The Memory of Lost Senses by Judith Kinghorn Page B

for one moment think that. She’s very fond of you, I know.”
    But he was at a loss. Why had Cora turned on Sylvia? Sylvia, who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Sylvia, whom Cora herself had claimed was such a dear friend. After a while he said, “You may be right. It may be the heat. I know she was used to it once, but we must bear in mind she’s a good deal older now.”
    Sylvia sniffed, tucked her handkerchief inside her sleeve, and for a while they sat in silence, side by side, looking out over the garden.
    “I only hope she comes back to us soon,” she said. “That we haven’t lost her.”
    “Lost her?”
    “It happened in Rome . . . in the summer. July and August. The heat brought it on, the delusions, the fever . . . paranoia . . . madness,” she said, so quietly that he had had to lean forward to catch the last two words.
    Now, he thought Sylvia had overreacted. His grandmother was right: she had had so little in her life, was as unused to drama as Cora was used to it. Poor Sylvia. But as he rose to his feet and moved toward the lamp, something surfaced. At first, a mere sensation, a glimpse and flash of yellow. Then, slowly, more: his mother, another lady, unrecognizable, faceless; a yellow-walled room, long forgotten, unidentifiable; and a small dog—sweet little thing, gray—rolling about on the rug in front of him. His mother and the other lady are behind him, talking. They don’t say the name but he knows that the “she” they speak of refers to his grandmother.
    His mother says, “She’ll never come back here to live, not permanently. She’s too afraid.”
    “But afraid of what?” the faceless woman asks.
    “Being discovered . . . being found out. Oh, she’ll come back for a drawing room at the palace . . . spend a week or so gadding about. But she’s terrified of any of them finding her. She thinks I don’t know, but I do.”
    The faceless woman says, “Did he know?”
    “No,” his mother replies, and she almost laughs as she says, “My husband adored her.”

    Upstairs, Sylvia lay awake in her bed. Too hot to sleep, too distressed to write.
    It had all started with the blessed letter, another letter. It had arrived in the afternoon post, and it had been she, Sylvia, who had taken it in to Cora. Sylvia had noted the pale yellow paper, the name and address typed in red ink . . . but perhaps only because of the somewhat clashing colors. Never could she have foreseen that she would later be attacked as the messenger.
    Cora took the envelope from her, and as Sylvia spoke of something else—she couldn’t now recall what—Cora glanced at it and then simply placed it to one side, upon her desk. She was dealing with bills, settling accounts. There was no reason for Sylvia to suppose the yellow envelope contained anything more than another invoice. But even then, Cora had been dismissive, sharp with her.
    “Is there anything else?” she had asked, interrupting Sylvia, and just as though she was a wittering servant.
    “No, nothing else,” Sylvia had replied, and far too meekly she thought now.
    Cora had stayed in that room, at her desk, for the remainder of the afternoon, which was odd, because she had told Sylvia at luncheon that she would take no more than an hour over her correspondence and accounts, and then, she said, they would take a walk. So Sylvia had sat on the veranda, waiting. She had used the time productively enough, making a new list of questions to ask Cora, and pondering an idea for a short story. But by four o’clock, and with no sight or sound of Cora, Sylvia had crept along the terrace and peered in through the south window. She could clearly see Cora, in profile, doing absolutely nothing at all but gazing out through another window—the one immediately in front of her desk. She could also see that there were no papers, invoices or even pens out upon the desk.
    She had been pressed up against the climbing hydrangea for some minutes, watching her