Our Distant Cousin (Part II)

Alexander pestered me about it all summer, as we saved up the money for train tickets to the other side of the country where our distant cousin once lived. The copies came in instalments, and I hid them from him in a box beneath my bed. I decided to leave them unopened. I’m embarrassed to …

Our Distant Cousin (Part I)

I remember that morning with unusual clarity. It is now vivid by the nature of its ordinariness. I took a tepid bath, while Alexander was still asleep. At eight o’clock I woke him, and as he bathed in the leftover water I prepared breakfast on the gas stove, for Alexander does not do well around …

The Shadow on the Wall (Part II)

It was dawn when I came to. The heat of the day had passed, and I awoke with a chill. I tugged my dressing robe out from under me, and neither got nor looked up. I was too afraid. I listened to the milk float whir past my house – milk bottles clinking as it …

The Shadow on the Wall (Part I)

It started on a summer’s evening. The Equinox, I believe. Dusk was arriving, so I began to shut the house and go to bed. As I closed windows, slid doors, drew curtains, the heat inside the house built up at once; swelling like the rhythm of music. I tried to ignore the sweat emerging at …

The First Edition (Part II)

There’s a moment’s silence. Anna walks in with caution, adorned in their mother’s old dress, her sister’s old pearls. She regards Anna – at how the sequins on the lapels have been safety-pinned back on, how low-cut it is, how low-cut it would have been for their mother. How sleek and black and altogether perfectly …

The First Edition (Part I)

She arrives early for the leaving party. She pays the driver, takes her travelling case from him, and turns to face her destination – a tall, dilapidated villa engulfed in little green flames of ivy. Behind the ivy, she can just about see that all of the shutters are closed. She thinks – there is …

Headlamps (Part II)

Marianne asked for a separate bedroom. Quite proper, of course, but there was a hint of panic in her voice which unsettled me. As though the thought of finding herself alone in the same room as Ellis filled her with dread. He, on the other hand, took me through to the sitting room, and asked …

Headlamps (Part I)

I had just made up my mind to start getting ready when the tele-phone rang. Ellis – in that false over-polite way he had now said: “if it’s not too much trouble, Corda” – he over-enunciated the first syllable of my name in that American way he did now – “would you come and pick …

A Place For Everything (Part II)

I felt uncomfortable. The carriage was hot, and I was wedged in by the table. To get up then, to get my case from the rack above, to the bottle of water and the pills, well that would have caused a scene. So I sat and sweated, and worried, the whole three-and-a-half-hour journey. About this …

A Place For Everything (Part I)

Dear Alice, I’m writing this to you at your workbench, in your studio. It seemed the most fitting place to do so. I can feel my own eyes peering down from every almost-finished portrait. Remember when you told me, early on, that I had “a beauty that can’t be justified by paint”? At the time, …