The useless umbrella, requiring one more hand than she has available, is furled and tucked beside Nicholas in the pram; her head in its plastic cap is tucked toward her chin against the rain as she hurries with Frieda down her shortcut’s footpath, the old familiar stones beneath her feet a mosaic of slate and the browned lace skeletons of leaves. It’s a route she knows by heart but has avoided for days now as she’s taken the long way around, the safe way, by the park. By the park she loves, yes, its single rolling crescendo of hill stippled with centurion trees, but the long way, the way of circumvention, the way she was walking, warily, hurrying then as well, to her doctor’s office when she’d seen Yeats’s house for lease. It was not just a path of avoidance, out of her way, the farthest route from the tube station, the shops, the phone box: a month ago it was also a manifest sign, a legitimate omen. It was the route she took to find her new life, circling at the edges of her old one.

Shoulders clenched below her coat collar, Frieda’s hand beneath hers on the handle, Sylvia pivots the pram at the half-block angle in the lane and pivots again a few houses down, turning onto Chalcot Road. She looks straight ahead: she’s just a block from her own new corner, then another block, broken by a mews or two, from the post office. She can do this route, too. She knows what she’s doing, the pastel houses lined up like children’s toys around the garden square—no reason not to—the familiar swing and the mothers’ benches at her left shoulder now, no one on the street—it’s raining, it’s a work day—her old flat on the right, its Doric-columned entrance like a sentry box. She dares not look up toward the third-floor windows, the little flat overlooking Chalcot Square where Frieda was born, just a block away from where she lives now.

“Let’s hurry, Frieda,” she calls to her daughter, breaking into a trot, passing as fast as she can through this no-man’s-land, the nineteen houses between her old flat, where her husband’s lover lives, and her new home, her new life in Yeats’s house on Fitzroy Road, barely out of sight on the other side of the next street.

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