CHAPTER FIVE
MODEL
Two weeks past the spring equinox and the last rays of sunshine slinked through the trees and the kitchen window, glinting on the knife she held. She was poised to chop a bunch of parsley for a leek and potato soup. Cooking was not Harriet’s strength yet she liked to spend time in her kitchen, donning an apron, pretending to herself she was back in her grandmother Emma Smythe’s house in Dorset. Picturing herself not as the grey-haired Emma she knew before she was uprooted to South Africa, but as a joyful youngster in a flapper dress and headband, hightailing down country lanes in an Aston Martin. A woman who knew who she was because she was where she was, among all her family and their friends.
The room leant itself to such imaginings. It was almost square with a geom
