Summary

In this chapter Claudia learns Tom has been killed and she is pregnant with his child. The chapter opens with Lisa visiting the elderly Claudia at a nursing home. The nurse there tells Lisa her mother had a fit in which she returned to the moment of childbirth and kept demanding to know the gender of her baby. Lisa sits with her mother, who is asleep and removed, for fifteen minutes, and is filled with disgust and pity for her. She thinks to herself her mother has never truly been in love. When the narrative shifts back to wartime Cairo, we learn with Claudia Tom was classified first as missing and then as killed. Claudia is tortured by thoughts of his death and wonders whether it was slow or instantaneous. Her unfeeling flatmate Camilla does not know about Tom and is flippantly dismissive of Claudia’s...