It was mid-July when Bruce and Maisey came home for the summer, Maisey with her hair finally and fully 'up.' In those calm July days, Maisey called often, and took to Persis with much of the fondness of a cat for cream. They competed amicably for Birdie and when they were not so engaged, they sat in the drawing room and talked sometimes of music and the continued thinness of Mrs. Craig's choir, sometimes of favourite books, never of that evening when the rue and the jasmine had been cut back.

It was with no more warning than the sudden foreclosing and purpling of the sky a little earlier than it had been doing, the month turned over and brought with it a sudden onslaught of rain. Persis watching it, found herself saying, 'when did that start?' and the other women followed her gaze. It was not, after all, the intensive rain of a short shower, but the deliberate and measured rain of a storm that did not mean to let up.

'We ought to have sent you home when this began, Maisey,' said Persis when after half an hour the rain had not let up.

'We're due to have more rain than God gave Noah when the Flood began.'

'I hope not,' said Una.

'Oh it will let up before long and I'll be out of your way,' Maisey unconcernedly said.

It was Persis's estimation that proved more accurate in the end. Una started on supper, talking to the others over her shoulder, factoring Maisey's presence into the measure of the cooking and ultimately sending Maisey through to the drawing room to play for them on the piano in an effort to clear the kitchen of too many hands. Over the sound of it Persis hovered on the edge of a conversation she had been meaning to start all day, and was on the verge of doing so when the telephone rang, and after waiting a moment, Una said, 'that's ours, I'll have to answer it,' and crossed the kitchen to the 'phone.

'No,' she said, 'No I haven't…as bad as that? Ye-es, we can see it, we've been watching it, listening too, the wind's positively singing. Maisey thought it might let up…no, no, Persis thought that too –are you sure –no one can? Yes, no, not urgent exactly but…we'll sort something out. Yes. Yes, we will, honestly, for heaven's sake don't worry…No, I didn't say that to make you…yes I love you to, but I could do with you being out of the house this evening. Yes, I think so, of course I will and I thought you might prefer to...it will save you having to tell Birdie about the lilacs anyway. Or find another story for John, who in any event, is round at the Manse,' and so saying she rang off.

'What was all that about?' Persis wanted to know. Maisey too, had stopped playing and returned to the kitchen table.

'The roads are flooding,' said Una, eyes half closed, her thoughts elsewhere as she said it.

'And? They can't be too bad if the line hasn't gone down,' Persis prompted.

'It's going, it was a terrible connection. There are branches coming down everywhere, or so I'm told. The cars can't get through,' Una said, as though this in itself were sufficient explanation of what had sounded a reasonably cryptic conversation and resuming the preparation of the leeks. Somewhere nearby came the sound of cracking wood and the falling of a dead branch, as if in illustration of the point Una had made. Persis looked out the window long enough to register it was not the greengage tree that was in peril; she need not have worried, Carl had bpruned it before going away.

'Well,' Persis said now, 'at least in here we seem to be at one remove from it. What is worrying you so, why won't you tell me?' Persis had been speaking to the room at large but this last she directed at Una.

'I never have liked storms, but it isn't that –I was more thinking of the doctor,' said Una, never letting up with the leeks. They were becoming improbably small. Maisey crossed herself with all the fluidity of a high-church Episcopalian and Persis rather envied her the gesture. Perhaps when we are settled at Oxford, she thought distractedly, I will try Maisey's variety of church properly. They seem to do feelings better than we do.

'I suppose,' said Persis, 'that at a push a person could try walking…' and went to the door to inspect the weather. Mentally she retracted what she had said; no one with an ounce of sense would try and walk through this. It was verily raining sideways and up, as well as down. Persis withdrew from the door and closed it, but not before a furious Tabitha came streaking in, too wet to care that this is not her entrance of choice. Maisey, for distraction's sake, came after her with a tea towel and gathered her up.

'You're two of a kind today,' she said to the cat. 'It's not like you to be so quiet.' Miriam, seeing Tabitha, leapt from her place on the front room sofa and flew to where her people had congregated.

'I suppose you knew,' said Persis to Miriam. That cat looked from Persis to Maisey and back again, her eyes flashing with exasperation. It's not my fault you wouldn't listen to me, they said, of course I knew and she came and curled lovingly round Una's feet.

'You mustn't go back through that, love,' said Una to Maisey, finally relenting over the leeks and depositing them into the pot of stalk and water that was boiling. Maisey thought that even if she could get home nothing would convince her to do so. She was needed here; this was rarely true of her home.

'I'll make up a bed, shall I?' said Persis. She was halfway to the stairs before it occurred to her to say, 'but you'll have to tell me where the linen is, Una, I've never…' but Una had already ceded the soup to Maisey and come after her.

'Let me do it,' she said and Persis did, but she came with her all the same.

'We'll muddle through,' she said as Una took down a Card Trick quilt and spare linen from the cupboard.

'I never said we wouldn't,' said Una, going through into the room that was Carl's and unravelling a sheet.

'My luck with other people's children is nothing like it is with my own,' then before Una could interject, 'how much time do we have?' and Persis took the corners of the sheet and helping to stretch it over the bed.

'I'm hopeless at guessing things like that,' said Una, tucking the corners under the mattress on her side.

'You'd think,' said, Persis, doing likewise, 'that you would have got the trick of it by now,' and she made a noise in the back of her throat with the effort of battling with the mattress as she said it.

'The circumstances are rather different,' said Una.

'You wouldn't have said, though, would you, if you didn't think…'

'Soon,' said Una, unfolding the quilt and working to turn it the right way round for the bed. Just for a minute, as she stood up from laying out the quilt, she seemed to waver, and she said, 'I'm trusting you, you know.'

'I know,' says Persis, reaching for her hand and pressing it. 'And thank you. God moves in mysterious ways and all that, yes?'

' 'And rides upon the storm' too. I can't help feeling we could do without the storm.'

'Here I was thinking you'd conjured it up. Myself, I couldn't agree more.' Persis helped with the coverlet and then began to retreat downstairs. Una went to follow her and Persis fended her off. 'You're impossible. You tell me 'soon' and then try to go back to making supper. You go lie down. You'll never extract Maisey from that kitchen anyway, she's as territorial as you are about them, I can tell,' and Persis was pleased when her orders are carried out.

To Persis's relief, Maisey was neither squeamish nor the sort of person to lose her head in a crisis. As she pointed out when Persis complimented her, she wasn't sure this counted as a crisis, just something that needed to be got through. And get through it they did, because Una's definition of 'soon' was not Persis's, who couldn't help feeling what Una meant as they talked over the quilt was 'immediately,' with the result that, so far as Persis was concerned, the only thing Una had right when they spoke over the making-up of Maisey's bed was that she was hopeless at judging the timing of such things. She said none of this, only folded and laid to one side the caul that had covered the baby's face and handed the little girl to her mother with, 'a sister for Birdie.'

It was while the child is still wailing and making a noise to rival that of timbrel and drum that the back door to the house swung open, and Maisey, keeping vigil with Birdie in the kitchen, leapt up with a rolling pin in hand because it was the nearest thing on the draining board.

'It's only me,' said Shirley's reassuring tenor and she set the rolling pin down.

'What in the name of all the Saints and Mary in Heaven are you doing here?' she said, coming towards him with a tea towel in spite of knowing it would do no good and be not half so effective as it was on Tabitha. But there was no towel to hand.

'I thought we'd trusted you to Ingleside, or the Manse or wherever you had gone to,' she said, taking in the sight of Shirley and thinking that no good could have come of his walking through flooded, muddy roads on one good leg in wind that had bent the aspens nearly double with its bluster.

'And not come home over this? I had no idea what was happening,' Shirley said, rubbing ineffectively at the water on his shirt, stepping out of his shoes as he said it.

'The impression I got was that you knew perfectly well what was happening,' Maisey said, rummaging ineffectively in the various cupboards for something more substantial than the tea towel.

'I don't suppose you know where to find anything here?' she asked hopefully, never letting up her search, though she did spare him a glance over her shoulder; in the half-light of the kitchen he did look a little worse for it, and it wasn't only the water, she thought.

'it's no good asking me,' said Shirley, then, 'it's not that you can't get through by the road, it's that no sensible person would try to.' He seemed oblivious to how this statement reflected on his own character. Maisey did not choose to enlighten him. Shirley reached for Birdie and Maisey said, 'go through and put something dry on before you come down with pneumonia. No one will ever forgive me if you do, and I still don't begin to understand what you were thinking –the roads must have been a state.

'They were and I'm not sure I was,' he said, beginning to do as she had said and understanding suddenly why Maisey and Una got on as well as they did. He wondered, half seriously, if he ought to warn Bruce. He stopped partway up the stairs, leaning more than usual against the rail and said to her, 'are they all right?'

'Ach Du!' she said suddenly, provoked out of English and into informality, 'of course they are, can't you tell? No child able to make such a racket can possibly be suspected of ill health. It's you I'm worrying over –now really, go, before you damage the wood on the stairs irreparably from standing dripping on them and the pneumonia becomes double pneumonia.'

Shirley was too relieved to notice her linguistic acrobatics, for which she was afterwards to be grateful. He went, trusting Birdie and the kitchen to her more than capable hands.

When Persis saw him in the doorway, she began, 'what in the name of –'

'Maisey's already invoked Mary, the cannon of saints and heaven, so I think you've run out of mentionable options,' said Shirley, and came to perch at the foot of the bed. Persis, with a lovingly exasperated gesture, abandoned the chair she had been sitting on and motioned him into it.

'You didn't really think I'd stay away all evening?' he said in response to the question in Una's eyes.

'I thought you might be glad of getting to sleep,' she said, smoothing the baby's forehead as she did so.

'As if I could,' and he dropped a kiss on the corner of her mouth.

Persis went out, muttering darkly that of all the idiotic things to do, walking home in weather that recalled the Flood at the dawn of time must surely be high up the list of most mad-capped, and in the still of the room, which was not so full of the wind or the rain simply because the attention of those therein was elsewhere, they talked over names. Birdie was asleep in the kitchen and John, by ill luck or good, depending on what whose perspective it was, was still over at the Manse with his grandparents. Consequently, in the first moment they had had properly alone together in recent memory and perforce cut off form the world by the weather, they talked of names because there had been no time before, between the death of Penny, the presence visitors, and the demands made by John and Birdie.

The rain drummed against the glass and the wind made an unearthly noise that made the Vaughan Williams Mass setting Maisey had lamented seem civilized, and over the sound of it they talked of what call the child Una was cradling and he for his part, would not be deflected by her gentle inquiries after him, what the weather had been like, how the others at Ingleside were.

'You are all right?'

'Perfectly. I've only walked from Ingleside home again.'

'Only –and in this weather,' but Una smiled all the same at the application of 'home' to Greengage Close, the implication that it had superseded the warm all-embracing aspect of Ingleside.

'Nothing,' Shirley feelingly said, 'will or could be ever quite so difficult as learning how to be at home again after the war, how to be as I was, not even coming home through the weather this evening.'

'Did you have to relearn it? I never noticed,' said Una, looking at him with a certain register of surprise.

'Not with you –never with you,' Shirley said, reaching for her hand and finding it otherwise engaged, supporting the head of the as yet unnamed child. 'I remember thinking I should have to, and the relief of finding that whatever else I had forgotten, I hadn't forgotten how to be on those afternoons over tea, the security of having nothing expected of me. The others…'

It was not a conversation they had had before, about the after-effects of the war, not since a long-ago evening in Rainbow Valley, and with the wind and the rain waging a war all their own outside the window it struck Una as only slightly less than usual that they should have it now.

'They were relieved too, to have you back. We all were.' Una said it quietly, but with a surety that rendered it impossible for the sound of the elements to swallow them, in such a way that implicit in the words, behind them even, ran the other, somehow unvoicable feeling, I was glad.

'I don't know. Mother, dad, mother Susan, they needed back the boy they had sent away –Jem felt it too –it was one of the few conversations we had together. It had something to do with making Ingleside itself again. You never asked that of me.'

'I couldn't very well have done, it would hardly have been a fair exchange,' said Una, laying the baby in her basket and reaching now for the hand he had offered her minutes before and he pressed it with uncharacteristic fierceness.

'All this to say that it was easier to come back to you through the rain, gale-force wind and whatever else, than it was to stay put and not know everything was all right. I never have been able to do worrying about you by halves. I don't think I could have gone you know, if you hadn't been so much nearer to being yourself then, it gave me an idea that I might manage to do something to might help put the world to rights again.'

Una was about to argue with him, to tell him it could not possibly have worked like that, when Shirley said, 'now forget the weather for half a minute –there will be time enough to worry over the weather and its various kinds of treachery another time –and help me. There must be a name somewhere that our families haven't worn to death,'

It was an infinitely more bearable thing to talk about than how wrong that walk could have gone, with the muddiness and unevenness of the ground, and Una acquiesced, and thereby mentally running through names in the family Bible, recalled the grandmother from Thrush Green.

'There was Grandmother Esther,' she said uncertainly, for she had still not quite vanished the mental picture of how the roads must surely have looked.

Shirley said, 'tell me about her.'

'I can't –I only properly remember hearsay from Aunt Martha.'

'You must remember a little,' Shirley pressed but Una had retained only the smell of lavender and a grand house not far from Maywater full of fussy and delicate furniture. Shirley needed no more convincing.

'There's room for her to grow into a name like that, no superimposed expectations.' It was all that could be wished for a child just then, he thought; the chance to be unhindered by the memory of what had gone before, not to be earmarked by catastrophe as they had both been. 'Anne' was added as a second name, for manifold reasons, not least of them to balance out the blankness of Esther's Christian name,and so she became 'Esther Anne,' by turns 'Esther' and 'Es' both to those around her.