Mr Hunter was handsome, in a rough, slightly battered kind of way, which actually made him more good-looking than ifhe'd been conventionally attractive. Dr Hunter had met him when she was a senior registrar 'at the old Royal Infirmary', although he wasn't from Edinburgh. He was from Glasgow, 'a Weegie', Dr Hunter laughed, which was generally intended as an insult by people from Edinburgh but maybe Dr Hunter didn't know that, being English. He had courted her for a long time before she 'caved in' and married him. Mr Hunter was 'something in the leisure industry' but exactly what was unclear to Reggie.

Dr Hunter and Mr Hunter seemed to get along pretty well, although Reggie didn't really have anything to compare their relationship to except for Mum and Gary (uninspiring) and Mum and the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary (horrible). Dr Hunter laughed at Mr Hunter's shortcomings and never seemed to get annoyed with him about anything. 'Jo's too easygoing for her own good,' Mr Hunter said. Mr Hunter, for his part, would bang into the house with a bunch ofnice flowers or a bottle ofwine and say, 'Hiya, doll,' to Dr Hunter like a comedy Glaswegian and give her a big kiss and wink at Reggie and say, 'Behind every great woman there's some shite guy, Reggie, don't forget that.'

Most of the time Mr Hunter behaved as if he couldn't see Reggie at all, but then sometimes he would take her by surprise and be really nice to her and tell her to sit down at the kitchen table while he made her a coffee and tried to make rather awkward conversation ('So what's your story, Reggie?') although usually before she could start telling him her (not inconsiderable) 'story' his phone would ring and he would leap up and pace around the room while he talked ('Hey, Phil, howy'are doing? 1 was wondering if we could get together, I've got a proposition I'd like to run by you.').

Mr Hunter called the baby 'the bairn' and tossed him in the air a lot, which made the baby shriek with excitement. Mr Hunter said he couldn't wait until 'the bairn' could talk and run around and go to football matches with him and Dr Hunter said, 'Time enough for all that. Make the most of every second, they're gone before you know it.' If the baby hurt himself Mr Hunter picked him up and said, 'Come on, wee man, you're fine, it was nothing,' in an encouraging but not very sympathetic way whereas Dr Hunter hugged him and kissed him and said, 'Poor wee scone,' which was a phrase she had got from Reggie (who had in turn got it from Mum). When she said Scottish words and phrases Dr Hunter said them in a (pretty good) Scottish accent so it was almost like she was bilingual.

The baby liked Mr Hunter well enough but he worshipped Dr Hunter. When she held him in her arms his eyes never left her face, as ifhe was absorbing every detail for a test he might have to sit later.

'I'm a goddess to him now,' Dr Hunter laughed, 'but one day I'll be the annoying old woman who wants to be taken to the supermarket.'

'Och, no, Dr H.,' Reggie said. 'I think you're always going to be a deity for him.'

'Shouldn't you have stayed on at school, Reggie?' Dr Hunter asked, a little frown worrying her pretty features. Reggie imagined this was how she was with her patients ('You really have to lose some weight, Mrs MacTavish.').

'Yes, 1 should,' Reggie said.

'Come on, sunshine,' Reggie said to the baby, lifting him out of his high-chair and planting him on the floor. She had to keep an eye on him all the time because one moment he'd be sitting contentedly trying to work out how to eat his fat little foot and the next he'd be commando-crawling towards the nearest hazard. All he wanted to do was put things in his mouth and you could be sure if there was an object small enough to choke on then the baby would make a beeline for it and Reggie had to be constantly on the lookout for buttons and coins and grapes -ofwhich he was particularly fond. All his grapes had to be cut in half which was a real chore but Dr Hunter had told her about a patient whose baby had died when a grape got stuck in his windpipe and no one had been able to help him, Dr Hunter said, as ifthat was worse than the dying itself. That was when Reggie got Dr Hunter to teach her not just the Heimlich manoeuvre but mouth-to-mouth, how to stop arterial bleeding and what to do for a burn. And electrocution and accidental poisoning. (And drowning, of course.) 'You could go on a first-aid course,' Dr Hunter said, 'but they do such an awful lot ofunnecessary bandaging. We can do some strapping of wrists and arms, a basic head bandage, but you don't need anything more complicated than that. Really, you just need to know how to save a life.' She brought home a CPR dummy from the surgery so that Reggie could practise resuscitation. 'We call him Eliot,' Dr Hunter said, 'but no one can remember why.'

When Reggie thought about the baby who had choked on a grape she imagined him stoppered up like the old-fashioned lemonade bottle with a marble in its neck that she had seen in the museum. Reggie liked museums. Clean, well-lighted places.

Mr Hunter was very easygoing about the baby. He said babies were 'virtually indestructible' and that Dr Hunter worried too much, 'but then you can't expect anything else given her history'. Reggie didn't know anything about Dr Hunter's history (imagined herself saying, 'What's your story, Dr H.?' but it didn't sound right). All Reggie really knew was that William Morris sat on the bookshelf in Dr Hunter's living room while her own father was officially declared junk and lived in the old curiosity shop on the top floor. Reggie herself thought babies were extremely destructible and after the grape story she became particularly paranoid about the baby not being able to breathe. But what else could she expect, given her history? (,The breath,' Dr Hunter said, 'the breath is everything.')

Sometimes Reggie lay in bed at night and held the breath in her lungs until she thought they would burst so that she could feel what it was like, imagining her mother anchored underwater by her hair like some new, mysterious strain of seaweed.

'How long does it take to die from drowning?' she asked Dr Hunter.

'Well, there are quite a few variables,' Dr Hunter said, 'water temperature and so on, but roughly speaking, five to ten minutes. Not long.'

Long enough.

Reggie placed the baby's dishes in the draining rack. The sink was at the window and overlooked a field at the foot of Blackford Hill. Sometimes there were horses in the field, sometimes not. Reggie had no idea where the horses went when they weren't there. Now it was winter they wore dull green blankets like Barbour jackets.

Sometimes when Dr Hunter came home early enough, before the winter dark descended, they would take the dog and the baby into the field and the baby would crawl around on the rough grass and Reggie would pursue Sadie round the field because she loved it when you pretended to chase her and Dr Hunter would laugh and say to the baby, 'Come on, run, run like the wind!' and the baby would just look at her because of course he had no idea what running was. If the horses were in the field they remained aloof as if they ran, which they must surely do, in secret.

The horses were big nervy creatures and Reggie didn't like the way their lips curled back over their huge yellow teeth, she imagined them mistaking the baby's excited fist for an apple and biting it off his arm.

'Horses worry me as well,' Dr Hunter said. 'They always seem so sad, don't you think? Although not as sad as dogs.' Reggie thought dogs were pretty happy creatures but of course Dr Hunter saw the potential for sadness everywhere. 'How sad,' Dr Hunter said when the leaves came off the trees. 'How sad,' she said when a song came on the radio (Beth Nielsen Chapman). 'How sad,' when Sadie whined quietly at the sight of her getting ready to leave the house. Even when it had been the baby's birthday and they had all been so happy eating cake and pink ice-cream, afterwards as they drove home Dr Hunter said, 'His first birthday, how sad, he'll never be a baby again.'