I promised her I’d sort out the linen cupboard and finish the pile of sewing that looks as if it’s built up over a lifetime. Various items have been bagged up in the utility room with a sticky note saying ‘needs mending’ attached. It’s jobs like these, Claudia told me when I started, that will make all the difference around the house. She smiled as if it – as if I – was the most important thing in the world. How very trivial, I remember thinking when I told her that I liked sewing, that I had an eye for detail. Perhaps I have, I think as I reluctantly approach the front door. Maybe I got it from Cecelia as I watched her work through the long winter evenings. She’d hunch over the table in our tiny flat, an angled light shining above her as if she had a private mini sun in her own little world. Sometimes she’d work peering through a giant magnifying glass on a stand. I once looked at her through it. Her body morphed as if she were in the hall of mirrors at the fairground.
