Her baby is propped on her lap, as directed. With her photogenic house behind her, she faces the orchard and the flourishing garden, the banks of rampant flowers that the camera won’t see. The overcast sky, an impenetrable slab of heavy, shadowless light, presses itself to the landscape like an ether-soaked cloth. The poppies and the dahlia blossoms struggle, tossing their breeze-blown heads. She holds Nick steady under the arms, her fingers splayed over his footed coveralls as he frowns and stares and flails his fists. Frieda sits beside her on the grass, pensive in her ironed dress and Mary Janes, hands busy with a toy, a wooly dog with felt eyelashes tucked loosely under her elbow, a doll buggy off to one side.

Ted fumbles with her mother’s camera, waiting. Her mother passes through the composition like a nurse, collecting the tumbled doggy for Frieda, arranging, rolling the buggy out of sight. Kneeling beside her daughter for the final tableau, prim in her traveling suit. Nick flexes his toes and squints.

Sylvia submits. She’s hollow-eyed, pale, subdued. She gives off a low-voltage hum; she knows they can hear it. If they were to cut her open, she would glow, phosphorescent, like the cobalt-boned eels she and Ted caught on their honeymoon in Spain. She hated Spain. The whole country was a graveyard. Ted draws the camera to his face and holds it steady, stepping back into the soft soil beneath the rustling pole beans. Stumbling in his own dirt. He doesn’t care—he’s as closed to her as the sky. His paradise is but a phone call away. Or was. It’s winter now, all right. It’s so cold it burns. Her sweater is buttoned almost to the neck. She stares down the slit of his single, guilty eye. Yes, she’ll give him a picture: her shredded little soul, overexposed. The bloody tatters of their marriage dangling from her wrists like the layers sliced back on a cadaver. She scrapes her face together into a smile.

The shutter clicks. It’s time to rush her mother to the station. The flowers go on dreaming, kicking in their sleep like dogs.

9. “A Secret”

CHAPTER NINE

“A Secret”

DECEMBER 13, 1962

LONDON