According to the doctor, the baby will be born in ten more weeks. On the other hand, the doctor’s nearly eighty years old and possibly deaf, and Elfriede—counting back for the hundredth time to Wilfred’s last leave at the end of November—now considers whether it might be sooner.

“Does it matter, really?” asks Wilfred. “One week or the next. Anyway, in the end it’s up to the baby.”

“Of course it matters. You’ve got to be here when it’s born, and in order to arrange leave—”

“My dear love. You can’t be serious.”

Elfriede rises on her elbow and stares down at Wilfred’s face. In June, the Scottish day never seems to end, and the light streaming through the window gathers cruelly on the lines that spread across his forehead and out from the corners of his eyes, the lines that form a pair of parentheses around that wide mouth. She cups her hand around the side of his face and touches his moustache with her thumb.

“But you must. You must be here with me.”

Wilfred sighs deeply and heaves himself out of bed. Except for his face and hands, his skin is so pale as to be almost white. He finds his jacket, crumpled on the floor, and bends to pick it up, to shake it out and hang it on the back of a chair, to extract the cigarette case from the breast pocket. Elfriede, still propped on her elbow, examines his body like a doctor searching for symptoms. Of course he’s as lean as ever. His long, spidery limbs flash as he moves about the room, cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, picking up his discarded clothes in a military way. “Darling, you must understand there’s a war on,” he says. “I can’t simply lark off back to Blighty whenever the mood strikes.”

“Whenever the mood strikes? Your wife is having a baby!”

“As do the wives of my subordinates, on a remarkably regular basis, without any promise or even chance of their getting leave.”

“You’re a major, aren’t you? Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“Yes, it does.” He removes the cigarette from his mouth and leans his palms against the sill of the open window. “It means I’m obliged to set an example. It means I’m obliged not to ask my men to do anything I wouldn’t ask of myself. It means I’m the last chap who gets leave.”

“That’s not fair. Look at you, you’ve lost weight. Your face, it’s aged a decade since I saw you last—”

“Unkind.”

“Don’t joke. Your daughter needs you. Your wife—your wife needs you terribly—”