“I didn’t know,” Sylvia answers with difficulty, the words like pebbles in her mouth. Beyond the encapsulated air of the kiosk the street is coming to quelled, Sunday life. The news agent has opened his door and begun papering his racks. A woman with small children and a crocheted shopping bag stands patiently by, her back turned, at the empty wooden bins of Yeoman’s fruit stand.

“How will you manage with the children for Christmas?” Dido inhales, her interest begrudging.

“We’ll be all right,” Sylvia answers, her sense of endangerment idling, or at least less pressing than her need to draw Dido off. She glances through the kiosk glass at Frieda and Nick. Nicholas, holding a shard of cookie in his sticky mitten, watches his sister intently as she nibbles the edges of her own. Nicholas coughs and turns his head, gazing straight into his mother’s face. Sylvia waves weakly. “I’ve gotten some shopping done, and my mother has sent presents from the relatives,” she says. “I managed to do some of my baking yesterday,” she adds, stirring a faint recollection of her familiar, sedulous efficiency.

“Not those tiny peppery German cakes?” Dido asks.

“Lebkuchen—honey cakes,” Sylvia says.

“They’re a more devious weapon than the Luftwaffe,” Dido says, with bland drollery. “I believe those biscuits and the rest of your hausfrau talents had a collateral involvement in my having to get my face done.”

“I just made a batch. I could bring you some,” Sylvia offers.

“I should say not!” Dido says. “You might as well drive me straight to my surgeon. No, I think I’ll allow Trans World Airlines to save me from the threat of your Christmas cakes.”

“So you are leaving tomorrow,” Sylvia says, the manifest threat of being ripped to shreds tempering into cagey conversation.

“Yes, Christmas in New York,” Dido says, in a tone of amused disparagement. “And I believe Ted told me he would drive up to Yorkshire this afternoon as well. ‘Clearing out,’ as he put it.”

“He’s leaving today,” Sylvia says, her alarm rising.

“Yes, taking someone or other’s borrowed van,” Dido confirms, nursing her cigarette. “I can see it from this window, parked on the square. Not elegant transportation, but I suppose it will get him to his mother’s. Quite rusted away, in fact.”

“He’s driving,” Sylvia begins, her mind straining at a pretense. “Perhaps he can help me. I need some things I left behind at Court Green. I was hoping he could go there from Yorkshire and bring them to me—”

“It’s hardly a detour—” Dido says tartly.