“I went mad after he was born,” she says. “An extreme form of nervous melancholy. It’s a particular malady and one of Herr Doktor Hermann’s special fields of interest.”

“This Hermann fellow—have I met him?”

“I don’t think so. He’s in the psychiatric section.”

“The loony bin, you mean?”

Elfriede refuses to laugh. Instead she examines the collar of his jacket. The woolen scarf tucked inside, protecting his neck and chest from the damp, cold air. She whispers, “You should be disgusted. You should be appalled.”

“I’m just waiting to hear the rest of the story.”

“There is no rest of the story.”

“Rubbish. Of course there is. Lots of new mothers have a spell of the blue devils after their babies are born. My cousin spent a rough few weeks, as I remember. By God, I don’t blame them. I should imagine the whole affair’s rather a shock to the system, and then you’ve got this child to take care of, this mysterious little being keeping you up all hours and so on.”

“Not like this. I couldn’t—I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t—it was like a shroud settled on me. I thought I was going mad. I should have been joyful, I should have been grateful. I had a rich, loving husband. I had a beautiful baby. Everything for me was perfect. But I felt miserable and terrified. I felt shadowed by doom. I can’t even describe how black it all was. I looked at his face, his little squashed face, and he was a stranger. I thought, I don’t love you, I don’t even know you, who are you?”

“Poor Elfriede . . . my poor girl . . . and nobody understood . . .”

Now Elfriede raises her head to Mr. Thorpe’s kindly, bony face. She defies his kindness. She defies this compassion of his. She defies his freckles and his pale, gingery eyebrows.

“I tried to kill myself.” (She flings the words at his long eyelashes.) “I thought I should kill myself, because I was no use to my baby at all. I was a terrible mother. I was poisoning him with my own bitter milk. I thought I should kill myself before I killed my own baby.”

Mr. Thorpe doesn’t reply. Not in words, anyway. He lifts his arms and puts them around her. Her defiance crumbles. She leans into his ribs, into his shrunken chest, and shudders out a barrage of tears into the left-hand pocket of the Norfolk jacket, the one covering his heart. A shooting jacket, designed to withstand far more serious attacks than this one, thank goodness. His thumbs move against her back. He doesn’t speak. She smells wet wool, and the particular scent she caught two weeks earlier, in the infirmary garden, soap and the salt of human skin. Mr. Thorpe’s skin. Eventually she turns her face to the side and speaks again.