She hadn’t planned it beforehand. She’d been standing beside the creche while Edward was paying the bill, he’d had to go into the kitchen to do it as they were very slow about bringing it to the table. No one was watching her: the domino-playing boys were absorbed in their game and the children were riveted to the television. She’d just suddenly reached out her hand, past the Wise Men and through the door of the stable, picked the child up and put it into her purse.

She turned it over in her hands. Separated from the dwarfish Virgin and Joseph, it didn’t look quite so absurd. Its diaper was cast as part of it, more like a tunic, it had glass eyes and a sort of page-boy haircut, quite long for a newborn. A perfect child, except for the chip out of the back, luckily where it would not be noticed. Someone must have dropped it on the floor.

You could never be too careful. All the time she was pregnant, she’d taken meticulous care of herself, counting out the vitamin pills prescribed by the doctor and eating only what the books recommended. She had drunk four glasses of milk a day, even though she hated milk. She had done the exercises and gone to the classes. No one would be able to say she had not done the right things. Yet she had been disturbed by the thought that the child would be born with something wrong, it would be a mongoloid or a cripple, or a hydrocephalic with a huge liquid head like the ones she’d seen taking the sun in their wheelchairs on the lawn of the hospital one day. But the child had been perfect.

She would never take that risk, go through all that work again. Let Edward strain his pelvis till he was blue in the face; “trying again,” he called it. She took the pill every day, without telling him. She wasn’t going to try again. It was too much for anyone to expect of her.

What had she done wrong? She hadn’t done anything wrong, that was the trouble. There was nothing and no one to blame, except, obscurely, Edward; and he couldn’t be blamed for the child’s death, just for not being there. Increasingly since that time he had simply absented himself. When she no longer had the child inside her he had lost interest, he had deserted her. This, she realized, was what she resented most about him. He had left her alone with the corpse, a corpse for which there was no explanation.

“Lost,” people called it. They spoke of her as having lost the child, as though it was wandering around looking for her, crying plaintively, as though she had neglected it or misplaced it somewhere. But where? What limbo had it gone to, what watery paradise? Sometimes she felt as if there had been some mistake, the child had not been born yet. She could still feel it moving, ever so slightly, holding on to her from the inside.

Sarah placed the baby on the rock beside her. She stood up, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt. She was sure there would be more flea bites when she got back to the hotel. She picked up the child and walked slowly towards the well, until she was standing at the very brink.

Edward, coming back up the path, saw Sarah at the well’s edge, her arms raised above her head. My God, he thought, she’s going to jump. He wanted to shout to her, tell her to stop, but he was afraid to startle her. He could run up behind her, grab her… but she would hear him. So he waited, paralyzed, while Sarah stood immobile. He expected her to hurtle downwards, and then what would he do? But she merely drew back her right arm and threw something into the well. Then she turned, half stumbling, towards the rock where he had left her and crouched down. “Sarah,” he said. She had her hands over her face; she didn’t lift them. He kneeled so he was level with her. “What is it? Are you sick?”

She shook her head. She seemed to be crying, behind her hands, soundlessly and without moving. Edward was dismayed. The ordinary Sarah, with all her perversity, was something he could cope with, he’d invented ways of coping. But he was unprepared for this. She had always been the one in control.

“Come on,” he said, trying to disguise his desperation, “you need some lunch, you’ll feel better.” He realized as he said this how fatuous it must sound, but for once there was no patronizing smile, no indulgent answer.

“This isn’t like you,” Edward said, pleading, as if that was a final argument which would snap her out of it, bring back the old calm Sarah.

Sarah took her hands away from her face, and as she did so Edward felt cold fear. Surely what he would see would be the face of someone else, someone entirely different, a woman he had never seen before in his life. Or there would be no face at all. But (and this was almost worse) it was only Sarah, looking much as she always did.

She took a Kleenex out of her purse and wiped her nose. It is like me, she thought. She stood up and smoothed her skirt once more, then collected her purse and her collapsible umbrella.

“I’d like an orange,” she said. “They have them, across from the ticket office. I saw them when we came in. Did you find your bird?”

It must have taken Rob several minutes to notice that the sun was in her eyes. When he did notice, because she was squinting, he moved her sideways a little so she could see better. He felt the padded arms of the chair, where her thin bare arms were kept at rest by the leather straps, to make sure they were not overheated. She should have a hat, they were always being warned about sunburn. So far it had always been sunny during the day, though there had been a thunderstorm the night before. But no hat had been wheeled out with her.

“They forgot your hat,” he said to her. “That was stupid of them, wasn’t it?” Then he offered her another piece of the wooden puzzle, giving her time to consider it and to look also at the half-finished puzzle on the tray.

“This way?” he said. He watched her left hand for the slight movement towards him that would say yes. It was one of the few controlled movements she could make.

He also watched her eyes and face. She could move her eyes, though her head jerked around if she tried to swivel it too fast. But she had little control of the muscles of her face, so he could never tell if she was trying to smile or whether the contortion of her mouth was caused by the spontaneous knotting and unknotting of her jumpy flesh, the body that would not respond to the enormous will he saw, or thought he saw, sealed up in her eyes like some small fierce animal captured in a metal net. She couldn’t get out! She was strapped into the wheelchair, prisoned in her cage of braces, trays, steel wheels, but only because she was strapped into her own body as into some bumpy, sickening carnival ride. Let out of her chair, she would thrash, topple, flail, hurtle through space. It was one of the worst cases they’d ever taken, Pam the physiotherapist had told him.

But everyone agreed she was bright, very bright; it was amazing really what she could do. She could say yes by moving her left hand, and therefore she could play games, answer questions, indicate what she wanted. It just needed more work than usual on the part of the counsellor, and you had to do a lot of guessing. It took time, but after she had beaten him twice in a row at chequers, with no collusion on his part, Rob was willing to spend the time. He wondered about teaching her to play chess. But there were too many pieces, too many moves, a game would take weeks. He thought of her, sitting impatiently inside her body, waiting for him to get to the piece she wanted to move and figure out where she wanted to move it.

She hadn’t said anything. He turned the puzzle piece around. Yes, her hand said immediately, and he fitted it in. It was a giraffe, two giraffes, a funny-animal picture, a caricature. It struck him that she might not know what a giraffe was; she might never have seen a real one or even a picture of one.