Mirror, Mirror, Then and Now

Claire

The hairbrush turned up in the back of the dresser drawer, smelling faintly of lavender and coal dust. It had a silvered back engraved with initials that might once have been crisp but had softened over years of handling—L. A. or perhaps E. L., depending on how the light fell. The bristles were boar hair, stiff and stained at the tips with an amber patina. When I held it, my fingers fit the curve as if I had been meant to. It was the sort of object estate agents call a period feature, though no one had mentioned it when I signed for the flat on the first floor of the Georgian terrace, the sash windows rattling like loose teeth, the chimneys fretted with jackdaws.

I moved to Bath because the days in London had begun to spool without punctuation, because my mother could no longer remember my name reliably and the care home near Larkhall had a room that looked out onto a magnolia tree. I told myself the move was practical. I told David that it had nothing to do with us, though we both knew I was running towards a place with bones older than my grief. Three years together, and in the end, we'd talked to each other through solicitors' letters, dividing books and kitchen things like splitting atoms. The flat was a narrow set of rooms with an undulating floor, a fireplace bricked over, a cast-iron range that no longer aired bread but still exhaled a cold smell on damp nights. The dresser in the bedroom had a three-part mirror; somewhere in the centre wreath of the silvered brush, if I turned it this way and that, I could catch the dulled gleam of my own face and the shadow of the window behind me.

The first time I used the brush I did not expect any more than static. My hair is the sort that goes ragged in humidity and sullen in drought; it liked the brush more than I did. I sat on the edge of the bed with my back to the dressing table and the late light compromising with the rain, and I drew the brush through once, twice, listening to the small sound the bristles made parting my hair.

On the third stroke the room tipped. It did not move; nothing so theatrical. A sound gathered—no, not even that. A sense of a sound, like the pressure in your ears when a train goes into a tunnel. I could smell something that was not mine: beeswax, perhaps, and a sweeter, sharper scent that took me a moment to name—lavender water, the proper kind, not today's idea of it. It was absurd, but I turned my head as if the scent might be a person.

In the mirror the room was unspecific for a breath, and then it was still mine but dressed differently. The same window, though there were curtains where my blinds are—a chintz, faded and florid. The same mantle, but with a clock, a pair of small vases and a postcard propped up against the frame. My heart went off-kilter. I caught my breath as if someone had opened the sash too fast and let winter in.

And there, for a moment so brief I only believed it because it was already gone, was the impression of another figure, backs to backs, two silhouettes where there should have been one.

I put the brush down. The room became itself again. I made tea in an unsteady way and drank it standing up by the sink as if that might tether me to the recognisable.

I told myself I was tired, that the move had unsettled me. I slept and dreamt of long hair unspooling endlessly, a rope made of gloss and breath.

Lydia

I have always kept my hair long. It is a family habit. Mother plaited mine when I was a girl, and when she died I kept the brush with the silver back because it had known each of us anywhere we have been. We came to this house when the war began and Father took on work at the yard on the river, building parts for ships that would never see Bath's quiet waters. It is a good house: the wall that faces the morning is warm by April, and in summer the swifts shave the air with their cries asking. We have had worse.

Father's cough started in the trenches at Ypres and followed him home like a stray dog. Some mornings he spits blood into his handkerchief and we pretend not to see. The doctor says his lungs are scarred—gas, most likely, though Father won't say which attack. There are things the men don't speak of, and we've learned not to ask. Mrs. Wallace downstairs lost both her boys at the Somme, and now she keeps their room exactly as it was, their cricket bats crossed on the wall like swords.

Sometimes at dusk the room looks back at me as if it is not only mine. I do not speak of this because I am not foolish and because thinking a thing is often as dangerous as doing it. But there are evenings when I sit before the glass and see the suggestion of something that is not the room as I know it, as if the day has mislaid its edges. It is not frightening so much as it is a feeling of having stopped in a doorway and forgotten whether I meant to go in or out.

The brush makes a small noise through my hair. If I keep count of the strokes I can keep my thoughts in order. There is enough for my thoughts to do. Willie is not coming back and I am old enough to stop looking out of the window in the way that my hands have learnt without my telling them. His last letter spoke of mud and rats and a funny story about a tin of plum jam. Nothing about the shelling we read of in the papers, nothing about the gas attacks. If I press my palms against the sill they remember how it felt to set down that last letter there and go on with the day, and then go back and pick it up again, looking for a word that might have changed when I was not looking.

I have had to be practical. There is sewing; there is the taking in of shirts and the letting out of skirts for women who've discovered butter again now the rationing's easing; there is shielding Father's cough when neighbours come. The trouble with the practical is that it does not stop the things you do not speak of from existing. They follow you about like draughts in the kitchen.

It was not the first time I thought I saw someone else in the glass, but it was the first time I thought that she saw me. She was not me—I know the shape of my shoulders and the set of my head. She sat with the brush in her hand so still she might have been a drawing of a woman rather than a woman. There was a looking between us that had the quality of rain waiting.

I did not say anything because it would have been like speaking in church. I put the brush down where it belongs and the room agreed to be usual again. Later, in bed, I went over it inch by inch like a seam. It did not unravel.

Claire

There is a law that says if a thing happens twice it becomes real. The second time the brush slid and the room shifted I told the air hello. I felt silly and then, not. The word did something; it presenced the moment. In the glass the other room kept its chiming clock, its little vases. The clock said three minutes to nine, whereas mine blinked on my phone to suggest an afternoon. The woman was there. Her hair was the colour of wheat when the light catches the heads and you see the green still in it. She had a profile like the first figure you cut when you're learning to sew, all the essential lines, no extra flourishes.

"Hello," I said again, as if she might not have heard.

She flinched, the way you do when a draught runs down your back, and then she turned her head a little. I could not place her age. Younger than me, perhaps, but that is a moving target. Her mouth quirked, uncertainly. Mine did the same. If someone had walked into my bedroom at that moment, I don't know whether they'd have seen me speaking to empty air or the doubled room. It was so ordinary and so extraordinary that I nearly laughed.

"Can you hear me?" I said.

She said something then, but the sound took its time. I had the sense words were passing through cotton. "...h..." she said. Then, more surely: "Hall—o." The 'a' was drawn out, as if she were tasting it first.

We sat like that, the length of a breath that expanded and did not end. The air was not cold, but it had texture. I could feel it on my arms. A thunderstorm that never declared itself.

"Lydia," she said finally, and touched the brush as if it were a talisman. She said it as though the name tied her to the earth.

"Claire," I said. It sounded, in my ears, like a coin dropping into a china bowl.

Afterwards, in the unimproved kitchen, I smelt the brush on my wrist and tried to take it apart. Lavender, certainly. Beeswax. A dark mineral scent, like iron. A smoky trace that might have been coal fire or some older salt. I did not tell anyone about it because I have learnt that there are things it is better to carry quietly. I went to see my mother and brushed her hair with the soft brush I keep in my bag because it is something I can do to make both of us feel we are in the world together. She did not call me Claire that day, but I didn't mind; she stroked the sleeve of my cardigan and told me my hair was lovely, as if she had made it for me that morning.

When I got back the late light was pretending to be a candle. The chair before the dresser was where I'd left it. So was the brush. The mirror showed my room and a ghost of another. It had not been a dream after all. If I concentrated I could make out the shape of a parcel in the other room. If I did not concentrate, it went out of focus like a fly you decide to ignore.

"Claire," came over, more cleanly this time, and I realised she had been practising my name.

Lydia

Her voice is quick and careful. I do not know the parts of the world she speaks of sometimes—the motorway, a care home, the postie who wears shorts in January—but the shape of her telling is as old as any hearth-side. She holds the brush like a question and I like that she does not come at this as if it were sorcery or a superstition to be crushed, but as if it is a conversation in a room that is behaving, for a while, like an elder with its own ways.

She asked me what the year was where I am when I am. I told her. I could not help the small draw of pride when I said it as clearly as any telegram. 1919. The war has been over for months now, but you would not know it from the inward weather of many. The street is full of men who have brought parts of the trenches home with them. There are girls carrying babies conceived on last leaves, and girls carrying hems that dare to show an ankle now. The women who worked in the munitions factories still have yellow traces in their skin—canaries, we called them. There are grocers who keep a bit of flour back for the widow at the end of the row. It is all exactly how it is and nothing like it used to be.

Claire said my mention of the influenza made her swallow as if she'd been given medicine. She said it was strange hearing a thing in the present that she knew as past. The Spanish flu took Mr. Wallace’s sister just last month—survived the war only to drown in her own lungs. I told her that my present is not yet finished with me. Perhaps none of our presents are. We are always looking at them sideways; that is how they show their faces.

We make a practice of our talks. I do not believe that could have been accidental. There is a time in the evenings when the light does not belong to either of us entirely. We keep it between us the way I keep a saucer over the milk to keep the cat from it. Something in the air holds. It is not costly. I am almost afraid to say that in case some tax is levied later, but there it is. We do not give each other anything except words and what open faces can hold across a glass with two times in it.

She asked my surname and I gave it. She told me hers and I rolled it around in my mouth. It felt like the ends of a ribbon.

Some days we say very little and sit instead. I can hear the breath of her room when I am still enough: a far softness like the tumble of a bigger river somewhere beyond the hedges, and the hum that comes with the wires. Once there was a siren and my heart jerked, because sirens are fresh in us and they mean different things now—not the air raids but the fire engines—and the sound was thinner where it crossed. It made me think of brakes that have not been oiled.

She asked me about Willie. I spoke for longer than I meant to. You can tell the truth to someone you will never have to stand beside in the grocer's queue. Afterwards we were quiet and it was not the kind of quiet that chafes. It had the quality of the hush in church when everyone is thinking separately and together.

Claire

If you'd asked me before any of this I would have said I didn't believe in ghosts. I still don't, not the way the word is usually meant. What happened with Lydia was more like the way a scent can pull a place through time. It was not a haunting; it was a conversation.

When I told my mother about Lydia—because I did tell her, in my way; I have always told my mother things she cannot do anything about—she tilted her head like a bird considering seed. "Does she laugh?" she said, though it came out sideways, words knocked into one another like dominoes. "Would you put the kettle on, darling?"

"Yes," I said to both questions. It turned out that yes was the correct answer. Sometimes Lydia laughed. It came across like light hitting a glass unexpectedly and making it sing.

We learnt how to pitch our speaking so it didn't scare the other. We learnt that if we each counted ten strokes with the brush the room steadied, as if you can bridle time with numbers. We learnt the distance between hello and your palm touching the back of your neck and feeling—astonishingly—the weight of the other hand, not as pressure but as suggestion, as a warmth that was also the idea of warmth. The first time I felt Lydia like that I admitted nothing to the room for three days for fear whatever I had said without knowing it would retract itself. When I told her, she said she had thought she could feel someone plaiting her life back together and had chosen not to look in case they stopped.

I went to the archive at the Guildhall and sat with a pencil blunt enough not to disgrace the table and asked for anything they had on the house. The dusty air made me think of Lydia's world, everything sepia-toned and certain. The clerk was kind in that English way: polite and uninterested until I gave them something concrete and then fully invested. The house had been built in 1809; there was a terrace then, clean-faced, all the same height, with a railing to keep undesirables out. In 1919 the house had two households listed on the electoral register. There was a man with a cough—George Archer, veteran; there were two sons and a daughter. The daughter was Lydia Archer. The clerk pushed the album over and there she was in a photograph taken not in this room but somewhere near: hair pinned up, eyes that made you sit straighter.

Underneath it said: Lydia A., seamstress, volunteered at relief kitchen, later Mrs L. Partridge. The clerk pushed another sheet towards me. A marriage in 1922. I had to leave the room because I had the uncharitable thought that Mrs L. Partridge was someone else entirely, a poor trade. Outside a boy on a bicycle nearly knocked me over and I said sorry as if it had been my fault.

When I told Lydia, she smiled in that careful way of hers that does not concede too much to what is uncertain and said that she had a customer called Mrs Partridge whose hems were always too long and perhaps that was the only way the name could have come to be written. Words behave as they like in books. Then we were quiet and a moth went blundering at her candle and a fly caught the light in my room and for a moment all I wanted was this strange companionship that required me only to turn my chair slightly towards the dressing table and say what I thought.

"Do you love anyone?" I asked before I could rescue the question and fold it away.

"You," she said, as if she had been waiting to be asked. And then, almost at the same time, so that neither of us could say who had said the second thing first: "What do we mean by that?"

Lydia

I am not a girl who has been given much of romance that belongs to anyone but men coming home and women straightening their collars. If I have longed it has been in the way you long to hear your name said in a particular voice after too much silence. I had thought perhaps that the word love was not mine any more unless it wore mourning. I did not expect to give it to a woman who wears a cardigan the colour of ivy and takes her mother's hand in a room I have never seen. But I am not sorry.

We do the foolish things lovers do, the ones that are dearer to those who laugh at them than to those who practise them: we watch each other in our mornings and make tea at the same time though mine tastes of tannin and hers of whatever they put in tea now. We keep a tally of all the small ways our rooms differ. In giving of the small you become brave; it is a way to say I see you and the there and the then that make you you, not only the miracle that allows the listening.

There are constraints. I am a practical woman; I have learnt to make use of those. Mr Abernethy in the cap shop where I stitch in the back suggested, with a delicacy he does not waste on the buttons, that it would be better for everyone if I allowed Mr Partridge from the yard to walk me home. Lewis Partridge is decent enough—doesn't drink like some who came back, keeps his hands to himself, has work. I did not say that I prefer my own company because the times are not good for women who say such things. I said that lodging men are like terriers; if you give them a scrap one day they'll be at your door the next. It made Mr Abernethy laugh and I could hear in his laugh that he would not push. Still, you cannot keep repeating a joke forever.

And there are other constraints that are not men: like Father's cough on the stairs, the blood in his handkerchief that we wrap in newspaper before burning, like the washing that will not wring itself, like the notion that time does not belong to us and yet we must live in it as if it did.

One night—a night of yellow fog and lamplight that made the staircase into a place where ghosts might prefer to stand—we tried to do more than talk. I did not speak it as a desire that could be denied. I simply leaned forward as I have seen boys lean to knock an apple out of a hedge, as if the apple would be insulted if it were not picked. Claire, in her room with her blinds and her wires, leaned too. There is a place where the air between two rooms is as thin as a lover's excuses. For a second that stretched out thin as egg white I thought, I will feel her as surely as I feel the brush bristle the parting in my hair. Then she was only there in my seeing. I sat back as gracefully as I could and laughed because there is no other way to get your breath back when your heart has made its own demands.

She said, "I'm sorry," and I said, "No. Hush," and we agreed together, as if we had practised it, that there are things we can do and things we must only speak of, and some day the saying might be enough.

Claire

After the near-kiss that was and was not, life asserted itself. My mother had a fall. Falls, in the language of care, are their own lexicon. There are soft falls and hard ones; there are falls that are a prelude to fractures, and falls that are a way of exiting a conversation with dignity. Hers was the kind that sent the manager to the window to ask if the magnolia had budded yet, as if any good news could nudge the world.

I sat in the hospital corridor whose floor was so clean it tried to throw your face back at you and plaited my hair in and out, thinking of Lydia's hands as she works at hems and buttonholes. I wanted to tell her that my mother had called for her own mother in the good old way pain makes children of us all, and that I had felt both pierced and comforted, as if I were being honoured with a ritual.

When I got home there was a dampness in the air that felt like the house had been breathing too hard. The brush on the dresser had a hair in it that was not mine: a long fair one. Such a simple thing, a strand. I wound it around my little finger and it gripped like a promise. I set it in the top right-hand drawer, folded into a page torn from the back of an old calendar, and wrote on the calendar, in pencil, L. 3 March.

Lydia left small things for me sometimes, and I left small things for her. Once I tucked a sprig of rosemary under the edge of the glass and when the day was ours it made the room smell of kitchens and Sundays and uniforms. She said she could smell something sharp and green and new, as if the hedges had decided to have their say earlier than usual. Once when I opened the drawer there was the corner of a cigarette card with a lady in a swimming costume and a bob, her hands on her hips like a question. I have never liked the pictures they put on things for men to smoke, but I liked that one, because of the look on her face that suggested she knew what she knew and would not be coaxed.

I went back to the archive and looked for Lydia's marriage certificate. The search felt like trespass, my fingers leaving marks on the ledger. It was there, as texts are when they have been signed in ink. Lydia Archer to Lewis Partridge, fitter. Witnesses: M. Abernethy, J. Archer. In the margin someone had once dropped an ink blot and blotted it again. I ran my finger over the name and did not feel any ridge of regret. When I told her that night, she was quiet and then said, "It is one thing to read a thing in a book and another to live it." It might have been comfort. It might have been the frame of a picture it would hurt to get too near.

One afternoon when we had accounted for the rain and she had teased me for the names we have for our rain now—mizzle, stair-rods, that soft vertical fall like beads on a string—a proclamation came thinly through her room, the sort men with caps and rolled-up notices deliver to corners. They were saying something about a scheme to rehouse the men from the yard nearer to their work. The government was building new estates, proper homes for heroes they said, though Father called it being tidied away. Lydia's father would be moved, and the tenants who shared the house would become other tenants. "I may have to go," she said. She said it without strain, as if we were talking about the washing again. Then she looked at the brush and then at me. "I will leave this," she said.

"A hairbrush," I said stupidly.

"A line," she said. "If there is anyone to take hold of the other end."

That night I slept badly, like a swimmer turning, turning, to keep from sinking. When I woke the dawn was the colour of a bruise. The brush sat on the dresser, an ordinary object if you did not know its way of standing at a door. I lifted it and felt a resistance that was not weight but intention, like the pull you feel when you try to open a door against a slight breeze.

Lydia

Claire said that you could put a thing in a room and it would stay in that room so long as no one made a business of moving it, that we are not living in a house that belongs to me, or to those after me, but that the house is the one that is constant and we pass through it. I like that. It makes sense of the way I sweep under the bed and find bits of dirt that cannot belong to me and could not have made themselves.

I wrote a note on a scrap of paper torn from Father's old copybook, though I know notes do not go where we go. I wrote: To the one who comes after. Be gentle. Everything is easier if you are gentle. It looked portentous and unnecessary and I laughed at myself because I have no right to be the sort of woman who leaves messages for strangers, and yet I placed it anyway under the false bottom of the drawer, where there is a thin run of wood free enough to raise if you have the knack.

"I do not know if there will be someone," I said to the empty room, because sometimes I practise being without Claire on purpose, like I practise standing when the bell goes for the end of the day and no one wants to go home because the workshop is warmer than the house.

The last night, before the men came with their shoulders and their rope to move Father's chair, I sat and drew the brush through my hair carefully, so slowly I could feel where it hesitated. In the glass I saw not only my room but the other room that is also mine, and Claire in it, her mouth uncomfortable as if she had a pin in it and did not know how to hold it without pricking her tongue.

"Don't," I said, because I knew what she was thinking, and because I am certain that the going to a place does not work like that. We do not go in one whole piece; it is the going that is the thing, not the arrival. "We have had more than I would have asked," I said. "We have had enough to go on with."

She reached to the glass as if it were the surface of a river she might break with her palm. I lifted mine too. It felt like touching light on water. We smiled, which is something you can do with your whole person. Then the room let go. There is grace in things letting go in the proper way.

I left the brush in the drawer with the small shift to the side that means I placed it deliberately, not just put it down.

Claire

I did not expect that I would be the one to leave next. Life turns you fast sometimes and says keep up. My mother died with my name in her mouth and I will never stop being grateful. I did not need her to know me at the end any more than you need to make sense of the last page of a book you have been happy to live in. But when she said Claire it was like the click of a lock you have been turning without hope. We had tea in paper cups in the room with the magnolia framed like a painting outside and I brushed her hair one last time with the soft brush. If I had brought Lydia's brush it would have felt like a trespass; anyway I did not, and I am glad of that. Some things should not be made into symbols.

After the funeral that was and was not the sort she would have liked, I realised I could not afford to keep the flat. The landlord had a buyer and a date and someone came with a clipboard and looked into the boiler cupboard in a way that suggested I had been bunking with an animal. I packed my books and plates and the cardigan Lydia always liked and the photograph of my mother taken on the beach at Weston, squinting and pretending not to be cold. I left the dresser; it belonged to the room. The brush I left where Lydia had left it, in the top drawer with its small false bottom, alongside the inch of paper on which she had written, though she had not said she had done so. Be gentle.

I wrote as well. Not anything grand. I am not grand. I wrote: If it helps, there is more love in the world than people say. Then I put the key on the mantelpiece and stood for a small time letting the house notice my going.

I did not go to the dressing table. I did not sit and try to brim the room with whatever made the slip happen. I did not keep tally of brushstrokes. Some things you must not force. You must trust that you have had the portion you were meant to have, without grinding your teeth at the scraps in other people's hands.

In the street the magnolia was unspectacular and the sky was the colour of a dishcloth. A bus moaned to a stop. I walked to the top of the hill and turned back once to look. It was only a house.

On the train, when we slowed for a signal and the silver of the tracks ran away under us into magpies and hawthorn, I fell asleep and dreamt of hair unspooling and being gathered again in a palm. When I woke there was a strand of hair on my cuff, pale and fine, and the smell of lavender, though that might have been my handkerchief, which had been with me in a room where women had been kind.

Lydia

It is many years since I wrote this, if I am writing at all. It depends on where you stand. We went, Father and I, to the new place near the yard, and his cough had a shorter distance to travel to work each day, though it grew worse with the damp from the river. He died in 1921, quietly, the way men of his generation preferred. I married because the world is made of arrangements and because I could not spend the rest of my days being an answer to a question people ask to show they are listening. Lewis was kind enough. I did not love him as people love in books. I loved him as you love a chair that does not splinter when you sit. We had a son who liked to watch the horses. I sewed until my fingers took the shape of the thimble and then I stopped and did something else—worked in a shop selling ribbons and notions, where my hands could remember their cunning without the needle's bite. I did not think of Claire every hour; I am not perverse. I thought of her as you think of a tune you cannot place; I hummed when the light met the mirror the right way; I thought of her when women stood in the street with their hands in their aprons and looked up as if a bird had flown out of a letter. There were days we found each other again and days we did not. I did not look for proof because proof is a bully.

Once, old as I am now—I write this in 1964, with my hand less steady—with the world turned upside down again in a different way and the sky snarling with metal, I smelt lavender in a place where there was no reason for it and laughed like someone who has seen a child do something clever. Someone spoke from the far end of the room, and then, odd as anything, from the near end too—me and she, old and not old at the same time. It was nothing, it was everything. We have to make our own vows, I think, when the Church and the law are busy elsewhere.

In the end—I am not at the end; I am telling you a story—you will say, did you meet? You will say, did you put your hands on her as you might put your hands on a bowl to get it down from the cupboard? Did you go to her world with the wires? Did she come to yours and learn to shake washing to get the creases out and make gravy without lumps? I do not know how to answer you in a way that will satisfy you. We were in the room together; we were never in the room together. I can tell you that I left the brush for whoever would need it. I can tell you that when I could no longer lift my arm without the elbow complaining I thought, no matter, someone else will have strong wrists. You see how hope can look like passing on a tool.

Claire

In the new flat in Bristol, the walls are white in a way that makes you think of sugar. There is a plant on the sill that pretends it is not only mine to keep alive. I am not lonely. I am not accompanied, either, not in the way I was. Both of these seem true.

Sometimes I hold my own hairbrush—the modern kind, with a rubber back and broken plastic teeth—and close my eyes and count ten strokes and hear only my own tired breath and the neighbours' music coming through the wall like a heart defect. Sometimes, not telling myself I am doing anything branded as attempt, I stand by the mirror at the time of day that seems to slant similarly and think of the way Lydia said the word love as if it were practical. The mirror shows me my room and nothing else. It is proper that it should. Not every door opens always, and when some do, they are best left on the catch rather than flung.

I hear the woman upstairs brushing her daughter's hair before school and the child complaining that it hurts and the woman saying, gently, "Be still. Stop wriggling. It'll be over in a tick." The sound makes me think of a line, of two hands at either end of something taut and invisible.

I went back to Bath after a year and walked past the terrace as if I had business elsewhere. The house had new glass in the sash and the door had been painted an uncompromising blue. There was a removal van with a word that pretended to be French and a man in a high-vis vest carrying a chair with his hands braced against its underside as if he were keeping a promise he could not quite name. In my pocket, folded so many times the paper was going to dust, I had a note I would not deliver: Be gentle. Everything is easier if you are.

A week later, an envelope came with my name in a handwriting that did not belong to anyone I knew. Inside, a scrap of paper with a sentence in pencil, the graphite smudged as if it had travelled. If it helps, there is more love in the world than people say. No address, no explanation. I put it in a book of poems where the page fanned over it like a hand you can see through.

I keep the other brush—the silver one—in my drawer. I did not mean to take it and did not know I had until I unpacked it wrapped in a tea towel like a plate. Whether that was the house's parting gift or mine I cannot say. I use it sometimes, sparingly, as you use a good coat. I have not heard Lydia for a long while—years now, enough years that my face in the mirror has begun to show the kind of lines that suggest you've been paying attention. It is not absence; it is what you call a long game. If the room needs me to sit I will sit. If not, well. The strands of hair from all of us make a rope that has been tied and untied and made again, and if someone needs to escape up it in a story, or lower themselves quietly down, the bristles will hold. There will always be enough to go on with.