The Winter Folly by Lulu Taylor

his lordship.’
    ‘No, not at all.’ Delilah smiled, relieved that a professional was here to deal with the situation. ‘I don’t think he knows me, though. He seems to think I’m
someone called Elaine. Do you know who that is?’
    Anna thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘No, I’ve not heard of an Elaine before. But who knows where his mind is going these days? It could be anywhere in the past seventy
years or so.’ She took the elderly man’s arm and gently turned him in the direction of the old coach house. ‘Come on now, let’s get you back.’
    ‘Shall I come with you?’ Delilah asked, feeling she should offer to help.
    ‘No, don’t worry. You get on.’
    John’s father followed Anna obediently, and appeared to have forgotten about Delilah the moment she was out of sight.
    Mungo came bounding up.
    ‘There you are! Come on then, boy, let’s get inside.’ Delilah patted her thigh to bring him to heel, looked over her shoulder one last time at the old man being led away, and
continued back to the house.

Chapter Seven
    1965
    Alexandra stood in front of the mirror in the hall of the tiny flat she and Laurence shared in the married quarters and ran her fingertips over her hair. It felt unfamiliar and
shell-like, beads of lacquer clinging to it like tiny hard raindrops. At Chez Joel they’d made it shorter, with a jaunty curl and a lift at the roots from the giant black hairdryer that
she’d sat under for a hot half hour. The new style made her look older, and so did the make-up. Sophie Tortworth had showed her how to apply panstick, rubbing it in until her face became a
solid tan blankness. She’d learned how to rim her lids with the kohl and to spit onto the cake of hard black mascara and then comb it onto her lashes with the little brush until they stuck
out spikily around her eyes like fat spiders’ legs. The first time he’d seen her efforts, Laurence had laughed, but Sophie told her she looked very glamorous and grown-up, much better
than the dowdy girl who’d arrived in married quarters a few months before.
    I look like a wife now
, she thought.
I look like one of them.
    That was what she hoped. She wanted to belong, if only to stop them questioning her about how she was enjoying married life. It was bewildering to be surrounded by people after her quiet
existence, and there was so much entertaining and so many functions to go to. Almost every week there was a dinner in the mess, the men in their bright dress uniforms and the women in stiff silks
and glittering with jewellery. Alexandra could sense the competition going on between the wives, as they admired in honeyed tones one another’s dresses and shoes, the little evening bags
rough with beaded embroidery, the silken ribbons holding back hair in the styles from that month’s magazines, and the glimmer of a new rope of pearls or bracelet. So far, though, they’d
been nice to her, telling her how young and pretty she was, as though comforting her for her lack of style and the fact she only had one evening dress. At the dinners and lunches and coffee
mornings she was expected to attend, she could tell she was being assessed even while they were cooing over her.
    Alexandra was glad of Sophie, the wife of a lieutenant colonel, who’d taken a shine to her and decided to polish her up with a little London glamour.
    ‘It’s obvious you don’t have the first idea!’ she’d exclaimed but not in an unfriendly way. Sophie had made the most of unfortunate teeth and a big nose by
emphasising her eyes with blue shadow and getting her hair set into a style like a movie star’s. ‘And it’s a shame because you really are very pretty! Such big blue eyes, and that
little pixie nose. Darling, I’d have given anything for a nose like that – you’re so lucky. But you don’t do anything with yourself. Didn’t your mother teach you how
to put on lipstick?’
    ‘My mother’s dead,’ Alexandra had remarked flatly, and then