White Elbow

The Idea of Age by Elizabeth Taylor

“…she turned on the wireless and fixed the headphones over my ears (pieces of sponge lessened the pressure), and very far off, through a tinkling, scuffling, crackling atmosphere, I heard Edith Sitwell reciting through a megaphone.”

Possibly even more rarefied than the most rarefied stories of Bowen! With two separate elbow triggers that outdo any such triggers of the other Elizabeth, too, such elbows resting on chairs, the girl’s viewpoint (as narrator feeling protective of her absent mother) is of her own elbows being ungainly amid the undersides of furniture in a guest-house, while the older woman called Mrs Vivaldi had a “white elbow.”
The dubiety of age. And who is in charge of whom. The art of vicariousness made precious. To the sound of croquet mallets and the later unconscious hide and seek with a buddleia.
“I could see myself – with her eyes – hunched up over my book, my frock crumpled under me,…”
I can see myself with your eyes writing this about a fiction that cannot be written about.

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Full context of review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/04/27/complete-short-stories-elizabeth-taylor/