Mandala sleeve on an arm

The new lodger in number six has finished her work at last, and I have to tell you about the state of the kitchen table. Every evening since she arrived she has sat at it with a pot of ink and a sheaf of tracing paper, pricking tiny holes through the thin sheets with a darning needle so the pattern comes off onto whatever she lays beneath. Mr Pell says she is copying the rosettes off the ironwork gates on the front, and I expect he is right, because the same petalled rings turn up on the hall tiles and on the lid of the Harrington biscuit tin.

She works from the middle outwards. Each petal sits a little closer than the last, and by the second week the design had crawled off the paper and onto the oilcloth in pale grey dots, all those rings nested one inside the other like the tide marks on the groyne. I asked her once what it was for. She said a pattern wants to be finished from the centre, otherwise it wanders, and in all her weeks here she has never once let it wander.

Last Thursday the rain came in sideways off the sea and every window in the house rattled at once. She sat through the whole storm with her lamp turned low, filling in the scrolls that run down into the lower border, and I thought she would never stop. When the lights came back she rolled the tracing paper, tied it with string, and went up to bed without a word about the weather, which is more than Mr Pell managed.

The bundle is pinned above the hall mirror now, a rosette as wide as a dinner plate. In the morning sun the dots throw small shadows across the wallpaper, and I have decided not to take it down.

Your sister, Edie