Nonetheless, I was glad that Miriam had overruled Mrs. Bell and insisted that I be with her during the delivery. Richard Sutherland, for all his sense of the modish, had squeamishly declined to be present when Miriam half-jokingly invited him to watch the birth. He claimed that the ordeal of a woman in the extremis of labour, exposing her genitalia and gasping with pain, unconsciously mimicked the act of rape and diminished the wife in her husband’s eyes, as if he had witnessed her assault by an invisible stranger. Not for nothing did the world’s oldest cultures segregate women during confinement, preserving the mystery of the wife’s body.

By contrast, I felt my closest to Miriam during these last minutes. Everything bonded me to her: the sweat on her thighs, the mole above her navel, her freckles and pearly stretchmarks, the shaved skin of her pubis and the bright petals of her labia, her engorged clitoris with its endearing leftward tilt, the childhood riding scars on her knees and the spots on her bottom, the damp talc gleaming on her breasts and shoulders.

She farted lustily and reached up to grip the headboard. Midwife Bell averted her nose, but the air was heavy with the smell of anaesthetic gas.

“We’ll be waking the whole street if we go on like that. Push again now, dear. Baby’s ready. Push harder…”

Miriam frowned at the headboard, concentrating as she waited for the next contraction. Panting, she clenched her fists.

“God Jesus! My piles are killing me…!”

I knelt down and placed my hand between her buttocks, pressing my fingers against her swollen anus. The bloated lining of her rectum ballooned outwards, and I pushed the spongy cushion into her anus, then held it there as the last contractions came.

“One last push, it’s coming now, another push for the head…”

Miriam’s vulva had expanded and the crown of a minute head had appeared between her legs. The black hairs were moist and neatly parted, as if a thoughtful nature had groomed the child for its first appearance in this world.

“Push now, we’re almost there…”

The whole face had emerged, a high forehead, miniature nose and mouth, and closed eyes, streamlined as if by time, by the aeons that had preceded this child down the biological kingdom. Waking into the deep dream of life, it seemed not young but infinitely old, millions of years entrained in the pharaoh-like smoothness of its cheeks and its ancient eyelids and nostrils. Its lips were composed, as if it had patiently endured the immense journey across the universe to this modest house with its waiting mother.