It’s not that we begrudged her the success of the book – she was a generous enough woman, and certainly not our worst aunt, if we were to rank them (which we did, each year, outside the back door, rain macs and cigarettes arming us against the hum of cloying festive obligation inside the house) – but it had to be said, she did never shut up about it.
And it wasn’t that we thought she wasn’t smart, either – she’d chanced upon a good thing, tapped right into the romance zeitgeist when hockey and Formula One and ice skating had all had their tropey trophy moments on the bookshelves, and correctly observed that what the people wanted next was, in fact, operatic-themed erotica – but it really was obvious: she never shut up about it.
And so Maisy and me, we set the stopwatches on our phones as soon as she walked through the hotel door. Arrayed in thick velvet all the way down to her ankles, she tripped her way across the carpet to greet Great-Grandma – whose hundredth year we were there to celebrate – which took her ten seconds. The rest of our (extensive) family were arriving in dribs and drabs, so hugs and hellos to the already present contingent didn’t take her long, perhaps another sixty seconds all in.
Maisy was the last to be hugged, and she looked at me over our aunt’s fragrant authorly shoulder as the great novelist gazed over hers, staring directly at the moustachioed, waistcoated man shaking up a cocktail behind the bar. (Uncle Terry had started early. We didn’t even have time to set a stopwatch for him.) The seconds ticked by silently on pocketed, pixellated screens. Then –
“You know, darlings, that bartender looks just like something out of my book, Lend Me A Tenor…”
Chloe de Lullington (she/her) is a writer based near Manchester, England. She's good at funny with a side of sad - or sometimes just sad. Her debut novel, Cacoethes, a bisexual sugar baby Bildungsroman, is published by Northodox Press.
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