Julian Welles
July 29, 2020 5:36 PM
The Personal Touch by Julian Welles
Julian sank wearily into a chair, looking hopelessly around at the chaos enveloping what was supposed to be a family room. She was supposed to be trying to organize it and her bedroom – to unpack things and put them where they went, and get rid of all the boxes shoved into all the bedrooms other than Cecily and George’s – but was considering the alternative of imitating Cecily’s behavior of two days previously: bursting into tears, stamping her foot, and demanding to go home.It was her own fault, of course – at least to the extent it was anyone’s fault. If she had been more on top of things, none of this would have happened – the new house would have been sorted out weeks ago, for the most part – the ‘public’ parts of the house would have been completely finished, and the ‘family’ rooms would have at least been reasonably inhabitable. She hadn’t been, though, what with being pregnant and finding it more difficult than she had with Cecily, and so – here they were.
Go on. Got to get up, she tried to encourage herself. William had already been cross with her for not simply hiring someone to decide where all their worldly goods ought to go here, and then cross again when she had insisted on sorting out the childrens’ rooms before theirs, and then – well, the paint situation really had been astonishingly stupid, she had to admit. All she’d really thought of was that it would be nice if the childrens’ rooms were a little brighter, not considering that the paint fumes would make said rooms uninhabitable – well, even more than they were by default, as she had not for the longest time had the slightest clue where their beds were. It had been an awkward few nights, at Ted and Peggy’s increasingly over-filled house, trying to stay awake all night so she didn’t risk herself or Cecily somehow rolling on top of poor George until they’d found his bassinet….
She had been so careful about packing, too, she thought vaguely. Every box had its contents’ description written on it. How, then, were so many things not where they were supposed to be?
Forcing herself back to her feet, she pointed her wand at a heavy walnut set of shelves and floated them off to the left wall, just to get them out of the way. It seemed reasonable to think that it might be easier to just get books and photographs and whatnot out of the boxes they were in, put them on the shelves, and then worry about levitating the furniture into aesthetically pleasing arrangements. Even if things fell off, it would be easier to pick them up again than to keep navigating around all these twice-cursed boxes….
Thus resolved, she had almost emptied an entire box of photographs onto one shelf in no particular order when she heard a rap on the door behind her. Turning around, surprised – who would be here, now? – she raised an eyebrow at the sight of Lenore.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Lenore entered the room and shrugged, putting a large box down on one of the side tables, which was sitting pointlessly in the middle of the room. “Peg decided a good way to occupy Cecily would be to play hide and seek,” she explained. “Cecily’s Seeking, so I’m hiding here.”
“How on earth is Cecily supposed to find you here?” asked Julian.
Lenore pulled off a convincing expression of mild confusion. “She isn’t,” she said. “Isn’t that the point of the game?”
To her surprise, Julian’s first instinct was to slap her, an instinct she recoiled from as quickly as possible. “You do that very well,” she said sourly instead. “If I hadn’t grown up with John, I don’t think I’d know that you were being deliberately obtuse, but I do, you know.”
Lenore’s dark face barely changed expression, moving only into a sort of contemplativeness for a second. “Fair enough,” she conceded. “Plus you have known me for quite some time now, too, so.”
Julian stared at her for a moment, then chuckled weakly. “That is true,” she said. “I don’t know why you two can’t just – be normal, though.”
Lenore shrugged again and opened her box. “Coffee?” she asked, lifting a lidded porcelain mug.
Julian considered this. On one hand, if Lenore had made the coffee…Lenore’s mother was Turkish by birth. Lenore’s coffee was roughly analogous to John’s tea. Perhaps Lenore’s coffee had a cultural source, unlike the abomination unto cups which was John’s tea, but it was still…well, too strong for Julian anyway, most of the time. She was awfully fuzzy-brained, though….
“I dumped about a liter of milk in yours,” added Lenore.
“Gimme it,” said Julian.
There were also croissants – an odd combination, but Julian was past complaining. She nibbled on one of the croissants as she and her cousin sat on the sofa together and Lenore looked around at Julian’s heaped-up possessions.
“I don’t know how you have the nerve to try to deal with all this yourself,” said Lenore. “If I take anything with me when I change houses, I leave it to the staff to move it and sort it out.”
Julian sighed. “That’s what William says too,” she confessed. “I’m starting to feel like I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t want other people going through my entire life.”
“Do you have something scandalous hidden?” asked Lenore, looking curious.
“No! I just…I can arrange my daughter’s pictures myself.”
“So can a decorator,” said Lenore.
“It just doesn’t feel right,” said Julian vaguely. “It all feels…artificial. Wrong. To me, anyway.”
“You sound like anne,” said Lenore, amused. “Maybe it’s something about having children.”
“William has children.”
“Yes, but he’s only their father. And he’s William,” added Lenore. “He’s never been sentimental.”
Julian flushed, feeling vaguely criticized, somehow, though she didn’t know why. “William’s a very good father,” she protested. “And a good husband,” she added.
Lenore picked up her own coffee and took a sip of it. Julian tried not to read anything into the pause this necessitated. “I’d say that’s more of an effort than a sentiment,” said Lenore finally.
Julian shook her head uncomfortably. “He’s missed us awfully,” she said. “It’s been dreadful, being split up like this. I hope things are going to improve now.” At least once she fixed all her mistakes with the move, and threw the party that William wanted her to have, and went to the other events he wanted her to go to, and….
“Of course,” said Lenore.
She might have just believed that Lenore had simply come to see her because Lenore hadn’t cared for playing endless games of hide-and-go-seek with Cecily, but the problem with her relatives…she wasn’t actually sure what the problem was with her relatives. Was it that they were not very bright in certain ways, or was it that they thought she was too dim to notice the obvious? Nevertheless, when John popped up out of thin air with half a Battenberg two days later, it became quite obvious that there was a conspiracy.
Strangely, she was more touched by the concern than annoyed by the underhandedness. Perhaps she would be able to survive life in Ottawa after all.
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Julian Welles
The Personal Touch
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