“So your arrival at Yeats’s flat is a great success?” her mother asks, the starch of age-old, sub-rosal skepticism firming her solicitude.

Unnerved, Sylvia scrambles to recover from the sudden constriction that is her response. Her mother’s eye, invited or not, is once again upon her. Aurelia’s beatific pride in being front row center for Sylvia’s every memorable event—first word, first poem, first publication at sixteen, marital collapse at twenty-nine—is the culmination of her long-suffering motherly ambition, even the merciful remedy, it would seem, to the graphic shame of the summer at Court Green. “I feel just what you feel, Sivvy”—the tears in runnels down her quivering face in July—“he’s broken my heart, too.” The unendurable blubbering, the consoling martyrdom. The suffocating scrutiny, each of them distorted and distorting by the focus of a too-close lens magnifying their mutual debt. Out of Aurelia’s sight, connected only by ink or by cables anchored to the ocean bottom, Sylvia has labored to shore up the otherness between them and escape. She knows she could never again endure the naked exposure of last summer.

“Oh yes, Mummy, it was the perfect thing to do,” Sylvia says, true to the script, almost gay, straining to resurrect her old plucky self, dead since July, for her mother’s benefit. “It’s just what I needed. I’ve been welcomed back with open arms. I’m so busy I can hardly stop for tea, a real deluge of activity since we arrived. Already I’ve been commissioned by the BBC, and gone to the cinema, and shopped for Christmas on Regent Street. And I’ve just sold two more of my new poems to The Atlantic.”

“Wonderful, Sylvia!” Aurelia crows. “Did you make sure to give your editors your new address for the checks? And have you seen Ted, then?” she slips in.

Sylvia cups the phone, buying time as the 74 bus approaches. “Wait, Mother, here comes the bus.” Even with the door shut the booth roars with diesel noise as the bus whines by on its way toward Kensington, giving her a moment to assemble her story. “Oh yes, he’s been by,” she says nonchalantly. “We took the children to the zoo together, and he’ll be coming to visit them once a week or so. He’s agreed to a monthly allotment and regular visits will remind him.”

“Get the money you deserve for being a devoted wife, Sylvia,” Aurelia counsels. “Get your divorce finalized before he … embarrasses you.”

“Oh, it’s fine. I hardly think about it at all,” Sylvia says convincingly.

“Darling, I’m so glad!” Aurelia praises. “I thought it might be awkward to be in London with Ted, but I know you’re a brave girl. Don’t let him ruin your wholesome future.”