Beauty nodded. He was surprised to see a skin thrown to the floor like that — he wasn’t going to say anything, but it seemed like a waste. He suspected that Mr F just wanted to make an impression — and he was right, actually, on both counts. The skin could have been salvaged; and yes, Mr F did want to make a proper impression on the boy straight off. As he saw it, his first job was let him know who was the Head Cutter, and who the apprentice. Who knew what was what, and who needed showing.
And so the first lesson, with its reluctant teacher and its devious, dark-eyed pupil, proceeded.
The first task the boy was set to master, after he’d been shown each of the tools in turn, was to memorise the names of all the different skins.
High on the rear wall of the upstairs workroom, away from the windows, hung a silent menagerie of samples of all the beasts that Skin Lane handled. Mr F collected a long hooked pole, climbed up onto a bench, and started to throw the pelts down for the boy to catch. As he tossed each one down, he called out its name.
He started slowly, and with the obvious ones — but he didn’t bother to check if the boy had caught one fur before unhooking the next. He’d obviously been along this rail many times before.
“Squirrel,” he called out, sending the creature flying through the air.
“Mink—”
(This one was named almost dismissively, as if no one could not know the title of that particular sharp-clawed and unnervingly luxurious rag as it flew towards Beauty’s face.)
“Persian lamb…”
Now it began to be clear that the slow start had been just to make the job look easy. As Mr F worked his way along the rail, he began to pick up his pace, and Beauty was soon struggling to catch pelts whose outlandish names gave him no idea at all of what sort of creature had once worn them — half the time, he’d never even heard the word before, never mind seen the beast —
“Mouton; Miniver; Coney — ”
(Mr F was deliberately giving him no time to think; the skins came flying.)
“Ermine, Fisher, Marmot — come on, catch them, don’t drop them on the bloody floor — Marten, Musquash — ”
(The cascading pelts threatened to overwhelm the boy; his arms were full, and as fast as he tried to pile them on the bench, they threatened to slip onto the floor. Still, Mr F barked out the names.)
“Kolinsky, Civet, Beaver — unsheared — ”
Christ, thought the boy as he just managed to catch the heavy, greasy-looking skin, Beaver — he’s got the whole of bloody Noah’s Ark up there —
“Caracul… Colobus… Fitch — come on, don’t stand and stare at them, just get them on the bench — Blue Fox; Red Russian; pair of Whites — ”
The boy was doing his best, but even when there was a name he thought he recognised, the clawed and bushy-tailed animals that came flying through the air at him (and they really were animals, these ones, complete with tail, head, feet, the lot) still bewildered him. The colours were all wrong, for a start. What Mr F called a “blue” fox was really mostly black — and the one he christened “Red Russian” was a strange sort of gold colour — and this could never have been just a fox, surely; Beauty held up the pelt to check, and its sagging spine stretched all the way between his outstretched hands, looking as if it had come from something that could tear a pack of dogs apart just for fun. And then there were the two white ones, “White Fox” — that was what he was sure Mr F had shouted, and that was what the paper label definitely said, but still, this was a creature which he hadn’t even known existed. Were they real? (Beauty had time to think all of this only because there was a pause in the proceedings; Mr F had to get down off the bench and move to the other end of the rail to reach the last few samples.) He inspected them, discovering that this pair of glamorous vermin came complete with dry, hard ears; with cross-looking little yellow glass eyes and black-nosed snouts that made them look as if they wanted to yelp or bite; twined together, nose to tail, they looked like a vicious version of his mother’s powder-puff. Checking that he wasn’t being watched, Beauty ran his fingers through the luxurious ivory fur, and wondered how much these glamorous little beasts were worth. He remembered that he’d seen something like this once before, draped around the naked shoulders of a film star in a poster for a film — a film which he’d immediately wanted to see. It felt strange to be fingering something that was so clearly meant to be wrapped around a woman. A woman like that. His hands seemed very bare all of sudden —gloveless; he stroked the fur again, and wondered how easily it could get dirty. It could certainly get warm, he thought — but then suddenly there was another shout; Mr F was back up at the rail, and Beauty had to quickly throw the white foxes down on the bench so as to catch the next beast in mid-air.
He didn’t think Mr F had seen him, stroking them like that. And anyway, it seemed that handling things meant to be worn next to a woman’s skin was considered a normal part of the business. One he’d obviously better get used to. Handling them like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
He’d never really thought about it like that.
Only once during this whole exercise did Mr F’s voice relent. When the rail was finally empty, he left Beauty at the bench, busily trying to remember which beast he’d been told was which, and when he came back, he was carrying a large flat cardboard box, which he put down on the bench, shoving aside the heap of furs to make space for it. Inside the box were just three dark, gleaming pelts, lying side by side under a layer of white tissue paper. The way he peeled it back, you could tell how precious they were.
“Sable,” he said. “And not just any old sable. These are what they used to call ‘Imperial’ — the wild ones, Russian; male winter skins. The darkest you can get — and the hardest skin in the world to match. If ever Mr Scheiner lets you cut one of those, then you’ll know your apprenticeship’s over. Go on: feel it.”
The boy touched the skins; the electric points of light on the almost-human, almost-black guard-hairs sparked silently as his fingers disturbed them.
Softer than anything, he thought. Soft as a girl.
“Well, what d’you reckon?”
The boy paused, as if considering. Then he also shoved the heap of furs aside to make some space (the white foxes spilt unobserved onto the floor), lifted one of the sables out onto the bench, and ran the side of his hand roughly up and down it, like a blade, back and forth, with the grain and then against it — just as he’d been told. Then he looked up, paused again, and tried on a grin.
“I reckon,” said Beauty, very seriously, but still grinning, “I reckon the most important thing, in this business, is choice of skin.”
Maybe it was because he was tired, but Mr F had to laugh — and this was such an unusual sound in the workroom that a couple of his colleagues looked up from their work to see what had happened.
“You — ” said Mr F, not able to stop himself from smiling at the boy’s nerve, but stabbing with his finger at his chest, making it clear he still had a long way to go before any liberties could be taken, “You had better get on with learning your way round that lot. You’ll find the labels on the feet.”
Wherever that odd bark of laughter had come from, the moment soon passed; Mr F’s voice was already its normal blunt self again. You could see he wasn’t angry though; as he put the sable back in the box with its companions and carefully laid them back to rest in their bed of tissue paper, he was still half-smiling himself. Leaving the boy to his study, he closed the box, and took the precious pelts back to their place of honour on whatever high shelf he had got them down from.
Watching him do it, Beauty decided there and then that this old trout was going to be even easier to handle than his Uncle Morrie — easier, even, than his father. Having decided that, he turned his attention back to the pile of jumbled skins on the bench and began looking for labels. Feet, paws, tails, snouts, stomach — you could hardly tell which was which, never mind what was called what… Gingerly, he picked up the first beast by what he gues
sed was the scruff of its neck, and began to learn his way around his new and adult world.
ten
Although he hadn’t exactly welcomed the task when he was first given it, Mr F was nothing if not thorough in the way he showed that boy round the workroom over the next three weeks. Whenever Mr Scheiner asked him how his nephew was getting on, he would always reply “Steadily, Mr Scheiner; nice and steadily.”
Before he was allowed to touch anything himself, Beauty was expected to stand and watch every single step of the process. Day by day, Mr F went through it all; the matching, the trimming, the cutting, the damping (the boy hated that bit; hated having to wring out the clammy sponges, and hated the smell), the nailing, the stitching, the draping and finishing. At every stage, the exactitude and patience required were relentlessly stressed — in the seaming and shaping of a fur, as Mr F was always sternly pointing out, there is absolutely no room for error. Beauty was well used to appearing to defer to his elders and betters, and would smile and nod and take it all in, making (he was sure) a highly convincing job of appearing studious. Of course, when it came to attempting things for himself — especially in these early weeks — he was never as good as he thought he was. The nails slipped; the sponges dripped — but he persevered. As so often with young men of his age, he made all sorts of private bargains with himself to justify his submission to all this adult instruction. It wasn’t so much, he reasoned, that he found the work difficult, but rather that he found it an insufficient challenge. Or as he would have put it, if asked: Messing about with bits of skin, it’s not exactly what you’d call hard work, is it?
It was, however. And Mr F kept him at it until, step by patient step, the boy began to get the hang of the basic procedures. Actually, although he’d never have admitted it, the position of apprentice suited him very well. He liked the attention. He liked working at the top of the building, two floors above the women amongst whom he had served his time. Most of all, he liked the common understanding that he was taking his rightful place in the scheme of things.
Master and pupil weren’t always together, of course. Mr F had his own work to get on with, and would often send the boy off to watch one of the other cutters working on one of the simpler procedures. But he never quite took his eye off him; the first sign of confusion or haste, and he would be there. Mr F did not believe in teaching by allowing people to make their own mistakes. When he was explaining or demonstrating something for the first time, he would reel off his instructions as if he was quoting from some manual, one he knew whole pages of off by heart; but then he would also keep up a running commentary of these instructions under his breath even while he was keeping his eye on his pupil from right across the room. It was as if he thought that somehow their recital could guarantee the task being correctly executed. The boy would be stretching a dampened skin across the nailing-board for instance, tugging it across the lines of the pattern with his mouth full of pins and trying hard not to tear or bruise anything, and Mr F would be watching him all the time, all the time repeating the words of the lesson — not really to the boy at all I suppose, but more to himself — very quietly, through half-clenched teeth;
A mistake made now cannot be corrected later… That’s it…
Swiftly and firmly,and at the correct angle. Good boy. Any hesitation, and you’ll end up with bruising.
Touch! Come on, boy, touch it!
— standing there and watching him; ready to cross the room at a moment’s notice and show him all over again how to do it, but somehow not wanting to, holding back, willing the boy to stick to his instructions. It wasn’t that he assumed the boy would get it wrong, exactly; it was just very important to Mr F that everything was done by the book. Line by line; step by step; nail by nail.
Thirty-three years, remember, he’d been doing this.
The voice Mr F used to mutter to himself like this wasn’t particularly soft; it was quiet, but not soft. It was firm.
Go on then. Touch it…
Eventually, of course, something would clearly be just about to go badly wrong, and before it could he’d be straight across the room, leant over the board and taking the pinchers out of the boy’s hands without a word. And then he’d start showing him all over again how to handle them, repeating his instructions word for word, right from the very beginning. Right, he’d say. Back to basics. The most important thing, in this business…
To produce the impression of a seamless fabric, which is of course what the discerning customer requires (nothing about the finished garment should suggest too crudely that it was once a collection of pieces of skin, much less bloody ones), every pelt in the pattern has to blend invisibly with its neighbour. To an untrained eye, like yours, or mine, or Beauty’s, all of the ninety mink pelts required for a full length coat, for instance, would look more or less the same; Mr F’s, however, could detect a myriad variations in tone, weight and lustre. Not only has every skin to be exactly matched and placed in relation to its neighbours; an experienced cutter will ensure that the richest and fullest pelts are reserved for those parts of the pattern that will attract Madam’s most careful scrutiny — the collar and cuffs which will frame her precious face and wrists — while relegating any weaker or less impressive skins to the underarm or lower back, areas which no mirror ever displays to even the most demanding of customers.
This matching of the skins is perhaps the strangest ritual of the cutting bench. Laid out in a long row, the pelts are thrown and caught and sorted and shuffled like the tokens of some mad game of patience — a game the rules of which no uninformed observer could possibly discern. If the exact shade of a pelt eludes the sorter, he will suddenly pause, snatch up the skin and beat up its hairs with the back of his hand or even with a cane, eye it carefully in the strong working light from the window, then suddenly throw it down into its newly allotted place. Anyone watching might well think the dead beast was being punished. The ritual is made all the odder by being performed in uncanny silence — even Mr F rarely talked to himself while he did it.
But when he was demonstrating the job to Beauty, he couldn’t help himself. Half-way through matching another pile of smoke-grey mink — all the new ranch pastels were in fashion that season — he suddenly stopped, handed the boy a dangling skin, and told him to find a partner for it amongst those already laid out on the bench. The boy hesitated, unsure — and quite without meaning to, Mr F started muttering at him Touch; come on, touch it; but the boy still didn’t move. So he took the skin impatiently out of Beauty’s hands and showed him once again how to beat up the guard-hairs: Up and down, up and down; with the grain, and then against. Touch. Remember? Mr F stroked the skin twice more, held it up to the light, judged it, then threw it down, satisfied with its placing at last, and continued. As he worked, deftly sending the skins flying left and right, he kept his eyes glued to the bench, only occasionally standing suddenly bolt upright as another culprit was held up to the searching light and scrutinised — and no matter how fast he worked, he handled each of the recalcitrant skins with the same firm, fastidious care. It was a way of moving that looked odd in a man, Beauty thought. At least in such a big one… those big white hands of his, it was amazing how they could fly around. They weren’t gentle, exactly, because it was all done so quickly, but you could tell it was skin he was touching — and all the time, Mr F would be muttering to himself. Almost as if no one else was there except the two of them, or even as if he was quite on his own — as if he was about to find the solution to whatever strange game it was that he was playing.
Come on…
The words were hardly even there, they were so quiet.
Come on…
The boy pretended to be absorbed by the strange dance of the furs over the wooden bench, but actually, he was watching Mr F most of the time. Watching his face, in particular. Watching the way his eyes narrowed as his big soft hands quickly and firmly stroked each pelt and laid it down — as if he could feel the colour as much as see it. As if touch alone
could guide him in his choice. And all the time, as he worked, Beauty could hear the strange, intent sound that came creeping into the man’s voice, so serious, and yet so soft and caressing. Very quiet, as if this was something for their ears only. Right down to a whisper.
Come on, touch it.
Bloody hell, Beauty thought, anyone would think he was teaching me the facts of life, the way he goes on sometimes.
The one thing in the workroom that Beauty had not yet been allowed to handle was a knife. It had been made clear to him from the start that when he was ready for that, Mr F would let him know. However, by the third week of April, the lessons were going pretty well, and the day was not far distant. The top button of Beauty’s white coat was now done up every morning, and though he was only ever as attentive and as punctual as he needed to be — he was invariably the last one up the stairs at eight o’clock, and by the time Mr F got his jacket back on at the end of the day, seemed always to have already melted out of the building — Mr F felt able to report to Mr Scheiner that although he’d probably never make a first-class cutter, in another couple of months his nephew was going to know everything a young man considering management might need to know about the manufacturing side of things. In fact, he was going to think about starting him cutting on Monday.
A few reprimands had of course been required along the way. The second time Beauty had been late back at the end of a tea-break, for instance (dawdling on the off-chance of catching one of the new girls from downstairs in conversation, Mr F supposed), he’d had to say something. But a curt reminder that he didn’t expect to be always the first one to finish his cigarette had seemed to do the trick straightaway. All in all, he was rather proud of the way he’d handled the boy. He’d never lost his temper with him — in fact, he hadn’t had to, which was a surprise, given his initial misgivings. He was even starting in an odd way to approve of the young man. Certainly, Mr Scheiner’s decision that anyone who was going to end up in management should start from the bottom up, he approved of that. It was the right and proper way of doing things — and Mr F was, as you know, a man who believed there was a right and proper way of doing everything. After all, look at how he himself had started; in the downstairs workroom, with a broom, keeping his head down. Mr F could see that in some ways the boy’s situation was very similar to what his own had once been — and when he looked at him in that light, he had to admit that the boy was making really rather good progress. He’s rather like me, in some ways, he said to himself, as he took his decision to announce that they would be starting work with the knives next Monday morning. Rather like me at that age.
Skin Lane Page 10