the composition of her favourite dishes on the menu. The girl listened solemnly but asked no questions, to the aunt’s regret, for she had withheld several salacious details she would have alluded to if pressed.
The room they were in was decorated with huge vases of lilies and on the spotless white tablecloths, which the tables wore as if they were ball dresses, were small vases of violets. The girl chose a clear vegetable soup and bread, a lemon sorbet and strawberries drizzled with Armagnac. The aunt was disappointed by her poor appetite, and enjoyed her own food less as a consequence.
Afterwards they walked along a boulevard of shops with wide windows. In one, lights converged to worship a single stiletto shoe with a transparent icicle for a heel; in others were a red dress, a baroque pearl and a diamond dog-collar. The girl was led from one dress shop to another where skeletally thin women with white china complexions and slick red mouths discussed cut and fabric. The aunt was puzzled by the girl’s passivity. One would think she was being dressed in a bazaar for all the interest she showed in the clothes. Perhaps she was mildly retarded. Her sister had not said so, yet in looking back, hadn’t there been something unspoken in the letters she had sent over the years? Something struggling to be revealed?
The girl was unaware that the clothes were more important than the people who sold them. She was fascinated by the languid gestures of one woman ordering this or that dress to be brought out, with a ferocious smile that reminded the girl of a panther she had seen once in a cage, lying perfectly still with a bored expression in its lovely eyes. Only the flick of its tail had revealed its savagery. Pale, pastel-clad acolytes scurried to do the woman’s bidding. The girl saw that despite the identical pastel smocks and neat buns, they were quite different. One had a saucy look and quick nimble fingers, another smelled of cigarettes, and yet another had red-rimmed eyes which she had tried to mask with powder.
The aunt’s taste for frills and beading and what she called dramatic colours was gently but firmly directed towards more delicate fabrics, paler hues and plainer styles. The only thing she resisted was a white voile dress.
‘Not white,’ the aunt had said. Could they not see how it increased the insipidity of the girl’s features? Besides, white was the colour of confirmation dresses and shrouds. Privately she thought the use of white for brides was unfortunate; if she had ever wed she would have worn violet and peacock blue.
Like the foodstuffs, the clothes were to be delivered, so they made their way unhampered to an open-air restaurant within the main park in the city for afternoon tea.
‘I thought you would like the wildness of it,’ the aunt said, pleased by her own generosity, since open-air restaurants were not to her taste. She fancied the girl might be missing the primitive beauty of her home. She spotted an acquaintance who was invited to join them, a thin woman with glistening eyes snuggled on either side of a long sharp nose, who proceeded to whisper an interminable story about a man and his doctor wife.
The girl gazed around. It was the hottest part of the day and she could feel the dampness forming in the curve of her upper lip and along her spine, pricking at her palms. Beyond the awning roof of the restaurant, the park shimmered. There were green hedges manicured into animal shapes but they cast no shade. Carefully edged rose beds surrounded a small marble fountain where a woman with bare stone breasts endlessly poured water from a jug into a bowl. The paths were made from crushed white gravel that radiated a bright, white heat. Grass grew only in circles marked off by chains from which were suspended signs forbidding feet. Wrought-iron chairs stood about the edge of these pools of dazzling green and a few people sat in them and stared at the grass as if it were a pond where their faces looked back at them or fish swam.
There were not many other customers in the restaurant at that hour: a table of businessmen stabbing fingers at a map and an elegant woman in a grey pantsuit talking animatedly to a poodle seated on a chair opposite. After a time, a group of people converged on the restaurant talking loudly in foreign accents