Free Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans

who had lost her husband at Ypres, had sagged overnight, had lost all of her remaining vim as if the advent of another war had somehow filleted her, and Mrs Bailey, her daughter, who had discarded her own husband at some (never-to-be-discussed-or-even-mentioned) point, had snapped to attention and started to impose her own regime on the house, cutting the comfortable corners and snipping at the more decorative trimmings of life at Number 40. And Pamela, who had been pudgy and sweet, had all of a sudden become pretty.
    It was a self-conscious prettiness, reaffirmed in every mirror that she passed (and in every window and polished surface), and boys had started to walk her home from school, and even ask her out to the cinema, although she had not been allowed to go. And now that this prettiness had placed her in a new world, she had begun to notice, with apparent pleasure, that not everyone was as pretty, or as popular with the boys, as she was.
    She had started to walk home from school with little Margaret Raleigh from three doors down, who wore spectacles and had curves in all the wrong places and who, it was evident from Pamela’s demeanour, provided an especially flattering contrast to her own appearance. At home, she had begun to watch Edith, sometimes covertly, sometimes openly, with the expression of a zoologist viewing a new, inferior and slightly amusing species. Edith, mid-breakfast, would suddenly realize that Pamela was staring at her nose, or her hair, or her hands, her nails, her mouth; a hard, assessing stare that would make her self-conscious so that she rattled her cutlery, or clinked her teeth, in a clumsy way, against the water glass. Only once had Edith protested. She had said: ‘ Please don’t stare at me when I’m eating, Pamela’ and Pamela had looked amazed.
    â€˜I wasn’t staring,’ she’d said, in a wounded voice, ‘I was admiring your necklace’ and Edith had been left in the position of having to apologize to a thirteen-year-old. Afterwards, meeting on the stairs, Pamela had given her a triumphant look.
    It was ridiculous, of course – ridiculous for an independent woman of thirty-six to be intimidated by a child, but Edith had found herself beginning to glance around furtively as she scurried through the communal areas of the house, to cut short her little walks in the garden with Mrs Sumpter (a garden that was overlooked by Pamela’s bedroom), to retreat to her own room more and more. There, in the pleasant place that she’d made for herself, she could cut out a pattern, or read, or listen to the wireless, or write letters, without worrying about whether her chin was particularly shiny, or her hair in need of a wash. Because, although she had always tried to do her best with what God had given her, what He had given her was straight hair, a beaky nose, a small mouth and a permanent shadow under each eye, the whole packaged into an expression of perpetual anxiety, unchanging even when she was feeling particularly merry or at ease. It was true that He had also given her a pair of useful (if large) hands, a discriminating eye for line and colour, a near-perfect memory and a neat figure, but she knew that those were not items that had ever really counted. Pamela was only doing what Edith had done to herself at the same age – dissecting her appearance feature by feature and finding each one wanting.
    At the dressing-table, Edith took off her gloves and massaged her forehead. Lavender oil, she had heard, was good for headaches. Perhaps it was Mrs Sumpter who had told her; she felt too muzzy to remember. There was an unused phial in the drawer, a birthday present from her cousin in Norfolk, and she extracted the tiny cork and dabbed a little of the essence on her temples. The astringency seemed to cut through the fog behind her eyes and she held the cork under her nose and took a longer sniff. It was a purple smell, shot through with silver –