Hearts on the sewing machine, hearts on the beehive. Little painted hearts, sometimes flowers and leaves or a bird. On the trestle table in the playroom. On the piano. On Frieda's little rocker, on the doll bed made by Ted. Pink hearts a tripwire over the doorways. Hearts on the mirror in the hallway. Hearts and a garland on the baby's cradle.

Sylvia stands on a chair outside the guest room. She holds her fine sable brush; she paints a glossy red heart on the threshold. Downstairs, the nail-studded door opens in the back hall. She listens, her heart ticking like a bomb. Has it come? Is it over? Soft voices foam into the house: it's only Ted, Frieda, Nick. The heavy oak door groans on its hinges and clicks into the lock. Her fat black anxiety rolls back, for a moment, like a stone. She paints a leaf, flowers, steps down off the chair and checks her work. It looks just perfect; it looks just as it should.

"I can hardly bear to watch." Aurelia Plath is hamster flat against the warm red vinyl seat of her daughter's car, clutching her pocketbook in her lap. With her other hand she grips the door handle, darting a worried glance in Sylvia's direction.

"Mother, please stop it," Sylvia asks tensely, her neck craned over the seat as she drifts the car slowly backward. "I've done this for years, I know what I'm doing."

Sylvia's easing the clutch and reversing out of their parking spot on Cathedral Close, the lane that runs alongside Exeter's thirteenth-century cathedral. The opposing traffic approaches around the curve that rounds the cathedral green, the cars hidden until the last moment by the jaywalking crowds of sweaty summer tourists and by flickering patches of leaf shadow thrown from the mature hawthorns and plane trees shielding the cathedral from the street.

"You're right, it's my fault," Aurelia apologizes. "It's just so hard to get used to English driving on the wrong side."

"It's only wrong to you," Sylvia mumbles under her breath. "Could you please roll your window down? It's stifling in here." She pulls into the street and steers herself into the steady wave of traffic. Aurelia cranks down the window glass but pretends not to have noticed her daughter's rudeness. She gazes out the window, concentrating on the negligible view through the full trees.

Sylvia drives the short arc of Cathedral Close, past the lathe-and-plaster façade of Mol's Coffee House and the Georgian Royal Clarence Hotel. She pulls to the stop sign at the High Street intersection and prepares to turn left, her signalling arm out the window, into what would be oncoming traffic anywhere but England. The insistent blinker clicks like a surfacing memory.

A long parade of cars is inching narcoleptically down High Street, keeping Sylvia waiting at the intersection. She watches the traffic continue to pass, willing it to stop. Three more weeks; she needs to get a grip on herself. This is all her mother wants to see: the picturesque thatch. The baby skin. The pink-checked curtains. The hollyhocks. She's here for a tour of her daughter's heart, the nice part; she wants to see everything nice. There's no need to give her anything more. She can protect herself; it's only three more weeks.

"I'm sorry the day isn't turning out as planned," she apologizes stiffly, keeping her eyes on the passing cars.

"It's just fine, darling, there's no need to apologize," Aurelia responds, relaxing at the milder tone in Sylvia's voice. "I don't know that you could see that cathedral in one afternoon anyway, and we've had a full day as it is. I'll have a chance to study my Michelin before we go back. We still have lots of time this summer."

"Right," Sylvia replies with scant enthusiasm. The cars clear ahead of her. She steps lightly on the gas and pulls onto the High Street, heading west toward the river.

"I'm just glad we found that charming toy shop -- was that on Gandy Street, with the iron oil lamps on the walls of the buildings? I do hope Frieda will like the paper dolls. Don't you? They're not as pretty as the ones you used to paint --"

"I'm sure she'll be very excited, Mother. But we should reinforce them with tape before you give them to her. Frieda's a little young for paper anything. She's still at the stage where ripping things up is endlessly fascinating."

"Well I hope not -- they were expensive," Aurelia says, a trace of hurt in her voice.

Ignore it, she thinks, both hands on the wheel.

"I would have thought they would carry more baby things in a toy store," Aurelia says, veering the topic in a safer direction. "I did want to find something for Nick also."

"He's a baby, Mother," Sylvia says. "He doesn't need anything."

"I don't know about that," Aurelia protests. "When you could hardly walk you formed your blocks into the shape of the Taj Mahal --"

Sylvia sighs. Here it comes.

"-- just like the image on our bathroom rug. Babies are brighter than you think."

"Mother, I know," Sylvia says, growing exasperated. "I know about babies. But you gave both of the children piles of presents a week ago. They don't need anything more. They're too young to know the difference."

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