And there’s a crunch at her rarely used front door: snails. They’ve colonized the door, wiping their snotty track all over the enamel, dozens of slimy mountaineers rappeling her entryway. Disgusting and spineless, leaving the door a glittery public trail of dried spunk. Just like Ted. She hates these everlasting snails, their pointlessness, their goo, their nasty probes. On either side of the step, under the twin boxwood bushes, are dented aluminum pans of old beer, Ted’s Guinness. There are chipped saucers of flat ale all over the garden, a vain attempt to attract and drown the snails. They’d given up early on baiting; Frieda was out in the yard with her red tin spade every day. Drowning them seemed at least worth a try. Sylvia is scraping the one she’s stepped on off her heel and onto the mat; there are, in fact, a few defunct snails effervesced in the beer-turned-vinegar, the pans crowded with floating twigs and fragments of leaf as well.

Sylvia shifts the weight of her packages to one side, juggling to free a hand and pluck snails off her door. This is what Ted has left for her: this harbinger of indifference, this smear over her threshold. A head on a stick: Trespassers beware. As if she could be so easily deflected. It was her slimy disaster of a life now, and she was cleaning it up. He has no idea what she is capable of. She’ll keep writing, and she’ll kill these snails, too. She’ll start a salon; she’ll learn German. She’ll take care of the grounds, the garden, the house, the moldering house; the children crying, awake in their beds. She’ll carry their marriage, the life they’d made. She can carry it all on her shoulders. And she is going to carry it all, by god, back to London.

The snails are splashing her new shoes. Her fingers are sticky with goo. The snails don’t seem to be dying, either—they’re rolling in the pans, half submerged. Poking their heads out of their shells, sliding their filament eyes at her. She leaves the rest stuck on the door and lifts the latch. Inside, the water music of her children’s voices and Sue’s from upstairs now, the heat of the kitchen’s Aga hovering at the ceiling in the hallway. She drops her boxes and bags on an armchair in the parlor and storms toward the kitchen.