But he won’t see. It will remain unnoticed, missed by Ted, in its unmissable place through the next morning until Sylvia arrives, slim and incandescent as a candle, flushed, her cheeks bright with cold and fever, her skin translucent with all her sleepless nights, like new and gilded wax; her heart in the hands she keeps jammed in her pockets, trying to imagine how to begin to speak of faith. Not her faith in him, not an exterior faith, but her faith, newborn, and tender still, in herself. Not a solution, yet, not an answer to the questions their spoiled marriage has left unsettled, but something to hold on to. Struggling at her dumbness, veiling her struggle with a panicked critical eye, assessing the precise tone of the green walls of the room, the provenance of the Della Robbia crown moldings, his unmade bed, the burlap sacks lumpy with the onions and potatoes and apples that had gotten her here, her red corduroy in an unfolded heap, a glint of glass and honey-gold out of the top of one of the sacks, and on his desk the red leather binding of the complete Oxford Shakespeare.

His Oxford Shakespeare: immediate, perfect, the patina of its red leather deepened with age, like wine or brandy or apples; unbelievably reincarnated, as if her mistakes had truly, with the snow, been erased. And she will step toward it, this miraculous recovery, and draw her hands, empty, from her pockets, to touch it, to open it, an act of faith, a confirmation. And as he looks on, uncomprehending, and as she grasps the leather-bound cover in her fingers and lifts it, revealing the scrolled Florentine endpapers and the new bookplate from a shop on Regent Street and the inscription barely dry, she will remember her days of playing the anagram game with Mr. Crockett at McLean after her breakdown. It was winter then, as well, at least in her mind, until she got the game. She will get it now, too, the letters swimming up from this replacement and its inscription. The anagram will read you are ash.

41. “Wintering”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

“Wintering”

DECEMBER 29, 1962

LONDON

She rose from her bath on the morning of their meeting. The children were still asleep, Millie hours from arrival. She had been able to linger, then, over her ablutions, her preparations seeming almost bridal in her anxious excitement. Soaking in the hot tub laced with lavender salts, supplementing the swiftly cooling water with a steaming teakettle. Shaving her legs, buffing her feet with pumice, washing her thick hair and binding it in a towel. Rubbing rosewater and glycerine into her pale skin. Before the full-length mirror in her bedroom, dropping her wool robe to dress; her long body leaner than ever, delicate boned and frail, but purified, milky and translucent, like a candle left long burning.