The neighborhood has gone steely and lusterless in the rain, which has gradually seeped under Sylvia’s clear plastic cap and into her thick hair as she stands at the phone, and now trickles in cold rivulets over her stiffening scalp. Even this simple plan—the launderette, setting a date for a visit with friends, maybe a baby-minder engaged for a few hours—is a death by a thousand cuts. She’s scuttled with the loaded pram, dragging Frieda from the shelter of tree to dripping tree down the footpath at the edge of the park, looking for the nearest public phone; her skull crinkles, fragile and papery as the abandoned husk of an insect after the seven-hour stupor of her sleeping pills. It’s just her luck to find the phone here: mere steps from Dido Merwin’s disapproving front door on St. George’s Terrace. She’s passed this corner what must be hundreds of times in the past, to and from dinners at the Merwins’ a block and a half from Chalcot Square. But she never noticed the box at the foot of Dido’s street; she’d never needed it before. And now she’s got no choice but to use it, crouching in the shadow of a woman who’s never liked her, her soiled linens in the street.