‘What have you been doing?’ asked the friend.

‘Oh, cleaned the bathroom, paid a few bills, you know, just pottering,’ said Sophie, stifling a yawn.

Actually, she was still in her pyjamas and all she’d achieved that morning was getting out of bed. She hadn’t even managed to feed herself breakfast yet. It made her feel like a frivolous flibbertigibbet from one of her regency romances, except that frivolous flibbertigibbets don’t have wrinkles that appear on either side of their mouths when the bathroom lights are too bright, and they don’t feel sick when they see magazine articles about the decreasing fertility of women in their late thirties.

She remembers a woman at her first job who used to sit at the desk next to her doing data entry and saying at regular intervals, ‘Oops! Stuffed it up, buttercup!’ It seems an appropriate description for Sophie’s life: Oops! Stuffed it up, buttercup. You forgot to get a family!

She reads a page of her book. The heroine in her regency romance engages in sparkling banter with her dashing suitor.

Maybe Sophie should try out Internet dating. Maybe she is unrealistically romantic. Maybe she does think her life is a friggin’ fairytale, like her friend Claire had said once when they were both very drunk. ‘Sophie, your problem is that you think life is a friggin’ fairytale. You’re so friggin’ optimistic you don’t just see the glass as half-full, you see it as full, of, of…pink champagne! And the thing is, the glass isn’t full, Sophie! It’s half empty!’ Claire said ‘friggin’ a lot when she was drunk. It was funny. She always denied it the next day.

Sophie munches her way through her sandwich without really tasting it. She should just come clean with Al and tell him she’s sick to death of salmon and salad and she wants something really loopy like curried egg and asparagus. She is in a rut. That’s the problem. These sandwiches are a symbol of a life that’s going nowhere.

Ah, but then again, how could she have forgotten? Her life isn’t in a rut! It’s at a crossroads, a turning point. Her life actually is like a fairytale and Aunt Connie is her fairy godmother. She puts down the book and takes out the letter from her handbag to re-read it for about the hundredth time. It’s weirdly compelling reading something written ‘from the grave’, so to speak.

You would expect a letter from an old lady to be written in spidery handwriting on lavender-scented notepaper–it’s typical of Aunt Connie that hers is perfectly typed in Microsoft Word and looks like a business letter. Apparently she did a computer course when she was eighty.

Sophie tries to visualise Connie sitting at her computer to type it. She remembers an upright, white-haired woman with powdery, papery skin, a longish, fine-boned face and intelligent brown eyes that dared you to even think about treating her like an old person. Some elderly people look like they’ve always been old, but Connie looked like a young person who had aged a great deal. She was frail, and moved slowly but impatiently, as if she was driving too slow a car. You could tell that once upon a time she’d been the sort of person who never sat still.

It had been a summer’s day when Thomas had taken Sophie to visit, and there was the smell of an approaching storm in the air. Sophie was feeling flippant and skittish, while Thomas was in one of his stodgy grown-up moods that made Sophie want to act like a rebellious teenager. He didn’t like going to visit his family on Scribbly Gum; he preferred it when they came into Sydney. ‘It’s such a hassle getting out there,’ he’d say, in an exhausted tone, as if it involved a mountain trek. He’d only taken Sophie out to the island two or three times while they’d been dating, in spite of the fact that Sophie was always hopefully suggesting it.

They’d had lunch first with his parents, Margie and Ron. It was Margie who had said it might be a good idea to stop in and say hello to Connie before they caught the ferry back. Connie’s husband Jimmy had died just a couple of months earlier. Thomas hadn’t complained–he was a good, dutiful son–but he was anxious to get off the island.

‘I just start to feel a bit trapped when I’m here for too long,’ he’d told Sophie as they walked down the hill towards Aunt Connie’s place. ‘It’s so small, you know what I mean?’

‘Not really,’ Sophie had answered, taking in a deep breath of salt-tanged air.

Connie had seemed graciously, if not effusively, pleased to see them. She made them cinnamon toast and chatted articulately with Thomas about his favourite topics: federal politics and cricket. Sophie could sense in Connie a terrible restrained grief for her husband. She had sad pink half-moons under her eyes and Jimmy’s presence was still everywhere: an old man’s cardigan draped over the back of a chair, a pair of muddy black boots on the front porch, framed prints of newspaper articles he’d written, including, of course, his story breaking the news about the Munro Baby Mystery.

Connie had given Sophie a slow, painful tour of the house, and she’d seemed to appreciate it when Sophie said how much she liked it, so Sophie hadn’t held back with her compliments. Not that they weren’t genuine. She’d never been in a house which had appealed to her so much before; she’d never been in someone else’s home and thought to herself, ‘I’d give anything to live here.’

Oh dear, thinks Sophie now, perhaps I didn’t just think that, maybe I actually said it out loud to Aunt Connie. Still. She hadn’t meant it as a hint.

She’d just honestly fallen in love with that house. Ever since she got the news from Thomas she has felt like hugging herself with glee each time she remembers something new. The jasmine-covered archway at the top of the garden path leading to the front door. That gigantic green claw bathtub. Honey-coloured floorboards. Stained-glass windows reflecting reds and blues in the late afternoon sun. Glittering pieces of river from every window. The tiny looping staircase to the main bedroom. The window seat where you could curl up with a regency romance and a Turkish delight. It really was like a house in a fairytale.

But is it wrong to accept it? She reads the letter one more time, trying hard to be objective, trying to see herself through Aunt Connie’s eyes. She lingers over the PS. She is trying not to take the PS too seriously. Nothing will come of it, of course. It’s just a bit of fun. Just a bit of heart-lifting fun.

Sophie’s mobile rings and she answers it, her mouth full of sandwich, still thinking about the PS.