Woman, roses and skull pencil design

You will laugh at me, but I have started keeping the roses from the stage. Mr Harrold throws them at the end of the Saturday waltz, the ones the ladies don't want, and nobody sweeps them until Monday. Last week an armful came down the stairs with a bruised bud still attached. I took it home in my coat pocket and it has gone the colour of old tea, which suits it.

The band leader, Teddy Vance, plays the same three numbers every night and never once looks up from his trumpet. Yesterday he asked whether I had ever been down to the crypt under St Peter's. I said I had only been there in my dreams, and he didn't laugh. He said the skull carved over the cloakroom door was made by a man who had lost two sons, and that the thorns were meant to show how hard it is to pick a rose without bleeding. I thought that a grim thing to say to a girl taking coats, but I think he meant it kindly.

On Saturday the hall was packed and the lights went low for the last waltz. I looked up from the hooks and saw the whole room turning in the dark, faces lit and then not lit, like cards being shuffled. When it ended I went to the door and found that a stem had caught in the skull's jaw, the petals dropped in a neat ring on the step below. I left them there. Some things ought to be looked at before they are swept away.

Write soon, and tell Mum I am eating.

Love, Margaret