She widened the door, edged a step into the silent room, cranked her face into a wide, careless smile. “I’ve put the kettle on,” she told him. “There’s breakfast ready.” She watched him rolling his socks and shirts into his kit. It was only Sunday morning; their tickets for the train were for Wednesday to Dublin, then the ferry to Wales and home. She didn’t dare ask. But she couldn’t bear the suspense; she never could.

“We’re alone, you know,” she blurted, advancing into the room to stand facing him in the narrow passage between their two beds. She sat down on her own, watching for him to look up and meet her gaze, her weight on her wrists. Trying to look relaxed, brazen as she could manage, Cleopatra to the asp. “Richard’s gone to the pier. He won’t be back for some time—”

Slowly, years of her life ticking past as she waited for his response, Ted stiffened, dropping the last of his folded clothing on the coverlet. He looked up at her, his shadowed face pallid with a sadness that was almost, but not quite, pitying. “That’s not what you need, Sylvia,” he said. “You need something entirely different.”

She struggled to still her shoulders, her face kneading. She tried to hold her mouth steady, her chin collapsing as she fought back tears. “‘We were the last romantics…’” she quoted, all she could think of, stupidly, the words beating without mercy in her ears.

“But we never were,” Ted answered, shaking his head slowly. “It has always been much more real than that, or this—” he paused, tasting his thoughts before he spoke them, “—vacuous, premeditated sentimentality.”

After she left him, after the first night—the first of their sleepless nights—she crossed the channel from London in the car of Cambridge classmates, then drove on with them to Paris to meet a boyfriend from Yale. But Ted was already in her, had already entered her blood. It was serious; she felt the workings of the great machine. Tried not to rest her head on the backseat’s vibrating window glass, but too tired not to. Niggled discreetly with her head scarf for hours, making certain to cover the telltale bruises that purpled her neck.

“Of course it’s real,” she argued, her emotions metamorphic, fear transforming under pressure into challenge. “Look at all we’ve made.” Did she recite it, powerless to stave off her mounting, dendritic anger, or merely think it?

An ancient bridge, and more ancient tower,

A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,

An acre of stony ground,

Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,

Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,

The sound of the rain or sound

Of every wind that blows …