Flanking the cobbled walk that marks the path from the street to the north church door, the parallel rows of pollarded lime trees are not yet leafy enough to hide their knotty, cankered prunings. They’re stunted and grotesque. But the churchyard yew is full as always, its needles green-black, its branches impenetrable and upright. It completely hides from Sylvia’s sight the lych-gate behind it where the rector meets coffins on their pony carts at curbside, the footpath thick with mourners, littered with bruised petals. Her house is a shambles, she thinks, unpresentable, and Ted’s family is coming for Easter. It’s Maundy Thursday now, appropriately: a day for enforced charity. Tomorrow or Saturday they’ll come—Ted’s lazy mother to be waited upon, his spectral, shell-shocked father, even Uncle Fat Pants. She bristles at the injustice of it; she can’t possibly get any work done if she’s pulled into pieces like this, supervising the workmen and the children, entertaining the relatives, fending off the neighbors, coaxing the garden to life in this unrelenting winter, her poems left idling, grinding and pointlessly grinding to no conclusion, engines that won’t turn over. She’s up at two and at six, stupid with lack of sleep. And meanwhile Ted will be off, whetting the fantasies of schoolgirls, ignoring her—

Sensing him out of the farthest, intuitive range of her sight, she turns her head to see him looking for her through the parlor’s bay window, between the bookcases, his pale face passing in shadow behind the glass, like a fish swimming just below the surface. Like a fish crossing the shadow of a watcher on the bank, he vanishes, sinking back into the dark of the house.