“That’s right,” Sylvia responds, stepping aside, her voice shrill and snide, “you know what to do for them. You’re so devoted. You’re so wise.” When Ted has entered the flat carrying Frieda, Sylvia scrupulously closes the door, snapping the bolt with the side of her hand, then turns to face him, the untied belt of her robe dangling at her hips, her feet bare and thin.

“I came as soon as I was told to,” Ted says quietly to the foyer floor. “Dido told me you were busy with guests—”

“I was busy,” Sylvia whispers, pitiless, rocking Nicholas mechanically, “keeping these children alive, dousing their burning bodies while nearly out of my head myself—” She notices Ted lift his gaze, the almost imperceptible flake of movement as he looks around, cautiously, in the manner of a hunted creature plotting the split-second opportunity of escape. “What is it?” she asks him, seizing upon his bifurcated attention, “figuring the sums in your head? I can tell you exactly; I know every pound by heart. The two chairs, the coffee table, the straw mats; the bookcases I bought more cheaply because I assembled them myself. All my years of scrimping and going without and putting your career first, and now when it should be paying off, all that work, this is what I’ve got. I see the receipts from Selfridge’s in my sleep, a roll call of the discount casualties, the dead and the merely wounded—” She registers his face modulating, flinching, responsive, and she drills on. “What about you? How much have you spent on your abortionist? Where is the money from my grants, which was to pay for a nanny so that I could write, but which you squandered on yourself?”

She stalks him into the parlor, where he has ventured in search of a blanket, air, a covering for Frieda, something to shield their daughter from the velocity of her mother’s wrath. He finds some soft woolen thing on a wicker chair and picks it up, draping it, with one hand, over the child. “We both agreed we would live on those grants, Sylvia,” he counters with the deliberate delicacy of a doctor delivering bad news, pinching the blanket up awkwardly, trying to get it up over Frieda’s shoulders. “Don’t revise our history now,” he says, his flat tone cautionary but dispirited, fully cognizant of the pointlessness of any attempt to argue. He is avoiding her face, trying to keep from a full engagement with her overpowering valence. “We agreed to live on the grant money so that we could both write.”