The Winner Of Cheshire Novel Prize 2022 -Smoke & Honey
By Charlotte Morbey
Historical Fiction
There is a feeling of winter in the air. I can’t be sure, but I think there was a little snow on the highest peaks of the islands. The days will get shorter now, the clouded sky take on the velvet opacity of sea glass. My stepmother will shudder and complain, huddle into her cashmeres at the windows and look for excuses to migrate south.
She must have known when she chose to marry father that he lives here. Perhaps she overestimated her influence, or underestimated her loathing for Scotland. At the drop of a Parisian hat she invokes cars and trains to whisk her back to London. My need for grown-up clothes provided the latest excuse and even her monstrous efficiency couldn’t provide a wardrobe and haircut without me, so I had to be taken.
On the first morning we visited her hairdresser. A finicky little man with an unconvincing French accent, responsible for Selina’s own pale bob. He made extravagant promises, pulling my brown hair from its schoolgirl plaits and moving it just so while admiring the effect in his own mirrors. However my hair is as vexing as the rest of me. It sprung and bent out of shape as soon as the long weight was cut off. Not straight enough to echo Selina’s chic style but never curly enough to take a deliberate wave, the styling was a failure. Weeks later I still look like a schoolgirl but one who has shorn her head in some disaster. A fever perhaps, or a misguided attempt to disguise myself as a boy.
I have reached the garden now. The dog sets off across the lawn and I am tempted to follow, but instead I keep to the edge, a little downhill from Ardsmuir. The sinking sun has gilded the windows, giving the house even more of a fairytale air than its whimsical architecture already creates.
The rounded tower at one end, complete with conical roof like a witch’s hat, and the honest-to-goodness battlements fool some visitors into thinking it has a longer and more noble lineage. But, like us, the house is a fraud and a pretence. It is not yet a century old. The scale is wrong when you get close. The front door looks like some imposing castle partly because everything is just a little too small. It is a fairy palace looked at down the wrong end of a telescope.
Once, I spent an Easter holiday creating a picture of the house. I did it carefully, using my pencil as a measuring stick in front of my eye. As my art teacher instructed I looked for the triangles and the squares, drawing what was there instead of what I expected to see.
‘Your perspective is all wrong,’ said the teacher, holding the sketch book at arm’s length and frowning. She gestured to the carefully shaded trees and hills, the gigantic clouds. ‘You have drawn a splendid castle but you made it too small.’