You check the front door, move the buggy up against it, just in case.

The baby’s cry is now at boiling point. Your son wakes up and calls out for you too. Some tiny, shameful part of you is glad not to be awake alone.

You should go to them. Scoop up your son and bring him into your bed, feed the baby and then all lie down together, the way families must have for centuries, the way animals do.

The sirens again, outside. More of them now, and louder, shifting in pitch and frequency. There is something still tugging at the edges of your consciousness. A framed map in the hallway, askew on its picture hook. You right it, and 83think: Was the frame always cracked? For a moment, you feel gloved hands on your shoulder, hot breath down your neck. Why would the blinds rattle on an airless night, or a tower suddenly tumble?

Something is happening, somewhere, you tell yourself, but not here, not here, not now.

84

The Children

Trumpington Street is sculptural in the sunshine: slashes and rhomboids of light and stark shade. Traffic is heavy and the taxi travels slowly, the driver giving me the tour. The Fitzwilliam, the Pitt Building, Peterhouse. We’ve already had the Backs, the Mathematical Bridge, designed by Isaac Newton and made, the taxi driver says, without a single nut or bolt. Students took it apart once to see how it worked and were unable to put it back together. I know this isn’t true. Newton died a quarter of a century before the bridge was built, and it does have bolts, iron spikes driven in at angles obscured from sight. I walked over this bridge almost every day for the best – or worst – part of three years. But somehow the moment to say this passed, and so I smile and nod and let my mind drift.

I’m writing a story about Caroline Norton, who changed the lot of mothers forever with her battle to reform child custody law, or so the blurb on her biography says. I have the biography in a tote bag, though that’s as much as I’ve read of it so far, along with a sheaf of her poems, newly joined now by a raft of photocopies about marriage and Victorian 85law and women’s quests for equality. I’ve just come from Girton College, the first women’s college in Cambridge; dusty sunlight in high-ceilinged, book-lined rooms, parquet-floored corridors and a lunch buffet (poached salmon, potatoes, mixed sweetcorn and peas) under the patient lights of a hotplate in the Fellows’ Dining Room. A communal jug of tap water, tasting faintly of pewter. Polite tones in respectable surroundings; it all sounds eminently reasonable; Caroline Norton’s letters to the Right Hons, her pamphlets, her famous essay condemning child labour; her bills presented to the House of Lords. I’ll read the texts, write the piece.