Yet the bells of St. Mark’s peal over Primrose Hill, calling the faithful, their mellifluous notes stirring the leafless willows that bow and sweep along the misty banks of Regent’s Canal, a summons cutting the frozen air to carry past the old piano factories, the empty shops and terraced houses, the stilled swings of the schoolyard and playground. Cross-legged in the rugless parlor, feeling her bones, her whittled haunches against the unforgiving floorboards, she listens to the harkening toll of the bells, her fingernails paring the thin peel from a tangerine. Loosening the web of lacy tissues that binds the fruit, offering a section to Nicholas who refuses, muffling his cough into her flannel nightgown. Listening to the radio’s soar and chant of medieval carols, their inebriate censer of mysterious faith. Watching Frieda’s spellbound peeling of colored foil from every chocolate ball she unwraps, her beguiled gasp at the melting spheres. To keep it all in mind, to see it all: their onions, their potatoes, their apples and honey emblematic, the practical harvest of a complicated love, residue of their marriage and its betrayals—the myths of earth and air, the salt of tears, and sweetness. Yes, sweetness: these children, warm and alive, snuffling amid the litter of festoonery. Her poetry, finally—bled from her, but genuine for it, the one voice she had waited, needed, to hear. Out of the void, the meaningless black. How the mind, the heart, resist ambiguity, wanting to believe or not, yearning toward a single truth, edged and isolate, an Australia.

It is not just Ted. The void, the terrible trapdoor of the world swinging loose. She rubs her cheek against her baby’s downy head. Huddled in her lap Nicholas holds one of his wooden train cars, turning it over in his fat little hands, conducting his examination with infantile gravity. Frieda is deep in the serious business of play, tenting the slick dust jackets of the new storybooks over her smeary chocolate balls, over her flocked zoo animals, ribbon candy pressed into service as fencing.

It is something else, fragile but understood. She touches the edge of it, like Nicholas this Christmas morning: the vulnerable nativity of faith in herself, naked as a baby, on which, despite herself, she relies.

36. “Fever 103°”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

“Fever 103°”

DECEMBER 26, 1962

BOXING DAY

LONDON

“Now, blow—”

Delicately she pinches a tissue to Frieda’s raw nose, manuscript balanced in her lap. Nicholas naps heavily beside her on the bed, a little hothouse convecting beneath the sheet, coughing in his sleep. Temporality lumbers: it is still only Wednesday afternoon, Boxing Day. Three more days, three nights—