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, …

The Gathering Storm

I awake to the sound of church bells; distant; discordant; dull. I go to the window. The service is over. Guests are decanting themselves into cars, and I can see only the edges of hats, or heads tipped forward, or the faint pink blurs of hands. I’m comforted by the thought that if I cannot …

Fête

I have always preferred autumn. There is nothing to lose in autumn. In spring and in summer there’s a sense of impending loss that simmers beneath the surface. It lingers in the first buds of blossom, in the third warm dry day in a row. Because soon the blooms will die, the sky will cloud …