She glances involuntarily at his cranium and imagines it, beneath his thick hair, teeming with information. 'I don't know what time I'll finish. It's my first week, so-'

'All right, all right. I'll tell you what. You come and find me. I'll be at my office, in Soho. I'll be there all day and probably all night. So any time. Come whenever you're finished. I gave you my card. You still have it?'

Lexie nods.

'Good. The address is on there. So I'll see you Saturday?'

'Yes.'

He smiles and hesitates for a moment. Lexie wonders if he is going to kiss her. But he doesn't. He goes down the steps without a wave and crosses the street.

When Lexie reaches the fringes of Soho, she stops. She feels for Innes Kent's note and business card, which she has kept in her bag since the day she met him. She doesn't need to look but she does anyway. Editor, it reads, Elsewhere Magazine, Bayton Street, Soho, London W1.

Mrs Collins had been shocked that morning when Lexie came upon her on the stairs and let slip she was going to Soho later in the day. Lexie had asked her why. 'Soho?' Mrs Collins replied. 'It's full of bohemians and inebriates.' Then she narrowed her eyes. 'You,' she said, and pointed at Lexie, 'you're always asking why, aren't you? Curiosity killed the cat.'

Lexie laughed. 'But I'm not a cat, Mrs Collins,' she said, and ran the rest of the way down the stairs.

Lexie looks up the street that on her map is marked as Moor Street. It seems quiet for a place full of inebriates. There is one car parked at the side of the road; a man is standing in a doorway, reading a newspaper; there is an awning half closed above a shop; in a third-storey window a woman is leaning out to water some flowers in a window box.

Lexie takes one step into Soho, then another, and another. She has the odd sensation that she is motionless, that the pavement is moving under her and that the houses and buildings and street signs are reeling past. Her shoes make a clear toc-toc sound as she walks. The man with the newspaper looks up. The woman in the window pauses with her watering.

She walks past a shop with cheeses, big as wheels, stacked in the window. A man in a white apron is standing on the doorstep, shouting something in a foreign language to a woman with a baby across the street. He grins and nods at Lexie as she passes and she smiles back. Around the corner is a coffee-house, with men standing on the pavement outside, talking in a different language. They part, just enough to let her through, and one of them says something to her but she doesn't look back.

The buildings are crowded together, dark brick, the roads narrow. The gutters run and ripple with the earlier rain. Around another corner, and another, past a Chinese grocer's, where a woman is stacking pitted yellow fruits into a pyramid, past a doorway where two African men are sitting on chairs, laughing. A gaggle of sailors in blue and white uniforms are walking down the middle of the road, singing in staggered, off-key unison; a delivery boy on a bicycle has to swerve to avoid them and he turns to shout something over his shoulder. Two or three of the sailors seem to take exception and dart after him but the delivery boy pedals hard and disappears.

Lexie watches all this. She takes it all in. Everything she sees seems freighted with significance: the fluttering ribbon on one of the sailor's hats, a marmalade cat washing itself on a window, the billow of steam that gathers in the air outside that bakery, the chalked words Italian? Portuguese? on a board outside a shop, the strains of music, interspersed with laughter, that wreathe up from a grating in the pavement, the fur-collared coat and gold-clasped bag of a woman passing on the opposite pavement. Lexie drinks it in, every detail, with a feeling between panic and euphoria: this is perfect, this is all perfect, it couldn't be more perfect, but what if she can't remember it all, what if even the tiniest element were to slip from her?

She arrives rather suddenly outside the address in Bayton Street. It is a building squeezed between two taller buildings, with a symmetrical arrangement of sash windows and steps up to the door. Paint is peeling in curls off the sills and gutters. A pane on the second floor is missing.

Beyond the windows on the ground floor, Lexie can see a great number of people. Two men are peering at something they are holding up to the light; there is a woman on the phone, nodding, writing. Another woman is measuring a piece of paper with a ruler, talking over her shoulder to a man at the desk behind hers. In a corner of the room a group of people are bunched together, crowding round to look at some pages pinned to the wall. And there, next to the men holding something up to the light, jacketless, with his sleeves rolled up, is Innes.

Innes is, at this very moment, electrified by his magazine. The whole thing is being redesigned the look, the content, the feel of it. The relaunched issue will feature an artist whom Innes believes will make an impression, will leave her footprint on history, will be remembered long after all these people have crumbled to dust.

And dust is something that is preoccupying him greatly today. Because this artist works with white clay, brushed and planed so smooth it assumes the texture of warmed infant flesh, making it imperative that- Flesh? Innes's thoughts trip and stumble on the word. 'Flesh' is not a good word. Does it necessarily denote death? No, he decides, but the implication is enough to banish it from the paragraph he is privately composing in his head as he points out to the photographer that his lens must have been covered in dust when he shot this roll because the clarity, the slightly impure white that is the artist's signature, is by no means apparent.

Innes's mind is running on several planes. He is thinking, will the magazine masthead be all right at an angle like that, will it set off the plainness of the new font, I want the font to be plain, Helvetica perhaps, or Gill Sans, definitely not Times or Palatino, it must not fight for attention with the shot of the sculpture. He is thinking, warmed infant skin? No. Does he need the word 'infant' at all? Warmed skin? Warmed flesh? Does the juxtaposition of 'warmed' with 'flesh' expunge any overtones of death? He is thinking, will I trust Daphne to call the printers or shall I see to it myself?

As he crosses the room he looks out reflexively at the street, and so preoccupied is he with his magazine, with the impending font decision, with his article, that the image of the woman outside enters his mind and takes up a place there as a noise from the external world will incorporate itself into a sleeping man's dream. Innes immediately pictures this woman sitting with a typewriter at the desk next to his, her neat ankles crossed, her hand supporting her chin, that neck of hers turned so that she can look down at the street.

He stops in his tracks. The masthead must not be at an angle after all. It must be straight and at the bottom of the cover, justified right. It's never been done before! The font must be Gill Sans, bold, forty-eight point, lowercase, like so: elsewhere and the shot of the sculpture will float above as if the masthead, the name of the magazine itself, is the floor, the essential strut, the jumping-off point for the work. Which, in a way, Innes tells himself, it is!

'Stop!' Innes cries, at the layout man. 'Wait. Put it here. At the bottom. Like this. No, here. Gill Sans, bold, forty-eight point. Yes, Gill Sans. No. Perfect. Yes.'

The men with the contact sheet, Daphne on the phone, the visiting film critic and the layout man watch, unsurprised, as Innes stares at it for a moment, then bursts out through the door.

Suddenly Innes Kent is leaping down the steps. 'You,' he is saying. 'You took your time. Come here this instant.' He throws his arms wide.

Lexie blinks. She is still holding her map and his business card. But she moves towards him how can she not? and he envelops her in an embrace. Her face is pressed against the cloth of his suit and it registers somewhere that its nap is something familiar. She touches it with a fingertip, then pulls back to look. 'Felt,' she says.

'I beg your pardon?'

'Felt. Your suit is made of felt.'

'Yes. You like it?'

'I'm not sure.' She takes a step back to consider. 'I've never seen a suit made of felt before.'

'I know.' He grins. 'That's the point. My tailor wasn't at all sure either. But he came round to my way of thinking in the end.' He seizes her hand and sets off along the pavement. 'Right. Lunch. Are you hungry? I hope you're not one of those girls who doesn't eat.' He is talking almost as fast as he is walking. 'You don't look like you eat much. But I'm famished. I could eat a flock of sheep.'

'You don't look like you eat much either.'

'Ah, but I do. Appearances being deceptive, sometimes. You'll see.'

They pass at a fair pace along the street, down an alley, round a corner, past a man holding hands with two women, one on each side, both in shiny leather belts, all three of them laughing, past a shop with foreign papers in turning racks, past a group of girls carrying heavy sacks. Innes stops outside a restaurant. The sign above the door reads 'APOLLO', then nothing, 'APOLLO', then nothing, the word flashing on and off in blue neon. He opens the door. 'Here we are,' he says.

They go out of the sunshine, down a dark, twisting staircase to a low-ceilinged room. People are hunched at tables, with candles stuck into wine bottles flickering beneath their faces. In a corner, a man wearing a woman's feathered hat is playing the piano rather badly. Two other men sit squeezed on the stool with him and they are conducting a loud conversation above the player's head. It could, Lexie thinks, be any time of day at all outside mid-afternoon, the dead of night but down here you'd never know. There is a group of men, sitting around three small tables that have been pushed together. They greet Innes with shouts, raised wine glasses, expansive waves. Someone says, 'Is that a new one?' And 'What's happened to Daphne?'

Innes takes Lexie's arm and leads her to the back of the room. Catcalls and whistles follow them. They sit opposite each other in a booth.

'Who are they?' Lexie asks.

Innes turns to survey the group of men, who are now throwing candle stumps at the pianist and calling for more wine. 'They have many names,' he says, turning back. 'They call themselves artists but I'd say only one of them, no more than two, deserves that appellation. The rest are alcoholics and hangers-on. One is a photographer. One,' he says, leaning in close, 'is a woman who passes for a man. But only I know that.'

'Really?' Lexie is fascinated.

'Well,' he shrugs, 'me and her mother. And her lover, I'd imagine. Unless she's a very dim sort of girl. Now, what shall we eat?'

Lexie tries to look at the menu but she finds instead she's looking at Innes, at his blue felt suit, at his frown of concentration as he reads the menu, at the artists or alcoholics, one of whom now has the waitress a florid, large woman in her fifties on his lap, at the row of empty wine bottles that line the shelves, at the swirling patterns on the table-top.

'What's the matter?' Innes is touching her sleeve.

'Oh, I don't know,' she bursts out. 'I wish . . . I don't know. I wish I had a pair of red heels and some gold hoop earrings.'

Innes pulls a face. 'You wouldn't be sitting here with me if you did.'

'Wouldn't I?' She sees Innes is getting out his cigarettes. 'May I have one?'

He puts two into his mouth, watching her, strikes a match, holds it to the cigarettes until they ignite, then hands one over to her, all without taking his eyes off her face. 'You think you want hooped earrings but you don't.'

Lexie puts the cigarette to her own mouth. 'How do you know?'

'I know what you need,' he says, in a low tone, still looking her in the eye.

She stares at him, then bursts out laughing, without quite knowing why. What can he mean? Then she stops laughing because she has felt an unfamiliar sensation, low in her body, a kind of pull or drawing down. It is as if her blood and bones have heard him and are answering him. Then she laughs again and, as if he has understood, he laughs too.

He reaches out, cups a hand around her face, runs his thumb along her jawline.

Something unusual has happened to Innes. He does not fully understand it. But he can pinpoint when it began, this slight madness, this possession. When, a little over two weeks ago, he peered over a hedge and found a woman sitting on a tree stump. He looks at the restaurant table, at the floor, how it seems to feed and feed itself under all the furniture in the room. He feels for a moment the vastness of the city, the whole breathing breadth of it, and he feels as if he and this girl, this woman, are sitting together in its very centre, at the very eye of its storm, and he feels as if they might be the only people who are doing this, who have ever done this. He steals a half-glance at her, but only to be able to see her wrists, the way the sleeves drape over them, the way her hands are crossed over each other, the handbag placed on the bench next to her.

It seems at once peculiar and utterly right that she should be sitting there with him. He registers a vague desire to buy her something anything. A painting. A coat. A pair of gloves. He would like, he realises, to watch her unwrapping a gift, to see her fingers negotiating the ribbon and paper of a present. But he pushes the thought from his mind. He cannot mess it up, not this one, not her. He doesn't know why but he recognises that this one is different, this one is necessary to him. It's an unaccountable thought.

To distract himself, he talks. He tells her about his magazine, about his recent trip to Paris, where he bought several paintings and two sculptures. He does a little dealing in art, as a sideline. Has to, he says, because the magazine makes no money at all. He tells her the sculptures were by unknown artists and that this is what he finds exciting. Anyone, he says, can buy work of an established artist. She interrupts at this point to say, anyone with money, and he nods and says, true. But it takes skill and a degree of recklessness to take a punt on an unknown. He says he can't describe the feeling of walking into an artist's studio and thinking, yes, this is it, this is something. And then he spends a long time trying to describe just that.

He explains how he has ordered the work to be packed, in sawdust and then in newspaper and then in crates. When it's unpacked he has to take a soft brush, made from the hair of small mammals, and dust off the bits of sawdust. He doesn't trust anyone else with this job, which is, he admits, a little ridiculous. It means, he says, I spend most of my evenings in the back room at the office with a tiny paintbrush in my hand. Painting a painting? she says, and he laughs. Yes, I suppose so.

She doesn't ask much but she listens. God, but does she listen. She listens to him like he has never been listened to before. She listens as if every single word he says contains oxygen. She listens with widened eyes and an incline to her body. She listens so intently that he would like to lean towards her until their heads meet, at which point he would whisper: what? What is it you're hoping I'll say?

His father, he tells her, was English, but his mother was a mestizo from colonial Chile. Half Chilean, half Scottish, he explains, hence his Hibernian Christian name and also his black hair. This causes Lexie's eyes to widen the most. She was from Valparaiso, he says, and he watches Lexie mouth the word to herself, as if committing all this to memory. His father was sent out there to make his fortune. He was, Innes tells Lexie, the second son of a wealthy family. And he returned with a fortune and also a somewhat exotic wife. He died in a motor accident when Innes was two. Do you remember him at all, Lexie asks, and Innes says, no, he does not. His mother talked about returning to Chile then, he says. She never did. She wouldn't have been able to. Why not? Lexie wants to know. She always wants to know, it seems. Because there was nothing there any more, he says, nothing she knew. It's a different country now.

Ted walks, pushing the pram in front of him. He doesn't think he's ever been out on the Heath this early in the morning. Some time after five a.m. he had been woken by a hand on his arm, and for a moment he couldn't work out what was happening, why a woman was swaying above him in the dark room, why she was crying, what she wanted from him. Then it had all come back to him. It was Elina, holding their son, and she was asking, please. Please can you take him.

Ted hadn't quite been able to make sense of what she was saying a broken jumble of English and Finnish, with possibly some German mixed in, was coming out of her mouth, something about sleep, something about crying but the sense of it was clear, what he had to do was clear. He took the baby she was holding out to him; she collapsed on to the bed and, within seconds, she was asleep, her head not quite on the pillow.

And now Ted is pushing his son up Parliament Hill, slowly, slowly, because there is no rush, they aren't going anywhere special, he and his son, they are just walking for the sake of walking. The sun has risen to make the dew on the grass glint like shattered glass and Ted finds himself wishing that the baby was old enough for him to point this out, finds himself looking forward to a time when he and this child can walk together and discuss the visual effect of early-morning sun on dew, the astonishing number of people out jogging and dog-walking at this ungodly hour, the way you can already see that the day is going to be a hot one. It gives Ted a sting of pleasure to know that this will happen, that this child will be here, with them, that he is theirs. It seems an impossible concept. Ted still half expects someone to come along and put their hand on the pram handle and say, I'm sorry, you didn't really think you could keep him, did you?

A man older than Ted, perhaps in his forties, with skin tanned to the hue of oiled teak jogs past and gives Ted a quick, rueful smile. And Ted sees that the man, off down the path now, is a father too, that in his time he has probably done exactly what Ted is doing, the early-morning shift while the woman sleeps after a long night, the circuit with the pram and the sleeping baby. Just for a moment, Ted would like to run after him, would like to say something to him, to ask, does it get easier, does it pass?

Instead, he looks down at the baby. He is dressed, parcelled up, in a striped all-in-one. Alternating red and orange bands with green poppers running the length of his stomach and down his legs. Elina has said she doesn't understand why people dress babies only in white and pastels. She loathes pastels, Ted knows: the diluted cousins of real colour, she calls them, claims they make her teeth ache. Ted can remember the day they bought this outfit. Elina was only just pregnant, they were still speechless with the shock of it, when they passed a shop with tiny outfits strung from mock tree branches. Somewhere in East London it was; they were on their way to an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. They'd spent several minutes looking in at them, bemused, side by side but not speaking to each other. A green one with orange spots, a pink one with blue zigzags, a purple one, a turquoise one. Ted couldn't decide whether they seemed astonishingly small or unaccountably large. Then Elina had said, 'Right.' Bitten her lip. Folded her arms. Ted saw that she was steeling herself, she was making up her mind; he knew then that they were going to have this baby, that this child would be born, and he realised that up until this moment he hadn't been sure what Elina would decide, whether she did want it, whether she would go through with it. 'Right,' she said again, took two steps towards the shop door and pushed it open. Alone on the pavement, he felt his face break into a smile. They would be parents and their baby would always be dressed in colour. He watched through the window as Elina selected two outfits, still biting her lip, still with her arms folded, like a woman psyching herself up for a high dive, and he saw that she would stay with him, that she wasn't going to disappear off to New York or Hong Kong or wherever, as he sometimes feared. He remembers feeling as though he had X-ray vision, watching her there in the shop, that he could look at her and see through her body to the curled being suspended inside.

He is smiling now, thinking about it, as he looks down at his son. The baby's eyes waver towards his, seem to lock with his, and then they waver away to focus on something just past Ted's head. Ted cannot imagine, cannot comprehend what it is like to see the world for the first time. To have never seen a wall, a washing-line, a tree. He is momentarily filled with a kind of pity for his son. What a task lies ahead of him: to learn literally everything.

Ted reaches the apex of Parliament Hill. Ten past six in the morning. He inhales a lungful of air. He glances down at the tiny, bundled form in the pram and sees that the baby has fallen asleep, arms flung wide. He sees that inside the pram are pinned abstract black and white sketches, geometric shapes, probably done by Elina. She said something the other day about how babies of this age only see in black and white and, as Ted is stepping backwards to sit down on a bench, he is wondering how scientists can possibly know this.

He is stepping back. Three or four steps. Towards a bench he knows is there. He recalls this later. Because although he is sure of what he is and what he is doing a father of a young baby, out for a walk he cannot be entirely sure that he isn't a child, standing at the window of his yellow-curtained bedroom, listening to the surprising sound of his mother arguing with someone who has come to the door. Ted stands at his window, gripping the fabric of the curtain, looking down into the street, where a man is stepping backwards, three or four steps, off the pavement and into the street, and the man is looking up at the house, scanning the windows, his hand shading his eyes, and when he sees Ted, he waves. There is something frantic, urgent, in the way he waves. As if the man has an important message for him, as if he is beckoning him down to the street.

Ted lands on the bench with a thud. The recollection is gone. The image of the man walking backwards outside his house is gone. Ted looks at the silver pram handle, where the sun is glancing off it in sharp rays; he looks at the grass, the long swaths of it still glistening; he looks at the ponds at the bottom of the hill, and as he looks he is aware that there is a space at the centre of his vision. The periphery is clear but he cannot see the very thing he looks at, as if a hole has been burnt in the centre of a lens, as if he is looking through a shattered windscreen, and he realises that he is having one of the visual disturbances he used to suffer from as a child. A 'bizzy', his mother used to call them. This hasn't happened for years, and the old familiarity of it almost makes him laugh. The crackling, fiery bonfire that flares in front of his eyes, illuminating whatever he looks at, the prickling sensation down his left arm. He can't remember the last time this happened when he was twelve, perhaps, thirteen? Ted knows it will pass, that it means nothing, that it's just a neurological blip, a momentary confusion of pathways. But he keeps a firm hold of the pram handle, as if to ground himself. He is tempted to ring his mother and say, guess what? I'm having a bizzy. Bizzies once united him and his mother. She watched him, eagle-like, and if he so much as closed his eyes, she would be there beside him, saying, 'What is it? What's wrong? Is it happening again?' She took Ted to doctors, optometrists, consultants. She tracked down specialist after specialist with detective zeal. He had examinations, scans, referrals, X-rays, and after each of these appointments which meant a day off school for Ted he and his mother would go for tea. So instead of maths or chemistry or history, he would be sitting in Claridge's or the Savoy, eating sandwiches and cream cakes as his mother poured the milk. The doctors could find nothing wrong with him, they told his mother. It's just one of those things. He'll probably grow out of it. And meanwhile his mother wrote notes to the school, excusing Ted from games, from rugby, from swimming lessons. Ted told his father once that it was like seeing angels, like watching sunlight on moving water. His father had fidgeted in his chair, asked him if he wanted to bowl a few cricket balls. He didn't go in for fanciful talk.

Just as Ted knew it would, the refracting blaze at the centre of his vision breaks slowly into pieces and these pieces float to the edges of what he sees and then, finally, vanish. And Ted is back to the way he was, a man sitting on a bench, holding on to a pram. The baby is stirring in his wrappings, a hand flailing out, curled fingers brushing against the sketches done by his mother. Ted, taking this as a sign from the baby, stands and starts to push him back down the hill.

Elina is in the garden. Daytime. The sun horizontal above her, the plant pots, the coiled hose, that old tin bucket all standing in inky pools of their own shadows. She is sitting cross-legged on a rug and, on the grass next to her, her shadow is struggling to hold its shape. She watches it for a moment, fighting a losing battle with its surface, the millions of blades of grass all growing in different directions, at different rates. The shadow's edges are splintered, ragged, like something lost at sea.

Elina looks away from it and, as she does so, sees that she is holding a rattle in her right hand: a complex thing of coloured rods, bells, strips of elastic, beads inside balls. Beneath where it is suspended, the baby is lying. On his back, his eyes fixed on her. The frank interrogation of his gaze gives her a start.

She moves the rattle from side to side and the coloured beads ricochet around inside their clear globes. The effect on the baby is instantaneous and remarkable. His limbs stiffen, his eyes spring wide, his lips part in a perfect round O. It is as if he's been studying a manual on how to be a human being, with particular attention to the chapter, 'Demonstrating Surprise'. She shakes it again and again and the baby's limbs move like pistons, up, down, in, out. She thinks: This is what mothers do.

A clashing noise from the house makes her look up. And there is Ted, in the kitchen window, framed in the act of lifting a pan from the stove. He is here this week, she remembers now, he's taken time off work.

She turns back to the baby. She touches the hair on his temples, which is inexplicably turning from dark to light, she strokes the curve of his cheek, she rests a hand on his chest and feels his lungs fill, flatten, fill, flatten.

A squirrel with a grey-flecked tail darts from a flowerpot to the wall of her studio, its clawed feet gripping the wood as it shunts itself up to the roof and then away. The scrolled white petals of the calla lilies in the pot shiver with the vibrations.

She must have turned her head too quickly because the colours of the garden, of the baby's suit seem to blaze brighter for a few seconds. And now Ted is coming out of the house and, in the bright sunlight, the shape of him seems to shimmer and bifurcate and, for a moment, it is as if there is another person there, hovering just behind him. He walks across the grass and the shape seems to follow him.

'OK,' he is saying, 'get this down you. Pasta al limone, made with fresh-' He catches sight of her face. 'What's up?'

'Nothing.' Elina pulls her mouth into a smile. It is important to reassure him. 'I think I need my sunglasses.'

The house is dark and shadowed after the glare of the garden. Unfamiliar, almost. She stares about her as if seeing it for the first time. That vase, the orange bowl, the jute rug with a million tiny loops. She tiptoes past all these things that are hers but don't look like hers, through the kitchen and up the stairs. On the landing, she thinks: I am alone in the house. She stops for a moment, one hand resting on the banisters. She feels light, insubstantial, the air circulating around her empty arms.

She has tried to talk to Ted. She had thought it might help. He is at home this week, and the next. They are together, all day and all night, the two of them and the baby. She sits on the sofa, mostly, and breastfeeds. Ted cooks. Ted loads the washing-machine. Ted takes the baby out for walks in his pram and then she can sleep. She sleeps in short, snatched bursts on the sofa, in a chair, in bed if she's lucky and these naps are animated by hectic, speedy dreams, most often on the subject of losing the baby or being unable to reach the baby, or sometimes there are abstract images of fountains. Fountains of red liquid. These she wakes from with a jolt, with a galloping heart.

So Ted is at home, with her, the shoot is over, and she has tried to talk to him. She tried last night as they sat at the table, eating a takeaway. Ted had been cradling his son, hand bent back on itself so that the baby was able to keep his grip on Ted's thumb and she had liked to see that, that Ted had thought that the baby needed to hold his thumb and should continue to do so. And she had been close to him and she had put down her fork and touched his arm and said, 'Ted, do you know how much it was that I lost?'

'How much of what?' he'd said, without looking up from his plate.

'You know.' She waited before saying: 'Blood.'

His head swung up to look at her and she had waited some more. But he hadn't said anything.

'I mean,' she prompted, 'at the birth. The caesarian. Did the doctors tell you because-'

'Four pints,' he said flatly.

There had been a pause. Elina pictured those four pints lined up, as if in milk bottles: clear, greenish glass holding that startling, jewel-scarlet liquid. In the fridge, placed on a shelf, on a doorstep, in a supermarket display cabinet. Four pints. She toyed with her food, took a mouthful, stole a glance at Ted. He was sitting with his head bent, looking either at the baby or at his plate, she couldn't tell which, his hair obscuring his face.

'I couldn't see you at the time,' she'd tried again. 'You must have been over near the baby.'

He gave a noise of assent.

She picked up a silver-foil carton and, seeing it was full of chopped onion, put it down again. 'Could you see much?' she had asked, because she wanted to know, she wanted to hear him say it, she wanted to get whatever was in his head out so they could look at it together, so they could try to thaw this thing that had seemed to solidify between them. He hadn't answered so she had said, 'Ted? How much did you see?' He had put down his fork and said: 'I don't really want to talk about this.'

'But I do,' she'd said.

'Well, I don't.'

'But it's important, Ted. We shouldn't just brush it away as if it never happened. I want to understand is that so bad? I want to know why it happened and-'

He pushed back his chair and left the table. In the kitchen he turned, the tiny form of the baby clutched in his arms. His face had been stricken, unrecognisable, and Elina had felt a hot pulse of fear for him, for the baby. She wanted to say, OK, forget it, let's not talk about it, just sit down. Most of all, she wanted to say, Ted, give me the baby.

'They don't know why it happened.' He was almost shouting. 'I I I asked them the next day and they said they didn't know, that it was just one of those things.'

'All right,' she tried to say soothingly. 'It doesn't-'

'And I said, you can't say that, don't you dare say that. She nearly died, for Chrissake, and all you can say is just one of those things? You let her go for three days before realising the baby's jammed in some impossible position and then you let some fucking student carve her up and-'

He had stopped short. He stood in the kitchen and she had thought for a moment that he might cry. But he didn't. He came towards her, where she sat at the table. He handed her the baby and, without looking at her, he left the room. She heard him go upstairs. There was silence for a while. Elina sat tight on her chair. Then she had heard him opening cupboards, shutting doors and from these sounds she had known he was getting ready to go out for a run. She had heard him descend the stairs, then the front door slam and she had heard his feet, pounding the pavement, as he sprinted away up the street.

She finds the sunglasses on the bathroom shelf and is just about to pick them up when she realises that her body is moving quickly: it is turning and walking her towards the door, it is starting to carry her down the stairs. It takes her a second or two to work out why. The baby is crying, a thin, winding cry snaking in through the bathroom window. It surprises her that her body had heard and recognised this before she was aware of it.

Out in the garden, Ted is sitting on the rug. He has picked up the baby and is holding him gingerly in both hands. The baby is a tiny, angry automaton, legs and hands working like levers in the air, the cries regular, each one crescendoing at shriek-pitch.

Elina moves over the grass, bends and lifts him with one movement. His body feels rigid and his cries broaden into outrage. How could you? he seems to be saying. How could you leave me like that? She places him over her shoulder and walks to the garden wall and back, saying, 'Sssh, sssh, it's all right, sssh, sssh.'

'Sorry.' Ted is standing up now. 'I didn't know what to . . . I wasn't sure if he was hungry or not or whether . . .'

'It's all right.' She passes him on her way back to the wall and sees that he is watching her, anxiety gathered in his face.

'Do you want me to take him?' Ted says.