—

The physician intended kindness.

‘You must forget it, my dear Mrs Blood. Do not think of it as a baby, as a child. You lost a foetus which was unformed and but a few inches long. Spontaneous abortion is by no means uncommon. If you had gone full-term it may well have been born defective.’

Esther stared at him, her lips tight-drawn into an acquiescent smile. His words had no meaning: at least, what meaning they might have had was rejected by her own interpretation of what had happened to her.

Bindon was dead and she had been carrying inside her all that was left of him, a piece of his very tissue. That one time when he had loved her, he had given her the last of his life-force. Part of him had sought out the part that she carried and made it a whole being. Together they had made that tiny nucleus of the new baby. Of Tim! Bindon’s son, Tim.

‘Believe me, dear lady, you will recover more quickly if you will only make an effort. One understands the entirely beneficial grieving period for a husband, but it is not natural to grieve for something that was not yet a formed human…’

How could you know, you have never felt the struggle of the father’s element to reach its destiny. I knew at the very moment that I had conceived; I felt the changes happen within hours. I knew that Tim was inside me. I felt his soul enter and knew his name was Tim. He was not a foetus, an unformed human.

The physician saw the smile and was glad that his words had persuaded this sad and tragic little lady to give up the unhealthy notion that she must grieve over a lump of tissue long ago disposed of by the nurse.

Esther said that she would follow his advice when he said that she should remain in her father’s house with her little girl until she was returned to full health, then she might return to Mere: pick up the threads of her life once more.

But the threads of her life were not there to be picked up. They were destroyed, burnt away by Lysol, burnt in the domestic boiler. She was horror-stricken at the thought of ever returning to Mere, and London had become a most dreadful place in which Bindon’s body lay in an ignominious grave. In an effort to steel herself to it, time and again she rehearsed in her mind the scene where she with Baby and Kitt and Nursey would arrive at the front door of Mere, mount the steps and enter. Each time the house is a chamber of desolation and emptiness. Every tuft of carpet, every dust mote is as much infused with Bindon as with his absence. She can never go back. Any more than she can remain here.

No one notices as they walk by, at least if they do they do not take much account of it as Esther, seated beside the water in Kensington Gardens, eats from a box of expensive chocolates. She has prepared well. There are twenty Floris cream-centred chocolates given to her by her father and twenty tablets of salicylic acid she bought on her way here. With each chocolate she eats a tablet. She eats her way through the entire box.

As she begins to lose consciousness, she thinks of Kitt and how sweet he had looked in his little overall ready for his first day at kindergarten. And Baby… I should never have given her that name…

It is warm in the sunshine of Kensington Gardens. Passers-by see a lady who has been indulging herself, perhaps secretly, with a box of cream-centre chocolates and then dozing beneath the trees. The box slips from her lap.

A soldier, on crutches and wearing hospital blue, picks up the box and tries to return it. When she does not respond, he places it upon the seat beside her and in doing so sees that she is clutching a chemist’s box. He understands the signs, having thought of that avenue of escape himself not long ago. Quickly collecting the evidence of the aspirin box, he stops some passers-by and asks for assistance for the lady who appears to have suffered some kind of seizure.