Even Ted has admitted he dreams of losing Court Green. Not dreams—nightmares. Already it has become something much greater than a house or a home: a hibernaculum, for each of them, of some kind of ecstatic regeneration. The neighbors, the rector, the postman, all periodic audiences to the Hugheses’ ongoing battle to reclaim the lawn from the nettles, to harrow the overgrown tennis court, to sow invisible vegetable seeds in the frosted, slushy earth, to patch and repaint and somehow stave the rotting of their half-stone house as the rain drummed, month after dreary month, on the thatch—all of them have assured Sylvia and Ted how lovely Court Green would be come spring despite them, a bower of cherry blossom and old roses and a dozen kinds of daffodils, swifts in the eaves and pheasants sunning on the ancient mound among the apple trees. Still, they haven’t been prepared for the occult pleasure of it all, wave after wave of dazzling wonders, the feast it is, their true soul house, presented in all its glory today, finally, against the clear blue heavens. It is, simply, paradise. Even the rain become lovely, streaking the windows in mercury drops when Ted’s family arrived—the sanguine, straw-mulched garden vegetating, fresh with promise, beyond the clean glass; the green tulips coy with their unreleased silks. And the floor men finished by Easter, just this side of miraculous! Sylvia and Ted proudly conducted the tour for the relatives, pointing out the heirloom treasures they’ve picked up for pennies at auction; where the plumber bored a three-foot-long hole through the eight-hundred-year-old stone to hook up the Bendix washer; saw the sun, at last, beating onto the gleaming, newly painted floorboards upstairs.