The baby’s large, she knows that much. After seven months of pregnancy, Elfriede feels so big and so ungainly. Already she’s caught herself waddling. At the hospital, the wounded men cast her looks of alarm, as if they’re expecting her to lie down and give birth at any moment. Now, when she tries to run down the lawn to the river, she discovers she can’t quite breathe, because the baby’s stuffed in there all the way to her lungs. She slows to a walk. A rapid walk. Upon reaching the riverbank, she crosses the bridge to the small, tree-covered island where the Englishman had built a folly, as Englishmen do, inside which she and Wilfred have made love more times than she could possibly count. In fact, as she steps from the bridge onto the turf, bathed in the slow, blue twilight of a Scottish June, she recalls tramping over these grounds with Wilfred and the estate agent ten years ago, in a similar state of pregnancy, and how she and Wilfred had spotted the folly at the exact same instant, and looked at each other with the exact same thought. On the night they moved in, as soon as Johann was tucked in bed, they hurried here through the rain, hand in hand, and consecrated first the cushioned bench along the eastern side, and then—an hour or so later—the steps that led back down to the riverbank. Both of them soaked and laughing and consumed with each other. Eight days later Elfriede was bleeding to death. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Nearly a year passed before she and Wilfred made love again. Then he was off to India with the regiment. Two long years. Seven and a half months after his departure, Elfriede gave birth to a stillborn boy. She steps inside the folly and sits down on the cushioned bench along the eastern side, not for old times’ sake but because her feet can’t stand another bloody second.

Finally the sun’s going down. What a relief, the departure of light.

Elfriede closes her eyes and leans her head against the pillar. Some nearby robin whistles a brisk tattoo at the dying sun. How they sing, the robins of Dunnock Lodge. They woke her this morning at the first instant of sunrise. She was too thrilled to fall back asleep, because Wilfred was coming, a few days’ leave at last, he’d sent a telegram from Boulogne the night before. The shock of it, after all those months on the front! And the robins woke her at dawn. She tried on five dresses and none of them made her belly look any less disgraceful. Poor Wilfred, to come home at last and discover a hippopotamus instead of a wife.