Trevor Thomas, Sylvia’s downstairs neighbor at Fitzroy Road January 1963
A strange bird, a regular
toucan. When she refuses
to answer the front bell,
I howl wind and wolf up the stairs.
She flies open the door,
yells louder than any polite woman,
“Can’t you see I’m ill? I want to see
no one. I have so much to do.”
A few days later, Sylvia pounds
on my door. I see her through
the peephole and almost pretend
to be away, but she’s crying.
My heart’s no boulder, so I unlatch
the door. She melts onto the sofa.
She says she’s going to die,
and who will mind the children?
She blubbers and fumes, gives me
a blushworthy account
of her marriage’s dissolve.
Her anger smokes the parlor,
“That awful woman, that Jezebel.
” Sylvia steams, blames them both.
I stare at the grandfather clock
behind her head, wonder how
many minutes more this will last,
what excuse I might proffer
to escape? Sylvia flips open
the Observer, points to a poem
her husband wrote, then to a review
of a new book, The Bell Jar.
Mrs. Hughes claims she wrote it
under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.
The name was all Ted. Victoria for Ted’s
favorite cousin, Vicky Farrar, and Lucas
for that bastard friend of Ted’s, Lucas Myers.
Lucas never did like her, never gave her
a chance. She rocks on the davenport,
whispers that her name
is Sylvia Plath. I choke on my tea—
I recognize that byline—
who knew that Mrs. Hughes was Miss Plath?
I digest this as she bursts tear balloons,
shivers and quakes on my sofa.
She is a curious bird indeed—
a cuckoo, a dodo, a peacock
just now fanning open her feathers.
She looks entirely different to me
now. I reach out and touch her hand.
This incident is recorded in the unpublished memoirs of Trevor Thomas and in Paul Alexander’s Rough Magic.