She hadn’t meant it anymore. It was a girls’ book. A minor psychological study of the rot beneath pink taffeta. She began it, dreaming of the opportunity to tell Ted that he could not purchase their marriage contract out from under her, if it came to that. It had come to that. Noncommittal reviews have rendered the book somewhat less than profitable. Ted and his current whore could indeed have their freedom once all the pretty ducats have been squeezed from the spousal purse. Also, she wouldn’t mind a mea culpa from each of them. And how about a kiss goodbye?

De Born rang up last week. In that voice, he asked if she were working on something new. The book that Sylvia had been working on these last months had always seemed a valedictory. She told the old man that she was working on something final.

5.

Ted

He had gotten through Cambridge without solving the riddle of the typewriter. He did his papers and his poems in india ink calligraphy. The grand old men who mentored and loved him couldn’t help but be indulgent. Then in Northampton, Sylvia would type out his verses in the evenings after she had planned a lecture or graded a batch of essays. The sound of her Smith Corona’s marksmanship reminded Ted of the Morse code intro of the BBC’s nightly break-in bulletins during the London Blitz. “This is London,” Ed Murrow’s staccato voice would say (on loan from the sleeping lion across the sea), echoing the telegraph simulation in the background. This would be followed by descriptive, alternately ceremonious and hard-boiled testimony as to what was ablaze and what was smoldering amid the delirious illumination of the searchlights. The Luftwaffe sometimes displayed the coyness of swains at the contradance, sidling up to the ranks along the wall and then edging off at the initial moment of eye contact, their hesitancy only a flirtatious promise of return. If there had been no bombing attendant to the sirens that evening, the ballroom music would play on for a unscheduled hour or so before giving way to the theater of local color, with repeated descriptions of autos trolling by with knitwear muffs draining the glow from their head and taillights, and accounts of the yellow gas-detection paint layered over the tops of the postal bins that would turn a noxious brown in the event of an emergency, and thereby give a chap the opportunity to reconcile his soul with his maker, or simply to steel himself against the wretching and writhing death that he could by no means escape, but could dare to defy as befitting an Englishman with a knuckle for an upper lip. Ed would never fail to mention the newborns. Over and over again, the narrative would work its way around to the infants being passed hand-to-hand down or up the rungs of the bomb shelter stairwells before or immediately after the fray, their entire bodies immured within leather-and-steel gas masks like larval rouse locusts from outer space. Murrow, or rather Murrow’s prosaic scriptwriter, would say that these babies lie protected in their “wombs of war.”

As for the unlucky dead, they were amorphous, congenial losers who went without transition from being alive and negligible to being dead and constitutive of the meaning of life and war, sadly without any means to communicate the fullness of their revelations. The survivors were much less distinguished and much more exceptional. They were like inadvertent partygoers warming to the festivities despite themselves. Interviews were transcribed from the cramped and steaming wedges in the earth wherein citizens might be singing songs, darning socks, forecasting the weather, playing bridge, or arguing politics or about which of them had broken wind. Ted remembered the cockney who wanted to thank “Adeloff Hitler” for making a rubble pyramid out of the shoe factory that had employed three generations just like him. He told greater England not to worry; there should be plenty of work about for a man who owned his own spade. Also, there was the charwoman who wanted restitution for her broken dishes. She petitioned for the loan of the Windsors’ private stock.