My Fashionable Life

Elsa was down early: she waited on the folding chair, set up in the herb garden outside the kitchen door, for the first signs of tea. Alas, great aunt Dilys was visiting, down from Somerset, so the afternoon’s activity had been curtailed.

She didn’t really mind. She had spent the greater part of the day lying flat on her stomach on one of the unmade beds in the spare room, where the stairs ran up to the attic. A favourite passtime was to grab at random one of the endless boxes of ephemera that the attic could yield, and bring it down to sort through, rescuing anything that needed rescuing, consigning to the waste basket anything irredeemably decayed. Once she had found a bundle of correspondence between mother and father, sent, from the dates, well before they were married. She read two paragraphs of one letter before yelping and blushing furiously, stuffing the letters back in their box and labelling with large letters ‘LOVE MISSIVES – MA AND PA. DO NOT READ’.

Today she had found a scuffed box, papered with a dusty snakeskin print carefully labelled ‘Daisy. Treasures, 1949’. A yellowed, folded poison-pen letter, worn soft and battered on the edges, threatened parents with ugly death should they fail to grant Daisy her only demand and send her to boarding school. The glue on some of the letters had come unstuck. The message had perhaps never been sent: or, more likely, had been delivered, read, and returned to sender with a sigh.

From her deckchair, Elsa observed the bees, newly busy with the spring flowers. There would be honey, melting through the holes of a crumpet, for tea; although Elsa would have to restrain herself, being in company, from wiping her finger through the honeyed, buttery goop left on her plate before sucking on it.

Soon after that, she would be able to slip away, unnoticed. She could avoid the talcum-powder and handbag smelling kisses goodbye – great aunt Dilys’s visits were a great performance in terms of preparation and maneouvering her from car to seat and back to car, but never lasted long – and stretch her legs with a walk as the lengthening evening turned the sky to violet.