“Yes,” Ted replies, his mind, as well, operating on two channels, “but if you could keep them in reverse order for now, or number them—” He pats her arm as he passes her by to enter the kitchen, Sylvia, standing in concentrated attention before his unsteady table.

She picks up the first of the pasted sheets and begins to decipher. His inimitable handwriting leaps and splashes in blotty ink over the torn scraps. Spread across the desk, more of his handwriting maps the paper rags, her own typing evident on carbons and smudged bond. In the box at her feet, pushed aside toward the vermilion wall, reams and reams of rice paper settles, ripped from its signatures, the paper so transparent that the printing on one side shadows the other, the leather-covered boards and their Florentine endpapers utterly rent. Long before they ever met, the pages of his Shakespeare had thickened and buckled with the moisture of seasons on the Yorkshire moors while he waited out his National Service, fixing radios. Later, a bleaching summer in their sunny bedroom in Benidorm, his Shakespeare always on the table where they wrote side by side, newlyweds. It was what he read to her from while she cooked; what they memorized, slapping the book playfully shut to prevent cheating, when they were first lovers. The spine was chipped, the covers unintentionally warped in the crate they shipped to Massachusetts and back, two years later, to London. The fragile pages were dog-eared; the boards and their oxblood leather were stained with the trails of silverfish, the spine’s glue reduced to powder. Still, it had not been easy—

“I’ve been meaning to toss this out,” Ted says, emerging suddenly out of the kitchen, slipping the box and its destroyed contents far under his table, his words steering sharklike through murkily deep water. Before she can speak, he returns to the stove, carrying the kettle back in his mitted hand.

She gathers the pages he has finished pasting and walks rigidly, like something breakable, to her desk by the window in the front room. Ted distracts himself in the background, flirting with little Frieda, lowering her uneventfully into her playpen, handing her toys, murmuring enthusiasm. Sylvia sits at her desk rolling fresh paper and carbon onto the typewriter platen, aware of the tart ache in her pelvis, its slow implacable failing. Frieda tiptoes the perimeter of her playpen, proud of herself and crowing, gripping the railing for support. Ted is in the kitchen putting the tea tray together; Sylvia hears the delicate clatter of porcelain. She types in spurts, studying the flayed fragments of Ted’s handwriting, his rended words, piecing them back together. She wants to forget all this, the stain of blood touching everything, and she almost will.

33. “The Rival”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“The Rival”

DECEMBER 23, 1962

LONDON