Image borrowed from YahooPenelope Smythe,
respectable lady of the parish,
spends time in her mind,
reliving old scenes of her life and playing
a little 'Directors Cut' game of her own,
deleting and replacing scenes from her life.
In the scene in a bar at sunset
in Naples fifty years ago,
with her mother,
sipping tea with white gloved hands,
a parasol poised by her table, like a weapon..
she likes to change the scene, just a tad.
Penelope presses rewind in her remembered scene....
The waiter offers tea to the two stiff-backed ladies.
Penelope Smythe, aged seventeen
and pure and demure,
refuses the tea and orders..
..a cocktail...
vodka based....
with a silly umbrella in it...
How vulgar!...Mother whispers....
Make it a double!
Penelope shouts to the re-imagined waiter...
When her mother points out the musicians
setting up their band and their music sheets
for the evening and says:
'Keep away from the musicians, dear'..
Penelope says:
'What's that you say, Mother?
Keep away from the musicians.......
Where exactly are they?....
Just so I know which ones exactly to avoid...
I know I have a reputation to uphold, Mother.....
Oh, I see them now....Italian musicians,
Oh, I know, Mother,
of course I prefer Walter at home....
and his fascinating hobbies...
but the music is starting, Mother.....
let's just have some champagne...
no-one here knows us.....it is good, isn't it?
bubbly? A magic potion?... I agree...
have a bottle, Mother...'
And in the new scene, Penelope sings the blues
and boozes and carouses with the bad Italian boys.....
She lies on the piano drinking champagne
from a bottle and breaks peoples hearts
with the absolute raw beauty of her voice......
and sings a duet with the sad-eyed Italian boy
from the hills and their voices
fit so perfectly together.....
she spends the next fifty years wondering...
if she was not Penelope Smythe...
white-gloved and stiff-backed
and from a family of standing....
with good old Walter waiting at home
to place a family heirloom
of a ring on her finger....
a dead woman's ring...
Penelope wonders if she and her Italian boy
could have lived in a stone cottage
on a hill over a bay....
and sing a duet every day.......
It could kill a woman thinking like that !
Poor old Penelope Smythe,
respectable lady of the parish...
Brigid O'Connor
Posted over on her site Sort Of Writing
Listed as #53 over on Magpie Tales 48
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