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By Root 1429 0

back away from the trap door up into the attic so that she was out of Philip’s sight, and took off her sweat shirt. She slipped the bright dress on over her head. It would not go down past her hips, and stuck in a thick roll around her waist. There being no mirror in the house, she could not see what her arms and shoulders looked like, but she saw her sturdy freckled hands fidgeting at the roll of material, and felt that the dress was laying a claim on her, like an impostor demanding to be recognised. She stripped it off again angrily, and put back the sweat shirt, and with it a feeling of appropriateness and even virtue, as if she had been tempted briefly by the forbidden. She did not try on the apricot chiffon, with panels of silver beads back and front, some of them loosened, some vanished away as though a bead-eating insect had been at it. She held the sage-green lace with its swirling skirt up against her. It was tight above, with a pale-pink vee for modesty in the front, and the back cut down to the coccyx, with another little vee there. And afternoon dresses, the “New Look,” quite glossy and good. Who had put them up there, unable to throw them away? Who had forgotten about them and gone off, leaving all those trunks up there? She showed the dresses to Philip, who laughed at them, but when she said she would get something for them, quite a lot, shrugged, unwillingly respectful.

She put them in a suitcase and took the bus to Bell Street, to a shop where her mother, being hard up, had sold some dresses. She had got over a hundred pounds.

Saturday. The markets were crammed. The woman in the shop that sold antique clothes was already busy with a customer who was after a white crêpe-de-chine 1920s dress that had gold sequins in thick crusty-looking roses all round the hips. She paid ninety pounds for it. And it had a stain on the shoulder, which she said she would hide with a gold rose.

Alice went forward with her suitcase, saw the woman’s eyes narrow in greed as she took in what was there. Alice was determined to get every penny she could. She bargained closely over each garment, watching the woman’s eyes, which gave her away. They were clever, narrow eyes, used to poring over small stitches, a tiny rent, the set of a panel of embroidery. When Alice took out the apricot chiffon with the silver beads, she even sighed, and her tongue, which was large and pale, slid over her lips.

For that Alice got sixty pounds, though the woman kept saying a skilled sempstress would have to replace the missing beads, and it would cost—Alice had no idea what it would cost. Alice smiled politely, nodded, and stood her ground.

She went home with £250, knowing that the woman would sell those clothes for four times as much. But she was satisfied.

She was not going to tell Jasper. This meant that loyalty forbade her to tell Philip—who wouldn’t have believed her in any case. She told him she had got £150, gave him a hundred, and heard him sigh a little; such a different sigh from that sharp escape of breath of the woman in the shop. Like a child—like Jasper getting into his sleeping bag last night, coming home, to safety.

Well, that would keep things going, but not for long. Philip and she spent sixty pounds of it that afternoon on a second-hand gas boiler. And five pounds for its delivery. By the end of the week there would be hot water. Even heat, if those radiators that had not been stolen had not suffered by their neglect.

Not that Alice cared about warmth, not even after four years in her mother’s warm house. She had become used to adapting to different temperatures. Before her mother’s house she had gone through a winter in a squat that had no heating at all. She had simply worn a lot of clothes, and kept moving. Jasper had complained, had got chilblains, but even he had put up with it; yet that was one of the reasons he had been pleased to move in to live with her mother’s warmth, after a cold winter.

She spent a long evening working with Philip, as his assistant, handing him tools, holding steady the beam of a powerful torch.