Harold lowered his limbs into the seat beside hers. A heavy stillness crept over him and, after resisting for a moment, he closed his eyes. The light glowed red against his eyelids, and the sounds of birdsong and passing cars merged into one, that was both inside him and far away.

When he woke, she had set a small table at his knees with a plate of bread and butter, and slices of apple. She gestured with the upturned palm of her hand towards the plate, as if she were showing him the way forward. “Please. Help yourself.”

Even though he hadn’t been aware of his hunger, now that he saw the apple, his stomach felt scooped out. Besides it would be rude not to accept, after she had taken the trouble. He ate greedily, apologizing, but unable to stop. The woman watched and smiled, and all the while she played with a quarter of apple, turning it between her fingers, as if it were something curious she had picked up from the ground. “You’d think walking should be the simplest thing,” she said at last. “Just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.”

She wet her lower lip with her tongue, waiting for more words. “Eating,” she said at last. “That’s another one. Some people have real difficulties with that. Talking too. Even loving. They can all be difficult.” She watched the garden, not Harold.

“Sleeping,” he said.

She turned. “Don’t you sleep?”

“Not always.” He reached for more apple.

There was another silence. Then she said, “Children.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“There’s another one.”

He glanced again at her washing line, and the perfect rows of flowers. He felt the resounding absence of young life.

“Did you have any yourself?” she said.

“Just one.”

Harold thought of David, but it was too much to explain. He saw the boy as a toddler and how his face darkened in sunshine like a ripe nut. He wanted to describe the soft dimples of flesh at his knees, and the way he walked in his first pair of shoes, staring down, as if unable to credit they were still attached to his feet. He thought of him lying in his cot, his fingers so appallingly small and perfect over his wool blanket. You could look at them and fear they might dissolve beneath your touch.

Mothering had come so naturally to Maureen. It was as if another woman had been waiting inside her all along, ready to slip out. She knew how to swing her body so that a baby slept; how to soften her voice; how to curl her hand to support his head. She knew what temperature the water should be in his bath, and when he needed to nap, and how to knit him blue wool socks. He had no idea she knew these things and he had watched with awe, like a spectator from the shadows. It both deepened his love for her and lifted her apart, so that just at the moment when he thought their marriage would intensify, it seemed to lose its way, or at least set them in different places. He peered at his baby son, with his solemn eyes, and felt consumed with fear. What if he was hungry? What if he was unhappy? What if other boys hit him when he went to school? There was so much to protect him from, Harold was overwhelmed. He wondered if other men had found the new responsibility of parenting as terrifying, or whether it had been a fault that was only in himself. It was different these days. You saw men pushing buggies and feeding babies with no worries at all.