Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Dunmore Row ·
The Mirror Keeps Her Years
A shop assistant tells an insistent antique buyer that the brass-framed glass upstairs is not appraisable, and privately pieces together why the woman who owns it has looked twenty-nine since 1998.
June Faraday has worked the counter at the antiques shop on Dunmore Row for three years, and in that time has learned that the flat upstairs lets to a woman named Edda Lowe, that the flat's tall brass mirror is *on permanent loan* and is therefore not shop stock, and that a certain class of buyer, once they hear about the mirror, is worse than the class that haggles.
The buyer who came in October was the persistent kind. Ambrose Kell, of some address in the city with a brass plate, wanted the glass for a corridor he was fussing over, and offered figures not usually spoken aloud in shops. June fetched Edda down, and Edda heard him out with the patience of a woman being offered a hat she already owns, and said the mirror had been appraised already. Kell asked by whom. Edda said, *by itself*, which June wrote off as a joke until she saw Kell's face.
The valuer Kell brought had been through the flat at midday and come down with the frame described as Victorian, good, and the glass described in his report with a bracket around one word: *not appraisable*. June, doing the filing, has read the rest of that report. Visitors in the glass show normally, it says. Nothing irregular was observed in the reflections of any person surveyed. One reflection did not come under that heading, and the valuer has left the line for it blank, and the blank is very clearly deliberate, a hole routered in the middle of a form by a man who wanted it on record that he had looked through the window and chosen not to describe the room.
What June knows, from three years of Thursdays, is this. Edda Lowe is sixty-one, and looks no more than thirty, and has held there since a photograph in the regional paper, printed in 1998, in which she is wearing the same coat and the same expression. The woman in the glass is a different matter: thin, bent over the lower frame, the same clothes on an old body, an old face going grey at the mouth. There is a folded blanket on the mirror's shelf on the glass side, kept square, the way bedding is kept when someone sleeps in a bed nobody else admits to.
Edda takes her tea up at four. The cup is set on the shelf, on her side, because nothing passes through. June once carried the tray for her on a Friday when Edda's hands had gone stiff — she has done repairs all her life, June says; you can hear it in the wrists — and set the cup down where it goes, and stayed in the stairwell a moment to catch her breath. Through the door she heard two voices keeping two kinds of quiet, one speaking and one moving, the way a conversation with a person in a bed of a hospital has two registers in it, and nothing came through the glass of the second voice, which should not have been audible at all.
Some Thursdays there is a knock. Not a knock at the flat door: a knock from behind the glass, two taps, slightly arrhythmic, like a knuckle on the inside of a pane. The first time June heard it she dropped her duster. Edda did not startle at all; she put down her sewing and said, *she does that when the other room wants its blanket turned*, in the tone June uses for deliveries, and went up.
The arrangement has rules, and the rules are the frightening part, because they are tidy. If the glass were to break, or go on Kell's kind of paper, everything it has held would come down on Edda overnight: the whole sixty-one years, all at once, in one night of the body, and nobody in this building is prepared to be the instrument of that. Edda will not sell. She has refused better offers than Kell's, and her refusals to do with the mirror have a strange absolutely-settled cast, the settledness of two parties who are both protecting the other from something, and know it, and have agreed to know it.
She has been asked about it exactly once by June, at the going down of a Thursday's tea, gently, the way you check the stitching on a borrowed coat. Edda said the reflection had volunteered. That was all. Later that shelf's blanket, on the glass side, was squared away again, and in the doorway June heard, very faint, from inside the frame, a dry voice say something that had the cadence of the same sentence backwards — *no: she asked me* — and Edda, on the bed of the room beyond the glass, did not turn toward the sound at all, which told June everything about how long those two have had this between them, and nothing at all about which of them spoke first.