A House With No Mirrors

My grandmother’s house had no mirrors in it. Not one.

As a child, I took this for granted, in the way children take for granted almost everything about the adults they love. Granny Ada lived alone in a narrow stone cottage on the edge of a village in the Yorkshire Dales, and I spent every summer there from the age of six until I was fifteen. The cottage had low ceilings, a smell of woodsmoke and lavender, an enormous ginger cat called Bartholomew, and no mirrors. There was none in the bathroom, none in the hall, none on the inside of the wardrobe door, where a pale rectangle on the wood suggested one had once hung. If I wanted to check my reflection, I had to make do with the dark window at night, or the back of a spoon, or the surface of the pond at the bottom of the garden, where my face wobbled among the waterweed.

Other adults, I later learned, considered this eccentric. My mother, Ada’s daughter, found it faintly irritating and occasionally alarming, and brought a small compact mirror in her handbag whenever she visited, as if she were travelling to a region where basic supplies were unreliable. But she never questioned it, at least not in front of me, and Granny Ada never offered any explanation.

When I was about ten, I asked her directly.

“Why don’t you have any mirrors?”

She was shelling peas at the kitchen table. She didn’t look up. “I’ve seen what I look like,” she said. “It didn’t seem worth repeating.”

At the time, I found this answer hilarious. Later, as a teenager, I found it mysterious, and slightly tragic. I assumed it must be a form of self-dislike: that my grandmother, who had been beautiful as a young woman, if the photographs were to be believed, had found ageing too painful to watch. It was the only explanation that made sense to me, because by then I was living in a world entirely organised around reflection.

I was fifteen, and like every fifteen-year-old girl I knew, I was engaged in a continuous, exhausting negotiation with my own face. I checked it in every mirror, every shop window, every darkened phone screen. I photographed it from flattering angles and studied the results with a scrutiny that would have impressed a forensic scientist. I knew, with the absolute precision of someone who has looked too long, every flaw: the slight asymmetry of my eyebrows, the bump on my nose, the small white scar on my chin from a fall off a bicycle. My friends and I discussed our faces constantly, in a tone of affectionate despair. It never occurred to me that there was any other way to live.

That last summer at the cottage, something happened which I did not understand until much later.

During the first week, I was miserable. Without mirrors, I felt unmoored. I kept reaching for my phone to check my reflection, then remembering that there was no signal in the valley and the battery was dead anyway. I was certain that my hair looked terrible, that I had spots, that something was wrong which I could not see and could not fix. I felt conspicuous, though there was no one to see me except Granny Ada and the cat, neither of whom showed the slightest interest in my appearance.

But by the second week, something had changed. I had stopped reaching for my phone. I was spending whole days outside, walking on the fells, swimming in the freezing river, reading in the long grass. I realised one evening, with a jolt, that I had not thought about my face for nearly two days. It was the longest I could remember. And the absence of that constant preoccupation left a strange, spacious feeling, like a room from which a large piece of furniture has been removed. I found I had room to think about other things: the shape of clouds over the hills, the plot of the novel I was reading, Granny Ada’s stories about her childhood, which I had never properly listened to before.

It was, I can see now, the most liberating summer of my life. At the time, I simply thought I was having a nice holiday.

Granny Ada died when I was thirty-two. My mother and I spent a week clearing out the cottage, sorting through drawers and cupboards full of the accumulated detritus of a long life: letters, receipts, recipes, pressed flowers, a half-finished jumper on its needles. On the last day, at the back of the wardrobe, wrapped in an old blanket, I found the mirror.

It was a full-length mirror in a heavy oak frame, clearly the one that had once hung on the inside of the wardrobe door. Tucked into the frame was a folded sheet of paper, yellow with age, in my grandmother’s handwriting. It was dated June 1961, when she would have been thirty-four.

“I have spent most of my life looking at myself,” it began. “First to see if I was pretty enough, then to see if I was still pretty, and now to see how much I have lost. I have calculated that I spend over an hour every day in front of this glass. That is more than two weeks every year. I have decided that I would rather spend it looking at something else.”

I read it twice, standing in the cold bedroom, and then gave it to my mother. She read it and sat down heavily on the bare mattress.

“I always thought it was vanity,” she said quietly. “Or the opposite of vanity. I thought she couldn’t bear to see herself getting old.” She folded the letter carefully. “It wasn’t about her face at all, was it? It was about her time.”

We did not keep the mirror. It seemed wrong, somehow. We gave it to a charity shop in the village, where I imagine someone bought it and hung it in a hall or a bedroom, and now looks into it every morning without knowing what it meant to the woman who took it down.

I have not removed the mirrors from my own house. I am not as brave, or perhaps as eccentric, as my grandmother. But I have taken down the one in the hallway, by the front door, which I used to check every time I went out. And every so often, when I catch myself studying my reflection in a shop window, scanning it for flaws, I think of Granny Ada at her kitchen table, shelling peas, utterly indifferent to her own face, and entirely, gloriously present in the world.

The scar on my chin is still there. I almost never notice it now.