London is the emotional and narrative threshold from which Abigail attempts to rebuild her life. For her, leaving the city is not ordinary travel but a necessary rupture with a society that has ceased to welcome her, a past she can no longer bear, and the poverty that has narrowed her choices. Her departure turns London into the first setting of a larger movement from grief and isolation toward an uncertain life in America.

A City of Social Exile

London is defined through Abigail’s sense of abandonment rather than through architecture or civic detail. Recalling a Christmas party held three years earlier, she tells Sally that more than two hundred people attended, yet, apart from Sally, not one of them wants anything more to do with her. The contrast between the crowded party and her present loneliness makes the city feel socially immense but personally empty. London contains the network from which Abigail once drew belonging, but that network has become inaccessible, intensifying her conviction that she needs a clean break before she loses her sanity.

Her wish to leave is inseparable from financial desperation. Abigail explains that she is alone and broke and has tried everything to find another way forward. The proposed solution is a marriage to a wealthy American whose family fortune he must inherit, followed by divorce and the use of the money to establish her own business back in London. The plan makes London both the place she must escape and the place she imagines eventually reclaiming through economic independence. Its significance therefore lies in the contradiction at the center of her decision: she rejects the city’s present social world while still imagining it as the destination of a future self-made life.

London and Abigail’s Bereavement

The city is also the setting in which Abigail’s unresolved trauma becomes legible. Two years earlier, her family’s yacht capsized in a storm. Abigail was the only survivor; the bodies of her older brother and mother were recovered, while her father and younger sister were taken by the sea. The catastrophe has left her not merely bereaved but structurally alone, with the sea removing some members of her family and returning others only as bodies. When she speaks to Sally, a tear runs down her cheek, showing that the proposed escape is driven by an injury that remains active rather than by a simple desire for adventure.

Sally’s attempt to suggest another option cannot penetrate Abigail’s exhaustion. Abigail responds by insisting that she has tried everything, and her hand striking the table gives physical force to the limits of her endurance. In London, grief, poverty, and social rejection converge. The city becomes the container for memories that Abigail wants to leave behind, but it also serves as the place where she states, with unusual clarity, that survival requires movement.

The Farewell to Sally

Abigail’s final London scenes are shaped by friendship and ritual. She and Sally remain together late into the night, retelling both their good times and their difficult ones. They know they will miss each other but cannot say so openly, and eventually fall asleep beside one another. The quiet intimacy of this night counters Abigail’s claim that she is entirely alone: London has failed her as a social world, but it still contains one loyal relationship capable of offering witness and consolation.

The next morning, the wake-up call comes at six. Sally showers while Abigail packs the last of her clothes, and an hour later they leave the hotel for the airport. Sally insists that they are not going to cry and that the departure is not goodbye, but Abigail answers through tears. They return the rental car, check her baggage, and use the remaining hour before the flight to drink tea in a small coffee shop. Even the beverage becomes part of the anticipated loss. Sally promises to send tea if Abigail cannot find it in Texas, while Abigail promises to phone often. The farewell transforms London from an oppressive past into a place held together by a promise of continued contact.

Departure and the American Threshold

The airport departure completes London’s function as a threshold. Abigail does not leave with confidence that the marriage arrangement will be simple; she leaves because remaining has become intolerable. Her conversation with Sally combines practical preparation, joking anxiety, and suppressed mourning. Sally imagines Abigail’s fair skin burning under the Texan sun, and Abigail mentally notes that she will need more sunscreen. The detail gives the departure a concrete physical future while preserving the emotional uncertainty beneath it.

After reaching America, Abigail phones Sally and begins to describe the new environment. She corrects the assumption that she has arrived at a farm: it is a ranch, and Clayton is a massive, ruggedly handsome man who towers over her and has broad shoulders with almost no waist. This first report confirms that London has been exchanged for a distinctly different landscape and household, while the phone call keeps Sally and the abandoned city within reach. London therefore remains present as a point of comparison even after Abigail crosses the Atlantic.

London in the Book’s Wider Geography

The city’s importance is sharpened by the book’s repeated movement between places governed by unequal forms of power. Abigail’s departure for an American ranch belongs to a broader pattern of women crossing borders through marriage arrangements. Nairobi’s upbringing in South Africa is shaped by her mother’s preparation for a mail-order-bride opportunity in America; Maggie’s world is controlled by the Watchers, who choose one person from each community for servitude or breeding; Opal’s flight from enslavement carries her through the woods of rural Arkansas; and Elizabeth’s privileged English background is threatened by Patrick McDowell’s demand that she become his, backed by the threat of destroying her town.

Against these other locations, London appears as a specifically social and psychological form of confinement rather than as a battlefield or supernatural dominion. Its crowd of former acquaintances, its memory of family death, and its pressure of poverty make departure feel necessary, yet Abigail retains enough agency to imagine using the American marriage as a route toward her own business. The city thus establishes one of the book’s recurring tensions: migration can be both escape and transaction, and a new place can offer possibility without guaranteeing freedom. In Abigail’s story, London matters because it is the place she must leave before she can decide what kind of life she wants to build.