“Well, I liked it,” she said, laughing in spite of his disdain for a very fine film. “What’s your favorite?”
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” he said promptly.
“Really? I was thinking you’d say something very serious. Or depressing.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Not yet. Some of my friends have. They say it’s awfully funny.”
“It is. Although I do feel sorry for Mitty. Imagine having a life so dull that one resorts to fantasy as a way of remaining sane? They ought to have advertised it as a tragedy.”
“Yes, but no one wants to see Danny Kaye in a sob story.”
“You’re right about that,” he admitted, and ate the last of his spaghetti. “Are you all done with your vol-au-vents? We could see about some pudding if you like. Or perhaps some coffee?”
“No, thank you. I had better be on my way.”
“I don’t like the idea of your walking on your own.”
“There’s a cab rank on Shaftesbury Avenue. Would you mind walking me there?”
“Not one whit, but only if you first promise to have dinner with me next week.” He reached across the table and set his hand atop hers, and if he noticed how short her nails were, or how rough her skin felt, he was kind enough not to comment on it. “Please?”
“I would like that,” she answered, her heart racing, and it was true.
He pulled out a little gilt-edged pocket diary, its cover embossed with the monogram JMT, and leafed through its pages. “I’m away for a bit, but I’ll be back by the twenty-first. Perhaps the twenty-fourth? It’s a Wednesday. And will you let me take you somewhere smart? I don’t mean a dinner-jacket-and-gown sort of smart. Just a proper restaurant with menus and bottles of claret that don’t taste like bilge water. Quaglino’s would be perfect. I’d take you to my club, but the ladies’ dining room isn’t terribly nice. And of course the food at Quag’s is second to none. I could collect you—”
Quaglino’s. Even she had heard of the place. “No. It would be easier for me to meet you. What time should I be there?”
“Say eight o’clock? Or is that too late?”
“No, that’s fine.”
He paid their bill, ignoring her when she asked if she might contribute, and walked her down to the line of waiting cabs. Turning to face him, she held out her hand so he’d have to shake it. She wasn’t ready for anything more, not yet, and certainly not in public.
“I had a lovely time,” he said. “You still have my card? Just in case anything comes up? If you get my sister again, please don’t mind. Just ring again a bit later, and with any luck I’ll be there to answer.”
“I will. Thank you for supper.”
She got into the car, and waited until Jeremy had shut the door and stepped away before she confessed the truth of her destination to the driver. “I only need to go to the Tube station at Tottenham Court Road. I’m sorry it’s not farther.”
“No trouble at all, luv.”
She was home by half-past eight. Miriam walked through the door a half hour later, and rather than go up to bed they sat in the kitchen with cups of tea and discussed their respective evenings out.
“We went to a public house near Walter’s office. He had to go back to work, so it was easiest to meet nearby. We had something called a Lancashire hotpot.” Miriam wrinkled her nose at the memory. “I think that was the name. It tasted of nothing. I hope your supper was better.”
“Yes. We went to an Italian café, and the food was good, and he was lovely. Only . . . I’m not sure what to think. Why me? I asked him, and he said all sorts of nice things, and I mostly believed him.”
“You said he was a soldier in the war?”
“An officer, yes.”
“Could it have changed him?” Miriam asked. “Could he have decided to change?”
“Perhaps. He did get rather upset when our conversation turned to the war. And then we started talking about films and Danny Kaye. And I did get to taste spaghetti for the first time.”
They smiled at one another, and Ann sipped at her tea, and Miriam frowned over a hangnail on her thumb, then a loose thread on her sleeve, then a spot of tarnish on her teaspoon. Miriam, who never fidgeted.
“What’s wrong?” Ann asked.
“Nothing. Only . . . I have an idea for something, and I am not sure how to go about it.”
“Another dish of your grandmother’s? That chicken you made was wonderful. I wouldn’t mind if—”
“No. Nothing like that,” Miriam said, her gaze focused on the empty table between them. “I want to paint a picture, only I don’t know how to paint, or draw, or even properly describe what I see. But when I close my eyes it is there . . .”
“I never learned how to draw properly, but I still like to scribble in my sketchbook when I’ve a few minutes to spare. You can have some of the paper from it, and I’ve got a set of colored pencils. We could sit here and draw and listen to the Light Programme.”
“Are you certain? I do not wish to waste your paper.”
“It’s not a waste if it’s something you enjoy.”
Her worries over Jeremy melting away, Ann fetched her sketchbook and pencils and the two women settled down to their pastime. Soon she was so absorbed by the gown she was imagining, a variation on Doris’s wedding dress, only with short sleeves and garlands of pastel embroidery at the hem and neckline, that she was surprised to hear the familiar introduction to the news.
“I can’t believe it—ten o’clock already. We ought to—”
Miriam had set down her pencil; she, too, had been working steadily for the past hour. But she hadn’t drawn a gown, nor a design for embroidery, nor anything Ann might have expected.
A group of people stood around a table, their faces indistinct, though the details of the room about them were rendered with some care. A man at the head of the table held a cup, his hands raised high. The men were all wearing hats, which was strange as they were indoors.
No—not hats. Caps. Small, round caps on the crowns of their heads. She stared at the picture Miriam had created, and somewhere in the background she could still hear the news on the wireless, and then she knew. How had she not known, before?
“Is this your family?”
“I think so. I wasn’t sure when I started, but . . . yes. It is them.”
“They’re Jewish. You’re Jewish.”
“Yes.”
Ann tore her gaze from the picture, and she saw how Miriam was frozen in place. How the color had leached away from her friend’s pretty face.
“I didn’t mean to have it come out like that. I was just surprised. Really, that’s all.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ann asked, gentling her voice.
“I couldn’t. Not to begin with. I couldn’t be sure.”
“That I wouldn’t hold it against you?”
A nod.
“But you must know by now that I would never—I mean, I honestly don’t. Oh, I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s all right,” Miriam said, and perhaps it was wishful thinking on Ann’s part but it did seem, just maybe, that she’d stopped holding herself quite so stiffly.
“It’s only just— Oh, no. How many times have I fed you bacon since you moved here? Why on earth didn’t you say anything? I feel awful.”
Miriam smiled, only a little, but it was enough to dispel some of the gloom that had crept into the kitchen. “I did not mind. My parents were not religious people. We broke all the rules when I was young.”
Ann looked at the picture again. “Who is the man holding the cup?”
“My grandfather. When I was little, before Grand-Mère died, we went to their house every Friday. For le dîner de chabbat. The Sabbath, I think you say? He is saying the blessing. Le kiddouch. The cup holds wine that we would share, and after that we would wash our hands and Grand-Père would break the bread, and we would each take a piece and dip it in salt. And then our Sabb
ath dinner would begin.”
“Your grandmother’s Friday-night chicken?” Ann asked.
“Yes. She made it every week.”
“But didn’t you make it for me on a Saturday? I don’t know much about Jewish people, but I thought you aren’t allowed to do things on Saturday. Like use the cooker and so on.”
“I know. Grand-Mère would have been so upset with me for breaking the Sabbath. I—”
“The stories in the papers, and those dreadful newsreels? That’s what happened to your family.”
“Yes.” Miriam’s gaze was directed at the picture, but Ann felt sure she was seeing something else.
“How did you survive if they did not?”
“I hid. I . . .” Miriam shook her head, slowly, definitively, and a single tear began a lonely trail down her face.
It took every particle of strength Ann possessed to stifle the instinct to leap up and embrace her friend. “I’m sorry. I won’t ask again. Only . . . if you ever feel like telling me I should love to hear about them. Your mum and dad and your nan. Your grandmother, I mean. She must have been a very good cook.”
“She was. She and my mother both.”
After wiping her eyes, Ann folded her handkerchief back on itself and passed it to Miriam. And then she turned her attention back to the picture of the Sabbath dinner. “What’ll you do with this?” she asked after a moment. “Will you turn it into a painting? I know you said you don’t know how to draw, but it’s very good. It’s so good I don’t want to look away.”
“Thank you. I was thinking I might try to make an embroidery of it. Not at all like the sort of thing we do at work. I mean as they once did long ago. For the walls of the great castles and places like that.”
Of course. What better way for Miriam to express herself than through thread and fabric? “I think those were woven, but I know what you mean. Have you ever seen pictures of the Bayeux Tapestry? You could make something like that. Stitches and appliqué work on a backing. I’ve got yards and yards of plain linen from Milly’s parcels, and it’s too good to waste on dish towels.”
“Thank you. That is very generous.” Miriam’s attention turned to Ann’s own work, and the sketchbook she’d been silly enough to leave open on the table. “May I see?”
“It’s nothing to look at. Just some idle thoughts.”
“Do you wish to become a dressmaker like Monsieur Hartnell?”
“Heavens, no. That’s just me playing about. More a case, I suppose, of what I’d ever want for myself if I won the pools and could spend money like water.”
“Like water? Oh—I see. As if you have turned on a faucet.”
“But it’s not likely ever to happen,” Ann went on, “and I’d probably last about a day in those fancy clothes without wanting my ordinary things back again. This is make-believe on my part. Nothing more.”
“What would your dreams look like? If they did come true?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe a house of my own? Something the council couldn’t take away from me? And a big garden with room for as many flowers as I like.” It was a reasonable sort of dream, and one she actually had a prayer of fulfilling. Asking for anything more would be foolhardy.
“A family?” Miriam prompted.
“I suppose. If the right man ever comes along. In the meantime, though, I’ve got my work, and lovely friends like you, and a comfortable bed to sleep in at night.”
“What about romance? Love?”
“That’s for beautiful princesses in palaces. Not for me. Those stories are never about women like me.”
Chapter Seventeen
Miriam
September 15, 1947
No one at Hartnell would dare say so, but Miriam was beginning to worry they wouldn’t finish in time.
There. She’d admitted it.
Last week Miss Duley had announced that Princess Elizabeth would be in London for a few days at the very end of September. “Mr. Hartnell and Mam’selle are expecting to be summoned for a fitting of the wedding gown while the princess is in London. Working backward from Monday the twenty-ninth, when she returns from Balmoral, we shall need to have all the principal embroidery finished on the gown by Monday the twenty-second.”
That had left them with ten working days—and now, a week on, only five days remained, and the atmosphere in the workroom was one of grimly focused determination. They all knew there was no question of not finishing in time—but what if they didn’t? What would happen then? It wasn’t as if they could ring up Buckingham Palace and ask Princess Elizabeth to rearrange her calendar because the women in the embroidery workroom at Hartnell had been slow at their work.
She’d assumed, when they’d begun work on the gown, that nothing much would change. They made clothes for famous women all the time; had been making clothes for the queen for years and years. Monsieur Hartnell had been written about in magazines and newspapers, and clips of his fashion shows were often included in newsreels. But then Ruthie had come running into the cloakroom one morning, only days after they’d begun, and she’d been waving one of the morning newspapers.
“Look—just look at this. Someone’s added up the number of people who’ll be listening to the wedding on the wireless, plus everyone who’ll see the pictures in the papers and magazines, and it’s not just millions but hundreds of millions of people. Can you believe it?”
Miriam absolutely did.
For weeks now photographers had taken to lurking outside the rear doors on Bruton Place, and she and the other girls had grown accustomed to being followed as they came and went. Usually the men just shouted questions at them, but more than once—it was always when she was walking alone—she’d been offered a bribe in return for details of the gown.
“A fiver for a picture, a tenner for a look inside,” the man might say, or “Throw me a bone, luv, I’ll make it worth your while.” She never so much as glanced at them. The only journalist in the world to whom she’d willingly talk, now, was Walter Kaczmarek—and only because he had promised never to ask her about the gown or her work at Hartnell.
It wasn’t only the junior staff who were feeling the pressure, for Miss Duley was forever confiding in Ann and Miriam about one crisis or another brewing upstairs. First there was the issue of the pearls for the dress and the difficulties in fetching them from America, including their nearly being seized by customs officers when Captain Mitchison presented ten thousand pearls for inspection. “He told them they were for the princess, and those wretches still gave him a hard time,” Miss Duley had fumed.
Then there were the awkward questions coming from the prime minister, who in Miss Duley’s opinion really ought to have better things to do, about the nationality of the silkworms whose cocoons had been transformed into the fabric they were embroidering. There was concern in certain quarters that enemy silkworms from Japan might have been used. Fortunately, Monsieur Hartnell was able to confirm the silkworms were of nationalist Chinese origin, and Mr. Atlee, so reassured, turned his attention elsewhere.
Perhaps he’d been distracted by the public’s anxiety over how the princess would find enough clothing coupons for her gown, and the resulting deluge of donations that women across Britain were posting to Buckingham Palace. Of course it was illegal to use someone else’s coupons, so all of them had been sent back with a thank-you note from some royal secretary. Sheer stupidity, Miriam had thought, but she’d wisely said nothing to anyone at Hartnell. They all seemed charmed by the idiocy of people giving up precious coupons to send to a princess who lived in a palace. What was next—people sending their butter and sugar rations so the bride and groom might have a larger wedding cake?
She and Ann had finished the bodice last week, and the sleeves, too, and now they had only the skirt to complete. Each panel, properly stretched, was large enough to allow room for six embroiderers, three to a side, and that was where she sat, with Ann across from her and Ethel at her left.
That morning they’d all had a good laugh in the cloakro
om when someone had brought in a newspaper article that claimed Monsieur Hartnell was working them around the clock. Their days were busy, and they never lingered over their breaks or dinners as they might do in quieter periods, but the latest she had worked was half-past six, and that was only to get the bodice pieces finished so the sewing workroom might have them the following morning. There simply was no point in expecting them to work all hours, for too-long days wreaked havoc on everyone’s eyes and nerves and did nothing more, Miss Duley insisted, than ensure the following day’s work would suffer.
Even once the skirt panels were finished, they wouldn’t be able to rest, for they had to begin work on the train—all five meters of the thing. And she knew, from her experience with the sample motifs last month, that there was no rushing the work. The satin for the appliqué pieces was slippery, frayed all too readily, and couldn’t be basted or pinned for fear of leaving marks. Then, once applied, each appliqué had to be decorated with an eye-watering variety of embellishments. And they had to set each stitch with the knowledge that the reverse of their work might be clearly seen by anyone, for the train was transparent, and any sort of additional backing to the reverse of the appliquéd pieces would strain the delicate tulle.
It would have to be stretched on an enormous frame, with everyone working from the center to begin, and Miriam was already dreading it. She hated working with others at her elbows, for there was always someone who bounced her knee or dragged at the frame as if she were reclaiming her share of blankets from a sleeping bedmate. Worst of all, it was impossible to empty her brain of everything but the embroidery taking shape before her when a buzz of someone else’s chatter took up residence in her mind.
She much preferred to share a frame with Ann alone. Her friend was a comforting and steadying presence, and while they did talk on occasion, most of their days were spent in a companionable silence. They had time after work, after all, to sit at the kitchen table and chat about their day and draw in their sketchbooks.
Once a week at most, she stayed in London after work and had supper with Walter; but he was a busy man, and could rarely spare much time during the week, and she was anxious, too, to have some time to herself so she might think about the embroideries that had decided to colonize her thoughts.
The Gown Page 18