Framed within the glossy red grid of a jubilee telephone kiosk is a two-year-old girl wearing a carmine coat as red as the booth in which she stands. Her smaller brother is balanced on a chrome-edged shelf meant to hold parcels, and her mother is dropping coin after coin into the phone box. From her circumscribed spot on the kiosk’s damp, cast-iron floor, the little girl looks out onto the hill where she played last evening, now blanketed in a layer of blue fog hovering thickly over the grassy slopes and sports fields like a sterile sheet of cotton batting. The morning rain continues to fall, a cold, steady mizzle dribbling irregular trails down the glass-paned kiosk windows with their streaky views of Primrose Hill. The pennies chink in the coin box; her brother is starting to cry. Outside on the corner, his pram is soaking wet. Her mother pulled the bonnet up, but the gabardine cover would not snap closed over the pillowcases of dirty laundry she had piled into the bassinet. She hunches into the telephone, away from the public indictment of her soggy buggy parked on the corner of Regent’s Park Road for all to see.

Sylvia’s umbrella, snagged on the hook so thoughtfully provided by the General Post Office, is dripping steadily into the top of her overshoe. Nicholas is struggling, whining and grasping at her wet coat; she holds him firmly on his high awkward seat in the crook of one arm and flips the worn pages of her address book with the other hand. No one, no one is answering. Not the mothers who used to meet in the gardens in front of her old flat, the ones who could seamlessly carry on a conversation while digging out of a baby’s mouth sand from the box where the neighborhood cats buried their hard little turds. Not the wives of the poets with whom she exchanged recipes or sly asides, not the poets themselves. Not the Telephone House, where her application for service was filed over a month ago. If she could set up just one tea, one visit—

The pennies fall and return. No answer comes. The ringer drills its pointless holes into empty space.