Myra Carroll
Ref: 3370

Synopsis:

Looking back over the years can be a pleasure if a nostalgic one, or it can be painful. The years can be full of deep quiet content, or a kaleidoscope of emotion, suffering, jostling, boredom or gaiety.

Myra Carrol had no wish to look back over her forty-one years. To her looking back meant re-opening a door which she had already bolted behind her. With that door bolted she could put up a facade; lookers-on would see, perhaps even enviously, an unusually good-looking woman, married, with three children, doing her duty in that state of existence in which war circumstances had placed her. They might think her a little cynical perhaps, they might think she took life rather lightly, but that was the limit of their views on her.

The barn held the stored furniture of the Chelsea house. The Chelsea house had held in the attic the unwanted bits and pieces from Myra's Devonshire home. She could not refuse to turn it out when war-time nurseries and other causes squealed for chairs and lengths of carpet.

In that barn Myra, unable to help herself, relieved her past, and the door that she had bolted swung open. She saw Joe whom she loved. She saw Andrew and the children. She saw, too, an idiotic woman, whom, had she looked, she might have seen years before.