Dido smokes, holding the phone in silence. “All right, Sylvia,” she finally answers, her voice receding and skeptical. “‘Whatever flames upon the night / Man’s own resinous heart has fed.’”

“Don’t quote Yeats to me,” Sylvia says, imperious. “That’s why I came. I know what I’m doing.” As she hangs up the phone, Sylvia turns around, holding Nicholas, pink-faced and blotchy, his little body heaving with residual sobs, her own blood thumping. A phone slam: a pathetic, gutless gesture. Her damp skin prickles with disquiet. The rain continues to fall, the sky congested and close. This can’t go on: her future arrested, held in suspense by the weather, the barren, the absentees, public humiliations she can’t escape. She’s got to get her own phone, a lifeline. It’s Friday, nearing noon. Lunch hour, then afternoon naps for the children. She could lose the whole day, stuck at home in the dying light, like yesterday. Then the weekend, two more days incommunicado, a prisoner. The laundry will wait.

“All right,” Sylvia mutters to herself, scanning the street. The canvas awnings over the shops are dark and saturated, the scalloped overhangs sheeting with rain. Before her, across Regent’s Park Road, a short lane of narrow houses cuts through to Chalcot Road and beyond, past her new flat, to the post office at the corner of Princess Road—spanning the length of the entire four-block-long district, a much faster route than the park road’s broad curve along the perimeter of Primrose Hill. She knows what she’s doing. “All right,” she says aloud, gathering her address book and coin purse and sliding her pocketbook over her wrist, leaning her free elbow against the door of the booth. “We’re making a run for the post office. Quick like bunnies,” she says to the children, hurrying to the pram and pushing back the bonnet, revealing a miraculously dry spot for Nicholas to sit behind the pillowcases of drenched laundry. She swivels her head protectively up and down Regent’s Park Road, over her shoulder toward the intersection of Primrose Hill Road and the faster traffic behind them, before gripping Frieda’s hand and darting with the pram across the street.