The window space had my mothers desk in it. I could look out and get a glimpse of the pavement often with a chicken on it trying to get grit from the road. My mothers diary laid out and her encrypted writing that I was embarrassed of in school notes and later I faked when I lived on my own. Rebecca. Prepared for a life as a mistress of a house.
It was a three leaf desk with garland handles, it fitted perfectly into the large window near the flowerbed. I had found an earring belonging to a previous owner of the house there, she had been the first woman in the village to have electricity and had a lot of parties. The earring was shaped like a wedding bouquet but I think she never married. I hoped that her bedroom had been my bedroom and that the earring had been on her dressing table by the window and had flown out with the heavy push of an expensive curtain. Or maybe she cast the wedding bouquet out of the window as she danced into bed with a man.
My mother’s desk had a range of artefacts: heather and a snail shell petrified inside a glass paperweight-I tried to chip the heather out but the glass went opaque and I mildly ruined it. A bible with a solid silver front- every time I looked at it I had the same impulse I have with a biscuit to bite the top solid part off the soft papery bit and indeed I had done that when I was five and the bible was delicately held together by the immobility by the desk-if a fly had landed near it-it would have disintegrated.
The tray from Venice rested on this desk on the right hand side. It had three brass bean-bells from Africa on it and that’s all-my sister Harriet has those now. There was a miniature pencil that went with a lost diary and one or two stamps, a book being ludicrously extravagant. I have the tray now and it finally looks how I imagined it would if I owned it.
