The Proper Names

Left behind to help Nanma, Jo sat by the fireplace in the drawing room, manipulating brass tools while she awaited the call. She lifted logs from basket to grate, stacking them at pleasing angles. The proper name for these tools, she’d learned, was a companion set.

When they visited her step-aunt’s house, she often ended up alone, playing like a child younger than her thirteen years, treating the place as a doll’s house. Her step-cousin was the same age, and was expected to play with her, but she never seemed keen; her demeanour already seemed to Jo 50% middle-aged. She had a habit of tucking in her chin, a habit learned from her mother, when she disapproved of something or found it confusing. Jo, on the other hand, was still happy to be 75% child, and only 25% teen, though she knew this to be a cause for shame. She hoped they’d light a real fire later in one of their many real fireplaces – she’d never yet visited when it was cold enough for one.

To its family, this house seemed entirely traditional and conservative; no change was welcomed there. Nothing out of the ordinary, it seemed to say, nothing uncontrolled or irrational, has ever happened here. We are all just as you think we are.

To Jo, it was a labyrinthine playground. A hatch between kitchen and dining rooms was a quirky delight. A wide front door filled with stained glass coughed oblong jewels across the tiled hallway – exotically ecclesiastical for a domestic setting.

A bookish child, Jo tried to read the meanings in this building. In the deep doorframes - the proper name was architraves - and high ceilings; in log fires and dark, inlaid furniture, she read luxury, history, the setting for a literary romance. Every time she came here, she learned more words for things.