Free Facing the Light by Adèle Geras

stay, she thought. I will close that drawer and go back to thinking about the days ahead. She would, she knew, have her work cut out trying to foresee and head off any trouble arising between members of her family. She was stillcapable, surely, of seeing that everyone behaved themselves. That couldn’t really be troubling her, could it? So what was it?
    She sat at her dressing-table and picked up the silver-backed brushes that had belonged to her mother. Poor Maude, Leonora thought. What would she think of the fact that she was now known to most people simply as the wife of Ethan Walsh? A shadow, there one second and gone the next, crossed the glass in front of her eyes and she turned to see what it could have been, her heart beating rather too fast in her chest. Nothing. A trick of the light. Possibly even the reflected image of the painting that hung on the wall above her bed. That must have been it, the white of the swans on the water, seeming to move. Not really moving at all.
    Leonora soothed herself by looking at the photograph that stood on her dressing-table. Alex had taken it a couple of years ago. She smiled to think of her younger grandson and how, from the very first time he’d held a camera when he was no more than six years old, he’d almost never put it down. Whatever the occasion, there he’d be, snapping away quietly instead of talking to people. She would never have admitted to having a favourite grandchild, but there was, she felt, a special bond between herself and the rather quiet little boy who had always seemed to enjoy her company and never required anything from her that she couldn’t give. Even as an adult, he was still her darling, and she didn’t think anyone quite appreciated how talented he was.
    He has a gift, Leonora thought, for seizing the right moment, and quite often for showing more about people in the shot than they realized. There they were, she and Gwen and Rilla, fixed forever as they were that day, sitting on the bench under the magnolia tree in the Quiet Garden. I look good in that blouse, she thought, with Mummy’s pearls around my neck. Gwen had Gus on her lap, and theblue of her cardigan was flattering. Rilla looked happy in this picture, which made a change. She wasn’t often seen to smile in photographs and Leonora knew that was because Rilla felt it made her look too fat. She had on a long, gold-coloured dress, quite unsuitable for the country, and Leonora felt a momentary irritation, mixed with the concern that she always felt for her younger daughter. It wasn’t as though she was a stranger to Willow Court. She knew that it wasn’t a long-dress sort of place. Also, she was wearing altogether too many necklaces, which was typical of her. Leonora stared at Gwen looking down at the cat on her lap, and at Rilla looking at Gwen. Not me, she thought. I’m looking straight at the camera. Meeting its eye. The magnolia tree was lovely, studded with its pink and white tulip-like flowers. We seem happy enough, Leonora thought. She sighed, and turned her attentions to her face in the mirror.
    It was quite passable for nearly seventy-five, she thought, but that white hair. Where had it come from? When she wasn’t confronted by her own image in the glass, and on good days when her legs and arms obeyed her, it was easy for her to think of herself as Leonora Simmonds the beauty, the young mother whose two little daughters were her pride and joy. Her treasures. Concentrate on the good things. Don’t give houseroom to shadows. Keep problems in their place. That was always her style. It was what made her
a force to be reckoned with
. She smiled. Sean had called her that. She’d liked his words and summoned them up now to help sustain her till she saw him. A force to be reckoned with. She made her way slowly to the bathroom. It was getting late. She wouldn’t be able to stay with Nanny Mouse for very long.
    *
    Nanny Mouse was so old that