An Oxford Professor’s Wife Makes a Pilgrimage to the Sistine Chapel a Week After her Best Friend’s Funeral
by Anne Soilleux
Liza stares up at God and sees the face of her husband. Henry is speaking at a conference this morning and has assumed she’ll stay at the hotel with the other wives. She’s been here before, with Alice, during that forever-bright, liberating summer spent Interrailing before they went to university. She remembers fixating on Adam’s extended fingers and feeling that at last, life was within reach. Then she met Henry. He was her first year tutor, and has been tutoring her ever since; to round her brummie vowels, to swap mini-skirts for tailored linen, to pass the port to the left. Which newspapers to read. How to be just interesting enough for his donnish friends.
Alice despised him.
An eddy in the babel-babbling stream of tourists makes her stumble. An american student (tom-cat lithe, looking like Michelangelo’s David) catches her and apologises. He smiles, asks if he can buy her coffee. She knows she will let him kiss her over her ristretto, and when he invites her back to his pensione, she will accept.
Eve is not in this painting. Her wilfulness will ruin the Creator’s paradise and she will
be punished for it.
Liza suspects Eve had no regrets.
Anne Soilleux lives in Berkshire and sometimes writes short things.
This story won Second Prize in the April 24 Monthly Micro Competition.