“All right, all right—just wait for me,” Sylvia hears Rose say in a tone of anxious exasperation. Silently eavesdropping, Sylvia gathers up her bucket and scissors and stealthily steps closer to the lilac hedge rife with fat green buds bruising mauve at their tips. A moment later the smarmy ballroom music emanating from Percy’s television abruptly halts, replaced by an announcer gravely intoning the predicament of a wayward family of swans. Sylvia listens, picking flowers along the border of the hedge that separates her front garden from Court Green’s lane and the Keys’ stone cottage, adding stems of grape hyacinth, snowdrops, primroses of varying hues to a bunch she will take to her study. The doctor said one more stroke would have killed Percy on Wednesday. Now it sounds like Rose, despite herself, is destined to drive him to his grave. Lowering her bucket, now full, Sylvia crouches against the lilac, listening, hidden by the abundant foliage opposite the Keys’ front door. Rose continues to chatter at Percy who, unequipped with dentures since the strokes, sounds not much different from Baby Nick, gurgly and assonant. Rose’s voice ebbs and flows as she frets and scolds from room to room.

“Hullo?” Rose calls suddenly from her open doorway. Sylvia ducks low to the ground, holding her scissors still. She hears Rose handwringing out on her step, accompanied by the TV’s insinuations.

Now Frieda erupts from Court Green’s open door, a merry bunch of daffodils in her fist. Spying her mother right away, she runs, squealing, arms wide, over the path and toward Sylvia, whose desire to conceal herself has instantly vanished. Ted follows behind carrying the sleepy baby, Sylvia’s big Brownie camera around his neck.

“That’s the trick to get her off her pony,” he says, grinning, motioning at the bouquet.

Her family is coming to her in the pink and supple light, her breathtaking, enchanted family, the sun’s rays breaking out over them. Ted towers over their little daughter in his dear rumpled trousers, flawless, beaming like a god, all but immortal in the shadowless light.

“Stay where you are,” Ted says, leaning down to Sylvia, once she’s caught and released little Frieda, to hand her Nicholas. Together they admire and exclaim with their children, Ted helping Sylvia out of her mac. Isn’t our garden the most magical garden anywhere? Aren’t our flowers the most beautiful?

“Just stay there, don’t move,” Ted says, his palm out flat like a London bobby’s as he backs away, holding the camera and Sylvia’s coat. Sylvia settles herself in the cool grass, sinking into the field of flowers, dropping her scissors, tucking her skirt under her bare legs with one hand and feeling for nettles. Frieda squats in her Easter dress, toddler style, grasping her daffodil prize beside her euphoric mother.