Wearing Well

Opening scene

The gloves are the smallest thing, so you start there — kid leather the colour of weak tea, buttoned at the wrist, far too slender for your hands. You tell yourself it is a test. You tell yourself you will take them off in the morning.

You sleep in them. You dream of a hand that is not quite yours resting on a bannister, and when you wake the left glove has stopped straining across the knuckle. Only the left. You lie very still and feel the seam of yourself, and there is no seam — only the sense that somewhere a fraction of you has been let out or taken in, and that it does not hurt, and that you liked the dream.

The wardrobe stands open. The clothes hang in their patient rows, waiting to be understood one at a time. There is a slip of ivory silk that you have not let yourself look at directly. There is your aunt's photograph on the sill, watching you decide.

What do you reach for next — or do you take the gloves off while you still can?

Turn 1 of 13

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

The morning light comes through the lace curtains in bands, striping the worn floorboards where you stand barefoot, still wearing the left glove. You flex your fingers inside the kid leather and feel how it has begun to settle, no longer fighting the width of your knuckle. The right glove remains stubborn, tight across the palm, and you understand suddenly that this is how it works: not all at once, never evenly, but in its own patient rhythm.

You look at the photograph on the sill. Vivienne at twenty-nine, your age exactly, her face sharper than yours but not unrecognisably so. She wears a plain dress in the picture, nothing from the wardrobe, and her hands are folded in her lap where you cannot see them. You wonder if she started with the gloves too, if she stood in this same light feeling the first impossible thing happen and choosing not to pull away.

Your phone buzzes in your pocket. You ignore it. It is your father again, or the estate agent, or someone else who wants you to sell this house and its contents and be practical. The practical thing would be to remove the glove, to shower, to drive back to the city where your sensible life waits. Instead you find yourself opening the wardrobe doors wider, letting the cedar smell reach you.

The clothes hang in their patient rows. You have looked at them a dozen times since the solicitor handed you the keys, but you have not touched them. Now your hand moves past the ivory slip you cannot yet face and finds a silk blouse the colour of dried roses, high-collared, with mother-of-pearl buttons that fasten left over right. It would not close across your chest. You know this without trying. But the sleeves are long, and the cuffs are narrow, and you think of how your left wrist has already learned something about fitting where it was not meant to fit.

You take the blouse from its hanger. The silk is heavier than you expected, cool even in the warmed air of the room. You do not put it on. You lay it across the bed beside the right glove, which you have still not removed, and you sit on the edge of the mattress with your transformed hand resting on your knee, waiting to see what you will decide.