Excerpt of Half Broken Things by Morag Joss
(Page 4 of 6)
Printer Friendly Excerpt
Several of the residents were permanent, and the next time Jean had to
spend Christmas there one of them asked, too eagerly, how the niece was
getting on. She could not bear to disappoint—it was as if during the
intervening two years the residents had been on the edge of their seats
waiting for news—so she found herself telling them about the baby
(quite a toddler now, into everything!), adding that this year they were
away, spending Christmas with Jenny's husband's family. And it was
the same the next time, at which point Jean lost her nerve and packed
them all off to live in Australia. But she discovered that the
Ardenleigh residents had formed a high opinion of Jenny, and it did not
seem right to Jean to sully her niece's reputation by allowing her,
just because she had emigrated, to forget her old aunt in England. It
did not seem the kind of thing Jenny would do. So for Ardenleigh
Christmases she now produced Jenny's thoughtful present, relieved not
to have to produce also another reason, beyond the unbearably long
flight (at her age), for not spending Christmas 'Down Under'.
But this year it seemed that Jenny had slipped up, because the cardigan
was not a success. Jean had chosen it thinking its colour 'amethyst'
and realised, now that it had been hers for over a week, that it was
just a muddy purple. But it did not occur to her not to wear it even
though it now disappointed; she wrapped herself snugly into her mistake
just as she kept the letter close as a reminder to be at all times
braced against the temptation to forget it. It lay in her cardigan
pocket. In the mornings, bending to dust the feet of a table or to
unplug the vacuum cleaner, Jean would sometimes feel it crackle next to
her, as if a small, sharp part of herself had broken off and was hanging
loose against her side. It puzzled her, almost, to find that she was not
actually in pain. Sometimes she would take the envelope from her pocket
and look at it, but she did not read the letter again.
Yet, somewhere in the course of the afternoons, Jean would arrive at an
amnesty with the presence of the letter. As daylight took its leave, it
seemed to wrap up and bear away the threat that seeped from her cardigan
pocket. She could feel that the letter itself was still there, but she
would begin to regard it with a sort of detached astonishment, which
grew into simple disbelief that marks on a piece of paper should hold
any power over her. Walking from room to room, switching on lamps, it
seemed amazing to her that only this morning she had thought the letter
had any meaning at all. Here, in this soft lamplight, how could it? And
as the day darkened further, the picture of herself accepting some
pointless words in an envelope hidden inside her cardigan grew more and
more improbable. By night time, when she had settled at the drawing-room
fire and the peace of the house was at its deepest, the very notion of
eight months hence was simply incredible. Here, if she wanted it, the
future could be as dim and distant as she preferred the past to be.
On the fourth day Shelley from the agency telephoned.
'Hello?'
'Is that Walden Manor?'
'Yes? Hello?'
'Who is this? Jean, is that you? Jean? It's Shelley, from Town and
Country Sitters. Did you get our letter?'
'Oh. Oh yes. Yes, I got the letter.'
Jean disliked Shelley. She had met her in person only once, when a
householder had insisted that his keys should not be sent through the
post to the sitter and Jean had had to travel to the office in Stockport
to collect them. She knew she ought to try to feel sorry for her.
Shelley was burdened both by asthma and by a disproportionately large
chest, which together gave the impression that her breasts were actually
two hardworking outside lungs, round and wide, inelastic and
over-inflated. Jean now pictured them rising and falling and pulled her
purple cardigan round her own neat shoulders, swaying in a wave of panic
that suddenly washed through her. She waited with the receiver held some
distance away, trying to calm herself, while Shelley caught her breath
at the other end. She guessed that Shelley would be at her desk, winding
the telephone flex around the ringed index finger of her free hand, her
unbuttoned jacket of the navy businesswoman sort skimming the sides of
her blouse-clad bosom with the whish and crackle of acetate meeting
acetate. Possibly this was adding to the gusts of noise that Jean could
hear over the phone, now, as if some battle that she could not see were
being fought somewhere in the distance.
Excerpted
from Half Broken Things by Morag Joss Copyright © 2005 by
Morag Joss. Excerpted by permission of Delacorte Press, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
