The curtains glow and shimmer. Behind them the sun pushes bloody out of the chimney pots. Night’s infinite blackness breaks into geometry, ceremonial planes of light and shape, a London etched by the palimpsest of centuries. The chorion of the dark sloughs off, every moment of the moments before become a shifting continuum of fragmentary clarity, a spectrum of light and dark, of blame and culpability, of hope and hopelessness—broken into facets, broken again: like memory, or a kaleidoscope churning, or the eye of a bee.

29. “The Moon and the Yew Tree”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“The Moon and the Yew Tree”

OCTOBER 22, 1961

COURT GREEN

She stirs under the blue surveillance of the floodlight moon, the uncommon wakeful tempo of her husband’s breathing the disharmony that wakes her. She is six months pregnant, restless with the heft of her growing baby, the skin of her belly itchy and taut. Ted, though, is mostly immune to her noctural shuffling, or has been, since Frieda’s infancy—when he learned the time-honored husbandly art of feigning sleep through night feedings—until now. With effort she rolls onto her back and over, breasts and belly to his broad back.

“What’s wrong?” she whispers into Ted’s neck, sensing a peculiar fretting of his jaws.

“I dreamt my teeth had the texture of sugared cakes,” he whispers back.

“Pink frosting,” Sylvia offers knowingly.

Ted groans. “Yes.”

“I know,” she adds, settling into the furrow formed by their nested bodies in the bedclothes, a warm bulwark against the bracing October predawn. She manages to protract her arm over his waist despite her increasing girth. “I suspect these babies have sucked all the calcium from my very bones. If you find us a good dentist in Exeter, then I’ll go when you’ve tried him out.” She takes a deep breath, finding herself winded by the exertion of extended statement—the baby, it would seem, foundering in her lungs.

“So I’m the guinea pig,” Ted says, folding her hand into his own.

“Yes. I’m too ponderous to leave the house,” Sylvia confirms. They lie drowsing in the thin blue light, the black shapes of their bedroom arranging themselves along the walls.

“Are you too ponderous to work, then?” Ted asks, impulsively hoisting himself from the bed, turning to tenderly enclose her in the sheets and layers of comforters he’s disturbed.