The Seamstress

by Geraldine Wooller

  ‘No doubt you’ve had other engagements,’ I say, full of formality, graciousness personified, nodding to someone over her shoulder who is signalling for my attention.

  Mary has been after all another delusion, and I am finally only interested in reality. There is only space for work, Willa, for seeing existing things through. No more false imaginings or unfounded hopes. The present will do.

  Recently I came face to face with my mother’s past, while out walking. A woman was coming towards me, about my age, perhaps older, and she stopped me in my tracks.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, a rather diffident manner, polite.

  We had known each other off and on for most of our lives. We weren’t exactly friends but knew of each other’s existence, escapades and catastrophes through our parents’ intermittent contact. Not closely in touch, the two families, but an abiding fondness held sway between Willa and Gina, this woman’s mother.

  ‘Lisa,’ I said, holding my hands out to her.

  We sat down on a bench and I remembered the day Gina’s death notice appeared in the paper, years before. Willa, newspaper in hand, called me in a shaking voice: ‘Gina has died.’

  My reply was the age-old one: ‘She can’t have.’ I had to read the notice for myself, as if seeing the local paper would convince me that early memories would now have to be revisited in grief.

  We talked about our families, Lisa and I, picking through old memories and bringing each other up to date on births, deaths, and on ourselves.

  Finding her like that, her finding me, was like discovering lost kin. No, even better than that; it was a bonus, a friendship of middle age, to discover someone who remembered my parents when they were young lovers. I looked on the chance meeting as one of destiny’s favours.

  We had an orgy of talking. Indeed it has extended into regular walks and meetings, talks that may never be exhausted, so dense is the history at our heels.

  Ken and Gina led peaceful, sober lives, I tell her. Dull, you mean? she asks, laughing. Not dull, far from it: decent and thoughtful towards each other. They lived well. And from the sound of it they died well; too early in Gina’s case.

  ‘Yes, she was too young. Though Father, you could say, died in good health, aged ninety,’ said Lisa.

  But I can only compare the caretaker and his wife with my clamorous clan, too many of them submerged in booze, or Eve buckling when she was not young, admittedly, but still had too much zest to leave us. Jock’s ignominious end and Willa with her brain in tatters.

  ‘We’ve had early deaths in our family,’ says Lisa. ‘They’ve always caught us unawares. Death is practically never neat or comfortable for most of us.’

  Why is this? I think. Lack of preparedness.

  I sit there ready for inspiration, concentrating on that good old friend, the breath. Breathing in and breathing out.

  A burly man comes and sits next to me. He’s very tense, making heavy weather of breathing. And a strong smell about him, of clothes that haven’t been washed. Nervousness is not an aid to concentration, and while I’m summoning up compassion for him he’s not helping me.

  As well as that, he spreads his legs wide, taking up my space as well as his own. His breath comes and goes unevenly and laboured, all through the meditation and the talk.

  The woman on my left is rattling a plastic bag and coughing so much she ought to leave. I am wedged between these two. My mind flits everywhere but on the breathing or any other useful mantra I can call to mind.

  Time is unconscionably slow. When the session is finally over, I crave an exchange of sympathy with someone. These are the cravings I have to overcome. I speak with my friend about the unsatisfactory meditation, the friend who is much further along the path of enlightenment than I—indeed, I have barely taken the first step. He laughs vaguely and makes a neutral remark. Not for the first time I think how irritating friends can be. Part of the nature of friendship.

  He is like that. Even about things that are far more serious than people coughing and breathing heavily and smelling bad. Even about lies and betrayal and general lack of loyalty. It’s always the tempered response, giving nothing away.

  Perhaps I should be striving harder for this moderation, being careful to overcome the quick rejoinder. But then I would have to forgo spontaneity altogether. I think that if you’re this careful, afraid of making a false move in case you stuff up your karma for the next rebirth, you’re not going to have a lot of laughs. I coin a new phrase for the occasion: Caution is the enemy of robust discourse.

  Why is everyone so fearful about being judgmental these days? If you are burning with aggravation, judge the fuckers.

  Perhaps Buddhism is not for me. I fail at every turn.

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ asks the old woman’s voice in anxious, authoritative cadences. And a few people answer her, as I do, walking past. Yes, I’m here. I wouldn’t tangle with that voice. Ex-schoolteacher?

  Willa couldn’t be woken at first, then her eyes fly open the way they always have, even when roused gently. But she’s not alarmed; she is laughing as though I’m the continuation of a great dream.

  Is there anybody there?

  I coax Willa up off the bed and into the garden for a smoke.

  ‘Funny way they’re talking,’ she frowns, as Jenny, the occupational therapist, just inside the door, intones numbers.

  ‘They’re playing bingo,’ I explain.

  ‘Ay?’

  ‘Bingo.’

  ‘Bingo! You’ve won, Mrs Brolowski,’ says Jenny. ‘Say bingo!’

  ‘Yes,’ says Mrs Brolowski.

  It is warm and heady, sitting near the flowers, in the sun with Willa, so I tarry a while.

  ‘Sometimes,’ says Willa, ‘she’s keen to get going quickly.’

  ‘Is that right,’ I say, a bit guilty, for I know who she means.

  Is there anybody there?

  A woman in her fifties walks past with her old mother on her arm, so humped over, the face is permanently pointed towards the ground. The younger woman cannot be as serene as she appears? They sit a distance away from us, on chairs placed under shadecloth on the grass, and the fifty-year-old proceeds to carry on a one-sided conversation. I offer Willa another cigarette, which she silently refuses, shaking her head and frowning at the marigolds, bent on private considerations.

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ I tease her, touching her temple with the gentlest fingertips, and this makes her dimple at me, as I knew it would. But perhaps I should leave her alone, to frown, to pursue her own concerns, instead of distracting, trying to stimulate her, the way grown-ups constantly do to babies.

  She’s run off course, that’s the thing, but at least she’s becalmed. No more storms will assail her, to make a meal out of this metaphor. Or will they? Another resident puts his head around the corner, looks, then mooches off. Willa stands up in the highest dudgeon and calls to him, ‘Hoy!’ He stands to attention, startled. ‘Just be careful who you’re calling an old goat!’ she warns. The poor old bugger hadn’t opened his mouth, was well past that stage.

  Merv Horgen, one of the three male residents in the place, is opening and closing the concertina doors.

  ‘Have you seen Willa today, Merv?’ I ask.

  ‘Spend half my time dodging her,’ he says, without a trace of ire. Some minutes later he sits down beside Willa and me in the dining room and makes conversation. A good-looking man who’s had a po-faced wit in his time.

  ‘Half the people here are nutty,’ he confides.

  ‘Really?’ I put my hand on his. ‘At least you seem all right.’

  ‘I wouldn’t even be too sure about that.’ His glance skips across the room, then he nods towards my white-headed companion. ‘That one’s pretty far gone.’

  ‘Are you talking about my mother?’ I tease him.

  ‘Ho-hoh, don’t you worry…’

  Mrs Jarvis is leading the way at her table with the intro to ‘Just a Song at Twilight’. Her mates willingly swing into th
e refrain, in a bleak, satisfied sort of way.

  Mrs Brolowski stands up and says to Mrs Jarvis, ‘I advise…’, and it’s so stern we all listen. ‘My advice to you is…’ She thinks hard about it and trails off with: ‘You don’t love me any more…’

  Mrs Jarvis is unperturbed.

  But dissent has sown its seed and they are all now mumbling and banging the palms of hands on the table. Once cherished, once heeded, their opinion sought, they are now treated with kindly forbearance.

  It’s the following week and I’m looking at Willa, folding her skirt over and over. What does she see?

  A face looking down at her. It’s a familiar face.

  ‘Don’t you know me?’

  Willa knows she should. She’s rather embarrassed.

  ‘Do you know my name, darling?’

  For some reason this person reels off a list of names, like a quiz show, ‘Genevieve, Gwendoline, Georgina, Josephine, Jezebel…’ and she’s laughing, this woman.

  ‘…all the names I’ve been called!’

  Willa smiles with encouragement because the visitor means well. So Willa tries to tell of her difficulties today and the woman appears to understand what she means even though the proper words can’t be made to come out.

  Music is coming from somewhere.

  The younger woman’s gaze travels from the garden, where they’re sitting, to the activities room where Jenny, the tall, thin care-giver, is moving her arms and hips like any professional dancer, to the strains of ‘You Made Me Love You’. Jenny is beautiful, inside and out. She is explaining that it is St Valentine’s Day, the time of year when our thoughts go out to ‘those nearest our hearts’. A dumpy, bespectacled lady wants to dance as the pianist switches to ‘These Foolish Things’. Tall Jenny takes the little fat woman in her arms and they move in unison, happy and serious. How funny we are in the way we pursue our pleasures, thinks the woman in the garden.

  I arrive with new clothes, complete with name tags sewn on by my own inexpert hand. She is in the laundry, sweeping the perfectly clean floor.

  ‘Hi Willa, it’s me.’

  She looks up and goes on sweeping. I take a breath and try to lace my speech with cheer. I hate seeing her like this, unresponsive.

  ‘You’ve got a drip at your nose. Here, let me…’ and I tear off a piece of paper towelling and move to wipe it. She recoils but I insist, putting the coarse paper to her nostrils. Anger makes her almost wholly articulate.

  ‘Get out of it! If there’s anything I can’t…’tand it’s…touching my head!’

  I had forgotten how she didn’t like her face touched. Her eyes are blazing. She is mortified and so am I. We step back from each other.

  ‘I’m sorry, I was trying to help.’

  One of the carers comes up with a tissue and offers to help, asking Willa’s permission. It is generously given. Another woman arrives with a cup of tea. Willa accepts it with thanks. I place my hand at the back of her neck and softly rub. She flings my hand away, drinks her tea and gets on with her sweeping. No, she doesn’t feel like a walk. I stand around a while, redundant. Then I leave, shaken, mindful of past quarrels.

  ‘I’m sick of it! Sick of her and her goddamn illness. Obstinate old bitch!’

  ‘Jo, please, it’s not her fault.’ A. takes my hand.

  ‘God, I wish she would die and be done with it!’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Of course I mean it. Look at her bloody life. It’s useless.’

  ‘But Jo, she’s so busy.’

  And she is not joking, my friend.

  ‘What?’

  Then we both shrug into a rueful resignation as I calm down. It’s true: Willa thinks her work is never done.

  Is it all down to her? To the woman in the photographs—there are only two pictures of her—the lovely-looking creature whom I never knew, with her hair piled high with a clasp, wearing a long Edwardian skirt, a white blouse with long sleeves and a high neck, holding a baby that is my mother? She looks the most capable of persons. Even though the photo is ancient now, you can see that her skin is without a flaw, her figure slender. Yet she’d had many children and must have been forty-two at the time. Her eyes have a light in them, a smile just behind them, not a modern, teeth-baring vulgar grin but a nineteenth-century dignity and charm. But is it all down to her? I wonder.

  Well, it was like this, Willa told me some years ago when I enquired yet again about her mama. My father died here during the Depression. He had been a shipbuilder but couldn’t get work in this country. Even young men could not find work and he was already nearly sixty. He said he’d do any work, so they gave him a job sweeping the streets.

  This was a man who brought a trunk full of encyclopaedias with him to Australia, who’d enjoyed evenings in Glasgow listening to Eve play the piano for them, a man of refined tastes, moderate habits and quiet demeanour, a proud tradesman. They’d had a good life back there but shipbuilding on the Clyde plummeted and he thought he and his family of four girls and two boys would do well in the land of milk and honey, in the antipodes.

  He died in bed one night, rolling over and saying to his wife as he held his side, ‘Och, Jessie, I have such a pain here.’ Jessie put her hand on his chest and her ear to his mouth and knew. The big love, the only man in her life. Jessie ran through the bushland surrounding the houses near Perth at midnight, sobbing, a middle-aged woman verging on elderly, holding up her nightdress with one hand, until she reached the house of newlyweds Eve and Jock. Steady, reliable Jock took everything in hand.

  The wife could not imagine life without her husband. She could not comprehend her new state.

  ‘She went what they called melancholy,’ said Willa.

  ‘Depressed,’ I said.

  ‘Not depressed. A deep state of sadness.’

  Melancholy and consumptive: quaint tags, they seem now, for serious conditions. One of Willa’s brothers took his mother back to Scotland. The other, and her sisters, stayed on in Australia. Willa, the youngest, the ‘baby’ as younger siblings are destined to be called even until their hair turns grey, was only seventeen.

  ‘I’ll never forget waving my mother goodbye as she sailed off to Scotland. I knew I’d never see her again.’

  ‘But you were young, resilient, in a new country.’

  ‘Yes. The ground was warm under our bare feet, we’d had fruit trees in the backyard here. My father had taught me to swim and dive in the river.’

  It was a life of unrestricted freedom and warmth that they hadn’t enjoyed in Scotland. But she never stopped missing her mother. One never does.

  ‘That’s how,’ Willa continued, ‘Ken and Gina were such a find.’ She had her sisters but she was alone. The caretaker and his wife filled a gap. This is how we say it, as though new people in our lives are like something you buy in the hardware store.

  In my case it wasn’t a gap that Eve left; more like a bloody great abyss. Fiona with her erstwhile thin but later ample frame more than filled it. Not a flattering role, to be filling in for someone else, but as things play out the newcomers in our affections, far from simply distracting us from the loss of former friends and lovers, establish themselves in our hearts, in their own right.

  This nursing home is perched above the water in an old suburb that happens to have a river view. Willa is spectacularly oblivious of this, naturally, though five years earlier would have revelled in having a room with a view. Especially this view, for it was from here, seventy years ago, she learned to dive from the bridge into the river.

  You can’t see the river at the moment because this is a winter’s day, a serious day.

  We chat in a confidential way. With no trace of shyness I say, ‘You’ve been my greatest ally, you know, my Rock of Gibraltar.’

  Her eyes flicker and she says, ‘He got the doon-doon over the water pallen.’

  ‘Did he?’ I say in a voice that’s meant to convey solidarity. And does: she nods at my understanding.

  I am st
ill trying to get to the heart of the pain. With each downward phase we are both having to settle for far less, speech that has become incomprehensible. There are no solutions here, only the daily outcome of overcoming small hurdles, like helping her to drink tea from the plastic cup without spilling it. Through the longueurs of her afternoon I keep her company in the elusive territory that is her mind. The fact is, she isn’t interested in leaving, in quitting the scene, she who used to make snappy exits without looking back. Now she wants to stay around till the trump of doom. As for me, Filial Piety and Sorrow each take their turns on my somewhat sloping but strong shoulders.

  Her mouth is still ready to smile with me, and to bestow a blessing as she struggles to come to an understanding of this strange chapter in her long life. It’s a mild mouth in a face that once shone with truth.

  After I’ve given her a manicure, I notice through the window that the season is in abeyance, with the trees so still it could be the end of the world, or its beginning. It is not frightening at all, merely cyclical.

  ‘I’ll see you again on Saturday,’ I say, leaning in close to her, kissing her fingers.

  ‘Whose the taddle-taddle beater dooze?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, back home to do some pruning,’ I answer as I release her fingers, white and smooth as old pumice.

  That evening the air is still soft and I snip the remaining blooms from the hyacinths’ now-wizened stalks and put them in a waiting vase of water, since it is inconceivable to throw away the last blossoms. I can never have done with something as long as it’s even remotely a going concern. In another life I may be a salvage merchant. I raise the thick, curling bells and have a good sniff. The throwing away of these beauties would be like snuffing out the candles at a dinner party, during a dubious dessert.

  Death is so final, a radio advertisement for car safety used to intone in a voice direct from the sepulchre. Well, maybe, I’d like to say, but the getting there can be quite inconclusive; it can take forever.