“Ah! Pat, now.” Bridie thought about it while she blanket-stitched a duster, her busy hands sunbrowned even in winter. She must spend so much time outdoors. “Pat didn’t know how to . . . carry himself. It was most odd. He’d go lurching out of the room, I thought he was about to bash someone, the way his fists were swinging by his sides, but he was just on his way to work. He drove buses for South Down. It wasn’t worrying, his behavior. The bus company, they knew him well, they understood.” She leaned back in her chair, reflecting. “He chopped a lot of wood that winter. I used to watch him from the kitchen window, the ax right up above his head and then he’d bring it down, bang! And the two halves of the log would jump in the air!”

We both laughed. We’d earned the right.

“And then we had another baby,” she went on, “and everything started again. It will for you too.”

I couldn’t imagine it, and sighed again, to say so. Bridie chuckled.

“You’re not the most patient girl, are you. How long’s it been?”

The afternoon was fading outside. We were in January now, 1951. I don’t know how I had got through Christmas. Well, I do. There was no way around Christmas, so I had to. To look at James on Christmas Day, a shining, impervious, smiling vicar, you’d think nothing had happened at all. Iris rang me often. “He’s being very . . . strong,” I told her one time, and she said, “Oh, men,” in a way that made me feel she might understand, but I couldn’t elaborate. I remembered the deep relief in her voice when he recovered after the war. I didn’t have the courage to go back on everything and say: Iris, everything’s wrong. James is—wrong. Because what could Iris do, anyway?

“Oh, five months,” I said to Bridie, “and . . . eight days.”

“You’ll need to let the year go round.”

What a lovely thing to hear. Life was so exhausting that the idea of letting something happen, instead of having to make it happen, was balm. Time would take me onward until I’d no longer be thinking, This time last year I was this big with Catherine, and then this big . . .

As I was looking gratefully at Bridie my eye was caught by the picture on the wall behind her. It was the baby I’d glimpsed at the top of the stairs, her first and stillborn whose name was Gerard. “Oh, look.” I felt a rush of tenderness. “Gerard’s come down to us.”

“Indeed he has. Since meeting you, I’ve been reminded.”

“Oh, Bridie, I hope I haven’t made you sad.”

This was honestly the first time the thought had crossed my mind.