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squeeze her eyes shut, feel and think about only the pain. The pain is everything. While it happens, there is nothing else. When it fades, she flings herself up and away from the bed, and crosses to the wall. Four steps between the bedstead and the wall. She is in just her shift. She is sweating. The fire is lit. She comes to the wall and stops. Four steps between the bedstead and the wall. Four steps between the pains.
    She has no idea of time.
    She rests her forearm on the wallpaper, rests her head on her arm. Closes her eyes. The pain builds. She braces herself, stiffening. Behind her Mrs. Clack and Mrs. Bradley talk, too quiet for her to hear. Mrs. Bradley costs money. The pain screams, roars, and then it softens, aches and fades. She pushes away from the wall. Four steps back to the bedstead.
    “What is it?” Amelia demands. “What are you saying?”
    Their faces turn to her. But then the next pain hits, and she grabs the bedstead with both hands, and cries out. When she opens her eyes again, there is blood on the floor.
    “Sorry,” she says to the doctor. The doctor costs more money. His shining things are laid out on a cloth on the bedside table.
    He shakes his head, dismisses this with a tut. Mrs. Clack has gone. Mrs. Bradley stands ready, arms and hands bare and scrubbed. The doctor wets a wad of lint with chloroform.
    She wants to ask him, Am I worse at this than other women? Do I make more fuss, have I made more mess than everybody else? Are there other women who don’t work properly too? Do other women fail so miserably at the first hurdle?
    He screws the lid back onto the chloroform bottle, drops the lint into the apparatus. He slides a hand under her neck, steadying her. His hands are clean and cold.
    “Now,” he says, “breathe deep.”
    The apparatus over her mouth and nose, she heaves in a spirituous, strange breath. And the world collapses into darkness.
    When she surfaces again, she can’t think what has happened.
    A light has been left burning. There’s an oily, mineral taste in her mouth. She thinks for a moment that she has had some kind of accident—that she’s been hit by a bus—she feels sore all over. But then it returns to her—the hours compacted down to an eternity of pain, the failure, and then nothing.
    She turns her head and sees the baby in the crib.
    For a long time she just looks at the baby. Its skin is a reddish-pink colour, and there’s a sticky tuft of dark hair on its scalp. It looks raw, underdone. Its head is squashed into a strange shape, like it’s wearing askullcap made of its own skin. It’s not pretty. It is very far from pretty. But it is there, and it is real, and it lives. It sleeps there with a kind of quiet prepossession, as if entirely sure of its place in the world.
    She reaches out to touch it, to smoothe down its sticky hair. The movement makes the bedsprings creak, stabs her belly, sends a flicker of pain down between her legs. She sucks in a breath. Breathes it out. The pain fades. She reaches out again. Her back and shoulders ache.
    She touches the child. It is warm. Its skin is dry.
    I have to love you, Amelia thinks. Whatever else happens, it is my job to love you now.
    The old man must have been listening out for her, because she hears him come into the room now, tentatively, but without knocking. She doesn’t look round.
    “Are you all right?”
    She nods; the movement hurts. Even her neck is sore.
    He comes round the bed, and sits down beside her. He reaches out and touches the clean new cheek with his blackened hand.
    “What’ll we call him?” His voice is choked.
    She didn’t know that it was a boy.
    “Don’t bother him. Let him sleep.”
    The old man hesitates, lifts his hand away.
    “He’ll be William,” she says. “After his father. William Arthur Hastings. His son.”

Knox Road, Battersea
November 15, 1925
    A LADDER DESCENDS into the dark. He pulls himself down, hand over hand, deep into the water. He flips round into a flooded