Annabel - Kathleen Winter [119]
The costume bank was not big but it contained all the dresses and trappings for stage performances put on by the Berklee College of Music’s theatre and music performance sections. The room was too small, really, and as she made her way through the costumes, which hung from racks strung from the ceiling, the velvet and lace brushed Wally’s face, her shoulders, and her hands, and she felt like someone in a story from the Arabian Nights, passing through the doorway of a veiled tent, magical and starlit. She had begun working here in April, two hours a week on Saturdays, doing an inventory of the costumes in time for school to start in the fall. She had to find worn elbows and hems, torn seams, and anything else that would require mending, and she also had to pull out any garments that were too far gone and label them for discarding. Her aunt had got her this job because she knew the school’s costume mistress, who regularly came into the shop looking for trimmings and tailoring supplies. Wally had learned quickly in her aunt’s shop, and the costume mistress liked her. There would be no pay but Wally would earn tuition credits so that if she wanted to take Berklee courses when they started up in September, she could do so at a fraction of what it would normally cost.
“You don’t have to do it,” her aunt said. “If you want to take courses without doing the work, we can get you into some courses. If we got you as far as Wimpole Street in London we can get you to Boylston Street.”
“I want to,” Wally said. She knew singers had worn the costumes onstage. Musical notes would have fallen into the cloth, and the musicians’ bodies had touched the dresses and had left their shape in the shoulders and bodices. There was a nearness, touching the velvet and lace, to what she herself had wanted to be, and she could not resist a chance to handle the garments that had been worn by students who sang, even if she could not sing herself.
Thomasina Baikie had gone, in the first week of the previous September, to visit the Harley Street Voice Clinic as Wally and her aunt had requested. They had found Thomasina not at the Cale Street Hostel nor at the Cadogan Hotel, but at the other hotel, the one near Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, a hotel Thomasina had not named. Wally’s aunt had inquired on the telephone and found out the names of a dozen hotels near Poets’ Corner and had phoned seven of them. At the George Hotel the concierge had promised to give Thomasina their message on her arrival on August twenty-ninth, and he had done this.
Thomasina visited the Harley Street Voice Clinic, which was a private clinic and immaculate, she reported to Wally and her aunt. There was an original painting by J. M. W. Turner on the wall of the reception hall, and a sculpture by Henry Moore under a skylight. The doctor who looked at the information Thomasina presented to him on Wally’s behalf had not promised he could repair Wally’s voice. There was not enough information, he said, on the exact damage done to her vocal cords, and a lot of time had passed. He would need magnetic resonance imaging and he would need to see Wally for himself.
Wally and her aunt had made an appointment for February. From the week she had begun working in her aunt