Ted climbs down from his study in the attic carrying the single dense page of her new poem, completed that morning. He stands in the stone entrance of the kitchen and watches his wife—for a fleeting, unsuspecting moment—icing cupcakes at their borrowed table. A stack of their sorted correspondence, letters and solicitations, waits for answer beyond the baking tins and the cooling racks. She’s queued her sewing as well. Frieda potters in the background with a dustpan, muttering earnestly, lost in the last frantic moments of play before nap. The Bendix washer Aurelia has underwritten as a housewarming gift is chugging noisily in the larder, plumbed last week by no small effort through Elizabethan stone. The just-washed luncheon dishes glisten on the range top of the warm Aga, waiting to be arranged prettily along the plate rail. A spatula in Sylvia’s hand drips thick, pink icing. She raises her eyebrows at him, pleased with herself, surrounded by the reassuring currency of young motherhood.

“Cakes for the rector?” Ted asks.

Sylvia chuckles; they both recall the absurd episode of a fortnight ago, waiting for the Anglican rector’s visit due to Sylvia’s ambivalent, immediately regretted invitation, asking for an elucidation of evensong over tea. After three days of no-shows, Ted and Sylvia were fat and sick from the unoffered cakes they had gobbled. Finally the rector appeared with the Book of Common Prayer under his arm, his unassuming generosity succeeding only in making Sylvia feel even more unctuous about her desire to goggle, an infidel, during the most atmospheric services. But that misguided local debacle was not the genesis of these particular cakes. “You inspired me,” she answers Ted slyly, running the spatula over the top of the iced cupcake in her hand, finishing it with a swirled flourish.

Right on schedule, as Ted was preparing Frieda’s lunch after their morning in the strawberry patch, Sylvia had emerged from her study with the poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” written in a matter of hours, her usual practice of spending a day and night in imaginative rumination of a particular subject utterly forgone, this poem arriving in its complete state virtually unbidden, as if it had been waiting inside her, ready to be unloaded at her feet.

She waits, now, for his reaction. Uncomfortably he mouths the bit of his complicated assessment. It is a good poem. In its way, utterly new for her—unhesitant and unequivocal. It is a very good, perhaps a profound poem, and profoundly disturbing. The poem seems, to him, faithful: to her, about her. It is a thought he cannot manage without a precipitous sense of gusting loneliness.

“You don’t need me to tell you,” he begins. “You know.”

She frosts her cakes, smiling privately, knowing.