Molten umber, mahogany, earth: two rooms, blazing, in which a man is reflected as he reads. Two rings of cairngorm flecked with topaz. A man floating in brown, sepia toned—brown coat, face, hands, light. First in an office in Broadcasting House, bookcases crammed, play scripts and typescripts piled on the desk, in boxes, hastily cleared from a chair where the producer motions for Ted to sit, conversing and thumbing meanwhile through last week’s opened mail, searching for an oversized envelope neatly slit along the pasted flap, mumbling self-deprecatorily and finally easing a thick packet from a slumping pile. Oh yes, here it is, you’ve seen all these, no? Douglas Cleverdon must have asked, or something like that, in a scene projected without sound, without dialogue, a projection, in fact, not of the retina but of the mind, a fish-eye exchange Sylvia can only imagine, Cleverdon glancing over his shoulder, then, yes, and cocking his eyebrows at Ted seated in the proffered chair in his aged corduroy jacket. Yes, they concurred, brilliant work, like nothing she’d done before. Just as you’ve been telling me, Ted, the producer would have added, giving him all the credit, as if she were a puppet, a doll, a thing of his creation. I think we really must get a program out of this. This one, he might have said, selecting a sheet from the sheaf of her poems, I’m utterly knocked out. And Cleverdon began to read, aloud, the first few lines of “Daddy.” Listening, basking, Ted’s smug smile, the Cambridge leer, his nod of complacent approval dissolving as the words formed in the stale air of the office. Loaded, immediate, indefatigable, words demanding to be heard. Actually no, Ted would have interrupted, feigning benign curiosity, No, I don’t think I’ve read that one yet. May I—? And the producer, in midthought and phrase, stammering, Oh yes, really? Yes yes, quite right, perhaps she’s sent me things so new even you haven’t read them yet. It sounds from her note as though she’s been writing at a gallop. Here, have a look—what of this one, “A Secret,” or the one published in last Sunday’s Observer, did you see it? “Event” I think it was, yes, here, paper crackling as he passed the pages and back-folded newsprint into Ted’s outstretched hand. Ted in Douglas Cleverdon’s office at the BBC, her poems in his lap, high in the Art Deco building of Portland stone from which no desertion was possible, no craven leap through the window onto the Langham’s porte-cochere, say, or shimmy down the double marble colonnades of All Souls next door or blood-pumping disappearance into the crowds strolling Regent Street below. There was no escape for him now. He read her new poems, all Cleverdon had, turning the neatly typed pages swiftly—those he knew about—and others more slowly, absorbing the accounts of his bastardies. His secrets, he was rapidly discovering, were out.