“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Dido answers. “I’ve barely just completed my rubbishing of this place and couldn’t leave until I was done,” she adds in a tone of sleepy boredom. “The agents start showing it next week.”

Veins throb at Sylvia’s temples, purpling her meagerly immured fears. “Then Ted has already left for his mother’s?”

Dido inhales deeply into the receiver, her voice becoming nasal as she lights her first cigarette. “No,” she replies flatly. “He’s still here, camping out. I expect he’s peacefully in bed, as I was.”

Feeling perilous, Sylvia takes a deep breath, fighting to keep her thoughts in check. She gets straight to the point, pushing her imagination aside. “I need to speak with him, please,” she says to Dido.

Dido takes another deep drag of her cigarette. “My dear Sylvia,” she says with withering coldness, “I am still in bed. Ted is no doubt also still in bed, and, I would venture, given the hour, asleep. We had a very late evening last night, a last gathering—before my banissement to the States—of the literary set. You would have loved it, in fact. Lots of nasty gossip and clinking ice. Ted was the milkiest star in the galaxy, however, the model of generous wit. Or perhaps you wouldn’t have loved it, after all.”

Sylvia is hanging, hanging by a thread. “I really do need to speak to Ted, Dido. Please,” she says, knuckles ashen on the receiver.

“Why don’t you let me relay a message and make it easier on all of us,” Dido answers, her voice contemptuous.

But Sylvia has no message: she doesn’t know what to say. If she could hear his voice—

Her nerves begin to give completely away, welling into her throat. She is nearly speechless, unable to access the words. Truth and love and faith: signifiers only, only pyxes for the ineffable. “I have been working so hard—” she chokes out, struggling to mouth the syllables.

“I thought you told me you couldn’t work because your wretched husband had left you high and dry, and without a nanny you were helpless,” Dido counters, cutting her Mayfair elocution with killing scorn. “I thought you were sick. I thought the children were scraping their little knuckles on death’s door. At least, that’s the impression you gave Ted—” she continues.

Maybe it is Sylvia’s speechlessness that gives Dido pause; maybe it is the notable absence of counterattack that causes Dido to hesitate, holding the phone in silence, the infinitesimal stoking of her cigarette’s cinder the only sound, listening to the expansive quiet of Sylvia’s humbled desperation. Nothing, for an endless, catalytic minute, is said.

“If you had told me you were ill, I could have brought you and the children something,” Dido says, steely, smoking her cigarette.