She turns her head, searches the dashboard to locate the car’s starter. Her hands are still gripping the steering wheel. She turns the key in the starter and steps on the gas; there is a sudden metallic grind from the engine, and she jumps. It’s still running. She never turned it off. She flicks on her signal and glances into her rearview mirror, preparing to reenter the line of traffic.

She listens to her mother’s quiet, steady keening beside her as she pulls onto the single-lane road. The green Devon landscape revolves past the windshield and away.

*   *   *

She enters the house blinded, as by a bright explosion.

Her pupils flare, adjust, and the rooms of her house emerge, washed in the submarine light of summer afternoon. Her life takes tangible shape again, returned to her in high relief: the curtains she’s sewn wavering at the windows. Her pewter candlesticks, her braided rug; her Chesterfield sofa and its worn blue velvet undulating like a reef at the edge of the parlor. The playroom abandoned for naptime, the debris of toys and storybooks scattered over the floor. Her mother follows behind, brittle, her face wrung like a rag, carrying more packages. The ringing of the telephone begins to surface. The house is otherwise still.

“Ted?” Sylvia calls, peeling off her purse and bags. She hears his chair’s faint scrape across the floor of his attic study. Another ring stiffens in the air. “I’ll get it,” she says to no one, anxious to pull her life close, crossing the parlor and turning into the hall, where the phone table is centered against the wall between the staircase and the kitchen. Ted’s feet are clattering down the attic steps.

“I’ve got it,” she calls, as she reaches the phone table, rounding her voice: calm, efficient. As her hand extends toward the black receiver, she sees Ted turn the corner at the top of the carpeted stairs and hesitate in the blue shadows. She raises her chin to him and sends him a tight, hopeful little smile—a tiny intimate motion between people long married, almost a reflex, almost benign. She picks up the telephone, cutting off its shrill pulse. She brings the receiver to her ear. “Hullo?”

A second of dead air, then another, hisses at the other end of the line.

“Hullo?” Sylvia says again, her hand already tensing to hang up, her swiftly shaped composure going liquid at its center.

Ted is walking quickly from the second-floor landing down the remaining flight of stairs.

The line crackles with the oceanic suck of a hand covering the mouthpiece. The hand slides back, and the caller speaks into a tinny void. “Hullo,” says a deep, gravelly voice devoid of affect. “I’m calling for Ted Hughes.”