About this story
A month later she brings you to Poynton itself, the house she has spent twenty-six years assembling, on the very weekend her son Owen arrives early with his fiancee Mona, who wants pale curtains over old silk. By nightfall there are packing cases in the hall, and Owen is asking you to talk his mother out of filling them before morning.
How it opens
Sunday breakfast at Waterbath shone with varnish fierce enough to wake the dead.
Mrs Gereth escaped church preparations and found you alone beneath the garden trees.
My dear, your face says the wallpaper kept you awake as cruelly as mine did.
I tried closing my eyes, but the room continued through smell and memory.
Choose
The drawing room screen has three styles and confidence in all of them.
The varnish has united objects that deserved separate funerals.
The house might breathe if half its souvenirs forgot where they came from.