“January?” Sylvia exclaims, deflated. “How long will it be otherwise?”

“For your own service?” says the clerk. “February. No later than March.”

Sylvia groans, leaning her forehead against the mesh. “But I can’t wait that long,” she moans, feeling her face sliding out from under her control, her eyes filling and salty. “I can’t wait,” she says, looking up at the clerk again. “I have to have a phone. I’m trapped. I’m alone,” she says, gritting her teeth, trying to stem the impulse to cry. “What if I need to call for help? There’s got to be something you can do.”

“Surely you can get help from a neighbor,” the clerk responds, his voice blandly hopeful.

“How can the engineers ring me for an appointment?” Sylvia asks angrily. “I’ve got no phone.” She straightens her back, takes a deep breath, begins to turn on her heel, and finds that all she sees is filmy with tears.

“Madam, I assure you there’s nothing I can do,” the clerk says to her as she is turning from the counter. “You’ll get your phone. If it’s any comfort to you,” he says, smiling wanly, “I can tell you that this process is entirely out of our control.”

At the door, at the end of the vague, glassy line of postal customers she sees as through the back of a waterfall, a man holding a dark spongy newspaper he’d tented over his head steps aside. Sylvia pulls Nicky’s hat down over his ears, his sleeping face hot and flushed under her icy hands. The bells jingle as they leave, stepping out into the rain on the corner, turning back and retracing their steps in the steady drumming rain.

Under her feet, the wet flagstones of the footpath: buckling with tree roots, stained with the tarry gravel of workmen, catching her heel, laid randomly slab to slab as they are in Yorkshire cemeteries. She looks up, livid, panicky: Chalcot Road opens before her, or closes. From the point where she stands far into the wavery, watery distance, at the road’s end, identical houses line each side of the street, the creamy, three-story classical facades of the houses exactly the same, the columns and Georgian cornices and sooty terra-cotta chimney pots alike, the black wrought-iron railings following each other end to end in domino order, repeating down the street and receding to a vanishing point three blocks away. Fitzroy Road has disappeared, off to the side, unseeable, offstage. In the silvery wash of the distance, she sees herself reflected in tear drop, all the way down the street as in a hall of mirrors, her selves growing smaller and smaller, her tiny faces turned in surprise, or turned in something, an expression she doesn’t want to see, the last little face centered precisely over Chalcot Square, hovering, a captive of her past.

11. “Cut”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Cut”

OCTOBER 24, 1962

COURT GREEN