Midwife Bell moved expertly around the room, stirring up the dust and old talc as she ran a damp towel over the dressing table. She hung Miriam’s maternity smocks in the wardrobe like a theatrical dresser stowing away unwanted costumes at the end of a season. Beneath the bed she found a one-legged teddy bear and a child’s potty, ancient contents fossilised in place, and handed them to me with a refined grimace. She had arrived after midnight, soon after Miriam had finished her bath, but insisted on shaving and bed-washing her again. She changed the sheets as Miriam lay on the bed, employing a series of complex folds like a conjuror demonstrating a trick of large-scale origami.

Now that mother and bedroom met with Midwife Bell’s satisfaction, the child could be born. On the bedside table were her instrument case, gloves, and gas cylinder, everything except the legendary hot water, not a drop of which had I ever been asked to boil.

Disturbed by the noise, Alice had begun to cry in her sleep. Henry woke and shouted at her, rocking his cot against the wall. Miriam lay quietly, her large eyes on Mrs. Bell’s composed face, waiting for her next contraction. I went off to settle the children, played a short word game with Alice that she enjoyed, and then handed Henry his comforter, an ancient baby blanket that was a universe of friendly smells.

By the time I returned to the bedroom Miriam’s contractions were coming every other minute. Nightdress rolled back to her breasts, she filled her lungs with deep, measured breaths as Mrs. Bell sat beside her, listening to the child’s heartbeat with her stethoscope.

“You can hold your wife’s hand—I know she’d like that…”

I pressed Miriam’s fingers. She smiled briefly, but I could see that she had already withdrawn from me. Only the midwife and the child were properly in the room with her. She moistened her lips, staring at the shadowy ceiling and the frayed lampshade on the headboard, as if this were the only delivery that had ever taken place, the primeval birth from which all life had sprung. As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and sons belonged in the shadows with the dogs and livestock, like the retriever growling at Midwife Bell’s unfamiliar car from the window of my neighbours’ living room.