“Were you riding the gee-up horse, Pookus?” Sylvia asks. She was so unbearably lucky! Her incredible, weird luck. To have all this—spring and summer and years to come. The world at their feet. Ted is focusing the camera on her and the children among the daffodils. He sees them seated in the grass, the white and yellow heads of the flowers trembling before them, the sharp green sheaths bending and parting, the black-limbed elm rising behind against the robin’s egg sky. Frieda clutching her fistful of gold blooms. And Sylvia in ecstasies, laughing, a baby in her arms, her luminous face turned on her little girl, seeming more content, more part of herself, than he thinks he’s ever seen her, beginning to be the writer she has always struggled to be, the clouds, quite literally, thankfully, lifted.

“Did you load that color film, Ponter?” Sylvia asks, giggling with Frieda, cuddling drowsy Nicholas. Frieda continues the dramatic, garbled story of her ride on the gee-up horse, and her bear’s ride, and her dolly’s. “I’d love to send some of these snaps to my mother,” Sylvia says, tucking the edge of her Wellingtons well under her skirt.

“She won’t believe it,” Ted exclaims, his eye to the camera’s viewfinder. “It’s too glorious. Tell Mummy what you’ve got, Pooker Pie,” he coaches Frieda.

“Daff-a-dee!” Frieda chortles.

He was so good to her! She could hardly imagine what she’s done to deserve it.

“Sylvia?” Rose calls over the lilac hedge.

Sylvia ignores the intruding summons, getting silly instead with Frieda, getting Nick’s wide-eyed, newborn attention.

“One more—” Ted says, the shutter clicking.

“Sylvia, yoo hoo,” Rose calls again.

Frieda turns, smiling, toward the sound of Rose’s voice.

“Pooker, look at Daddy in the flowers—” Sylvia encourages. “Rose, just a minute,” she says, annoyed.

“Just one more, Frieda,” Ted calls, keeping the camera in focus as Frieda beams at the hedge, looking for the peek-a-boo face through the leaves.

So shatters the fragile meniscus of spring. Sylvia takes a deep breath through her nose, balances on the fingertips of one hand as she rises out of the grass with Nicholas, paradise lost. Rose blathers on as if anyone is listening.

“… bouquet for Easter?”

Nosing the baby’s head after a feeding three evenings before, Thursday night scudding in past a cold and drippy twilight. The winds that blew through the house, right under the feckless doorways as she’d finished “Elm” over lunch alone in her study, had finally eased off, which she realized because she could hear voices in the front garden over the deafening silence. Ted had been at tea with the bank manager’s family for hours. He’d missed Frieda’s egg and bedtime. She listened, sniffing the baby’s sweet bouquet.

“So if it’s not a real secretary, how do you know if, um…?” asked in girlish sotto voce.