she turned her head from side to side to check the profiles. Now that the lines were buried in the flesh of her cheeks they were more acceptable, the forced smile giving them an excuse to be there. She relaxed a little, even allowing a little genuine warmth to creep into the still maintained rictus of her lips. Her hair was looking good, she decided. The new girl had cut just enough to add some bounce and style without giving her that shorn look she hated. And the colour was perfect – exactly the right amount of Russet Brown to warm it up and soften the grey without looking overcoloured and hard around the tidemark, as John always called it. Suddenly she pictured Ruth’s thick, dark red hair spilling and curling, as she knew it must be, over the receiver as she talked on, and felt an uncomfortable little stab of envy pinch deep inside. The grin dropped a little and she sighed.
‘Anyway, Ruth,’ she interrupted, ‘I wanted to show Martin Havers some new swatches I picked up the other day. Lovely colours. And not unreasonable.’
‘For the—’
‘For the show house. Manchester one.’
‘Oh right, yes. Do you want to come in, or shall I—’
‘No, I’ll come in. It’s curtains I’m talking about. You know.’
‘Yes, Mrs Hamilton, I’m with you now. Do you want to—’
‘I’ll come up to town tomorrow. Do you know if he’s particularly busy or will any time suit him?’
‘I’ll put you through to Mr Havers’ office in just a moment. Did you find a good yellow after all that? It was a yellow you were after wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, I did. How clever of you to remember. Gorgeous. A lovely yellow.’
As she spoke, Eleanor could see herself spreading the large sample of lemony cotton piqué across Martin Havers’ desk, acknowledging his appreciative reaction with a satisfied little nod of her head. She pictured folds of it gathered and ruched and blowing from open sunlit windows into the magnolia-washed rooms of the new house. She was happy planning the schemes for the company’s more upmarket developments; the chance to spend a little more on fabrics and paint finishes made her feel less uneasy about the cheaper end of her work on the lower cost estates, where budgets were so tight as to give her no option but to plump for inferior, crudely patterned man-made furnishings that she knew she would never be able to live with herself.
‘Mr Havers’ line is engaged at the moment, Mrs Hamilton, but I’ll keep trying. Did you want a word with Mr Hamilton? He’s around somewhere but he seems to have slipped away from his desk. He has a ten o’clock meeting booked so he’s bound to be back in a second.’
‘No, don’t worry, I don’t need to speak to him; it was only to fix a time to come in and see Martin. I’ll ring back later on – or he can ring me. There’s no mad rush. Yellow curtains can wait till I’ve walked George.’
‘Talking of yellow – I love Mr H.’s new tie. All those swirly things on it – very unlike his usual.’
‘Well, I’m obviously in my yellow phase at the moment. I think it perks him up; very jolly. Certainly better than the usual old dark red. Anyway, Ruth, I’ll see you next time I come up. I’m so glad you had such a good holiday – and just ask Martin to give me a ring later.’
‘Yes, of course, Mrs Hamilton. Nice to talk to you. ’Bye.’
As Eleanor walked out of the large, tastefully decorated drawing room into her large, tastefully decorated hall she brushed a hand gently through the front of her hair, then patted the soft curls at her neck. Going up the stairs she automatically straightened her back and pulled in her stomach, vainly trying to flatten the persistent bulge that swelled from below the waistband of her camel skirt to the creases at the tops of her thighs. She paused at the window on the half-landing one flight up and squinted at the faintly reflected outline that she could just make out against the dark background of the shadowed lawns beyond. She sighed a little, pulled the muscles even tighter and moved briskly up the next flight and towards the bedroom, vaguely wondering, as she so often did, why she bothered to worry about her face and figure. John, she knew, loved her just the way she was. Indeed, he never stopped reminding her of it. He was aware and appreciative of the way she dressed; of the trouble she always took over her hair and makeup; of her neat nails and polished shoes (well groomed, as her father had described it), but the relentless signs of ageing that Eleanor acknowledged were creeping into every aspect of her body had never affected his feelings for her and seemed to have no bearing on the inevitable ebbs and flows of the physical side of the marriage. Their sexual relationship came and went in slowly moving cycles of which she was only indistinctly and intermittently aware. On odd occasions she would find herself lying in bed mulling over the evolving shapes and patterns of her marriage, like some infinite, dreamlike version of the earth’s surface – giant plates imperceptibly shifting over millennia to meet in slow motion crashes for a few centuries, before gliding away from each other again into frigid separation. There were periods when she would realise, without surprise or even regret, that they hadn’t made love for several weeks – even months. Certainly there had not, at least since the early days of their relationship over thirty years ago, been times when it had been more frequent than weekly, and, for her part, their supposedly joint decision to have no children had given their sex life an aspect of pointlessness that added to her lack of enthusiasm. Sometimes, during her night-time musings, she would admit to herself that John had talked her into the policy of childlessness; that she herself would have welcomed the ‘disruption’ and ‘diversion’ from their ‘comfortable life’ that he was so adamant had to be avoided, and at times she hated herself for having acquiesced so easily. In the main, however, she convinced herself that she had fully accepted the idea, and felt no lack at either the absence of offspring or the irregularity and unadventurousness of their love-making. The comforting friendliness and companionship of the partnership was enough, and she had long ago understood that John’s libido had gently dwindled, as hers had, to the stage where the occasional routine coupling was all that was needed to keep both parties satisfied.
She walked into the salmon quietness of the large bedroom and made to cross to her dressing table, but stopped suddenly in the middle of the room, her gaze fixed on the window in front of her, but seeing nothing.
At first she couldn’t think why she knew so certainly that her life had changed for ever. She stood suspended in mid-step, frozen into immobility by the shock of the knowledge that as yet had no substance or reason. Her mind wildly flashed back over the past few seconds, seeing in disjointed, back-to-front snatches the moments leading up to the present one. She saw herself entering the room; then her steps into the doorway; then the walk across the carpet of the landing; then her feet taking the last few treads up the stairs – no, her mind had been calm then; she could sense from this distance her normality on the stairs. It had been somewhere between the top of the stairs and—
Eleanor walked quickly out of the bedroom and back onto the landing, hoping she had been wrong; silently screaming at whatever force was controlling this pivotal moment in her destiny to transform what she knew she was about to see lying on the couch in the dressing-room next door.
She had no realistic hope of changing the fact that the yellow snake would still be there, coiled, waiting, on the velvet surface, just as it had been when she saw it those few moments before, but she forced herself to believe that she just might be able to make it change into something less portentous; differently patterned; differently coloured: less deadly. From where she now stood she could see only one blue arm of the couch: the seat and the other end being hidden by the frame of the open dressing-room door. She leant her body the last few inches sideways needed to clear her view, tilting her head to peer reluctantly at what she didn’t want to see. As she moved, the unfocused white gloss moulding in the foreground of her vision slipped away to the side like a curtain pulled back from a sickening tableau.
It still lay there, just as she knew it must; the dark blue pattern along its length pulsing against the bright yellow background. As she stared at it, mesmerised by its unassuming yet deadly presence, she could feel the poison already seeping into her soul. She marvelled at the intricacies of her subconscious;