“That sounds perfect, Sivvy,” her mother replies, gratitude fountaining in her timorous voice. “I don’t know what will become of the Christmas package,” she continues with enduring anxiety. “I mailed it to North Tawton as I hadn’t heard from you. I wanted it to arrive in time, but you never called me to tell me where you were.”

“I’ve already filed the forwarding orders, Mother,” Sylvia reassures. “But it’s getting so cold now, I really must get us three inside.”

“Oh, Sylvia, we’ll miss you so on Christmas—” her mother laments.

“I’ll miss you too, Mother, but I’ll write you every detail,” Sylvia fawns.

“Don’t forget, I’m here, darling—” Aurelia says.

“How could I ever forget you, Mummy?” Sylvia answers. She hangs up, her mother sucked back into the line like a genie into a bottle. She hangs up, holding the receiver down, down as it struggles and finally stills.

She pushes open the paneled door of the phone box, nearly gulping for breath. The incoming rush of cold and silence hits her with renewed clarity. Not even life insurance when her father died—her mother suddenly having to work full time, sometimes two jobs at once, living with her aging parents, pooling their savings, the bleeding and all the surgeries—sharing a bedroom until Sylvia left for her Fulbright at Cambridge. Her hair, what her mother proudly called “German blonde,” in plaits down her back, arms crossed as she watched Aurelia sign the slip of paper in her meticulous secretarial hand. It was the day after her father’s death; it was settled. She’d come home from school crying with a contract written in pencil. Her mother had signed it, promising she’d never marry again. Nothing to show for her life but her children. No life but the furious girl breathing beside her in the dark, the words they passed back and forth—the alphabet learned at Aurelia’s feet, poems for each other they hid under napkins at dinnertime. All those letters. And this unworthy daughter, Sylvia thinks—her volcanic resentment, guilt, anger, shame hardening on the surface of her thoughts—begrudges it all. Sylvia steps out of the phone box, closing the door behind her.

At the scrape of the door Frieda and Nicholas pivot toward their mother, brilliant cheeked in the cold, cheerful, excited, their noses running. Sylvia doesn’t bother to look in her pocketbook; she knows she doesn’t have a handkerchief. Her knuckles white on the handle of the pram, petrified, she stands like a stone on the footpath as the people pass by.

28. “Purdah”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“Purdah”

DECEMBER 21, 1962

LONDON