Half Broken Things by Morag Joss Read Free Book Online Page B

the other beds, too. There was any amount of bed linen. I chose the best, pure linen with lilac piping for Michael and Steph’s room, the one with pale dove-grey walls and darker grey velvet curtains (although of course I didn’t know then, precisely, that this room would be
theirs
).
    Oh, and that was the evening I burned the inventory, too. Over the course of that day it had become an even greater irrelevance than Shelley’s letter, and so it went the same way. I remember that it was still less than halfway through January, and perhaps there was something of a Resolution for the New Year in what I did.
    â€”——
    The next day Jean left the house in a beautiful olive tweed coat. In the hall she caught sight of her reflection in the long mirror and noted almost with complacency that she looked elegant. How could one fail to, in such a coat? There was a kind of clarity in the silhouette she made. And the same clarity was beginning to enter her mind, pushing aside anxieties and opening it up to small pleasures, such as the way she could spin almost like a dancer as she twisted to see the swing of the coat from the back. The coat she had arrived in, already in her mind just
that old navy thing,
was still lying slung across the oak chest. Turning from the mirror, she picked it up gingerly, as if it were a heap of used bandages. It already felt much less hers than the olive tweed, so the feel of the inferior cloth disturbed her only for a moment, off-handedly; but the smell of it, sacky and with a tang of railway station about it, pulled her dangerously close to acknowledging the old Jean who had worn it last. She bundled it into the cloakroom and as she closed the door on it she lifted one olive tweed sleeve and took a deep breath. The new scents, floral, English, reassuringly her own, glided up to her. She still had on the raspberry cashmere things underneath the coat and had taken from the wardrobe some black shoes, gloves and a leather bag, all of which, she hoped, would make sure that the old Jean did not waylay and follow her when she left the house.
    The walk down the drive took twenty minutes. She had never seen it in daylight except in the distance from the upper windows, because she had arrived by taxi long after dark on her first evening. Since then she had been outside the house only to walk round the gardens, bring in logs and to try the doors of the outbuildings. Now, walking between the fields of Walden that bordered the drive on both sides, she felt there was little to see beyond their mild contours except for lines of drystone walls and stands of trees. The landscape itself, empty of livestock, people or buildings was pleasant; it harboured no threat and so held little interest. Jean felt mildly grateful, for that was all she required of it for now. In fact the kind of people (Mother was one) who noticed things in the countryside—interestingly shaped roots or poisonous fungi or how many berries there were—had always rather irritated her.
    Jean did not hurry in the new shoes; she liked to look down at them as she walked along and feel the slight slipping contact of her feet with the leather lining. The rain and winds of the previous few days had blown a thin layer of mud on the tarmac drive into tiny patterns, like sand on a beach after the ebb tide. Trickles of water, dammed by clumps of saturated dead leaves and flung twigs, had found their channels. Jean did not avoid the wet particularly but she was already looking forward to her return, remembering that in the wardrobe there were some warm-looking slippers that she had not yet worn. She would light the fire in the drawing room and spend a quiet afternoon there; she might even stretch out on the sofa and nap after lunch, because her morning in Bath was bound to be rather exciting and tiring. Today the housework would be skipped, of course, but since that did not matter to her, it could hardly concern anyone else. This afternoon