Autumn Reunion

Her long, shapely legs were encased in sheer nylon stockings and she wore navy high-heeled shoes.

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She did not have many visitors these days. Her contemporaries were already deceased or equally as immobile as herself.

She gazed down wryly at her fingers, twisted and and gnarled with arthritis. Sixty-odd years ago those fingers had been white and soft, deft enough to make her own dresses for the County Ball, deft to apply the powder and lipstick artfully; soft to touch the hands of handsome young men, to stroke their hair, to wrap around their shoulders as their lips met in a passionate kiss.

Those days were long gone. Her fiance shot down in a dog fight over the Channel in the darkest days of the war, she had devoted herself to nursing until, after the war when she could somehow no longer face the prospect of courtship and marriage with someone else, she had settled back to help her older brother, back from the war with a substantial gratuity which he had invested in purchasing a run-down boys' prep school in the quitest part of the Lincolnshire Wolds.

Together they had built up a reputation for the school, expanding its accommodation so that in its heyday it took ninety boarders and almost as many day boys.

But her brother too was now dead, and the school buildings long since sold to a major international company intent on relocating outside the metropolis. She had lived quietly in retirement until she was no longer physically able to look after herself properly, and now she lived in this retirement home in the country, a large mansion accommodating some thirty folk like herself.

Comfortable and well looked after as she was, she still regretted the loss of her valued independance. But she was a realist - she accepted her lot and her constrictions philosophically, although sometimes she wished for company. For despite her immobility, her mind was as acute as ever.

Today was special: she had been wheeled out onto the terrace to her favourite spot. From here she had a good view out over the lawns to the distant lake with its fringe of trees. Their leaves were just beginning to turn in the early autumn sunlight.

Drama

Late September was her favourite time of year. It had been, for her, the beginning of a new school year with all the promise it contained for the new intake of boarders. She had taught English at the school - she had been a good teacher, capable of inspiring her charges with a love of poetry and literature, and especially of drama. Sometimes she mused that had life turned out differently for her, she might have gone on stage herself.

At school she contented herself with staging the annual play production, and the beginning of the school year was the time when she enjoyed the excitement of choosing the production of the year, and planning and casting.

Even now as she sat at the end of the terrace, she had asked the nurse to bring her one of her favourite plays to dip into and sample the pleasure of its language. Her hand trembled as her fingers grappled with the book on the table beside her, her favourite collected edition of the plays of Shakespeare, heavily marked with her own editing now faded and blurred. The book fell heavily into her lap, opening out at the middle of one of her favourite plays: "As You Like It".

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