Up the gravel-crusted footpaths of primrose hill she rises, pushing Nicholas in the pram. Past the traffic crossing and wrought-iron palisade at the undulant edge of Regent’s Park Road, the last decaying sycamore leaves cartwheeling, hand-sized and yellow, over the flagstone footpath, slick black taxis and their soundless occupants flickering by like penny theater scenes at the edge of her sight. Across the green lawns spreading on all sides, she walks in the last granular light of afternoon. Frieda’s mittened hand curls around the curving chrome chassis of the pram. Sylvia leads her, a docile calf, toward the playground at the foot of the hill. But the summit exerts its own pull, its cloud-marbled arc of changeable, potent sky drawing Sylvia’s muted attention.

It is quiet at the top of Primrose Hill. Only a few distant walkers tugging their coats about them and hurrying toward the shops and beyond, to Hampstead; no one at the crest. The hawthorns splayed alongside the ascending footpaths are black-jointed and lacy against the colorless light, bare but for their red berry tassels. At the playground a couple of older children are puttering unsupervised in the high-sided sandbox, their open jackets flapping. Sylvia lifts Nicholas, blinking himself awake, into the wooden saddle of the infant swing.

Frieda has run to the edge of the sandbox to watch the older boys filling their dump trucks. She waits, her hands knotted behind her. The elastic frog on one of her rubber boots has come unclasped. The boys’ hands and faces are raw with cold, red and chapped from the damp sand. Sylvia pulls her head scarf tighter, glancing around for their mothers. This would be the day not to run into any of her old neighborhood crowd. She’s swaddled her grisly, tearstained face like an unpresentable baby: another appalling surprise. She takes cover, harrowed and benumbed, behind the deflecting solidity of Nick, who is content to merely dangle in his swing, snowsuited, in his pointy tufted hat, contemplative and sleepy, his feet lightly swaying. He knits his infant eyebrows and studies the sandy slab of concrete below him that records with faint shadows the infinitesimal orbit he’s making.