‘Really?’
His gaze seeks mine and our eyes lock meaningfully. His don’t look so blue now; they look deep and black as the night sky.
He says, ‘The three of us were aligned on that day. Do you realise, Fern, if it wasn’t for that …’
I hold my breath and finish the sentence in my mind – we’d never have met.
But he carries on cheerfully, ‘I’d be warm and dry in the Market Hall right now.’
KIM
It’s raining. I’ve got the lights on. Enid kept me on the straight and narrow for sixty years, and now that she’s gone and I’m home all alone, I think about her clothes all the time. When I try them on they feel as cool and gentle as her touch. I can’t concentrate on anything else. They’re a guilty obsession. They’re all I can think of. I’ll be glad when Cato Hamilton takes them away.
Let’s get this straight – I don’t want to be a woman. I’ve never thought I was born in the wrong body. I’m not tormented by it. It’s more like the feeling when you want a scone with jam and cream and you look in the fridge and there’s no cream. You hanker after it and settle for a scone and jam but it niggles and takes the enjoyment out of eating. Because it’s better with cream.
Being in the house without Enid is better when I’m wearing her frock.
This one is hers, the one I’ve got on. It’s purple and very tight on me; I struggled to fasten the zip. Enid was slim, with the appetite of a sparrow. She deplored greed. Enid was a model of restraint and I always admired that in her.
The doorbell rings and I stand motionless. I’ve got half a mind not to answer it, but I haven’t spoken to anyone for two days, so I pull on my plaid dressing gown over the frock to answer the door.
Mercia’s standing on the doorstep wearing a transparent rain hat over her fair hair and lobster oven gloves. She’s carrying a lasagne in a Pyrex dish and she’s startled to see me in my dressing gown.
‘Ooo! Did I disturb you?’ she asked, full of concern.
‘No. Come in,’ I tell her.
‘It’s still hot, but if you’re not going to eat it now you might want to pop it in the microwave for a couple of minutes. I’ll take it through to the kitchen.’
She comes back still wearing her oven gloves. She smacks them together and barks like a seal, which makes me laugh.
‘Tea?’ I ask her.
‘Lovely!’
Under my robe, the frock tickled my shins as I walked to the kitchen. I feel daring and uneasy. Enid would have something to say about me entertaining a woman in my dressing gown, never mind what was underneath.
I carry the two mugs into the sitting room and I fling open the curtains. The window’s freckled with rain. There’s a fine layer of dust on the windowsill, as fine as face powder.
Mercia’s sitting down and I notice she’s wearing lipstick, pink and pearly.
Enid stopped wearing make-up at around the time that her hair started to go grey. She said she felt a fool in it, at her age. ‘I look like a pantomime dame,’ she said crossly, looking at herself in the magnifying mirror. ‘I’m not trying to attract a man, after all. It’s different for Mercia.’
Mercia has been widowed for many years. Her husband Bertie was buried in the South China Sea. He died on a cruise. She never showed any sign of wanting another husband. She takes holidays at regular intervals – organised tours by coach or train – although she’s given up on cruises for obvious reasons. She always looks nicely put together.
I sit opposite her and my heart’s beating so hard that I can hear it thump in my ears like waves on the beach.
She smiles. ‘You’re looking …’ She doesn’t finish the observation. Something has caught her eye and her smile fades.
I know immediately even without looking that my purple frock is showing. I cover my knees quickly with my robe.
Mercia raises her eyebrows. She doesn’t meet my eyes for a few long moments while she keeps her thoughts under control.
I gulp my tea down quickly, even though it’s hot. Suddenly, I can’t breathe properly. My ribcage won’t expand. I’m suffocating. The frock is too tight.
I see black spots floating before my eyes, just a few at first, as if it’s snowing soot. It turns into a blizzard that blots Mercia out. I can feel my muscles weaken.
I’m dying.
I imagine the voices of the paramedics: this old guy wearing a frock so tight he suffocated himself.
Concerned, Mercia’s voice comes from a great distance. ‘Are you all right, Kim?’
I shake my head frantically and tear off the dressing gown.
She gets to her feet and I plead with her, ‘Mercia, don’t go! Could you unfasten it? I can’t breathe!’ I’m struggling to stand, gasping shallowly like an old fool while Mercia comes behind me and tugs at the zip fastener.
‘Can’t get a grip on it; I’ve got a touch of arthritis,’ she says grimly. ‘Have you got a paperclip? Or a shoelace?’
The blizzard of spots blots out the room and I can feel my thoughts draining from my head.
‘Oh! Hang on there, Kim,’ she says. She dashes off and comes back with a pair of scissors. ‘Hold still!’ I can feel the cold blade against my chest as she cuts straight down the bodice of the frock, through my chest hair.
Released, I gulp air in gratefully and my ribs expand. I sit down, panting and flexing my shoulders, and the spots gradually clear from my vision like midges in sunlight. I’m too ashamed to look at her.
As I put my dressing gown back on, Mercia starts to giggle.
‘Honestly, I don’t know how you ever got into it,’ she says.
She’s laughing at me. I look down at my white-haired chest. Pathetic. I close my dressing gown and knot the belt tight.
‘Sorry, Kim,’ she says. ‘Didn’t mean to laugh. I wasn’t laughing at you. Politically incorrect and all that. It’s just …’ Another giggle escapes. ‘It’s as if you had the vapours.’
‘The vapours?’
‘Swooning. Like a Victorian heroine in her corsets.’
‘I shouldn’t have sat down in it. I shouldn’t have had the tea.’ I shouldn’t have worn Enid’s dress. Reluctantly, I force myself to look at her through my shame and I ask, ‘What’s going to happen now?’
‘In what way?’
I stare at her for a moment. ‘People talking.’
She raises her eyebrows again and blows out sharply through her nose.
I’ve offended her. I watch her drink her tea. Soon, the cup will be empty and she’ll go. I can’t wait for her to go.
She puts the cup carefully down on Enid’s favourite coaster, which has a blue sailboat on it. ‘Shall I tell you the secret to happiness, Kim?’
‘Go on.’
‘You’ve got to move with the times.’
‘Move with the times,’ I repeat.
‘Nobody cares about this sort of thing anymore, Kim. It’s different now. Things have changed. Boys can wear skirts as part of their school uniform. Where have you been for the past few years?’
I’ve been here, with Enid. ‘I didn’t think that sort of thing had anything to do with me,’ I tell her.
‘Never mind. It’s never too late to learn,’ she says, getting to her feet. She glances at me and presses her lips together, squeezing back a smile. ‘Although, if you’re going to make a habit of it, you might want to buy yourself clothes that fit.’
Her kindness fills me with gratitude and I nod, seeing her face through a film of tears.
‘Don’t forget to eat the lasagne. Keep your strength up,’ she advises.
After she’s gone, I eat the lasagne, but my shame still hangs over me and I’ve got an evening to fill, so I empty Enid’s wardrobe into black bin bags and call Cato Hamilton.
Delivering myself from temptation, Enid would say.
LOT 8
Black velvet opera cape with large padded collar and pink silk lining, hook fastening, full-length, circa 1936, unlabelled.
Now that Moss has magical
ly and skilfully restored my dresses and suits to their former glory, business has picked up again. Before I restock on Friday night, I spray the flat with Moth Stop, because when I opened my wardrobe door a movement caught my eye and to my horror, I saw a little brown moth fluttering out of sight into a wool jacket.
Fabric moths look so innocuous, like tiny folds of delicate tissue paper, but their one job is to reproduce and they’re good at it, so they like to be part of a gang. The moths do the breeding not the eating and their larvae are pretty, almost decorative, like fine silver silken threads. The larvae, too, have a mission in life, which is to eat. It’s the larvae that do the damage. I’m not talking about a snack here. One small hole in a garment isn’t too bad. But these little grubs treat it more like a running buffet; a little bit here, a little bit there, a quick look at what its neighbour is having and a speedy wriggle to a new spot.
Their secret weapon is they look so surprisingly innocent, but like most insects they’re totally dedicated to a cause. Forget cedar balls. Cedar balls don’t bother them in the slightest. Moths will happily reproduce using cedar balls as furniture. Professional and expensive fumigation works in the short term, but once the larvae find a good source of food they’ll eventually come back and carry on where they left off.
What kills them best are old-fashioned mothballs, those little pungent white balls that dissolve and gradually give off a gas that poisons moths – and, incidentally, repels snakes, bats and squirrels, gives susceptible people anaemia and puts off customers.
The war between clothes moths and me is ongoing.
I stick some pheromone moth traps around the flat to gauge the degree of the infestation and spray the place liberally with pesticide. Then I go along to St Mark’s Church, where they’re setting up for the Nearly-New Clothing Sale.
I like working in the vast holy emptiness of the church and I like the organiser, Naomi Brown. She’s a tall, slender woman with an eye for the asymmetric in hems, sleeves, necklines and hairstyle, who greets me warmly because I’ve brought my Allen keys to tighten up the clothing rails that invariably develop a lean.
The church is sunlit, jewelled with stained glass, highlighted with gold-leafed angels, and we’re watched over by a solemn Virgin Mary holding a chubby toddler.
There are lots of bags on the floor – bin bags, carrier bags, designer shopping bags –and that’s when the excitement starts, when we begin to unpack. There might be a Primark dress in a Selfridge’s bag and a John Galliano suit in a bin liner.
Since the popularity of vintage, more people have become experts on the subject. The charity shops keep the labels and sell them at a premium price. The jumble sale has been dropped for ‘nearly new’ and Mary Portas is the Queen of the High Street, so the church nearly-new sale is always popular for bargains.
I like this kind of redistribution of wealth and I’m happy to be on this side of the church door instead of queueing early outside with other dealers; they’re the first people in line for any sale. We pitch up early and have an eye for a bargain, but what got me on this side of the door was my knowledge about fashion and how much things ought to be sold for. I always offer a fair price. As helpers, we get first choice and first refusal, which is a huge plus.
Naomi’s an expert, not only on fashion, but also on the people who bring the clothes. She knows the importance of provenance, she likes people and she also knows interesting facts, such as that Jesus’s clothes had no seams.
Not only that, but the lack of seams in his robes had also been foreshadowed in the Old Testament years before – it was that big a deal. I love that kind of detail. Little-known fact: the Bible’s big on clothes.
Some of the items I recognise from previous sales, because the church also acts as a clothing swap for disciplined people who believe in the one-in-one-out method of minimalism.
I unearth a tan fringed leather poncho, a gold leather cowboy shirt and a matching skirt. I come across a Comme des Garçons dress, which I show to Naomi Brown, and she says that Joan Fielding, a psychotherapist, has brought them in.
‘Post-nuclear’ seems a surprisingly chaotic choice of dress for a psychotherapist – it’s black, with mismatched sleeves, random slits and raw hems, but who knows? It might have been the owner’s idea of sartorial humour.
I’m interested in the Comme des Garçons and I fall in love with a Le Smoking-style evening trouser suit, which I buy with a compulsive feeling that if I didn’t, I’d regret it. I know I will find a buyer for it.
I also like a full-length black opera cape lined in pink silk that I can see Gigi wearing, with her love for the dramatic.
Naomi prices the four items for me and at 8 pm we call it a day and have a glass of wine each before heading home.
As an added bonus, Cato turns up at my place on Monday night with a consignment of orange-bin-bagged clothes from someone who’d recently passed, and a bottle of Romanian wine.
‘You’re going to like these,’ he promises, dumping the bin bags in the centre of the room. He tosses his tweed cap onto Dolly’s head.
The bags sigh as if punched and slowly exhale the dying breath of floral scent.
He sits on the edge of the red sofa, gripping his moss green cord-clad knees in anticipation. ‘This lady was a padded coat-hanger kind of gal,’ he says, because I’ve told him that I judge people by their coat hangers.
It suddenly occurs to me that David Westwood probably uses wooden ones. I’m not sure why I keep thinking about him. ‘Good,’ I say, contemplating the mound of bags warily. There’s nothing quite as exciting as going through old clothes, but sometimes there’s nothing so disgusting, either, and I never know which it’s going to be.
By arrangement, Cato brings all the garments for me to sort – and that includes stiff underwear, grub-eaten wool, stained pyjamas and the soiled laundry that people assume they’ll tackle at some time in the future when they’re ready to, not realising how time-consuming dying is.
Or maybe they do realise.
Maybe they realise then they sink back into their soft pillows and think, what the hell! Let someone else deal with it!
Let’s face it, it’s got to be one of the main perks of dying: the knowledge that keeping your possessions in order isn’t your problem anymore.
‘Okay! Let’s see what we’ve got,’ I decide robustly, ripping open the bags and upending the clothes on the floor while Cato finds my wine glasses and unscrews the cap on the bottle.
‘Ta-dah! Oooh!’ I say, admiring the promising orgiastic huddle of entwined velvet and silk, or possibly acrylic and polyester.
Cato stares at the pile with interest, wedging the bottle between his knees.
He generally takes my word for it whether the clothes are designer or not, and he’s learned that Jonelle is actually John Lewis and Florence and Fred is Tesco, not a couture label.
‘Her husband just wanted her things cleared. He doesn’t want to keep anything of hers; no jewellery, nothing. He says he’s not sentimental that way.’
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that ‘one size fits all’ is a myth, in clothes as in life. I look up and meet Cato’s pale green eyes.
‘I suppose grief hits some people like that. They don’t want to be reminded of what they’ve lost,’ I comment, draping the clothes on the chairs.
Bottom line – there’s no smell of mothballs and the dresses are pristine. If clothes are the outward manifestation of a person, this woman was squeaky clean and had impeccable taste. ‘Look how slim she was.’ The clothes’ previous occupant favoured long pleated skirts in rich colours, pussycat bow blouses and jersey dresses, Jean Muir for Jaeger. My eyes light up. I have new stock!
As I unfold them I notice that one of the dresses, a purple wool crêpe, has been unevenly cut down the front with a pair of scissors. I smooth it out and wonder whether she was trying to remodel it. But it looks wildly haphazard and freehand. Sacrilege! ‘Eww, it’s covered in white hairs.’
‘Maybe she put i
t on a dog,’ Cato says. ‘Possibly a greyhound, from the shape.’
‘Don’t!’ I shudder at the thought. I put the ruined dress to one side and hold up a long green-and-gold printed velvet skirt. Loving it. It falls to my ankles. ‘She was really into pleats, wasn’t she?’ I say, checking the label. ‘I love pleats and pussycat bows.’
‘Do you?’ Cato asks with sudden interest. ‘I didn’t think they’d be your kind of thing. They look a bit Thatcherish to me.’
‘True … they are a bit Thatcherish,’ I agree, quickly playing it down – it’s always a mistake to be too eager with Cato during negotiations. ‘She’s tall, too. But so neat.’ I take a gulp of Cato’s Romanian wine and glance at him for corroboration. ‘She was neat, right?’
‘Oh, absolutely.’
‘You know what they say? Clothes are the outward manifestation of our inner lives.’
‘Who says that?’
‘Er – I do.’ That’s what I believe. The woman these clothes belonged to had abandoned her earthly body for dimensions new, but she’d left something of her personality behind and it resonated positively with me.
‘Our outward manifestation? Oh, I like that,’ Cato says, dabbing his mouth with a monogrammed handkerchief – not his monogram though, I notice. ‘It’s very philosophical.’
‘Thanks.’ I’m really pleased with the contents of the bags. The summer is coming but the days are still cool, perfect for the mid-season gravitas of velvet and silk. I’ll choose an outfit for myself, too, to wear on the stall as an advertisement for my new stock. I can feel a whole new persona coming on thanks to Cato. I’ll be cool and well groomed and prim. ‘I’ll give you thirty for the lot.’
Cato chokes politely on his drink and gives me an injured look. ‘Come on, Fern, play fair. You love them.’
‘I only love them with thirty pounds worth of love. Like you said, they’re a bit Thatcherish. It’s a niche market. And they’re a small size.’
Cato holds his wine glass up to the dim light from the window and contemplates it thoughtfully. His pale wispy beard blurs his jawline, giving him a saintly aura. ‘You can have the lot for a hundred.’
A Random Act of Kindness Page 10