The Colour of the Sun, by Joan Kellett

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Frank had bought the paint without consulting her, which was the first thing. The second thing was the colour.

‘Primrose,’ he said, prising off the lid with a screwdriver. He said it proudly, as though he had mixed it himself.

Valerie looked into the tin. It was the yellow of a child’s raincoat. For thirty-one years the hall at Number 14 had been magnolia, and she had liked it that way: it showed nothing, it asked nothing, it went with every coat that had ever hung on the hooks.

‘It’s very bright,’ she said.

‘That’s the idea.’ He had already spread the dust sheets, overlapping them exactly, the way he had once laid out drawings at the depot. Since his retirement in March he had laid out a great many things exactly. The shed. The spice rack. The pension book, in a plastic wallet, in a drawer that had to be closed with two hands. She had begun, privately, to count the days until the allotment came free.

They worked in silence for an hour. Frank cut in round the light switches with a small brush, holding his breath. Valerie did the long walls with the roller, quickly, not looking too closely at what she was doing, and every so often he came along behind her and touched up a patch she had missed. He did not say anything. He did not have to.

At eleven she put the roller down.

‘I’m going to make tea,’ she said, ‘and then I’m going to my sister’s.’

Frank straightened up. There was a smear of primrose on his glasses. ‘Now?’

‘Now.’

She was in the kitchen with the kettle on when she heard him come and stand in the doorway. She did not turn round.

‘The day we moved in,’ he said, ‘you stood in that hall and said it was like living inside a biscuit tin. Magnolia. You said when the children were grown you’d paint it the colour of the sun.’

The kettle began to tick and rattle on the gas.

‘I don’t remember that,’ she said.

‘I do. I wrote it down.’ She heard him fumble in his cardigan pocket. ‘I write a lot of things down. I don’t know what to do with the days, Valerie. I thought if I did one thing you wanted.’

She turned. He was holding a small notebook, the kind he had once used for mileages, and he looked so foolish and so lost, with the yellow smear on his lens, that the anger went out of her all at once, like air from a tyre.

She took his glasses off and wiped them on her apron.

‘It’s not the colour of the sun,’ she said. ‘It’s the colour of custard.’

‘Is that worse?’

She considered the hall, half yellow, half magnolia, a line down the middle where they had stopped.

‘We’ll see,’ she said, ‘when it’s finished.’

What impressions does the writer create of the relationship between Valerie and Frank? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.