Page 55 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“It must be dreadfully hard on her, all the commotion.”

“She is in decline,” I said honestly. “The doctor comes when he can, but there’s little for him to do. Her liver is failing.”

“Oh, darling Elsie, I am so terribly sorry. She is the central light in your life.”

It startled me. I would have chosen another for that pillar. “One of them, certainly.”

“Your prince is a fantasy, my dear. It’s easy to love someone at a distance.”

I frowned, slightly embarrassed at the acuity of her comment. I didn’t think I spoke of him very often. “We’ve been friends for decades,” I said. “No more.”

“Peter mentioned his letters recently, that they arrive in clutches of three or four, every week.”

“Peter mentioned the letters?”

“Tanveer has ever been a pebble in his shoe.”

Because I had once left him and gone to India when we were in Cairo. I had intended never to return.

Until my hand was forced, once again. A hollow memory of my return to England rustled, and I could not bear it, not just now. “Tanveer worries about us, Mother and I. He asked if I would write every day, so I have been doing so.”

“As one would, with a dear friend.” She sipped her wine with a droll lift of an eyebrow.

“I wrote many, many letters to you when I was in Cairo and India,” I said.

She gave me a piercing gaze, holding her manicured fingers on the condensation of her glass. “We have shared everything, Elsie. Why are you so cagey about him? Do you think I’ll judge you?”

A fair question. I had an image of a carved box, inlaid with ivory, that held this secret thing, the thing we barely acknowledged even to each other anymore. “It is the only thing that really belongs to me.”

“Not your paintings?”

“Yes, of course the paintings.” I grappled with what I meant, what I could say without giving away that sense of private connection, a thing that both lived in the world and not. “But paintings are meant to be public. Even if they’re vulnerable or revealing, the entire purpose of them is to communicate with someone else.”

She inclined her head. “I am quite sure I have never loved anyone as you love your work.” That arched brow. “Or your prince.”

Both were a blessing and a kind of curse. “Maybe you will one day,” I said. “But perhaps it’s easier not to.”

“I don’t think you believe that for a single moment.”

I thought of leaving him in India the last time, and the sound of his voice on the phone the morning after the first horrible raid. “It does seem foolish sometimes.”

She reached across the table and covered my hand. Fiercely, she said, “Never.”

We picked through our lunch. Outside afterward, we paused. The weather was misty but not pouring. “I would like to walk back,” Nina said. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all. That sounds wonderful. I’ve hardly had enough walking the past month.” We put up our umbrellas and window shopped as we always had. Some windows had been patched where they cracked, others were taped as a protective measure, but it was still possible to look at the goods within. Such as they were.

I stopped in a stationery shop and bought airmail paper. The clerk said, “Good luck to him,” as if all airmail letters went to troops. I merely said thank you.

The streets held a somber tone, vaguely deserted, people hurrying along with their heads down. We passed a section of a block that was a pile of rubble, shops standing fine on either side, a hole in a park where a small bomb had made a crater. Everywhere a mucky grime lay overthe windowsills. “I wonder how long it will take them to destroy the entire city?” I said aloud.

“Churchill will stop them long before that happens,” Nina protested. “Already the tide is turning.”

“Is it?” I said lightly.

As if to underscore the thought, the sirens went off. We were miles from home, and I did not know the neighborhood well. “What shall we do?”

“Let’s find a Tube station. What’s near?”