Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [85]
Mary shook her head. 'In London I was often idle,' she confessed.
'But you said you went to school?'
'Oh yes,' she answered, her tongue dry. Careless, ducky! said Doll in her head. 'I only meant, the last few months, before Mother...'
Mrs. Jones clucked sympathetically, pins between her lips. Plucking them out a minute later, she said, 'I suppose you gave up the school when poor Su needed nursing?'
Mary nodded mutely, as if the memory were too painful for speech.
When the light started fading, round four o'clock, Mrs. Jones had Mary switch to the simpler chemises and seamed stockings that she sold ready-made to the lower sort; now it wouldn't matter so much if a stitch wasn't perfectly straight. It occurred to Mary—sitting sewing by the side of Mrs. Jones—that this was just what Susan Digot had always wanted for her girl. Mary pressed her teeth together hard. The beggarly luck of it, to end up obeying the cold bitch who'd thrown her onto the streets in winter! Well, at least her mother would never hear the end of this story, if Mary could help it. Susan Digot would eke out her days wondering whether her only daughter had given birth in a frozen gutter. She'd go to her grave not knowing, and good enough for her.
'Mary?'
She glanced up, afraid her thoughts were showing on her face.
But Mrs. Jones was smiling in concern. 'You've pricked yourself.'
She hadn't felt it. Bright blood flecked the hem of Mrs. Jarrett-the-Smith's winter petticoat.
'Let you run and rinse it out in the kitchen. Ask Abi for cold water, and a rub of lemon.'
'It's plain cheap cotton,' muttered the girl.
'Then let it be clean, at least,' said Mrs. Jones.
'Why can't I be steaming that taffeta cape of Miss Barnwell's?'
'Because this is our bread and butter, Mary.'
When the girl came back from the kitchen she stood staring out of the little window of the shop, where twilight was settling on the roofs of Monmouth. 'Did my mother like it here?' she asked abruptly.
Mrs. Jones looked up with startled eyes. 'Why, Mary, what a thing to ask!'
'But did she?'
The mistress bent over her sewing. 'It wasn't a question Su would have put to herself.'
'Why not?'
'We none of us would have. This was home. Is,' she added confusedly.
'And will you stay here forever, then?' asked Mary, curiously.
Mrs. Jones thought for a moment before asking, 'Where else would we go?'
Mary had always had a feel for clothes and what they meant. But these days she was learning to read a costume like a book, decipher all the little signs of rank or poverty. She was developing a nose for vulgarity; much of the stuff she'd paid out her earnings for, at the stalls of the Seven Dials, now struck her as shoddy tat. Fine cloth, that was what mattered, according to Mrs. Jones, and clean lines. And the very best dresses weren't the brightest and gaudiest but the ones that contained months of hard labour: edges stiff with hand-sewn lace or knobbed with beading. There was no way to cheat or skimp on it: beauty was work made flesh.
Something else Mary was learning: what mattered just as much as what someone wore was how they carried it off. The best silk sack gown could be ruined on a stooping, countryish customer. It was all in the gaze, the stance, the set of the shoulders. Mary set herself to learning how to move as if the body—in all its damp indignity—was as sleek and upright as the dress.
Whenever she heard a particularly sharp rap at the front door, she knew it would be a footman knocking on behalf of his mistress, and she would run to clear the little sofa in the shop, straightening her apron as she went. Most afternoons the household on Inch Lane was as busy as a hornet's nest. Patrons plagued Mrs. Jones with last-minute requests.
One Saturday, for instance, she was sold out of yellow ribbon by eleven o'clock, and had to disappoint Mrs. Lloyd who wanted some specially to bind a silk chrysanthemum onto her wheat-straw hat. Then Mrs. Channing ran in to have the hem of her new robe à la française taken up half an inch, having got the