Marchmont Road, by Isobel Rintoul

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

It was past midnight when I let myself into Mrs Lennie’s house in Marchmont Road, and the fog had followed me in. I had my shoes in my hand and was halfway across the hall when the gaslight flared.

She was sitting on the bottom stair in a tartan dressing gown, her hair in steel pins, with the kitchen poker across her knees like a sword.

‘Mr Cairns,’ she said. ‘You will be aware of the hour.’

I began to explain about the fog and the anatomy lecture that had overrun. She listened with her lips pressed into a thin line, nodding slowly, as a judge nods at a story he has heard many times before. Then she rose, gripping the banister, and I saw that she had been sitting there a long while: her feet were bare and white with cold.

‘Young men,’ she said, ‘are forever being swallowed by the fog. My Torquil was the same. Twenty-two, and every night a different excuse.’ She did not say where Torquil was now, and I did not ask. There was a photograph of him in uniform on the hall table, and she touched its frame as she passed, the way one touches a pew.

In the kitchen she set a pan of milk on the range and stirred cocoa into it with fierce little circles.

‘Drink that,’ she ordered, ‘and if you are ever late again, Mr Cairns, I shall lock the door and you may sleep with the medical skeletons.’

She stayed until I had finished every drop.

What impressions does the writer create of Mrs Lennie?

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