The temperature, near freezing, has chilled the color from the frosted sky. Along the arcing footpath that traces the boundary of Primrose Hill the trees have withdrawn, smoky colored and contracted with cold, their bare aloof limbs repelling the clouds.

She’s had just enough sleep to brace her, coffee to start her heart, a warm breakfast. Frieda and Nick are dressed in their thickest wools, all but their rosy faces covered, enrobed together under a blanket she has tucked against the sides of the pram. In the pocket of her winter coat a scrap of paper rustles against the silky lining, talismanic scrolls of ink from Ted’s pen: the telephone number of the flat on Montagu Square, Dido’s mother’s. He told Sylvia last week he would stay there through the holidays, moving elsewhere—he didn’t know where, or he didn’t say—when he returned from his Christmas in Yorkshire.

She guides the pram to a stop before the telephone kiosk at St. George’s Terrace, presses the toe of her shoe to the brake. The shops are shuttered and locked, Regent’s Park Road quiet and still as a mausoleum this early on a Sunday. Sylvia hands the children cookies she’s brought to divert them, wipes spills from their covered cups of cocoa. She gathers the toys that have slipped out of reach, gathers her courage as she steps into the booth.

The coins throttle into their slots, the numbers on the circular dial tick and stutter. She holds the scrap of paper in her hand. As the ringing begins, she closes her eyes, breathing in the self so ready to fly off in a million pieces, not knowing what she will say, having no words at all—her sense of truth too enormous for words, an inchoate lexicon.

Planets pass between rings. The windows of the launderette and the news agent’s shop are lifeless; Yeoman’s green grocery is barred by a locked, metal grate. It’s only the cold that makes her shudder, Sylvia tells herself; she steadies the receiver at her ear. There is a burr disrupted, and a swift black sweep of air as the line connects.

“Hullo?” Dido wheezes into the phone.

Sylvia startles, unprepared, prepared only for the sonorous roll of Ted’s voice. She had allowed herself to imagine only that: Ted’s voice.

“Dido?” she responds, her own voice tinny and small.

“Oh,” Dido says, “Sylvia. What are you doing up so inconveniently early on a Sunday morning?” Dido’s question is thick with the haze of interrupted sleep.

“I’m calling for Ted. I thought you’d already gone to New York,” Sylvia blunders. It would never be easy for her, she thinks. Always the obstacle, the flaw; Cerberus always lunging at the gate.