My Candlelight Novel Read Free Page A

rain, and there was a dog in the Lismore lane, sniffing round the wooden stumps of the house over the way. The road was primitive, just a walkway really, made of earth. Because it seemed to be always raining, it almost never dried out, and it was this smell of damp that pervaded our house. Mould grew on almost every surface. I fully expected that ferns would sprout from the cornices one day.
    I plonked Hetty down on the bed next to Lil, and went out for the breakfast tray, which I made room for on the bedside table.
    Lil blew on her tea to cool it. She leaned forward and pursed her mouth to take a sip. I was reminded of the way Hetty ate, leaning forward in her high chair and taking food from the spoon with such a pretty scoop of her lips. Perhaps as people got older they really did revert to babyhood. Lil and Hetty seemed to have such affinity.
    Now Lil was handing her a triangle of toast. Hetty, full to the brim with scrambled egg, couldn’t possibly be hungry. She took the toast and pressed it between the palms of her hands, squeezing out the butter like water from a sponge. She let the toast fall onto the bed and leaned forward to touch Lil on the face.
    â€˜Sophie darlin’, do you have a cloth?’ (Do you see how readily endearments sprang from Lil’s mouth?)
    I lunged forward to wipe butter from my baby’s hands with a teatowel, splaying her fingers and cleaning her creased little palms. While I was there I dabbed the butter from Lil’s cheek. Lil and I never had proper conversations. We always spoke the comforting language of the everyday, and rarely revealed our more intimate thoughts. Today, Lil was engrossed in fussing about with Hetty.
    Still feeling like a parlourmaid, I took the time to put a bit of spit and polish on the framed photographs that stood on the dressing table. There was a picture of Kate and me together when we were very young, not long after we’d come to Samarkand, looking, as Lil would have said, ‘as though nobody owned us’. There was one of Hetty and me when she was a tiny baby. I was very puffy and pale; Hetty was wrinkled and pinkish. If we looked rather blurred and indistinct, it wasn’t because of the poorness of the photography, it was because we were both still in the process of becoming. Shortly after that picture was taken we’d both unfolded into being mother and child, and I am pleased to say that these roles became us.
    As a reminder of Kate’s growing up and away, there was a picture of her with her friend Marjorie at their Year 12 formal, at the end of the previous year. Marjorie, as always, looked like a latter-day Snow White in a perfect little 1950s style frock, while Kate wore an old suit (!) that she’d found in Lil’s cupboard. I’d advised her against it at the time, but had to admit now that she looked quite fetching and not at all masculine in it, her long red hair cascading over her shoulders.
    The suit had belonged to Alan, Lil’s son who had died, and it was his photograph that I did last (he had long hair in this picture, and wore some sort of ethnic shirt), spitting on the hem of my dress again and wiping the glass most tenderly. I had asked Lil once what he’d been like, and she’d said that he’d been a lovely boy, a beautiful, tender young man. ‘But close,’ she added. ‘I mean, there was lots he didn’t tell me. He often kept his feelings to himself. He was like you in that way.’ And it pleased me to be thought to be ‘like someone’, even someone I wasn’t related to, because it made me feel connected, the way other people were.
    Lil finished what she wanted of breakfast, and had eaten very little. Passing Hetty to me, she clambered out of bed and went to her wardrobe to choose a dress. Great black moths spilled from the cupboard and flapped about the room as she rummaged around. They were not clothes moths, but must have loved dark spaces. I sometimes