alone, she did this. Spoke aloud small words of encouragement or motivation that in another time and another life might have been offered up by a relative or a lover. Not that she keenly felt their absence, having learned over the years to be self-reliant in all aspects.
It might have been the season of goodwill, but she saw no reason to add sparkle and gaudiness to her home, already filled with clutter. The only exception was the rather fragile and misshapen lump of gold-painted, salt-baked dough that had started out in life as a star before age and clumsy storage saw it eroded to this rather ugly nub. Ugly, that was, to everyone apart from her. As was customary, it hung at this very moment from an old branch of pussy willow on her mantelpiece. It was all the decoration she needed.
Pulling back the bedcovers and despite her desire to get the letter finished, Molly took her time. Manoeuvring slowly, as any haste on her part seemed to invoke dizziness, she swung round her skinny legs with their overly large knees until she was sitting on the edge of the mattress. Flexing her toes inside her bedsocks, she stared down at the network of proud purple veins that ran in tributaries over her legs, visible through the thin skin, and tried to remember a time when her pins had been smooth, lump-free and shapely – a long, long time ago, that was for sure. Beauty, she had learned, despite everyone’s apparent preoccupation with it, was but fleeting and also relative. It fascinated her how aesthetics seemed to have become the most important thing, remembering a time when the phrase ‘it’s what’s on the inside that counts’ was the mantra of the day and when women in particular seemed too preoccupied with all that life threw at them to worry about wrinkles, imperfections and liver spots.
‘A different life, different times . . .’ She looked at the book with the letters enclosed within and pictured handing it to her son. How would he react? A shiver of nerves ran along her limbs at the very thought. These nerves, however, were shot through with something akin to excitement. As though she was finally going to take her place on the podium, having waited a lifetime for the honour.
In the half-light and clutching her teacup, Molly made her way with caution along the narrow corridor of her cottage, its walls lined with heavily framed works of art, redolent of another life, lived in a four-storey house in Bloomsbury. She walked to the top of the stairs, her slender build enough to cause the floorboard on the landing to creak. The noises of her home were to her a conversation of sorts, a reminder that this little building too had a life, a history and a voice. Her home for life . . . She found it comforting. The very bricks and mortar were not only her haven but also her companion.
. . . feelings and consequences that have been shut away, boxed, taped and shelved for much of my life. And trust me when I tell you that it is a box that has weighed heavily in my thoughts . . .
‘What else do I need to say?’ she asked aloud, revisiting the words of the letter in her mind.
There was a moment when her concentration wandered: her mind fixed on the secrets that lay between the pages of her book and it was in that second that she took a step. It was a movement of mere inches, a small thing, but one that would change the rest of Molly’s life.
Time stood still while her brain continued to whir, and Molly knew exactly how things were going to unfold, a minuscule window of warning too brief to act upon. Ludicrously, she clutched the dainty, porcelain cup and saucer, decorated with forget-me-nots, to her chest, as if protecting this was of far greater importance than protecting any of her aged bones. Molly was aware of her feet lifting from the ground as her socks slipped from under her, sending her frail body horizontal for a beat, before she felt the first crack of the back of her head against the lip of the two-hundred-year-old wooden stair and then of every crack on the back of her head against the subsequent twelve steps over which she thumped. There were only two thoughts rattling around in her brain as it shook back and forth, back