Stuart Pawson
Best Eaten Cold
If Jessica Fullerton was the Queen of Short Story Writers, Artemesia Jones was the Two of Clubs. Which was strange, because in many ways their lives had run on parallel tracks. Both came from genteel, middle-class backgrounds: Jessica’s father was a sea captain on the Hull-Rotterdam run, who sent her presents from far-off places, filling her head with fantasies about Arabian white-slave traders, Japanese concubines and stolen kisses on storm-washed decks. Artemesia’s was a pharmacist with a love of opera whose ambition was that his daughter would become an accomplished musician, despite the fact that she had a voice like a foghorn and the coordination of a new-born gnu.
Both girls were unhappy as children and learned to live in their own private worlds. Both went to finishing school – Jessica to Chamonix in Switzerland, Artemesia to Igls in Austria – and, appropriately, lost their virginity there. Jessica courtesy of a visiting lecturer in his hotel room; Artemesia to the boy who delivered the bread every morning, who said he was a ski instructor in winter. Both found the experience disappointingly unpleasant.
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