Free The Snow Globe by Judith Kinghorn

general household expenditure. There were invoices, paid and unpaid and pending; and invitations, and RSVPs, and postcards and letters—from friends, from family and from charities dependent on her support.
    This was Mabel’s life, or had been, once. Because many of those books and habits—though Mabel hung on to them, perhaps in denial, or in longing for what had been and waiting for its return—were, in truth, redundant and quite unnecessary. The number of servants at Eden Hall had late one summer and in a matter of weeksdropped from fourteen to seven, then to five. Of the seven men from Eden Hall who’d gone off to fight, two had survived, but only one had returned there to work. And regular houseguests—those vibrantly colored Saturday-to-Monday creatures who had spilled out of cars and into the house, filling it with noise and laughter—were, too, a thing of the past. The war had silenced the party, and now it was simply too costly to live like that.
    When Mabel finally rose from her desk, she turned off the lamp, paused by the window and pulled back the curtains. Snow continued to fall, blanketing the contours beyond in ever-thickening white, creating newly fat shapes of the topiary and specimen trees. From where she stood, Mabel could see the light of Daisy’s room, burning so brightly that even through the veil of falling snow it appeared for a moment as though the window were open. Briefly, Mabel wondered what her youngest daughter was doing. Hopefully collected, hopefully composed, she thought, moving away.
    Climbing the stairs, Mabel ticked off and added to the list in her head: rooms and beds still to be aired . . . clean towels and new cakes of soap to be put out . . . At the top of the stairs she paused and thought for a moment of looking in on Daisy. But it was late and she was weary, and she simply could not cope with any more histrionics. Furthermore, it was, she knew, only the very beginning of a potentially hazardous week. As she passed her husband’s bedroom door she could hear the low rumbling from inside, picture him lying on his back, mouth open. He hadn’t always been like that, she thought, and a glimmer of a younger Howard fought to break through in her memory. She pushed it away. There was no point in remembering, not now. It had been too long, much toolong. Excluding the cursory kisses of their weekly hellos and good-byes, and the others reserved for special occasions and birthdays, Howard had not touched her in years, and she tried to remember how long, exactly, it had been.
    Hanging her dress away, closing the wardrobe door, Mabel sought to recall the last time. She stretched up her arms, pulled on her nightgown, feeling the silken fabric fall over her naked body like gossamer in a spring breeze, and slowly moved to the bathroom. She raised her eyes to the face in the mirror: the dark curls now silvering at the temples; eyes once bright now dull; the lines around those eyes and the other lines—running from either side of her nose to her mouth, her chin. Time, not Howard, had taken her and made her
his
, she thought. She pressed the two tiny slivers of soap together in her hands, turned on the taps and washed away the threat of tears. Then she picked up the rough towel and held it to her face.
    â€œSix years,” she said finally, turning back the voluminous eiderdown.
Six years,
she thought, climbing beneath the cold linen and pulling up layers of blankets. She stretched out an arm, pushed a switch and turned onto her side, rubbing her feet against the warm hot-water bottle at the end of the bed, wrapping her arms around herself, remembering.
    Howard, once so dashing, so attentive and in love with her, had all but vanished from her life. Now she and her husband were more like business partners, running a home, a family; making the day-to-day—or rather, week-to-week—decisions about that place. He came; he went. Inevitably