© 1996, Linda Moore

There was something unfamiliar in her eyes - a sort of light... a gleam of... what? He'd known it before, a long time ago, but he'd forgotten what it really was. Until now. At last it clicked. Hope?

"What is it?" he asked her, suddenly finding that the breath was catching in his dry throat and making it impossible to answer Gill's original question. Of course he wanted their child. They both wanted one badly, so very very badly. They had timed it perfectly, chosen a time together when they had felt ready after years of close union: then they'd discarded the packet of pills and tried, time and time again, to make the baby. The doctors could find nothing physically wrong with either of them. But it had been three, four years... and nothing. They could not accept that it was not meant to be.

And it hurt.... the hurt took in their love and crushed its delicate edges into a pulp, until it was nothing but a small kernel deep down within the pain, despair and unbelievable sense of failure.

"I still love you," she told him. "I still love you even if we do turn away from each other and know that we're not going to make a baby without help."

IVF.... the words were about to come out before she reached out one finger and pressed it gently to his lips. He was silent.

"Not what you're thinking," she whispered. "It's mad. It's very mad. But I've heard of this place, and I'd like us to go there. I don't think anything in this world can help us. Please.... please open your mind and listen."

He stared at her then, saw the pale and sad face rimmed darkly with hair, the soft eyes staring intensely back at him, the lines where her hurt was showing. A face of shadows and moonlight. He realised, after all, that he loved her. It ached.

"Tell me about it," he said.

They went to the place one evening, after they felt sure that the tourists would have left. The warm pale sun made the mown lawn in which it was centred seem to shine with a subtle light. With the sun setting, and the rough shrubbery surrounding it, it looked for all the world like a faerie green. Lee became aware that the place was ancient, much more so than he who had abandoned history at the age of thirteen could understand. It was a still place, silent, and its seemed not to be of this world. He remembered that Gill had told him this world could not help them, and shivered.

He could feel everything that he knew receding, becoming unfamiliar and distant. This place was the only reality and he took a step back, pulse racing, intimidated.

Gill caught hold of him, grasped his hand. Her warm squeeze made him feel more secure; at least he had her, with him. He was reassured, but even so noted the almost fanatical light in her pale, steady eyes. Momentarily, she too became a stranger to him.

"Believe," she told him, her voice urgent. The warmth of her tone brought them back together. "Put your hands on the stones. See how they are lined up - a circle with a hole for the woman, a standing stone on either side for the man. Whenever you see a postcard you see the round stone and the tall stones aligned - one within the other. The meaning's clear enough."

"Yes," he said, understanding the symbolism much more easily than he understood what he, an accountant, was doing with his wife next to an ancient lonely monument to fertility. Mad. Crazy. As mad as they'd been throughout the years since the moment they'd chosen for conception had passed, become stale and strained.

He walked to the stones, smelt the scent of grass becoming damp in the evening glow, of earth beneath, touched the rough granite, saw little quartz crystals in the stone and touched those too. Quartz. That he could understand. Stone, earth, grass... but not ancient magic. He tried very hard to believe, for Gill, for the sake of their child.

And then suddenly he felt cheated. All the pain he had tried to avoid for so long caught up on him and he closed his eyes against the tide. He clutched the top of one of the pointed standing stones and never knew whether he made a sound or wept, silently, inside.

When he opened his eyes, feeling dizzy and reeling, worn out before he'd even begun, he sensed Gill standing behind him. He stretched out the hand with which he'd held onto the stone, noting that the nodules of granite had made an impression, a pattern of little circles on his palm.

It was almost dark, and the stones were sharply silhouetted in the green. He turned to face Gill and realised that she was naked. He could see the goosebumps on her skin. Very abruptly, he became hard.

"Quickly, now," she told him. It seemed that she was speaking through clenched teeth and he realised that she was cold and afraid. "I've prayed. Please believe."

"I believe," he said. And he did: he believed, very strongly, in the life of their child.

She had told him that she wanted to be passed through the ring of the centre stone, three times. Once each for the two of them, a third time for the soul they wanted to summon into her body - so she had told him .He helped her to do it, knowing that in the morning her wide hips would be grazed and sore.

After the third time, she took him by the hand to where she had lain out a clean white sheet for them on the grass. She undressed him, slowly, formally, with reverence. And in silence placed her hot mouth on his, and brought him through.

It did not matter. He had believed, and now here was the child to prove it, to melt away the long winter that Gill and he had shared. Their child, their summer child.