They had been married almost two years. They had been wary of having children too soon. There had been so much to do, coming to the farm when Ralph needed them, establishing themselves, learning the life. Yet she had felt from day to day as she moved about the house and he moved about the farm that there was a space about them waiting to be filled.

She had thought that a child would fill the space but now he was there it seemed to her that the space had turned to water. That distance she had known between herself and the world, which had been the dry emptiness of the rooms where she had moved each day, the flat fields, the length of the gravel drive, had become a lake, a still grey lake. Now when she moved there was that slight resistance of water, and ripples spread out across the lake, slowly widening and smoothing, almost disappearing before they touched the shore. She woke in the night and fed the baby. She fed him again in the peace of the mornings when finally he slept quiet and long. In those formless lengthening spring days after he was born she had the sense that she, he, the two of them, were floating. An island had formed about them. And Charlie, for all his love, was a visitor to the island. He was one of those others, coming across, holding out his big hands with the smell of the mainland on them. He carried something from outside to her and the child, something separate, apart, that kept him apart in the present, that might yet have been a piece of the past.

Outside, on the shore that she could see from the window, holding the baby to see through as-yet-unseeing blue eyes, the gulls followed the plough. Even when the tractor was out of sight the birds made their trail in the sky beyond the young hedge, white over the brown soil. When Charlie came in the smell he brought with him was earthy and dark. The smell within the house it seemed to her was white.

In the whiteness, the baby slept. She watched, and saw his tiny being quiver all of a sudden as if he was not quite yet of this earth, not even of the island but of the air some inches above, between land and sky. Gravity seized him, deep in his guts, and he woke and cried.

Claire was up a ladder, tying a rose. Kumiko came and stood beneath. Put out her hand to the ladder to hold it steady.

It’s all right, she called down. I do this all the time.

The white rose had grown right across a bedroom window.

I just have to tie in this rose.