Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable. My poor house, she thinks ruefully, watching coal smoke chug and curl from one of the two brick chimneys at the crest of her thatched roof. The elm tree beyond it waves and clacks as if for rescue in the high, gusting wind that has been blowing all night, the tiny, heart-shaped leaves so fresh on the branches they’re almost undetectable from this distance. Only twigs, black sticks, the tree bursting skyward into the chimney smoke, all of its frayed nerves on edge. Sylvia stands in the hard rain’s hush, under a contracted, cold noon sky. Now and then the wind blows stinging pricks of icy rain up into her face as she holds her umbrella and watches from the soggy green churchyard overlooking her soggier front lawn, where the workmen who are sealing her floors have piled their sacks of gravel and bitumen and cement.

It’s another tempest, another spongy April day of pitiless English weather, another day without spring. Restless, she holds her umbrella and slowly paces the boundary between the church grounds and Court Green, peering down the sloping bank of the cob retaining wall faced with unquarried rubble, stepping back and forth between the tilting pickets of collapsed gravestones re-erected at her property line and the uneven rows behind, all of them grown mossy and mineral stained, their faces etched by spreading patches of vividly colored lichen: orange, red, mustard gold. The steady, deafening hiss of the incessant storm is punctuated now and then by the forlorn bleats of animals, cows and sheep, left out to graze or stand numbly in the rain.

“Why did you stay?” she was asked last week; the interviewer came down from London to record her for a radio program on Americans who live in England. Why indeed? It certainly wasn’t for the weather or the closeness of the sea, though maybe she once thought it would be. All she could think of was the miserable Yorkshire seaside resort Ted had taken her to the year they were married, the charmless boardwalk clotted with chip papers and squabbling gulls, the muddy flat slurp of the ocean. The people on preposterous holiday in their raincoats, huddled in blackened inns. The tape recorder clicked chidingly on the parlor tabletop; she stopped herself short of saying something truly insulting. Her in-laws would in all likelihood listen to the BBC broadcast, and so, she had newly realized, would her neighbors.