Grace was general assistant. She swept the floor every morning, opened the blinds, propped open the front door to air the place, took a bucket and hard broom to the pavement just outside. Sparkling cleanliness was Mrs Ticknell’s aim.
‘Gotta be just so, if you want ladies,’ said Mrs Ticknell.
The ladies spent the most, on embroidery silks and canvases, gloves and hat-trimmings.
‘See here, Gracie, look!’
And Grace would be summoned to admire Mrs Ticknell’s latest acquisition from the mysterious sweatshops and alleyways of manufacture, the box of pale yellow silk rosebuds, the fat china cherries complete with stiff paper leaves, the wreath of forget-me-nots as delicate and airy as the real thing, all packed in tissue paper, all to be carefully itemized and laid away in the right labelled drawer in the stockroom at the back, or in one of the numbered drawers in the shop itself.
‘Put the fire on, Gracie, let’s be cosy!’
Mrs Ticknell, altogether forward-looking and ambitious, had gone for gas, and the shop was warmed by a metal square of greyish grids hanging face-down from the high ceiling. To light it Grace had to catch and pull down its dangling chain, using the special wooden pole-with-a-hook, a faintly fairground pleasure; the gas would catch with a sudden liquid curl of racing blue flame, and the grids begin at once to glow deep scarlet.
Warm and comfortable: there was a row of upright wooden chairs beside the counter, in case of queues, and along the far wall a sofa with claw feet, upholstered in grey velveteen, and much set about with cushions. The sofa and the little table in front of it were for the use of customers, but both were also lures: the cushion covers, changed frequently, matched or contrasted, exhibited Mrs Ticknell’s own virtuoso cross-stitch tapestry, or trapunto, or quilting, and the table was covered with a newly starched lacy cloth every week, and one or two of the latest magazines for ladies, and vases of flowers, sometimes artificial, and scattered artfully with charming lavender bags, delicate place mats or babies’ dresses, all of them for sale, but also suggestive in themselves of things a passing customer might decide she simply must make now, for herself – all the essentials so readily to hand, for a price, of course.
Just before nine every morning, Grace turned round the sign in the door to read OPEN and went to stand behind the high oaken counter, proud before the wall of shallow square shelves full of wool in great twisted hanks, and below them the bank of fifty little drawers, each with its number on an ivory plaque, all of them neatly crammed with the multitudinous items of haberdashery: the different types of needles, the extended families of pins, cards of bias binding, hooks and eyes, French chalk, ribbon, cords, tassels, elastic and hundreds and hundreds of buttons, every colour and size and shape sewn on to cards by the dozen, with Best British Make written across the top in brown printed scrolly letters. All of which, in less time than Mrs Ticknell had at her most hopeful imagined, Grace had off by heart, down to the last buttonhook – what a clever little thing she was, what a memory!
And Grace’s manner, too, was just right, thought Mrs Ticknell; always gentle and polite, always ready to help but also quick to withdraw, to let well alone while someone wrestled with difficult choices. That was rare, thought Mrs Ticknell, increasingly proud of her own foresight and general acumen in taking Grace on in the first place, and soon quite forgetting that Mrs Dimond had ever leant meaningfully upon her counter, or that she herself had ever had doubts.
Because the drawback – well, that was hardly her fault, poor girl (thought Mrs Ticknell). Hardly her fault that she was what she was.
It had certainly given Mrs Ticknell pause at first. Would custom be put off? Would the ladies, the essential high-spending ladies, decide to shop elsewhere?
There were one or two other shopkeepers that might, she realized, during the increasingly fraught and sleepless week of Grace’s initial evening training sessions, see her hiring of Grace Dimond as an advantage of their own. One or two smaller, dingier and hitherto altogether less classy traders might tweak their stock, lay themselves out to please a little more, and coax away her livelihood. She was about to ruin her own business, just through being too obliging!
But as she went to open the door to old Mrs Wrightson on Grace’s first Monday morning Mrs Ticknell, to her own surprise, knew a sudden moment of strange inner resolve. Various religious tracts, bits of old sermons, other more political speechifyings, half-heard, barely remembered over the years, leapt into her head as if of their own accord, all muddled together, but still with a sort of grandeur to them. They spoke to her firmly: Grace Dimond is a nice bright girl – are we not all men and brothers – let Mrs Wrightson get used to it – let her go hang if she won’t!
Meanwhile the rest of Mrs Ticknell, the part that considered bills, quaked with unease, for Mrs Wrightson spent all day every day at her embroidery frame.
Give her a chance to get used to it, said the inner grandeur. Let all seem normal!
Mrs Ticknell drew herself up straight, and as she ushered her customer in said as lightly, as casually, as she could:
‘Good morning, Mrs Wrightson – have you met my new girl here, Gracie, helping me out, for now?’
Grace, schooled beforehand, bobbed Mrs Wrightson a curtsey; and old Mrs Wrightson, after a single tiny start of surprise, had smiled back, and kindly said how nice for Mrs Ticknell, and could she trouble them for a little more of the pale ochre, or order some, and the high grand feeling inside Mrs Ticknell went pop and vanished, though she remembered it afterwards, and was powerfully pleased with herself for being on the side of Good.
Mrs Wrightson had a certain local cachet; her approval, or benign indifference, made others more likely to approve, or at least not mind one way or the other, thought Mrs Ticknell. But here she was wrong. Once word got about, there were considerably more casual visitors to the shop than before. Most locals had heard tell of Mrs Dimond’s act of adoption, widely considered at once baffling and sanctimonious, and had at least glimpsed the strange exotic kid herself, over the years. Now there was an easy chance to have a good look at her, and talk to her face to face. If one or two customers were lost, rather more took their place. Grace Dimond was not off-putting, Mrs Ticknell finally realized; she was if anything more of a draw.
And then she so quickly grew practised and knowledgeable, and ready to help with the interminable stock-taking, bane of Mrs Ticknell’s life, and stay late on ordering nights, and finally at quiet times take over altogether, so that Mrs Ticknell could nip out to the shops or visit the market, or have a peaceful cup of tea uninterrupted at the back! Those were fine times for Mrs Ticknell.
On the whole fine for Grace too. Sometimes she stood with her palms spread on the counter, inhaling the quietness and the rich cleanly smells of new material, glorying in the jolly fact that she was playing at shops with an actual shop. A real heavyweight mechanical till, and real money! It was easy, that was the thing that struck her most; easy to remember the stock, to keep the accounts straight, to check the orders. She had not been fully aware of the constant effort she had put into being unnoticeably average at school, but now she felt all the pleasure of turning the effort the other way round, and letting herself shine.
At first she had herself feared being something of a spectacle, had envisaged goggling crowds, and hadn’t slept much during that initial training week either.
There was never exactly a crowd, but often there was goggling.
‘Where are you from then?’ she was asked, often. The tone was generally kindly enough, she thought, but who ever asked that of Mrs Ticknell, or leant, say, across the counter in the chemist’s shop next door to enquire about the origins of the assistants there, and then pursed their lips or popped their eyes in disbelief on being told, no matter how demurely? Or smiled outright, as if she had said something funny? Amused, she supposed, at the endless joke of what so many persisted in seeing as an exotic-native appearance instantly contradicted by her accent. Some never seemed to tire of it.
; All the same: ‘It ain’t that bad,’ she told Lily Houghton, trying to be kind, for compared to Lily’s place the wool-shop job was hardly work at all, though the days were long and her feet often ached with the standing, for Mrs Ticknell allowed no sitting at all behind the counter.
And she was learning so much, not just about dress-making. Mrs Ticknell, once she relaxed in Grace’s company, was a revelation in herself. She knew everyone Grace knew, often in far more scurrilous depth, and was rarely silent for more than two minutes together.
How was Mrs Dimond, as had saved her dear boy Gerry’s life, no, never would she forget that! Of course Mrs Dimond was a twin herself, fancy! How was Mrs Givens, out at the Home, wasn’t it? A gifted needlewoman, Bea Givens. Did Gracie know that the two of them had once been famous for their tricks and games, long since?
‘The Kitto Twins, that was their maiden name right enough, Beatrice and Violet Kitto. Bea pretending to be Violet, Violet pretending to be Beatrice, they’d take anyone in, their own mother sometimes; everyone knew now and then your poor Ma’d end up getting no dinner, because Bea would come in and eat up, and nip out, come back in again saying she was Violet, see?’ Mrs Ticknell laughed.
‘And they used to do this act where they made out they was one person – you ever see that? Well, no, I dare say they don’t do it no more. Years back, this was. I only seen it the once, I was maybe four or five, so they must have been what, sixteen, seventeen, great grown-up girls they seemed to me. Out on the old common – where the bus depot is now – they had a little table set up, and stools to sit on, either side. And then they acted, being the one girl, see? Like in a looking-glass. They each had a hairbrush, and us-all stood about watching, and wherever you stood they looked like one girl sat in front of her glass, see, a-brushing her hair, and parting it, plaiting it! Plait one side then the other, never seen anything like it, tying on ribbons – blue they were – good as a circus, except I remember – it made you feel all funny inside, bit like Alice if you see what I mean, going through the looking-glass, you know that book?’
More bewildering than any Lewis Carroll, for Grace, was the idea of Violet playing with Aunt Bea, of them being giddy girls – embarrassing really, even slightly horrifying. Surely Violet had always been as she was now, reserved, affectionate, dignified, and above all, old?
‘Mr Dimond? Ned Dimond, ooh he was a looker, tell you that for nothing, all the girls were after him, Ned Dimond! Had a way with him and all. Everyone thought,’ (here Mrs Ticknell lowered her voice, for all they were dusting the back room well after closing time) ‘that he had an understanding with your auntie, with Beatrice; but she went away to London; that was when all of a sudden he’s engaged to Violet, married inside the month! Some said, getting her own back for all them dinners … you see a flat box up there, Gracie, labelled “Lewin”?’
Mrs Ticknell sounded a little self-conscious, aware perhaps that she had overstepped a mark.
‘All so long ago now, and I dare say there was nothing in it anyway,’ she added piously, as Grace passed the flat box down to her. ‘That’s the one. Look – ordered and paid for, and never collected these thirty years!’
The box held a pair of beautiful gloves wrapped in tissue, of fine slippery knitted silk, in cream and palest pink, with ivory buttons and wrists edged with filmy lace.
‘Whose are they?’
‘Well, they’re Miss Lewin’s,’ said Mrs Ticknell. ‘Shocking thing – you heard a Miss Peony Lewin? No? Strangers, her folks owned a brewery, well, more than one probably, took on the old manor house out on the coast road – where your auntie works now, don’t she, this was before it was a Home, of course, the Lewinses takes it, has it all done up very fine, you know it, surely?’
‘Yes,’ said Grace, her heart beating fast, longing to ask if Mrs Ticknell, fount of all local knowledge that she seemed to be, knew that she herself, Grace Dimond, had once been a nameless and abandoned infant at that very Home. Presumably she did; but the habit of careful quietness held Grace’s tongue. ‘I know it well,’ she said.
‘Course you do, a-visiting your auntie,’ said Mrs Ticknell comfortably, ‘and this was before I took over here, ’twas still Miller’s then, but Miss Peony Lewin comes in, the daughter – her own carriage outside, you’d think she was royalty – comes in all by herself, orders these here gloves, and takes a single cambric nightgown, very plain; and the very next day ups and drowns herself in the lake there, Rosevear Lake, in nothing but that very same nightgown – bought her own winding sheet!’
‘Oh, but why?’
‘No one knows,’ said Mrs Ticknell. ‘I dare say she had her reasons, poor girl, just put the box back where it was, will you, dear? Miller’s wouldn’t sell ’em on, and nor shall I; but lots of folk – you really not heard this? – have seen her, they do say.’ She lowered her voice. ‘At the Home, of a summer evening, she comes to watch the children play, a-standing in the reeds with her two arms folded, like this! My cousin’s girl as works there, her friend, saw her there come sunset, with her ankles in the water, nearly died!’
Mrs Ticknell knew all Silkhampton’s misfortunes. Carriages that had overturned fifty years before, spilling their occupants out on to the road at high speeds, horses that had bolted in the market square, swinging heavyweight carts sideways into the screaming crowds, badly built scaffolding, thatch struck by lightning, robberies, riots, rick-burnings, murders and shipwrecks; she knew the names of all the men lost when Bert Givens’ boat went down (one of them a relative of hers, by marriage) though not the name of the local woman who had left her baby lying as she thought safe in a corner of the field one harvest time (‘Pigs eat anything’) and every date and detail of the entire county’s mining disasters, collapses, explosions and floods.
Sometimes Grace came home from work feeling a bit like Violet after a day in the kitchen garden, needing a long sit-down and a cup of tea. At the same time it was somehow rather exhilarating: there seemed to be so much more to Silkhampton than Grace had ever suspected. It was as if Mrs Ticknell was letting Grace in on the grown-up world, the one that had to be kept secret from children.
And all the while, as she talked, Mrs Ticknell sewed. If there was no one in the shop her hands were never still. Some of the time she used a small sewing machine bolted on to one end of the counter; sometimes Grace turned the handle for her, when she needed both hands for something tricky. Often though no machine could stitch fine enough.
‘Want to do this? I show you how? Here, take it, go on. No; smaller than that. That’s right. Littlest bite you can.’
And then the doorbell would go and a customer come in, and Mrs Ticknell would instantly put her work aside and jump up, full of gleeful energy.
‘Morning, Mrs Withers! What can I do for you?’
On St Valentine’s Day, leaving home so fast, Grace arrived early; the shop was still locked, the blind down inside. She did up her coat in the mirror of the dark window, and adjusted her hat. The street was fairly quiet; she stepped back on the pavement, and studied her own full-length reflection.
She had made the plain wool coat herself, copying the narrow close fit from a picture on the front cover of one of Mrs Ticknell’s magazines for ladies. Her hat was of toning velveteen, its angled brim threaded with malleable boning wire, trimmed with one slanting feather and a gathered length of dark gauze tied in a bow at the back, with trailing ends that were lifting a little in the light chill breeze.
In the darkened glass Grace examined the coat and the hat, and the pretty line of her cheek, and the slight womanly curve of her breast, and was struck with something like awe: it seemed to her that, standing just so, in the same pose as the lady in the magazine, her reflection was actually perfect. An intense happiness gripped her, a lightness inside that seemed to her to have nothing to do with the sin of vanity; it felt more like honesty. Look, see? Perfect!
And there was the card in her pocket, she remembered. Why not from Tommy Dando?
Just as she thought this
there was a sudden grit of footsteps beside her, too close, so that she looked round startled, and it was him, taking a hurried step back as if he was startled too, one gloved hand rising automatically to his hat.
He coughed a little. ‘Morning, Miss,’ he said.
Grace did not speak. He was hardly a stranger, but he had accosted her in the street. She looked away, her lips parting.
‘Miss Dimond. Sorry, I –’ He stopped. He took the hat off, and for a moment held it to his chest. Then he clapped it on again, and was gone.
For a minute or two more Grace stayed where she was on the pavement, lost in almost unendurable excitement. She was looking her best, and knew now that her best was spectacularly elegant and pretty; and he had been there to see. He could not have missed her beauty.
She remembered the time she and Lily had bumped into him after the pictures, and how he had not looked at her, any more than she had looked at him. Not straight, just tiny glances. Because a quick glance was all you could bear. How wonderful it would be to take a proper long look at him! That’s all I want, Grace told herself. Her lips went on smiling all by themselves.
She drew a deep shaky breath, and then the black holland blind in the half-glazed shop door went up, and Mrs Ticknell appeared, her front hair still in curling rags.
‘Hello, my lovely,’ she cried, as she unlocked the door, ‘ain’t that hat turned out well!’
‘Oh, thank you!’
‘Just like a fashion plate, apart from, well, you know –’
Grace laughed from sheer good humour. Apart from that, of course. A shrug to that, today.
‘– still, a real young lady!’
‘A young lady what’s handy with a mop and bucket,’ said Grace, unbuttoning the coat.
‘That’s the kind for me,’ said Mrs Ticknell. ‘Light the fire first, though.’
The Midwife's Daughter Page 14