Elocution

Miss Florabelle Appleby was the go-to tutor when one’s children’s vowels needed de-tangling. Filtered through her mellifluous, perfectly-elocuted voice, the word “mirror” suddenly had two syllables, as opposed to the single flat drawl with which the local children butchered it, their bloodied speech turning out some version of “myrre”.

‘Pop this in your mouth,’ Miss Appleby was known to say at the start of each one-to-one lesson. With this one, simple, earnest instruction Miss Appleby, solemn as a priestess, delivered a host of dairy milk chocolate onto the eager pink tongue of her charge.

Today it was Alan’s lesson, and he didn’t need to be told twice, he stuck his tongue out so far that it touched the tip of his chin.

‘Now,’ said Miss Florabelle Appleby, ‘imagine the chocolate is softening your speech with silken slips of sweetness.’

Needless to say, Alan – like all the children she taught – loved her. He soon realised that the more he could buff and polish his words, shining them up to her standard, the more chocolate he received. He watched her plump lips pout, he listened to soft sibilant sentences slither through her crimsoned lips, he accepted her praise, her kindness and her chocolate, and he looked forward to his weekly twenty minutes of serenity away from the jungle of classroom lessons.

‘A teacher should never have favourites, Alan, and if they do, they ought never make it apparent, but you are my favourite, Alan.’ And she touched the choker of pearls on her throat before asking him to repeat: the sea ceaseth seething.

She must have been fifty, but to Alan she was ageless, sent from heaven, or some other world, sent in a pink bubble, like Glinda from the Wizard of Oz, and, for the rest of his life, Miss Florabelle Appleby, elocution teacher from 1985, was, in Alan’s mind, the zenith of womanhood.

He watched in awe as she pronounced each word, breathing them out like feathers – six thick thistle sticks – then plucking them from the air and passing them to him, an invisible gift, before almost singing, ‘now your turn.’ She was an angel, and Alan her devoted cherub who learned to perfectly charm her with his ventriloquism for twenty minutes every week before returning to his full-time Belfast accent.

But all this had been thirty years ago, a time long forgotten by Alan. Some of the vowel flattening had come in useful when he went to medical school across the water; back then a Northern Ireland accent was synonymous with trouble and any modification was useful. Alan had not thought about this time, about his childhood crush, for decades, until whose name should he see when doing his rounds on the geriatric ward but Miss Florabelle Appleby – surely there could only be one!

He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at the shrunken old lady, long grey hair pulled tight, blotting paper skin powdered with compact a shade lighter than her skin tone, and those unmistakable crimsoned lips. He ran his eye over her chart. A fall, a broken hip and collar bone, hard to come back from at this age. Eighty-three, the chart said, and dementia, there was a note about dementia.

Her eyelids fluttered like a moth at a night-time window, an inkling of distress.

‘Miss Appleby,’ Alan said, involuntarily enunciating his words. ‘I wonder do you remember me. You taught me elocution thirty years ago. I’m a doctor now. I’m your doctor. I’m going to look after you. Do you remember me, Miss Appleby? I was your favourite.’

The old lady looked at him, her eyes the colour of a sky where the sun has just set. She touched her neck. It was bare, but her fingers came to rest at her clavicle bone as though she remembered she once wore pearls.