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gleaming. The room was massive, running almost the entire length of the house, and I could see how Tristan found the space to pace and stamp about.
    I shuffled carefully towards the stack of papers, and once I had rounded the door I saw that they stood before a large canvas, empty but for a few streaks of green. Like grasses, they darted across the white space, seeming almost to shimmer against the bright nothingness, reflecting the ripples of the distant trees. I looked at the canvas for a moment, trying to understand it. By being in Tristan’s space, where he created this work I was yet to see, I hoped that I could somehow know him a little. But there was only grass. I could not know him by his grass, could not glean anything of his feelings towards life, towards his lost love, towards me.
    A pile of sketchbooks stood in the corner, haphazardly leaning against the wall. My eye lingered there, staring hard as though I could see inside without even opening them. I longed, with a fervour I could hardly bear, to look inside. But I could not. It was engrained too deeply. I could not pry. To look in a room without touching anything, I reasoned, was acceptable. It was when you looked more closely that people got angry. It was when you opened things, like drawers or books, that you crossed an invisible line. The line that separated right and wrong.
    Despite being, by my own reasoning, on the correct side of that line as I stood in the middle of the floor, several feet from anything remotely private, I knew I had to leave without being found. I wanted to tear from the room, to obliterate any marks I might have made in the dust, any tracks I had left in the air. Tristan would return, I fancied, and see the mess I had made of the air, and how I had disturbed the lint that floated in the sunlight. I edged backwards, remembering all too late about the creaking floorboards. It was a metre to the door. It felt like a mile.
    When I reached the safety of the hallway, once the initial rush of relief had passed and I looked back to see no evidence of my intrusion, I realised that I was cold and sweating. I hated myself. I hated how I couldn’t control my own mind, and that I didn’t know if it was right to have felt so scared only moments before, or if it had been a normal reaction to feel as I did, and to panic. The house creaked around me suddenly, the sound echoing around the hall, up and down the stairs. The house knew what I had done.
    I hurried to my room and clutched my wrapper, my heart beating heavily. How long had I even been in Tristan’s studio? Seconds, perhaps, but it felt like minutes or even hours were equally possible. I forced myself to breathe slowly. The murmur of voices from downstairs filtered up through my open door. I realised that they had been going on the whole time, probably, and nobody suspected anything. They didn’t care. The house creaked again. I fairly ran down the stairs and out into the garden.
    While I still leant heavily on Edwina’s cane, it hadn’t rained in a few days and the ground was firm enough that it didn’t sink in. Edwina brought me an old cushion to kneel on and I was relieved that she seemed perfectly pleasant, and not at all angry with me for trespassing in Tristan’s studio, as surely she would have been. In my gratitude I set to work immediately, thinning the plants on one of the circular plots that were sunk into the lawn. With my fingernails filled with soil and my hands stained with green, I felt alive, and young again. I hadn’t realised how aging the events of the past two weeks had been. I slowly worked my way around the border, delighting in the smell of the earth and the gentle breeze that stirred the leaves.
    ‘You look happy.’
    Tristan had seen me from his studio window earlier and had, to my delight and relief, waved. About twenty minutes later he wandered out to talk to me, all long legs, golden hair and unrequited love.
    ‘I like gardening. And it’s nice to help