The Mirror

This story was inspired by Picasso's Girl With A Mirror                                                  

It’s a beautiful room, not cold and clinical like many of the foyers of up and coming restaurants.  This place has no axe to grind, it has arrived and is comfortable in its own skin.  The sofas are comfortable and not too low, the wall a beautiful deep burgundy colour that warms and relaxes.  It’s a perfect place to begin an evening with friends, or it would be if they were my friends, or even our friends.  They’re not, they’re Robert’s friends, and they are very, very boring.

I smile sweetly, murmur the usual pleasantries, sip a sherry that is really too dry for me, but Robert feels it’s a “classy” drink, and I have to fit his vision of the perfect wife, at least for this evening.  No-one is at all interested in what I have to say, so I let my attention drift, letting the hubbub of polite talk and attempted witty repartee swirl around and away from me.  That’s when I first notice what’s going on in the mirror.

It’s always what’s round the corner that’s most intriguing, isn’t it?  I seem to have spent much of my life wondering what was being said in the murmur of words coming from the other room, always found the discussion of the next couple at the party more intriguing that that of my own group, always longed to join in the enthralling conversation in the seat three spaces back from me on the top of the bus.

But this is different.  There IS something round that corner, and it’s not in this room.  At first I thought it was just a strange distorted reflection of the heavy gilt carving of the mirror frame, or a distant echo of the pictures on the opposite wall, but it isn’t.  I’ve checked it out three times now. It’s actually quite hard to do that in public, there are only so many reasons to look in a mirror without appearing super-vain.  I can only see it if I look really closely and at quite an acute angle, so I think this is the last time I can try before dinner, and I must make the most of it.  Something in my eye, I think, that will allow for a lot of blinking and peering, and I’m absolutely certain that Robert won’t offer to come to my aid – the callous creature that he is.

This is an Alice Through the Looking Glass moment!  I now know just how Alice felt – intrigued and eager, reluctant and frightened.  There are things round that corner that I recognise, things I left behind years ago, things I wish I still had.  And there are shapes too, that are almost people.  People I knew and loved, or thought I did.  I thought I loved Robert once.

Robert is talking.  Mumbling.  Whining.  Accusing.  He’s going in to dinner, will I please hurry up. 

“A minute,” I say.

The others go with him, they barely notice my absence, all are far too busy talking about themselves, persuading the whole room how elegant, witty, chic and established they are.

Now I’m alone, and free to look boldly into the glass.  So I do.  It isn’t what I expected, all I can see is me, young-ish, pretty-ish, something and nothing, not exactly memorable, a bit of a fish out of water in these opulent surroundings.  The shapes have gone – they were only on the edge of my consciousness.  But I know they were there, morsels from my past, the shadows of people who populated the roads I had left behind, all continuing their lives without me.  And I longed to go back there, and then go forward with them into the life that throbbed in every corner of that mirror-world.

It was remembering Alice that did it!  What a wonderful topsy-turvy world she found, escape and excitement.  I knew the other side of the mirror was inhabited by promise and animation and – oh, just plain fun.  Exactly what I needed.

“Are you coming?” 

Robert’s peevishly discontented and insistent voice broke into my thoughts, and at that moment I knew for certain.

I would have to go through the mirror frame, walk into my past and see my possible future.  To make the alternative choices.