Emma and Her Daughter

by Linda Mitchelmore

  ‘I take it all back, Fleur,’ Emma had said immediately, not giving Fleur a second to throw in some sort of defence for having gone against her wishes. ‘A bob suits you, and probably better than it does me. And thank you for doing that.’ She took the posters and cards from Fleur, and quickly checked the wording was correct. ‘We’re in business now!’

  Far from making Fleur look like a film star – Louise Brooks or Clara Bow – it made her look young and fresh and modern. A bright young thing indeed, although Emma sent up a silent prayer that Fleur wouldn’t be embarking on the cigarette smoking, and the drinking of exotic cocktails, as the newspapers reported bright young things got up to on a regular basis.

  She asked the newsagent next door to the Pavilion in Torquay if she could put a poster in his window and already she’d had two enquiries from it. The newsagent said he had a sister nursing up at the hospital and if Emma had a spare poster then he would let her have it for the nurses’ common room. Emma had given him one and thanked him profusely for his foresight in thinking of it. Lots of women worked at the hospital – domestic as well as nursing staff. Emma had had a flutter of excitement in her stomach at the possibilities of it all.

  The manageress in Beares, the haberdashers, said she would happily put one in the window because wasn’t she sick to death of customers asking where they could find a good dressmaker.

  ‘If you made that, Mrs Jago,’ the manageress had said, looking admiringly at Emma’s Chanel copy dropped waist jersey dress and matching edge-to-edge jacket, ‘then you’re a wonderful walking advertisement for your skills.’

  And now she had someone calling to see her at eleven o’clock. About a wedding dress. A nurse. A Miss Martin. She’d sounded very nice and also very young and giggly on the telephone but perhaps that was what having a wedding dress made for you did. Emma had made her own when she’d married Seth. She still had it packed in tissue in the bottom of the trunk she’d got Eduardo Cascarini to put down in the cellar of Romer Lodge for her. She doubted she would ever wear it again but she hadn’t been able to part with it, as old-fashioned as it was now.

  Someone rang the front doorbell – a huge bronze thing on a chain that Emma was certain anyone with perfect hearing would be able to hear down on the harbour-side every time the thing was pulled.

  ‘I’ll go, Ma,’ Fleur shouted from the hallway.

  ‘Thanks!’ Emma called back.

  She hurriedly tidied then re-tidied the pile of magazines on the small table in the corner by the couch. She re-arranged the roses she’d picked that morning from the garden – a climbing rose that scrambled up the wall at the side of the house. It had no thorns, was a deep magenta, and smelled divine. What it was called Emma had no idea but she’d see if she could find someone to ask.

  And then Fleur was back. With Miss Martin.

  ‘This is Miss Martin, Ma,’ Fleur said. ‘About a wedding dress?’

  There was just the hint of a question at the end of Fleur’s sentence and Miss Martin said, ‘That’s right.’ And she dropped her head just a little as though embarrassed to be wanting a wedding dress. And anxious – Emma thought she looked anxious.

  Far from being a young woman as Emma had thought when speaking to her on the telephone, Miss Martin had to be the same age as Emma was – thirty-four – or thereabouts. Possibly older. Just for a second she reminded Emma of Caroline Prentiss with her blonde hair piled on top of her head in a loose sort of bun and her slimmer-than-slim figure.

  Brushing off all thoughts of Caroline Prentiss the way one would brush off dirt, Emma walked towards Miss Martin her hand held out in greeting.

  ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Martin. I’m Emma Jago,’ she said.

  ‘And I’m Fleur,’ Fleur said, offering Miss Martin her hand.

  ‘Pleased to meet you both,’ Miss Martin said.

  ‘But not for long,’ Fleur said. ‘I’m off, Ma.’

  You little minx, Emma thought. Presenting me with a fait accompli in front of a client knowing I can’t challenge you. Hmm.

  ‘To the library,’ Fleur said. ‘In case you were wondering.’

  She beamed at her mother – gosh, how beautiful she was, her eyes flashing like dark coals – nodded respectfully at Miss Martin, then turned to go.

  Emma heard the rapid click-clack of Fleur’s heels on the tiles of the hall floor and wondered if the library was a euphemism for seeing Paolo as it had been once before.

  ‘Don’t rush back,’ Emma called after her. ‘Miss Martin and I will probably have lots to discuss.’

  But the thud of the front door shutting told her Fleur had already left.

  ‘You have a beautiful daughter, Mrs Jago,’ Miss Martin said.

  ‘Thank you. She takes after her father for looks.’

  And then she realised what she’d said and laughed. Miss Martin put a hand over her mouth to stifle her own laugh, but failed miserably.

  ‘Gosh, that came out all wrong, didn’t it?’ Emma said.

  ‘It did rather,’ Miss Martin said. ‘I shouldn’t have laughed but I couldn’t help it. And we all need a laugh sometimes, don’t we?’

  ‘We do,’ Emma agreed. But it was true – Fleur was a Jago, through and through. And thank goodness for that. Although sometimes her sharp ways reminded Emma too much of Caroline Prentiss and she did her best to smooth off the rough edges of Fleur’s character. ‘Now then, shall we look through these?’

  Emma had selected the magazines with pictures of wedding dresses in them and opened them at the relevant pages. They were spread across the cutting-out table. She’d had the foresight to ask in Beare’s for some sample fabrics telling the manageress she had some future brides coming for consultations. A little white lie there with the brides, plural, when it was only the one – Miss Martin – for the moment, but she had to start somewhere. And if she made a good job of Miss Martin’s dress then other brides would flock to her door, wouldn’t they?

  Well, thank goodness Ma has got something else to think about other than pestering me to do something, Fleur thought.

  She neared the pier and on a whim decided to go on it. Paignton pier was nothing more than a few sheds on stilts, with a row of one-armed bandits down one side, and was nothing like the elegant one over in Torquay, but it would be something to do. She had a few pennies in her purse and would play the machines for a while. Her ma would go crazy if she knew she was doing that. Gambling was a sin, wasn’t it? Well, that’s what all the notices outside the churches said, although her ma had never told her as much. And what’s more, her ma never set foot inside a church. Fleur remembered asking her once, back in Vancouver when she’d been ten or something like that, why they didn’t go to church on Sundays like everyone else and her ma had replied that she’d fallen out with the church over an issue many years before and she saw no reason to fall back in with it. And that had been the end of that conversation. Not that Fleur minded really. Although she’d seen some very good-looking young men coming out of St Andrews Church in Sands Road last Sunday with their parents. Hmm. Paolo had asked her if she’d like to go with him to church one Sunday for Mass but she’d declined. Why would a woman want to wear a bit of lace over her head to go and pray? And they had incense in Catholic churches, didn’t they? And from what she could remember, girls who were Catholics at her school in Vancouver had told her every darned thing was a mortal sin and you needed to confess it. She and Paolo had done a few things that if she’d been a Catholic she’d need to confess but why the heck would she want to tell some old bloke who’d never married sitting the other side of a little grille thing in a wooden box what she’d done?

  But she would have to do something to fill her time, she knew that. She was getting bored. But what?

  ‘A course of some kind?’ her ma had said the night before at dinner. ‘Shorthand and typing, perhaps? Accountancy? Your father was very good with figures.’

  And he was very good at gutting fish as well, Fleur had answered whippet-fast, which had br
ought tears to her ma’s eyes. She regretted that. Her ma was her ma and, she knew, a lot less strict than some. She didn’t make her put her hat on to go out, for one thing. And before she’d had her hair shingled, her ma had let her wear her hair loose, not coiled up and rolled up and stuck underneath a hat. How Paolo had loved to run his hands through her hair! And how tingly it had made her feel when he did. But her hair was shorter now and she’d discovered that Paolo could do other things to make her feel tingly.

  Fleur put a penny in the slot of the machine and pulled the handle. The little barrels with pictures of fruit spun round, going faster and faster so that the colours spun out to a whiteness. When they eventually stopped there weren’t three of anything in a row.

  ‘Lost again,’ she said. Well, that was six pennies she might as well have thrown down the drain. The church might not be right in thinking gambling was a sin but it was a fool’s game. She wasn’t going to waste another single penny on it.

  She walked out through the double plate glass doors onto the open end of the pier and walked over to a railing, resting her elbows on it.

  France was over there somewhere – home of her grandfather, Guillaume Le Goff. A little place called Benodet in Brittany so her ma had said. Not for the first time she wondered why her ma didn’t go to France, if only for a holiday. There were three large yachts moored in the bay and Fleur daydreamed about what it might be like to sail. Her pa had suffered from seasickness, she knew that. He’d been happy enough to work in the office of his shipping business, though. And he’d loved painting even more – God how she missed him.

  Tears began to well thinking about her pa and how she’d loved to stand beside him while he painted at the easel – not talking, just watching. She had at least four portraits he’d done of her growing up, and she wasn’t going to get another one now, was she? Fleur gulped in an attempt to swallow her tears, but one escaped and slid down her cheek anyway.

  ‘You look like you could use a cigarette.’ A man’s voice somewhere behind her, but close.

  A cigarette? In a holder? Fleur had seen Mary Pickford in the film, Rosita, smoking a cigarette. The thought of smoking thrilled her and frightened her in equal measure. But did she want to smoke just because a stranger was offering her a cigarette? Paolo smoked and she wasn’t sure she liked the taste of nicotine on his lips, or the smell of it in his hair.

  Fleur shook her head.

  ‘I’m not offering to push you off the end of the pier,’ the man said, with a hint of a smile in his voice. He sounded kindly enough. Fleur turned to look at the speaker. He had to be at least thirty if he was a day. Very dapper. He was wearing white flannels and a short-sleeved shirt with a V-neck sleeveless pullover. His dark hair was so shiny, with a precise parting on the left-hand side that Fleur wondered if he might have polished it. He raised his eyebrows at her in a do-you-want-a-cigarette-or-not? sort of way. He had a moustache she thought would probably tickle if he tried to kiss her. Not that she was going to give him the chance.

  He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. And a lighter. He leaned onto the rail beside Fleur, shuffled closer.

  ‘One won’t hurt,’ he said, and Fleur could smell alcohol on his breath. Spirits. There’d been enough men with spirits on their breath at the Grand Hotel for Fleur to know what it was.

  ‘You could be right,’ Fleur said. ‘But I don’t want one. Thank you.’

  ‘You sure?’ the man asked. ‘Plenty of women smoke. Bright women. Smart women.’ He looked at Fleur from head to foot as he spoke, as though he was appraising something he was thinking of buying. The look made Fleur shiver, despite the warmth from the sun.

  ‘Do they?’ Fleur asked. She’d never had a man force his attention on her before and she didn’t know how to deal with it, apart from running off.

  ‘Sure do,’ he told her.

  Fleur scanned the pier for women smoking. Yes, there was one on the other side, leaning against the rail, a cigarette dangling from long fingers. She was wearing a large hat with the brim almost covering her face. And then, as though sensing Fleur looking at her, the woman pulled the brim of her hat even further down, turned sharply, looking out to sea.

  The man began to draw a cigarette from the packet. ‘Beautiful girl like you should be welcoming new experiences.’

  Fleur thought she detected an accent in his voice that wasn’t English. Not Canadian though. American, perhaps? Well, she certainly wasn’t going to ask him. And this was an experience she could have done without.

  She turned and ran back down the pier, conscious that the man’s eyes were on her. She should have gone to the library like she’d told her ma she was going to. What a jerk that bloke was! What had he taken her for? A floozy? Well, she was far from that.

  But, God, growing up was hard to do!

  It was as though Emma had known Stella all her life. Within minutes of Fleur leaving Stella asked Emma to stop saying ‘Miss Martin’ every other word and to call her Stella, because goodness not many people called her by that name any more. At the hospital all the patients called her Nurse, and she was Miss Martin to just about everyone else from the woman behind the counter in the dairy to matron and everyone in between. It was as though the making of the dress had already been agreed upon between them.

  ‘Except my fiancé,’ Stella said. ‘He calls me by my Christian name, of course.’

  ‘Stella’s a lovely name,’ Emma said. ‘And you must call me Emma.’

  She wasn’t sure if it was etiquette for a client to be so informal but what did it matter, really, as long as there was respect there.

  An hour flew by as they looked at magazines and Stella told Emma what sort of dress she’d been thinking of. Emma could see that Stella would need something designed just for her, and not made from a Butterick or a McCall pattern. Certainly nothing in the magazines she’d shown Stella was quite right.

  ‘I could design something for you,’ Emma had said. Could she? She’d never really done that before but she’d adapted patterns many times so it couldn’t be too hard, could it?

  ‘Gosh,’ Stella said. ‘You’re making me feel like a rich film star.’

  ‘It needn’t cost any more than a paper pattern would,’ Emma told her. ‘I can cut a pattern from just about anything – brown paper, newspaper, tissue paper, whatever I can lay my hands on.’

  That much was true – she could, and she had. And she was good at drawing. Seth had told her she had a natural flair but he’d given her some tips on perspective so she was fairly certain she could make a good fist of a design for a wedding dress for Stella Martin.

  ‘Gosh, can you? How clever. Where did you learn to do that?’

  ‘I think I absorbed it through some sort of osmosis,’ Emma said with a laugh. She reached for a sheet of foolscap paper on the dresser, found a pencil and began a quick sketch. ‘My maternal grandfather was a tailor and he taught my mama. She wanted to be apprenticed to him so she could learn tailoring but it wasn’t allowed. But my grandpapa taught her anyway. He was dead before I was born.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ Emma said. ‘It’s how things are. My mama began teaching me from when I was old enough to thread a needle. I hated it then. I was a very grumpy, reluctant student at times but …’ Emma shrugged her shoulders and concentrated on her pencil drawing. ‘Something like that?’ She slid her lightning sketch across the table to Stella before snatching it back again. ‘No wait. That neckline will need jewellery.’

  Quickly she drew a head and shoulders into her design and pencilled a chain and a pendant at the neck. Her mama’s amethyst necklace. The necklace Matthew had hunted down after it had been stolen, not once, but twice. How easily she remembered the shape of it. How easily she drew the leaf and rosebud tooling on the gold mount around the stone. She wondered for a moment where it might be now, where Matthew might be in whose safe keeping she had left it.

  ‘Well, I’m very glad your mother persevered with you,’ Stella sai
d. ‘Very glad.’

  And so am I now.

  ‘That pendant,’ Stella asked. ‘What stone is it?’

  ‘An amethyst. As dark as blackberry juice and as plumped up as a goose feather pillow.’

  ‘It sounds as though it’s precious to you.’

  ‘It is. It was my mama’s.’

  ‘Then I won’t ask to borrow it for my “something borrowed” for good luck.’

  ‘I don’t have it at the moment,’ Emma told her. ‘I left it in the safe keeping of a friend when I went to Canada and … and I haven’t got around to asking for it back yet.’

  Emma crossed her fingers behind her back that Matthew – wherever he might be – still had it and that he would return it to her one day.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of asking to borrow something so precious,’ Stella said. ‘Honestly. And did you know amethysts were worn in amulets by the Greeks to ward off drunkenness?’

  Emma laughed. ‘Really? I’ve no need of that!’

  ‘I could use it sometimes up at the hospital on a Saturday night,’ Stella said, laughing with her. ‘More than a few drunks wander in for the warmth and mistake me for a long lost lover!’

  How good it felt to Emma to share laughter.

  ‘What I’ve done,’ Emma told her, stabbing her forefinger onto the photo of a model in a copy of Vogue wearing a boat-necked dress, ‘is I’ve taken the neckline from that one and the skirt from something else I saw in another magazine. You need fullness.’

  ‘Because I’m so thin!’ Stella laughed. ‘My fiancé is always telling me he’s afraid I’m going to break when he hugs me! He should see me lifting fifteen stone men about! All the running up and down the wards keeps me thin, not that we’re really allowed to run.’

  ‘No,’ Emma said. ‘I’ve heard nurses aren’t allowed to run, even in an emergency.’

  What would it be like to have a man, a fiancé, to hug her? Would she ever feel a man’s arms about her again?

  Emma sketched and Stella chatted on.

  ‘I hope people won’t laugh when they see me getting married in a white dress.’