It is a struggle, this mood of dis-ease, this gnawing of dissatisfactions, as helplessly compulsive as the last primitive, rabbit-brain weeks of pregnancy. “Full of yourself—” her mother used to say. “Aren’t you full of yourself—” Admiringly, when she was small. It meant something else later on. She feels belabored, her thoughts disorganized—not empty, like the inexpressible nothing she felt before her breakdown, and after. Nothing like that. Far from that. She has new poems, drafts and drafts of one in particular piling up on her desk, unfurling like a bolt of cloth, sliding in every direction. Why not her? When will it be her? The villagers frown over their rutabagas at the greengrocer’s, casting glances at her and brightening, making up excuses to start a conversation. “Oh, Mrs. Hughes—” She wonders if it was even Ted who suggested her for the BBC broadcast. Again! She hates the thing inside of herself that knows the bottom and nothing else. It’s her own faulty character, this disorder of her heart.

She needs to get back. Nicholas must be stirring by now; her breasts prickle, hard and tight with milk. Sylvia turns the corner of the church, toward the south porch, and her elm and her home come back into view. Flinty headstones teeter in every direction; the cobblestones are brightly mortared with moss. Rainwater gullies over the uneven pathway. She hears the oceanic boom of the tree crashing around past Court Green’s roofline, like a wave curling up over the house. Someday someone would find the elm still there, its roots deep in the foot of the Iron Age hill. Archaeologists would come looking for it. They would punt out in their skiffs down the undersea A30 and beach on the shores of the mound, its moat filled and flooded to encompass all of what had been Court Green. Her three submerged acres would lie at the bottom of the pool, the cob walls, the reed-and-wheat straw thatching all crumbled to fish waste. And there beneath the rippling surface, amid the frilled white reflections of the narcissi and the jagged elm leaves floating on the water, they would see her disintegrated life—her Dutch tea set in shards, her sewing machine florid with rust. All at the slimy, red-earthed bottom, all decomposing, all but the elm. The smoke-blackened, hand-sawn Elizabethan elm rafters from Ted’s attic; the thick, six-foot elm plank that was her writing desk; the three-trunked elm itself: inscrutable, impervious, perfectly preserved, like the bog men found with hair still growing, undigested seeds in their intestines thousands of years after they sank from view. It was good for coffins and wagon wheels. The elm, immutable, would outlast them all.