The rain beads the dark dome of Sylvia’s umbrella, gathering at the dentate edge and dropping to the ground in crystalline, elliptical chains before her face as she raises her eyes. The granite bell tower, the most ancient feature of the church, looms at her shoulder, its Norman walls spattered with celadon flecks of lichen, like a painter’s drop cloth. Under the oak-shingled spire, eight bells wait for Sunday; a ninth sanctus bell rings the hours all week long. Twenty feet up the south side of the tower, a sundial melts into the wall, hardly noticeable, camouflaged by its abiding stone face and weathered wooden frame the exact gray of the granite of the tower. Its lines of declination fan outward in rays, predicting the movement of the sun; its iron gnomon, purposeless today, bleeds a ruddy stain onto the tower wall. Engraved across the top of the dial plate is a motto: LIFE IS LIKE A SHADOW. Sylvia reads it, considering its dense music, its fugue. “Life is like a shadow”: she speaks it aloud, plucking it out, considering. “Love is like a shadow,” she says. The words fill her mouth.

13. “The Night Dances”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“The Night Dances”

DECEMBER 14–15, 1962

LONDON

She should have known: The endless tears. The long, long naps, today and yesterday. Then tonight’s comfortless supper. “Please—” she fantasized pleading as the three of them crouched miserably together at the little table in the kitchen. Trying vainly to capture his red-faced, wailing attention, begging: “Please—” She watched him wearily, held his dripping spoon for him; she waited with it, suspended, as he shrieked. An inconsolable tyrant, catastrophic in his terrycloth bib, his soft crew cut of neutral-toned baby hair standing upright in indignant outrage. Frieda, bearded with stew, merely looked on, a mildly interested gawker.