The pains started on a hot night in high summer, a little after supper, and Thomas went out to the garden to wait the way a man goes out to wait for a verdict.
He had done this three times. He knew how it went. With Edmund it had gone on through a night and a day, and he had walked the lane until he had worn the grass off one side of it. With Alys it had been quicker and he had been less afraid, and been punished for that, in his own estimation, by Margery. He remembered Margery's night in pieces that did not join up: Cecily's voice gone flat and quiet, the basin, the colour of Victoria's face, a quarter of an hour in the middle when nobody would look at him. He had told nobody, not even Victoria, that he still woke from it some nights.
So he sat on Wat's bench by the kitchen door with his hands between his knees, and he braced for that night again, and he waited for the moment when the voices upstairs would change.
Aldith arrived an hour in, in a handcart.
She had not walked further than the fever-house door since the spring. Joan's brother Wilf was pushing the cart, red in the face and visibly regretting every decision that had brought him to it, and Aldith was sitting in it upright with a blanket over her knees, as if it were a litter and she a bishop.
"Don't look at me like that," she said to Thomas. "I'm not here to work. Cecily's got the work. I'm here to sit in the corner."
"You should be in bed."
"I've been in bed. It's very dull and nobody in it has a child coming." She held out a hand and he helped her down, and she weighed almost nothing, and they both pretended not to notice. "I saw her through the last one. I'll see her through this one. I'm owed the ending, and so is she."
Cecily met them at the top of the stairs and looked at her old teacher with an expression of pure exasperation, and then went and fetched the good chair from the other room without a word, and set it in the corner, and Aldith sat down in it like a woman taking her place at a table.
The door shut. Thomas went back down to the bench.
It was quiet up there. That was the first thing that frightened him.
With the others there had been noise — Victoria's voice, sharp and furious in the way she was furious at anything she could not govern, and Cecily answering, and feet. Now there was very little. Once he heard Aldith say something low and Victoria laugh, actually laugh, and then go silent. Once he heard the floorboards. Then nothing for a long while, so that he stood up, and sat down, and stood up again, and found Alys at the kitchen door in her nightshirt watching him with grave attention.
"Is Mam all right?"
"Yes," he said, and did not know if it was true. "Go back to bed."
"You're walking about."
"I walk about. It's what fathers do. Bed."
She went, slowly, looking back. He heard her tell Edmund on the stairs that Da was walking about, in the tone of someone filing a report.
He had got as far as the gate and back, and as far as the gate again, when he heard the baby.
It was not a thin cry. It was a large, indignant, thoroughly healthy bellow, and it went on, and under it he heard Cecily say something brisk and Victoria say something brisker, and he stood at the gate with his hand on Ralf's latch and found that he could not move his legs.
"Four hours," Cecily said, coming down to fetch him, with the satisfaction of a woman whose evening had gone exactly to plan for once. "Four hours and nothing of any kind. No bleeding to speak of. She's done this so often now that her body's stopped asking anyone's opinion."
"That's all?"
"That's all." Cecily looked at him more closely, and her face changed. "You thought it would be the other night again."
He did not answer. He didn't need to.
"So did I," Cecily said, quietly. "For the first hour. I had everything laid out for it. Every cloth." She put a hand on his arm for a moment, which she did not often do. "It wasn't. Go up."
Victoria was sitting up against the pillows, flushed and damp and furious at nothing in particular, which was how he knew she was well. The baby was in the crook of her arm, enormous and red and already asleep.
"It was frankly insulting," she said, "given the other three."
Thomas sat on the edge of the bed. He could not say anything for a while. She let him not say it.
In the corner, Aldith had her eyes shut and her hands folded on the blanket.
"She did nothing at all," Victoria said, not lowering her voice. "She sat there and told me I was making a fuss, and that the last one had been worse, and that she'd delivered calves with less complaint. That was the whole of her contribution."
"It was the right contribution," said Aldith, without opening her eyes. "You laughed. A woman who's laughing isn't clenching. I've been doing this forty years." She opened them, then, and looked at the baby across the room for some time. "He's a good size. He'll do." A pause. "That's my last one. I'll not see another lying-in from the inside. I wanted it to be a dull one. Thank you for obliging me."
Nobody said anything to that. Wilf took her home in the cart in the grey before dawn, and she slept the whole way, and Cecily walked beside it.
The argument about the name lasted three days.
Thomas wanted Walter, for Wat. He said so on the first morning, over the cradle, and was surprised by how much he wanted it.
"No," said Victoria.
"He'd have liked it."
"He'd have hated it, and you know he would." She did not look up from the child. "He made Edmund a bench and refused to let anyone tell the boy where it came from. A thing a man makes for a child shouldn't come with a story attached. He said that. You were there." Now she looked up. "A name's a thing you make for a child. You want to hang Wat on this one so he has to carry him about. I won't do it. Let him be his own."
Thomas wanted to argue. He found he could not, because it was Wat's own sentence and she had quoted it to the word.
They named him Hugh, which belonged to nobody in particular. It was the first of the children's names that came with no story, and Thomas thought afterward that this had suited the boy better than anything else they could have given him.
Hugh was large, placid, and slept.
He slept, in fact, to a degree that alarmed Thomas badly in the first fortnight, until Cecily explained with some asperity that a baby who fed well and gained weight and woke to be fed was not showing a symptom, he was showing a personality.
"Edmund screamed for the best part of a year."
"Edmund was Edmund. This one is not Edmund. That is how children work and I've explained it to you four times now."
Edmund was six, Alys four, Margery two, and the house, which had been extended twice and would be extended again, arrived that summer at the particular state of controlled disaster it would keep for the next ten years. There was never a quiet room in it. There was always at least one person upset about something trivial. It took an amount of daily labour that would have appalled him at thirty.
"You're smiling at nothing again," Victoria said one evening, over the wreckage of a supper.
"I'm not smiling at nothing."
"You're smiling at a floor with porridge on it."
"I'm smiling at a floor with porridge on it," he agreed.
She looked at him for a while across the table, the four of them asleep or nearly asleep above them, the porridge drying on the boards.
"I was frightened too," she said. "All the way through. Right up until he shouted." She picked up her cup. "I didn't tell you because you'd have walked another furrow in the lane."
"I walked one anyway."
"I know," said Victoria. "Alys reported it."