Maiden Voyage

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She tog cinnamon toast in the kitchen, quite naked except velvet dippers and a pink velvet hair riband, when they came the house to give her the news that her father had died.

Nigel came into the kitchen in his purple and turquoise dressing-gown, and said seriously, "You'd better pop on. Mr. Fearson's outside and says it's rather drastic."

That was probably her last ever carefree moment, her last completely carefree moment, and Nigel would remember it for years even when he was married and living in Oxfordshire with a wife called Penelope, three Shetland ponies, a duck, and a pair of overweight twin daughters with Fair Isle sweaters and freckles. He would see it as an illuminated picture postcard: Catriona standing by New World gas stove, her white face already turning towards him, and those slightly slanted eyes already beginning to cloud, her dark curly hair tied back with the riband, and the long bare curve of her back lighted by the eleven o'clock sunlight. Eleven o'clock morning on Thursday, June 12,1924: what a time and a day to be twenty-three years old and in love, especially with Catriona. She had her mother's height and her mother's figure, tall and unfashionably large-breasted for 1924, but with narrow hips. And she was easily the most devastating girl that Nigel had ever known, even more of a goddess than Rosebud Wilkinson; and he eyed her nakedness possessively as she walked across the kitchen, lifted her pink satin robe from the back of the kitchen chair, and slipped it on.

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