“But my husband isn’t here,” Sylvia says, her head thudding at what seems an impossible argument, doubly impossible to resolve in her enervated state. She pauses, gathering the remnants of her strength. “Excuse me, Mister—?”

“Professor Thomas.”

“Professor Thomas, perhaps you could do me a small kindness. I’m expecting my nappy service and my husband tomorrow—he’s been away on business. He doesn’t have keys. When they ring, could you let them in? My husband will move the pram. I’m so sick, you see—”

“I simply can’t,” he crisply replies. “If I haven’t already left for work, I can’t imagine that I could hear your bell. I’ve been nearly deaf since I was a youth.”

“But—you heard my babies crying—”

“Mrs. Hughes,” Professor Thomas sniffs, “if you are so sick, why aren’t you properly dressed? Where is your dressing gown?”

“I just came down with the trash—” Sylvia explains, reddening like a chastised child, her head reeling, “—I thought the ground-floor flat was vacant—”

“Aha,” Professor Thomas cuts her off, brandishing his ordnance map as if to silence her, “but as you can plainly see,” sweeping his arm across the threshold to his open parlor, “I’ve been squashed into a flat too small—to satisfy your ‘greater need’—and as I have two impressionable sons who visit, I can’t risk any scandal.” He assesses Sylvia, eyes her clutching her nightgown. “Evidently you have many resources on which to call for favors. I, however, cannot allow any false conclusions to be drawn. Good night.” With an air of victorious finality, he steps back into the doorway of his brilliantly lit flat to let her pass.

Sylvia hurries past him, as much as she is able, hunched over, holding her wastebasket and her gathered nightgown, queasy, her face blenched and glazing with perspiration. She rounds the staircase’s turned newel post and seizes the banister, stepping gingerly up each riser, feeling his cold eyes on her back as she retreats up the stairs into the darkness.

15. “Ariel”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Ariel”

OCTOBER 27, 1962

COURT GREEN