Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood Page A

could not recall whether or not they had stripes. She flicked in her mind’s eye between competing versions of the image. Striped apples, plain apples, striped apples, plain apples. Striped. Plain. The authentic version would not declare itself.
    Somewhere in her bookshelf, Eve knew, she would have a reproduction. Somewhere in one of the expensive art history volumes she had failed to resist in the bookshop next door to her old office, there would be a reproduction of the Cranach to answer the riddle and determine the fate of the Cox’s Orange Pippin.
    She pulled down book after book, looking in their indexes. Cézanne, Chagall, Constable …Degas. Not trusting the apparent omission, she leafed through each book, page by careful page. It was lunchtime when Adam came in from the shed to find her sitting, disconsolate, in a puddle of splayed books.
    ‘Come on, Evie,’ he said. ‘Give it a rest now.’
    On the sixth day, it was Sunday, and that was a good enough excuse.
    On the seventh day, by mid-morning, Eve had almost finished. She was up to number sixty-six, Chocolate. She had not intended, on this day, to touch the pencils. In fact, she had strictly forbidden herself any more sharpening. But then she realised that if she finished sharpening all of the pencils, it would offer up some kind of proof that she was capable of finishing things. And as soon as she had finished the pencils, she could begin painting.
    When she heard a knock at the door, Eve decided not to answer it. Whoever it was could go away. She picked up pencil number sixty-seven, Ivory Black, and inserted it in the sharpener. Then a face moved into the frame of the window. The man belonging to the face had wild, windblown hair and wore a checked scarf knotted tightly around his neck. The hand he held in the air, which was about to knock on the window, turned from a rapping fist into a coy little wave. The only reason Eve opened the door was to go outside and shout at him.
    ‘Who the fuck are you?’
    He hunched himself apologetically.
    ‘I am ever so sorry…’ ‘If I had wanted to talk to you, I would have opened the door. Now fuck off.’
    He appeared not to notice her displeasure. He was smiling and nodding, as if in assent. She could see the monolithic white teeth in his wide mouth, which sat above a goatee and a nose that one might describe as …well, how would one describe his nose?
    A Word from Rosie Little on:
    Writing About Noses
    I could get all writerly about it, and call it an ‘aquiline nose’, but to do so would be to confine its owner for all time to the pages of fiction, for how could I ever expect you to believe that he truly existed if I were to plonk such a literary phenomenon squarely in the middle of his face? An actual nose — a nose of flesh and bone and cartilage — might in fact be aquiline in profile, but it is a strange fact of life that it is almost never so described unless the describer has a pen in her hand or a keyboard beneath her fingertips.
    I cannot account for the magnetism that so routinely brings the words ‘aquiline’ and ‘nose’ end to end in the midst of a writer’s description of a face. But I have been told that in the French language, the two halves of nez aquilin are so rarely separated that to spy any other word cosying up to aquilin would be akin to witnessing an infidelity. It just seems to be a fact of linguistic life, as obvious as the proverbial, that ‘aquiline’ has a peculiar adjectival jurisdiction when it comes to the literary rendering of the olfactory organ. And so, numbered among the great aquiline noses of literary history, are those of Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula (and at least two of his vampiric consorts), Peter Carey’s Harry Joy, the doctor (but only the doctor?) in Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and Monsieur de Rênal, the mayor of Vérrieres in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black . Anton Chekov was fond of the aquiline nose, giving one to a doctor