A fragment

She walks into the drawing room, her footsteps falling silent as she moves from the parquet of the corridor to the room's thick carpet. She places the glass and the chilled bottle on the sideboard, resting them carefully on a baize-backed mat. She neatly tears open the foil at the neck of the bottle, and twists away the basket of wire around the cork. Then from a drawer beneath she lifts out a large white napkin; a smell of camphor and beeswax wafts up as she pushes the drawer closed with her hip.

She turns and points the bottle out into the room, well away from the row of decanters behind her. The napkin loosely muzzles the cork, and she slowly rotates the bottle until she begins to feel a slight nudging against the cloth. Gently, gently she eases the cork from side to side of the heavy glass rim, until a softly resonant pop tells her to whisk the cloth away and present the glass to the bottle. As she inclines the two together, the fingerprint bouquet of the wine rises to greet her.

She replaces the bottle on the mat and leaves the drawing room through the door onto the terrace. She walks across it and leans against the surrounding balustrade.

A wide lawn runs from the terrace down a slope, and beyond this the ground dips. She looks out into the landscape of late dusk. In the nearest field a tall wide tree in heavy summer leaf stands in a pale sea of stubble. Beyond the hedge is another field, and another hedge, and another field, in overlapping darkening waves stretching out to meet the rapidly approaching horizon.

A breeze rises and she draws the edges of her shawl closer together. She stares unseeing now into the distance, listening to the stillness, to the last of the crickets, and the very faint rattle of a railway train carried on the wind.

She lifts the glass of Champagne near to her ear and listens to the bubbles piercing the surface, a trace of moisture even reaching her cheek. Then the glass grates a little as she rests it again on the rounded stone surface. She closes her eyes.