“It’s not true,” Ted says, shaking his head. “My mother—”

“Your mother what?” Sylvia challenges. “Your cowardly, gossipy mother ran for cover when your sister crucified me the last time we spent Christmas in Yorkshire, a mistake I swore I’d never make again. Stuck in that slovenly house for a week? Now you think I’ll go back for another dose of mortification? Isn’t the scandal here enough? ‘Fare Thee Well,’ and you telling anyone who will listen it’s all the fault of my irrevocable childhood, not your own doing? You think I’m so lacking in self-respect I’d be packed off to relatives, hunch over my petit point—my ‘decorative arts,’ as your girl puts it—while you resume your debaucheries elsewhere? I’ll be no Annabella, no Lady Caroline Lamb to your slaughter.”

“What?” Ted blunders, utterly mystified.

Sylvia fixes him with a caustic, death-blade look. “You’ve already set this up to get me out of your way, haven’t you, Lord Byron? ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.’ I know. I’m sure you think delivering me into your family’s custody will keep me from writing as well.”

Ted is shaking his head in disbelief. “Sylvia,” he mutters, “that’s insane.”

“That’s always your trump card, isn’t it, Ted?” she savages him, stung by his use of the word. “When you can’t bear what you’ve done, you blame me. You tarnish me with all I entrusted to you.”

This is the impasse, the speechless stalemate. The children are limp in their arms, incontrovertibly rejecting the chance to witness the full collapse of their parents’ short-lived, fragile accord. Whatever civility they had warily hammered out in the last month, the flat-hunting, the tentative settlements and divisions and schedules, is crumbled like chalk. All of it nothing but theory in a free fall of alienation, no common language between them, just the squalid silence of their estrangement. Just the terrible convulsive breathing of the fallen nestling trying to die. She couldn’t wait for that baby bird to die: gasping in its shoe box for a week, keeping them both awake at night and sick at heart with its brave mournful cheeping. Ted taped the cardboard box to the bath hose and hooked it to the gas stove, finally, in the kitchen of their apartment at Smith. She was relieved, and ashamed of her relief—the bird’s innocent misery an oppression she was desperate to escape.

“What can I do?” Ted ventures, breaking the perilous silence.

Sylvia watches him, his cowlick falling over his eyes, watching her, his chin resting on Frieda’s back. “Do something concrete. Bathe these children. Sterilize Nick’s bottle. Listen for the nappy man. Stay with them while I run to the shops and the launderette.”

“I can go for you,” Ted offers.

“No—” she snaps. “I want to get out of here.”

“All right,” he says, backing instantly down. “All right.”