I embraced Miriam, breathing the familiar heady scents of baby talc, basil, gloss paint, and washing powder that clung to her smock. On its hem was a brown potty stain left by one of the children, taking its place among the countless stains and smells of our little house, a realm of soft armpits and swollen nipples in which I had spent an entire life.

“Rest now. Don’t start rebuilding the bedroom.”

“Bring me back some magic.”

*   *   *

With a last wave, I latched the gate and set off with Henry and Alice down the sun-filled street. Polly the retriever had decided to join us. He trotted beside Alice, now and then detouring to quiz and spray a lamppost. The modest houses in Charlton Road sat in their quiet suburban gardens, but seeing them through the dog’s and the children’s eyes transformed the rosebushes and rockeries, the freshly painted front doors and forgotten roller skates. They became more vivid, as if aware that Polly and the children would soon forget them, and were urging themselves more brightly into existence. Our own house was as modest as the others—my salary as assistant editor of a scientific journal barely matched the small mortgage—but Miriam, Henry, and Alice turned it into an endless funfair of noise and cheer. Behind other doors in Charlton Road were other Miriams. Young wives and their children strolled the streets of Shepperton and played in their gardens like agents of an exuberant foreign power.

The number of children always surprised me—this small Thames-side town was a life engine. When we reached the end of Charlton Road we had already collected a sandy-haired boy on a tricycle, two ten-year-old girls, and the infant daughter of the local builder. The splash meadow was filled with children playing on the grass and fishing for minnows along the reedy banks of the stream. I could almost believe that the bright summer frocks, fishing nets, and children’s voices were a dream conjured from this placid stream asleep beneath the willows.

Alice and Henry ran towards the bank, where two mothers kept watch on a park bench. I took off my tennis shoes and walked in bare feet through the cool pelt of the meadow. Beyond the willows lay the calm surface of a gravel lake, its giant excavator rising like the gantries at Cape Canaveral.

Water surrounded Shepperton—the river, the gravel lakes, and the reservoirs of the metropolitan water board whose high embankments formed the horizon of our lives. Once I told Miriam that we were living on the floor of a marine world that had invaded our minds, and that the people of Shepperton were a new form of aquatic mammal, creatures of a new Water Babies.

“You’re Tom, the poor sweep,” she told me, as if placing me for the first time. “Poor Tom…”

“And who are you—Mrs. Do-as-you-would-be-done-by?”

“I don’t think so, somehow. More like Mrs. Do-as-you-would-like-to-do-with…”