they were preparing to leave. The aunt smiled but took this as the criticism it was, and on the way home spoke disapprovingly about her friend’s husband, who was the president of a firm that had lately been accused in the newspapers of bribing a politician to secure a government contract. She might acknowledge the girl’s deficiencies, she thought to herself wrathfully, as was her familial right, but other people should be more restrained. She was now glad she had not followed her initial impulse and issued an invitation to the small party she had planned in honour of the girl’s birthday, which was two weeks away. Given the girl’s limitations, a party could only be a social disaster.
A fortnight later, a box arrived from the girl’s father and also a parcel from her mother. They had been sent separately, but perversely, the same carrier brought them to the apartment. They were a day early, but the aunt suggested the girl open them in case they contained something perishable.
The parcel contained a sleeveless shift of white silk with small leaves sewn in white satin thread around the hem and neckline, beaded with seed pearls. It was far too young, the aunt thought. Worse, the card from her sister specifically bade the girl wear the dress on her birthday because the mother had dreamed of her in it. The aunt thought this a ludicrous and even irresponsible thing to confide, but only admired the needlework in a lukewarm voice.
The girl fingered the dress, wondering what her mother had dreamed.
The box from her father contained roses. Not long-stemmed roses with tender pink buds, which the aunt would have deemed appropriate for a young girl, but a dense tangle of crimson buds nestled amongst dark green leaves, with stems that curled impossibly in on themselves and fairly bristled with thorns. The colour of them as well as their barbaric confusion confirmed the foolishness of her sister’s choice in a husband.
At first the roses seemed to have no scent, but that afternoon, when they returned from an exhibition at a gallery, the whole apartment was filled with their perfume.
The following morning, the aunt woke in fright from a dream in which she had been running naked through a forest of wild red roses, pursued by some sort of animal. Wrapped in a soft lace nightgown under chaste pink linen, she patted her plump belly and told herself she ought not to have drunk coffee so late in the evening. But when she opened her bedroom door, the smell of the roses was so powerful that she blamed them for her dreams. Panting, she broke her own rules and struggled to open some windows.
Later, as she set a dainty birthday breakfast table, she glanced from time to time with real loathing at the roses, which had opened during the night and now gaped in a way that struck her as frankly carnal. She nibbled at the haunch of a marzipan mouse as she set its companions on a small glass platter, consoling herself that at this rate the petals would be dropping by midday and the flowers could reasonably be disposed of by evening. Beheading the mouse with a neat, sharp bite, she thought of the pictures she had seen of her sister’s husband and reflected that she had always known there was something wrong with him. A doctor should look ascetic and have slender, white pianist’s fingers and soft, limp, blond hair, but the man was swarthy and his hands were as big and rough as those of a village butcher.
She shuddered to think of such hands on her body and wondered how her sister had borne it. She folded pale green napkins, and remembered her own birthday at this age. There had been an elegant party to which silver-edged invitations had gone out. She had worn lavender taffeta and a matching chiffon scarf in her hair, and she had met her guests with skin as pink and cool as ice-cream waiting to be licked. But the boy she had hoped would kiss her had gone to the garden to wait, and when she had been delayed, had embraced another girl instead. The aunt had come out into the moonlight in time to understand that her moment of romance had been stolen. It seemed to her now that there was an inexorable current flowing from that night to this apartment and this day, where she stood as virginal as the girl for whom she