Ellerby Crescent, by Winifred Saltonstall

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Mrs Lavinia Crabtree had polished the borrowed teapot until she could see her own face in it, and she did not altogether like what she saw: a woman of fifty-three with a good brooch and a mended petticoat, who had walked three streets to Mrs Birtwistle’s back door the night before and asked, in a voice she hardly recognised, for the loan of a pot.

Her own teapot, the Georgian one with the swan’s-neck spout, had been at the pawnbroker’s on Market Street since March. So had the candlesticks. The spoons had followed in June. Nobody knew. That was the important thing. Since the Captain died, nobody in Ellerby Crescent had been allowed to know anything at all.

Now the vicar and his wife sat on the good chairs in the front parlour, and the borrowed pot gleamed on its tray, and Lavinia poured with a steady wrist.

‘What a handsome pot,’ said Mrs Pennefather. ‘Is it family?’

‘My husband’s mother’s,’ said Lavinia, and the lie went down as smoothly as the tea.

She was describing the Captain’s years in India when she heard the gate. Through the lace she saw the Birtwistle boy coming up the path in his brother’s outgrown jersey, his face scrubbed and determined. Lavinia’s heart did something it had not done since the telegram. She rose, too quickly, but the parlour window was open to the June afternoon, and the boy’s voice came through it, clear as a bell at a funeral.

‘Mam says can she have the teapot back after, Mrs Crabtree, ’cause the rent man likes his tea.’

For a moment nobody in the parlour breathed. Lavinia felt the room tilt, the china dogs on the mantel, the photograph of the Captain in his dress uniform, the vicar’s kindly, horrified face, all of it sliding gently away from her like furniture on a ship. Twelve years of careful lies, she thought, undone by a child with a runny nose.

She set down the pot. Her hand, she noticed from a great distance, was perfectly steady.

‘Tell your mother,’ she said, ‘that I am most grateful, and she shall have it within the hour.’

Then she turned back to her guests and offered Mrs Pennefather another slice of seed cake, and only she knew that her fingernails had left four small crescents in her palm.

How does the writer show Lavinia Crabtree’s thoughts and feelings as she tries to keep up appearances?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Lavinia
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

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