217 Babel Street | Roof Garden
The air was cool and startlingly fresh. How many weeks had it been since she had ventured out? Lulu eased herself onto the bench by the goldfish pond, laid her cane beside her, and watched a dark helix of starlings twist and flow against the twilight sky.
It wasn’t that she disliked children. They frightened her – with their sudden movements and their embarrassing questions and the revolting leakages from their miscellaneous noses. She would have reassured the girl with a “There, there” had it been within her power to do so, but it wasn’t, and that was, quite simply, that. So she’d hidden behind the statue of Pandora as the little thing bolted for the door.
Besides, the child would have ogled and poked. Lulu cringed at the thought of the spectacle she would have presented in her Wellington boots, her yellowing satin Liberty pyjamas, her flannel dressing gown, her mother’s musty fox stole (its tiny paws clutching at her chest), and the silk scarf she’d bought years ago in Marrakech and wore these days, turban-style. Femme fatale. That’s how she’d once been known. But her hair, once lush and dark, had thinned to nothing.
Like everything and everyone else.
Her brother. Her mother. Three husbands. The artists, the intellectuals, the poets, the frauds, the lovers and the traitors. All gone.
It is a sallow fate to outlive all whom you have loved (and hated), and to be able to speak of them, to remember them, to no one.