“Hullo?” Sylvia says, elbows on the kitchen table, her free hand fingering her braided bun. “Assia, this is Sylvia Hughes—”

Her voice carries through the apartment, moving over it lightly, like a fine mist. It settles over the painted floors and the glossy molding that traces the rooms. “—you’ll have to visit us there. It’s Ted’s dreamscape. Our own Avalon, complete with apple trees and the bones of pagans. Ted’s older brother spent a year somewhere in Devon as a gamekeeper, long ago. Before the war. He spent all his time hunting pheasants. Ted says it was the happiest year of his life.”

Her voice lingers, coating the bedroom wallpaper, sifting down over the folds of the jackets and wraps in the red-painted vestibule. It glazes the surfaces of the furniture: the top of the compact enameled table where they sit, the spines of the books, the bureau in the hallway by the bathroom. It covers the Olivetti typewriter and the neat stack of typed pages on the small table before the window in the parlor, the pink pages of a manuscript that will be completed, to Sylvia’s great relief, in a week’s time, her first novel, 274 pages of a novel she’s titled The Bell Jar. Like their cramped life on Chalcot Square, the story of the bell jar is an episode she’s getting out of her system.

Like mist, Sylvia’s voice will evaporate from this apartment, and that’s just fine with her. Yet she relishes the idea of bequeathing the flat—stifling or cozy, depending on one’s mood—to another pair of fledgling writers. The Wevills seem like their sort of people, Assia particularly. They don’t deny it: Sylvia and Ted both believe in signs. One last act to indemnify the good auspices of their move; after the applicants departed, they fished the crumpled list of callers, names and numbers, out of the wastepaper bin under the sink. Then Sylvia picked up the telephone. The handoff feels, in its small way, fortunate.

6. “Barren Woman”

CHAPTER SIX

“Barren Woman”

MAY 19, 1962

COURT GREEN

The orchard floor, three weeks ago thick with a thousand daffodils and fragrant white-starred narcissi, is littered now with apple blossoms. They fall like confetti—random, frivolous, a moment of glitter. Throughout the stone-walled treescape, the blossoms hang in suspense, dropping weightless petals onto blades of tall grass, onto the hard-tamped ruddy soil. They yield at the least breath of wind, shed like cells or bits of pale tissue.