Still Life with a Peach
Daffodils, a silver shoe and a peach sit on a packing-case before a group of elderly artists. Thea daubs lines on paper, tongue resting on her bottom lip. Remembered scenes flicker in her mind: flowers in a milk bottle, table covered in newspaper, underwear steaming on a clothes-horse by a range. Thea, the land-girl, prizes beet from frost-bitten ground, steamy breath mingling with morning mist. Her party shoes had been red, not silver. The girls helped colour each other’s legs with cold tea. Sometimes there were nylons if they danced with Yanks from the air-base, big and blond with wandering hands. Joshua was different, his shy smile and teeth white in the moonlight as he walked her home. She shouldn’t have let him touch her but she loved him, his skin dark, his hands black velvet. ‘You have such pretty ankles, Miss Thea,’ were the first words he’d cr...