“Ha,” she scoffs. In the seven weeks since moving into Court Green, the work has been never ending. Though charming and only idiosyncratically neglected from a panoramic distance, the unflattering close-up of daily intimacy has revealed their house to be nothing short of falling apart. The backbreaking scullery sink, surely more prehistoric than Dido Merwin’s at Lacan, had to be replaced right away, as did the house’s only toilet. In those rooms not floored in quaint but treacherous, unmortared pitch cobbles or splintering softwood, the dry-rotted floor joists were resting directly on raw earth. Entire families of field mice skittered fearlessly to and fro under the stolid, carved back door, iron-clad and hewn of centuries-old, nearly petrified oak but gaping a good three inches up from the stone threshold. Ted scoured the local auctions and weekly market for carpentry tools and began building bookcases, cobbling together crude bits of furniture for the empty rooms, chopping firewood, digging beds for a vegetable garden, scything the chest-high grass tennis court. Sylvia worked beside him, painting the interior—pink plaster walls and glossy white wainscotting—while Ted whitewashed outside. She sewed curtains and corduroy draft stoppers, upholstered second-hand armchairs and cushions for window seats, supervised the endless stream of plumbers and carpet layers and miscellaneous tradesmen hired to repair whatever they couldn’t manage themselves.

Even so, the Hugheses’ housework has encompassed an institutionalized, imaginative dimension. They have renewed their day-splitting rota of child care, their arrangement since the arrival of eighteen-month-old Frieda. During his afternoons free of baby-minding, Ted has completed the radio script for his play The Wound and is finishing a second, meanwhile driving to remote Devonshire stations to make other motley recordings for the BBC. Harper’s Bazaar has just published his short story “Snow,” and with the story he’s working on now, he’s mulling his way toward completion of a collection awaited by his publisher. An invitation has just arrived asking him to serve as one of two judges for the annual Poetry Society book selection.

Sylvia, similarly, has written five good poems since the move, spending her mornings in her increasingly alluring study. While at Court Green she’s sold her first article to one of the British women’s weeklies and opened her London publisher’s letter of acceptance for The Bell Jar. Remote as the Hugheses now are by design, the clairvoyant mail still finds them, bringing commendations, checks, sought-after commissions. For a fortnight Sylvia has been relishing the droves of new children’s books arriving in oversized boxes from the New Statesman, more than she and Ted together can possibly review. This straightaway burst of literary fecundity seems portentous, a confirmation of their last two years’ weightiest choices as a couple and expanding family—a ludicrously expanding family, Sylvia likes to joke, right out of her brassieres and underwear.