No, she told him, she stayed for the butchers: the English butchers who cut things up while you watch. Theirs was a dismemberment she could follow as she’d follow a narrative: knowing then where everything went, where everything goes, not the blank ignorant horror of wondering where all that blood came from. Not the cunning hermetic miracle of America. After years of British life it still struck her as so blatant, seeing whole pigs hooked by their trotters and turning at the ceiling, she feeling sick looking up at them, fascinated, sawdust clogging her shoes, the pigs revolving, lurid, blinking off and on like a red light district.

She told him she stayed in England because it wasn’t America. She made a joke of it, but she’d meant it: she was shrugging off American rules. She wanted her own rules, out in the open. And Ted’s, of course—they could live as they pleased, as writers. Ted had hated teaching as much as she did; it was a long, slow death with an audience. Here, she could have her mornings in her study, she could birth her babies at home, she could walk in the scudding rain while Ted made lunch; she could do as she liked. It was all up to her. England wasn’t like America. She felt no scrutinizing eye upon her. But now, to her agitation, they’ve been noticed.

Ted has been invited to tea by the bank manager’s wife, whose sixteen-year-old daughter is being primed for university. The town is fawning over him. They’ve all seen his photograph in the dog-eared doctor’s office Vogue; they’ve heard him weekly on the BBC. Now, curious and flattered, they’ve come lowing through the sodden garden, stumbling past the sentinel holly and the intrepid daffodils, batting their eyelashes and shoving their daughters forward, the silly cows. No more casseroles, no crocheted baby hats for Nick. No gifts of January oranges for her confinement or sugared cakes for Frieda. They were coming for Ted Hughes.

And he was going. He would go that afternoon and impress them even more, bend over the girlish verse with a kind observation, the loan of a book or a record. While she stays home with the workmen forking their barrows of concrete onto the playroom floor, tracking tar and mud over the bare floorboards in the hall, leaving her no peace, cooped up in the rainy gloom of the drafty house. Endlessly filling the gurgling Bendix, typing Ted’s drafts, taking Ted’s dictation. She stands at the edge of the churchyard regarding her front garden’s forbiddingly high gate, which leads toward the street and the church and past to the village, the roadbed rutted and eroded by god knows how many generations of market-driven hooves before it was finally paved.