This is all she’d known then, killing time—a phrase whose accuracy made her wince—with her children at the village playground, the inescapable facts: Ted was having an affair. He was sleeping with Assia, sleeping on floors in London to see her. Sylvia didn’t, beyond that, know where he was or what he would do. She had wanted to know it all—the truth, all of it—she knew there must be more. But in the glare of these particulars alone her mind was a bedlam of horrified torment and disbelief. Months later, standing in the cold London twilight, her face still flushes with shame: he knows everything about her. She has no secrets—he’s always known more than she has known herself. Where would it go now, all that was her, now that he didn’t want it?

Her children are still swinging. Still, Sylvia stands by absently, one cold hand clenched deep in her pocket, letting their movements, the shapes of their bodies against the fence, the incremental slump of Frieda’s socks wash by her. In September she’d written her mother about the majestic view of Dartmoor from the playground, as if that made her life less forlorn, less cramped and scared. What was it he had said to her? His words had fallen like blows, and now she couldn’t remember. It was too exhausting to concentrate on the hard things, the elemental truths of the self. She couldn’t then, and she can’t now—she notices again how her self slips away, uncatchable except by the most strenuous effort. It was slippery, the self, like a baby in a bath.

That’s all she needs. All, more likely, that she can manage: a bath. Hot as hell. As hot as she can stand, tropical, so hot she breaks a sweat. So hot and long her fingers pucker. Scalding hot, a brandy’s sting—she’d have a brandy too, a cat’s eye in the tub: the burning and the numbing, a fossil stiff in amber.

The little deaths of all these leaves: the stunted oaks, the London planes, rolling by in tatters on the grass; she dreads this recycling of days. The shadows of her children are flying out over Dartmoor, over the rooftops of London, out over the world as she watches. The older boys have vanished, teased back into the dark by their invisible mothers. All along Fitzroy Road the other mothers will be just preparing their suppers as she heads back with her children to their dark flat. Eyes downcast, her scarf pulled close, she’ll pass the glowing, knee-high windows of the garden flats and see all those other mothers headless at their cooking. They’ll be chopping their vegetables, making their stews, ringing their puddings with cream on the other side of the steamy basement glass.

10. “The Jailor”

CHAPTER TEN

“The Jailor”

DECEMBER 14, 1962

LONDON