The Gothic, beaded towers of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, the serpentine Thames, the sinuous green downs of Salisbury Plain roll toward her, monumental and blank and ineffectual. The melancholy dolmens and toppled bluestone of Stonehenge, Bath’s lustrous golden facades relinquish the light as they sink from view. Past Exeter Cathedral’s helpless, faceless saints hugging their time-pocked columns come the elderberried hedgerows and patchwork hillsides of Devon, the fields of barley and the ragged cattle and her apple trees. Among them her beehive, sheltered on its painted stand. Her garden, dying back under the giant elm. And then her house appears, her cobbled court and rotty thatch; the nine glazed panes of her French kitchen window rise and revolve away. The dank, moss-covered church rears up over the picket of lichened gravestones she could see from her study, laburnums, seemingly endlessly, through spring. The yew, as always, has caught the setting sun in its black-green needles. The butcher, the post office, the bridge over the river, the slate-roofed village flash forward, and suddenly she’s on a grassy hillside flanked by stone walls and hedgerows sprouting late dog roses, by the giant tufted fingers of a Victorian-era monkey puzzle tree at the gate, by stunted English oaks growing close to the ground. Not again: she’s standing at a swing set with a view of the purple mass of Dartmoor looming out of the patchwork heather, beyond the borders of the village playground. It is September, three months past, and she sees herself alone, speechless, pushing a child in a swing at sunset.

It was September: a vicious and despairing time. Ted was gone, just gone—her mind raced ceaselessly, picking over dead conversations. Draping wet laundry across the steaming, cast-iron doors of the Aga, choking on the fraudulent cheer of her nursery teas, she rehearsed for future scenes—showdowns, pleadings—and analyzed merciless replays of recent ugly vignettes, already glittering malevolently in her memory. She agonized: what she should say, what she shouldn’t have said. What was the truth? She had desperately wanted to know. She couldn’t find it for the slipping of her mind. For all the stillness and silence she lived inside at Court Green, the hours and days she would go without hearing another adult voice, without speaking, she couldn’t escape the roaring in her ears. There were always the voices whispering their terrible, urgent advice.