The children, first of all, had been ill, and so had Sylvia. He didn’t trust her to make the trip by herself, so physically spent; it was an all-day drive, one way, in ordinary weather. He’s come because he feels he owes her this much—even so paltry a grant as this. His guilt, what he’d done to them, to her, has made him as powerful as the giant she’d imagined him to be: he could bring her the treasures she wanted. In turn, he could justify his rationalization that this break, this end, as she would have it, was good for her. She had the things that were really important, what she wanted most—her children and her art. She was better off; he’d seen what she had been able to do, freed of their claustrophobic symbiosis, his eye upon her, her own, pitiless, upon herself.

And because, after all, this was how their relationship had always worked: she needed; he responded. He had moved to America because she so wanted to; it was a need, at the time, that he understood only in part. They came back to England, thank god, because she’d been ready to go, had needed to. There was no small relief, he could admit to himself, in fulfilling her limitless need with a mere trip through the snow, a few apples, some material.

And his need was to see his house, his home, to go back to the proof that it really existed, not a hallucination but a dream become nightmare. He needs that reminder: too easy, since summer, to slough away the unseen, unreminding losses, to reward oneself with the throb of the new, the heady, greedy, gloating ease of no history. To be forgetful when remembering holds such a razor to the throat. It was easy, he has discovered, to justify anything in a vacuum.

All he had ever wanted was to make his life simple; to make room for his soul’s expansion. To write, only that. Instead, every decision—jointly made at her insistence, because of her need, despite how often practical, how often fruitful—complicated his imagination with distracting detail, like those intricate sketches she’d made during their honeymoon: melon carts heaped in the swarming market square at Benidorm; wreathed garlic, rope sandals, jugs of wine tethered against the swaying beads in shop doorways. The sardine fleet back with its silvered morning catch, the shimmer of jumbled scales and bald eyes glinting against the cerulean sheen of the ocean, under the critical blaze of sun; orange starfish and scarlet crabs caught in the bunched mesh nets. The more complicated the subject, the better she liked it. It gave her something to dissect, a problem she had the means to solve, something she could wrestle down by ingenious will.