drive and made them shine.

Are we done now?

No, there’s one more. Roseraie de l’Hay. As the sun dropped it became cold. Her fingers froze even within the leather gloves. That pain came in her back again.

Later she would think that it might have been because of the roses that Richard was born two weeks early.

But it was a good moment for Richard to be born because Charlie had time for them. Wet weather, days of incessant rain, and Charlie was in the house. He built the fires in all the rooms, and for the first week or two her mother came to stay. She had barely needed her because Richard was an easy baby. He slept and woke and fed and slept, some separateness or containment to him, behind his blue eyes that would become bluer as the weeks passed. The house seemed a sure and safe place, with them all there and the lights on and the fire burning, and the rain outside. There was a man who had visited them just the day before she went into labour, someone who knew Charlie from India in the war, and he had left suddenly in the night. When he had left she had the notion that he had taken away some danger from them, that Charlie’s heavy winter mood had lightened. But perhaps that was only the effect of the baby coming. That he was happy, for those days at least. She remembered how his hands quivered as he first took the white bundle from the midwife, though they were such big hands that he might if he was more sure have cupped a newborn in one alone.

Then her mother left, and Charlie went back to his work after the rain had stopped, and she was alone in the house with the child.