The doorways to the shops on Regent’s Park Road are garlanded with meaningful swags of greenery, blatant seductions for holiday shoppers. Colored lights blink garishly in the windows of the flats above. A girl in The Queens Head, the pub across the street, is wiping a tabletop with a filthy rag and staring at her through the window. Sylvia turns her back, searching her book for someone else she might call. Dido is out of the question; now that Ted was gone, there was no reason to keep up the pretense of friendship, a pretense Dido most decidedly abandoned when she offered, unasked, to house Ted. The windows of the phone box have begun to cloud, fogging up with the heat of three damp bodies. Her mother in Wellesley (fast asleep, thank god, no temptation there), the solicitor: both just as risky as the only other choice she’s got left, and nearly as expensive. She turns to the front of the address book, just out of curiosity—not because she’s going to use it—looking for the loose scrap of paper on which she wrote the number of Dido’s mother’s flat, where Ted is staying. The back of an envelope, blue airmail, the thick uneven line of her Sheaffer pen—she knows exactly what the paper looks like, the deckled edge where she tore it from the aerogram, but it’s not there. It’s not in the back of the book either, not tucked between the pages. She can almost see the number in her mind, she’s looked at it so many times, willing the solitary girlish aperçus and Arabic loops of her intent penmanship to reveal something other than the practical: some divination, a sign. She checks again, more slowly, fanning the onionskin pages under her fingertip, Nicky crying at her side and attempting to crawl down on his own.

It’s disappeared, slipped from the book. And there’s no one left to call but Ted.

Cautiously, hugging Nicholas whimpering at her neck, Sylvia leans to the right, edging beyond the glass-encased RATES & INSTRUCTIONS poster, which shields her partly from view, to glance cautiously up Dido’s short, sloping lane and its block-long row of grand houses separated from Primrose Hill by its own hairpin strip of garden. None of the curtains is moving. Still, Sylvia can feel the prim Palladian reproach of St. George’s Terrace. Lord Byron’s scandalized widow died here a hundred years ago, humiliated; she read it in a biography last month. She’s sure Dido told her that Robert Frost had chucked her under the chin here as a baby. Or maybe that wasn’t here; maybe Dido had snagged this manse from one of her several discarded husbands. The nerve of her judgments! No wonder Dido is sheltering Ted; she and Assia have so much common ground.