They induced me later that day. It didn’t matter what drugs they gave me because Catherine was beyond harm. I was too small, I think, for the volumes they administered. I floated far away on the tide, dry land not making sense anymore, being too solid and stable. Wrecked on the waves, blood and tears leaving me in streams, I pitched and rolled in time to the wringing of my contractions. When the sea flood roared in I clung sobbing to her, my treasure, but she slipped away from me to be washed out through a hole in the hull. Then I foundered, and there were hands all around me, stretching out, and they brought me to shore.

—

James came in. Openmouthed, his cheeks marble-pale, his eyes pouched, owl-like in grief. He sat down on the edge of my bed. He was carrying a bundle wrapped in a thin towel with a wide blue border, the blue of laundry blueing, and in this blue, picked out in white, was the word sunlight. Her face was in shadow where the towel was folded around her head and tight under her chin, as if to protect her from a winter day.

—

The advantages of having a vicar for a husband. The clerical collar pressed the medical gowns back against the walls. I was privileged. My daughter was not wrapped in newspaper nor was she left naked in the sluice. She was not buried with nine others in a mass grave. This was how it was, then—then being the 12th of September 1950. We cremated her and put her ashes in the small cedarwood chest my father had given me. It was good for a baby, with its chubby curved lid and squarish shape. The ashes, inside a bag, fitted in snugly. The chest was small enough to sit in my cupped hand and there it did sit, for an hour or so every day.

We went to register her death and there was no place on the certificate for her name. It said, fetus, female. When I got home I stuck a slip of paper over that part and wrote Catherine, and in my mind’s eye I entered in through the high oblong doorway of St. Catherine’s Cathedral in Alexandria, the lintel lifting above my head and the soft darkness within receiving me and the tiny bundled form in my arms; and all I knew of her, all I had felt of her, was the hospital towel she was wrapped in and which they gave me to take home.

—