She is head down when the doorbell rings, on her hands and knees, painting the floor for the unmaterialized au pair. On her hands and knees she draws her brush across the scuffed and rough-worn planks, crawling backward toward the door. Insomnia has left her in a state of dynamic paralysis, moving perpetually, her thoughts unfathomable. She is on her hands and knees and gray as this first coat, prostrate with the ineluctable weight of Ted’s silent, anguished approbation, a gravity that pins her ever lower, deepening, as the hours ache by. Her manuscript is still in the parlor, untouched, sacramental, where he left it. She dips her brush into the can and spreads the heavy linoleum paint, masking the flaws that time will eventually, inevitably, uncover, despite this unyielding effort. At the intrusion of the doorbell she raises her head reflexively; the children regard her from the hallway with their moist fists of apple cake, their covered cups of milk.

With effort Sylvia pries herself up from the floor, scooping Nick onto her hip as she enters the hall and cracks the door to the flat. She pauses, silent, for signs of the professor in the lower flat. At another reproving hiss from the unanswered bell, Sylvia descends the stairs.

A gold-braided maroon uniform has capsized on the steps outside, engulfing a sullen teenager who pushes a yellow envelope at Sylvia and a fat receipt book. “Western Union,” the uniform says perfunctorily. With Nick held aside from the chilling draft of the open doorway, the telegram squeezed in her hand, Sylvia signs the receipt, which the delivery boy then submerges in the enormous pocket of his jacket before he lists away. Standing barefoot in the hall, too numb to hope or dread, she tears open the sealed flap of the envelope and unfolds the wafer of paper it contains. The words swim at first, unpunctuated. It’s a cable from her mother in black block letters: URGENT CALL COLLECT AT ONCE EMERGENCY LOVE MUMMY

*   *   *

Riding the tide of wild panic, Sylvia has rushed to the phone box across the street from the post office on Princess Road, an arguable step or two closer than the kiosk at St. George’s Terrace, relievedly free of the gauntlet of Chalcot Square. Both Frieda and Nick are in the perambulator, stuffed into coats and hats over their pajamas. Sylvia is calling her mother, breathlessly waiting as the operator wades through endless static for a connection to the American exchange. The morning is cold but crisply clear; Sylvia leaves the glass-paneled door of the phone box open to the pram outside. The scent of fresh bread from the bakery at the corner makes Sylvia’s stomach roil. It is her mother’s unnerving talent to divine Sylvia’s most vulnerable moments, a gift for appearing, omniscient and generously pious, at the lowest possible tide.