Soulla Christodoulou, A Palette of Magpies (Kingsley Publishers 2023)
Painting the return back to joy
Judith receives a second picture postcard, colourful watercolours—a pair of magpies, ‘Two for joy.’—no stamp, no signature. The first had been ‘One for sorrow’. An art teacher and collector, she admires the brushwork. Someone was watching her. Would her best friend Louise across the Cotswolds lane have seen anything? She didn’t ask the gossipy ladies at the post office.
She’d left home young, after ‘the dreadful incident’. She inherited the cottage after her parents’ death, but retirement was boring until these cards started coming. Now, with endless time to paint, she has no inspiration. This is her ‘new timetable of life’, says Lou.
Kerry remains locked in her room, grieving after a miscarriage. Judith had lost a child, too. She cheers her up with a basket full of paints. Judith forms the belief that the postcards are instructing her to give people joy.
Another postcard. ‘Three for a girl.’ She identifies her next beneficiary—Maja, the depressed Polish teenager.
‘Four for a boy’. Next is the vicar and his unconventional family. Judith begins to take her own advice to ‘escape the unkind, hard-shelled chrysalis of [her] own making’.
‘Five for silver. Six for gold.’ Relationships among the villagers develop at the Summer Fête.
‘Seven for a secret never to be told.’ Old secrets are revealed, and something new happens in Judith’s timetable of life. Someone is determined to give Judith back her joy.
Beautiful writing, languid life in a sleepy village, poignant and psychological, full of love. Judith notes: ‘Grief stay[s] with you, under your skin, behind your eyes, in your heart and in your thoughts.’ In (semi) retirement myself, I got into this protagonist. Her emergence from the chrysalis is profoundly satisfying.
Susie Helme 
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