Shadow Baby (34 page)

The moment the car had driven away, Shona left. If only she, too, had a car, she could have followed her mother and found out where she worked and then there would be two places to watch. But why watch any longer? She had achieved her objective, she had seen her mother. There was no need to spy any more. Conscious that the next phase of this discovering operation was now upon her, Shona felt almost regretful. It had been so simple just to watch, to look, and not think of acting. Her role had been passive and she had enjoyed it. The long hours of cold and discomfort sitting among the bushes had made her feel virtuous. She was suffering for a purpose and it had appealed to her But all that was over. Working out the next strategy was tougher and far, far more important. She’d read of people at this stage employing go-betweens, neutral people who went and saw the real mother and sounded out her reaction then reported back. It was unthinkable in this case. No one else knew, there was no one else at all who could fulfil such a delicate role.

But should she write or telephone first? Would that be the best way to announce her presence? Neither seemed right. If she telephoned and got her mother she felt she would dry up. There were no words adequate for a telephone conversation, they would be wasted. How could she say, ‘I am your daughter, remember, you had me nineteen years ago and I was adopted?’ No, too abrupt, too shocking. A letter would be better but it was too impersonal. She wanted to be there when the disclosure was made, to be able to hear and see her mother She would just have to march up to the front door and ring the bell and do it. She would ask if she could come in

- ‘Excuse me, you don’t know me, but could I come in for a moment?’ Her mother would be amazed and ask why. ‘Well, I have something to tell you, about myself and you.’ Then surely her

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mother would guess and her face would change and … Impossible to imagine the rest.

Shona went over and over this scenario, spotting snags all the time. Her halfbrothers being there, making it embarrassing and difficult, or her mother being in a hurry and closing the door, or some stranger she didn’t know about answering the door. She had to be sure her mother would be on her own, she had to have seen the husband, the nanny figure, and the boys all leave the house, and be as certain as it was possible to be that no one else, not even the cleaner, and certainly not the grandmother, was in. Then maybe she could invent some sort of initial cover, be a collector for some charity or other, just to ease the door-opening. She would need a tin or box but that was easily made. Save the Children, she’d be collecting for Save the Children, and this would lead her beautifully into ‘Actually, I am your child’ - oh, how ridiculous. Still, she liked the collecting disguise, it made her feel she’d have more confidence. If she lost her nerve she wouldn’t feel so bad, she could just mumble and flee after saying she was collecting.

What should she wear? This was hard. Not her black outfit. She knew she looked quite threatening in that and not at her best. Vanity should not come into it but it did. She wanted to look attractive, a girl of whom her mother could immediately be proud. She would wash and brush her hair and wear it loose. Everyone, men and women, always raved about her hair. But she couldn’t wear a dress, simply couldn’t bring herself to be false. Anyway, unless it was an unusually mild day she would be wearing a coat and she had only one, as an alternative to her black ski-jacket, a green raincoat. But she liked this coat, though it was pretty useless, not at all efficient as a raincoat and never warm enough in cold weather. She knew she looked good in it. The colour looked well with her hair and the shape flattered her. So she’d wear the flowing green coat and her black trousers and white polo-neck sweater. There wasn’t much else she could wear when she thought about it. Catriona was always offering to buy her more clothes, but she had never wanted any.

There, then, it was settled. On the morning of her birthday she would greet her real mother, trying to pick a time when she would be alone, just after everyone else had left, that hour in the morning Shona had learned was the best. Then by nightfall she would be with her real mother at last. The joy of it would be the best birthday present she had ever had.

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THEY HAD an odd way of training people in Arnesen’s firm. Young men and women were taken on as Evie had been taken on, but they were not properly apprenticed until at least six months had passed. During that time they were watched closely and only when it was decided they had the right attitude were they offered a permanent position leading to a full-time career. What this right attitude was bewildered many a new worker. It seemed to have nothing to do with actual skill, because there was no opportunity to develop or demonstrate this at first. They were not let near any cutting or sewing but spent their time fetching and carrying and tidying up. Many a disgruntled youngster, turned away after the initial trial period, claimed to have been cheated. ‘They didn’t give me a chance to show what I could do,’ was the complaint.

But Evie understood very quickly what constituted the right attitude and prospered accordingly. There was an art, in the first place, in moving about the different rooms in such a way as not to interrupt the harmony between tailor and material, or machinist and machine. You had to be able to appear at someone’s elbow without jostling it and then wait for a pause in their activity to hand them what they had asked for. Making clothes, whether cutting material or stitching it, was very far from being an automatic business - it needed intense concentration at the level to which Arnesen’s aspired and this concentration must not be broken. Evie was perfect. She slipped in and out of rooms quietly and carefully without ever calling attention to herself, and yet performing efficiently all the tasks she was given. Her intelligence was also noted. Tidying up at the end of each day needed an unsuspected amount of intelligence. The tools of the trade, the scissors (of many different sizes and

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types) and the needles and threads (of every strength and hue), all needed to be sorted and put in their respective places so that they would be ready to hand when needed. Evie had, from her very first day, loved arranging the scissors in order of size and had laid them in neat rows beginning with the shears and working down to the tiny pairs used for snipping wisps of thread after a garment had been sewed. She had a good eye, too, for colour. Matching colours was important. She’d be tossed a scrap of silk and given the command ‘Thread, quick!’ and have to rush to the huge open shelf where reels of every colour were stacked and choose the right shade immediately. It was astonishing how many people could not do this, could not see instantly which of fourteen pinks matched the rose silk.

It was this talent for colour-matching which brought Evie to Henry Arnesen’s attention during the second half of the first year she worked in his firm. Her relief at being told she would be taken on and trained now, at the end of the initial six months, was equalled by a genuine delight in her work. She was happy at Arnesen’s. She felt she fitted in, even though she had made no friends and hardly spoke a word throughout each long day. But she realised she had been accepted, she was part of what was going on and had no need any more to be nervous and worry about being thought stupid and useless. No one thought her stupid. Little compliments came her way all the time - merely a case of ‘good girl’ and ‘that’s right, that’s what I wanted’ but they were enough for someone who had never been praised in her life. The forewoman in the hand-sewn department took quite a fancy to her and used her most, claiming Evie had the surest eye for matching she had ever come across. Soon Evie was not only matching thread to material but having her opinion sought on the choice of colour for the material itself. She was taken by the forewoman, a Miss Minto, to the warehouse and asked to help match the colour of an artist’s sketch to material. Miss Minto would hold the sketch up and say she couldn’t tell whether the dress was meant to be sky blue or aquamarine and what did Evie think? Evie would timidly point to the bale she thought the best choice and Miss Minto would nod and say she was about to choose that one herself.

The customer, of course, had the last word. The fitting-room was on the first floor and Evie was overawed by its grandeur. It had a beautiful carpet and silk curtains and a fire always burning in the marble fireplace. Here Arnesen’s most important customers came to

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consult over patterns and materials and then later to try on garments at various stages in the making of them. If the customer was very special, Henry Arnesen himself would handle the consultations, but usually Miss Minto did so. She wore different clothes on these fitting days and looked almost as grand as the customers. When she told Evie she was going to be granted the privilege of helping with the fittings she also told her she would have to smarten up before she was ever allowed in a customer’s presence. ‘You are shabby, I am afraid,’ she said. ‘You will need a decent dress, Evie.’ Evie was overcome with embarrassment. She knew she was shabby, if clean and neat, but there was nothing she could do about it. Her wage was only just sufficient to support her in her Warwick Road attic and it had been a struggle to save up enough to buy something she needed (a pair of shoes) far more than a dress. But Miss Minto was not insensitive to the situation of young apprentices and went on to tell Evie to go and pick enough material to make a dress for herself. It had to be black and it had to be plain but beyond that she could please herself.

The dress was made within a day. Evie cut it out herself, given the use of the edge of a table and a standard pattern to guide her, and it was machined for her by Mabel, the kindest of the machinists. There were no fittings. Evie could not possibly have taken off her existing threadbare navy dress, because then Mabel and everyone would have seen the parlous state of the undergarments, so she pretended she had tried this new dress on when she had tacked the pieces together in another room, and that it was just right. Since she had measured herself very carefully, disaster was avoided. The dress fitted. It was plain enough even for Miss Minto who, in fact, complained it was too plain. ‘You look like a mute at a funeral, Evie, for heaven’s sake put some braid on the sleeves or something.’ Then there was the problem of her hair, her poor, difficult, wild hair. Evie wore it in an attempt at a bun but, though she flattened it every morning with water, it would not stay flat all day long, and by the afternoon wisps were escaping all round her face. Miss Minto made her take her hairpins out so that she could look at the hair properly and ordered Evie to fetch a brush while she ‘had a go’ at it. Evie could have told her ‘a go’ would fail. ‘For goodness’ sake, girl, it’s like a dog’s hair, it must have driven your mother wild.’ Evie blushed and kept silent. ‘You will have to wear a cap,’ Miss Minto

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said finally, ‘there are some quite pretty lace caps about. I will get you one, it is a justified expense.’

Clad in the new black cotton dress and the white lace mob cap covering her bothersome hair, Evie was duly initiated into the rites and mysteries of the fitting-room. It was her job to assist Miss Minto in all kinds of small ways - to hold lengths of material up, to hand over tape-measures and pins, to get down on her knees and do the pinning of the hem under the watchful eye of her superior. She was told not to say a word but that was an unnecessary instruction to give Evie. The customers usually had their own maid with them, or else a friend to help them dress and disrobe in the small room off the fitting-room, but occasionally Evie was called upon to assist in the removal of garments. She found this excruciatingly intimate and dreaded her scarlet face being commented on, but these women she helped disrobe were far too self-obsessed to notice Evie’s agitation. She wondered whether, if she had had a mother, the sight of mature, unclothed female bodies would have seemed quite unremarkable, but as it was they seemed peculiar to her. Her own body was not something she had studied since her first days with Mrs Bewley, when she had thought herself so horribly like a skeleton, but even now, when she saw the breasts and stomachs and bare arms of these women trying on clothes, she felt like a different species herself. Her own body, though no longer so frighteningly thin, shrank within her black dress as she surveyed the well-rounded proportions of the customers. And these women liked their bodies, they were happy to preen in front of mirrors and conscious only of admiration. There was never anything wrong with their own shape if a dress did not look good - it was always the fault of the dress or dressmaker. Evie heard such lies being spoken by Miss Minto that she could hardly credit she was hearing aright, but then after the customer had gone she would hear the truth and understand the nature of the game being played.

Henry Arnesen himself only attended fittings for coats or suits. Day dresses and skirts and blouses were left to Miss Minto, though Mr Arnesen did occasionally supervise the choice of evening dresses, if not the fitting of them, simply because the materials for these were expensive, and it was important no mistakes should be made. Miss Minto was always there too, although merely in an advisory capacity. Evie, when she was first taken to one of these special fittings, was there in no capacity at all. She was there to be ‘on hand’

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and to open the door. The customer on that first occasion was the Dowager Lady Lowther, a woman well past middle age who was small and exceedingly stout. To Evie’s relief the dowager had brought her own maid and required no further assistance. Her maid stood behind the sofa upon which her mistress sat and stared through Evie as though she were not there, holding one end of a length of gorgeous blue satin while Miss Minto held the other and Mr Arnesen pointed out the depth of its sheen and beauty of its rich colour. The dowager was to be presented to Her Majesty the Queen at some grand function and wished to be dressed in appropriate splendour. There was a tension in the room which Evie felt most distinctly. Mr Arnesen had already spoken of the problems ahead to Miss Minto in Evie’s hearing. The dowager was almost impossible to please, convinced as she was that she had grown merely a little plump when her size was gross. She would need flattering and the dress to be cut as cunningly as possible to minimise and disguise the serious imperfections of her figure. Choice of material and of colour, Mr Arnesen had stressed, were vital. The dowager must be steered away from her favourite colour, a bright fuchsia, and towards paler shades, preferably a grey-blue or dark bluegreen.