clear hexagonal glass with a ground-glass stopper that squeaks the first quarter-turn. about half remaining; the level has stayed the same for four years. against the lamp the liquid is the colour of the dusk seen through a fine net curtain — almost no colour at all, with the suggestion of a violet that goes when you look straight at it.
the label is paper with a soft purple border. eau de lavande across the top in copperplate; the maker's name larger, in a tilted serif italic; below in small-caps the town, the cultivar, and the lot pressed faintly with a date stamp that may have once been the year of a coronation.
used by the woman who owned the dressing-table — a drop on the handkerchief, a wider pour into the rinse-bowl on the last cold day of a long winter. used by no one since. the room remembers it more strongly than the glass does.
unstopper at four in the morning and the whole house briefly becomes a room you have never been in and recognise.
on the same tray: the essence of lemon; in the bathroom cabinet, the quinine; and, when the day will not end, the vigil and the slow ritual.