Page 113 of Still Me
Conscious that, as she’d lived alone for years, she might need her space, I would often go out for a few hours in the day, sit in the library and look for jobs but without the urgency I had felt previously, and, in truth, there was nothing I wanted to do. She would usually be either sleeping or propped in front of her television when I returned. “Now, Louisa,” she would say, pushing herself upright, as if we had been mid-conversation, “I’d been wondering where you were. Would you be kindenough to take Dean Martin for a little stroll? He’s been looking rather concerned...”
On Saturdays I went with Meena to the library protests. The crowds had grown thinner now, the library’s future dependent not just on public support but a crowd-funded legal challenge. Nobody seemed to hold out much hope for it. We stood, less chilled as each week passed, waving our battered placards and accepting with thanks the hot drinks and snacks that still arrived from neighbors and local shopkeepers. I’d learned to look out for familiar faces—the grandmother I’d met on my first visit, whose name was Martine and now greeted me with a hug and a broad smile. A handful of others waved or said hi, the security guard, the woman who brought pakoras, the librarian with the beautiful hair. I never saw the old woman with the ripped epaulets again.
I had been living in Mrs. De Witt’s apartment for thirteen days when I bumped into Agnes. Given our proximity to each other, I suppose it was surprising that it hadn’t happened earlier. It was raining heavily and I was wearing one of Mrs. De Witt’s old raincoats—a yellow and orange 1970s plastic one with bright circular flowers all over it—and she had put a little mackintosh with an elevated hood on Dean Martin, which made me snort with laughter every time I looked at it. We ran along the corridor, me giggling at the sight of his bulbous little face under the plastic hood, and I stopped suddenly as the lift doors opened and Agnes stepped out, tailed by a young woman with an iPad, her hair scraped back into a tight ponytail. She stopped and stared at me. Something not quite readable passed across her face—something that might have been awkwardness, a mute apology, or even suppressed fury at my being there, it was hard to tell. Her eyes met mine, she opened her mouth as if to speak, then pressed her lips together and walked past me as if she hadn’t seen me, her glossy blond hair swinging and the girl close behind.
I stood watching as the front door closed emphatically after them, my cheeks burning like a spurned lover’s.
I had a vague memory of us laughing in a noodle bar.
We are friends, yes?
And then I took a deep breath, called the little dog to me to fasten his lead, and headed out into the rain.
—
In the end, it was the girls at the Vintage Clothes Emporium who offered me paid employment. A container of stuff was arriving from Florida—several wardrobes’ worth—and they needed an extra pair of hands to go over each item before it hit the shelves, sew on missing buttons, and make sure everything that went out on the rails was steam-pressed and clean in time for a vintage clothes fair at the end of April. (Articles that didn’t smell fresh were the most commonly returned.) The pay was minimum wage but the company was good, the coffee free, and they would give me a 20 percent discount on anything I wanted to buy. My appetite for purchasing new clothes had diminished along with my lack of accommodation, but I said yes gladly and, once I was sure Mrs. De Witt was stable enough to walk Dean Martin at least to the end of the block and back by herself, I would head to the store every Tuesday at ten a.m. and spend the day in their back room, cleaning, sewing, and chatting to the girls during their cigarette breaks, which seemed to happen every fifteen minutes or so.
Margot—I was forbidden to call her Mrs. De Witt anymore: “You’re living in my home, for goodness’ sake”—listened carefully when I told her of my new role, then asked what I was using to repair the clothes. I described the huge plastic box of old buttons and zippers but added that the whole thing was such a chaotic mess that I often couldn’t find a match, and rarely more than three of the same type of button. She rose heavily from her chair and motioned to me to follow. I walked very close to her, these days—she didn’t seem completely steady on her feet, and frequently listed to one side, like a badly loaded ship in high seas. But she made it, her hand trailing the wall for extra stability.
“Under that bed, dear. No, there. There are two chests. That’s it.” I knelt and wrenched out two heavy wooden boxes with lids. Opening them, I found them filled to the brim with rows of buttons, zippers, tapes, and fringes. There were hooks and eyes, fastenings of every type, all neatly separated and labeled, brass naval buttons and tiny Chinese ones, covered with bright silk, bone, and shell, sewn neatly onto little strips of card. In the cushioned lid sat sprays of pins, rows of different-sized needles, and an assortment of silk threads on tiny pegs. I ran my fingers across them reverently.
“I was given those for my fourteenth birthday. My grandfather hadthem shipped from Hong Kong. If you get stuck you can check in there. I used to take the buttons and zippers from everything I didn’t wear anymore, you know. That way if you lose a button on something nice, and can’t replace it, you always have a full set that you can sew on instead.”
“But won’t you need them?”
She waved her good hand. “Oh, my fingers are far too clumsy for sewing now. Half the time I can’t even work the buttonholes. And so few people bother with fixing buttons and zippers these days—they just throw their clothes in the trash and buy something awful from one of those discount stores. You take them, dear. It would be nice to feel they were useful.”
—
So, by luck and perhaps a little by design, I now had two jobs that I loved. And with them I found a kind of contentment. Every Tuesday evening I would bring home a few items of clothing in a checkered laundry bag of plastic webbing, and while Margot napped, or watched television, I would carefully remove all the remaining buttons on each item and sew on a new set, holding them up afterward for her approval.
“You sew quite nicely,” she remarked, peering at my stitches through her spectacles, as we sat in front ofWheel of Fortune. “I thought you’d be as dreadful at it as you are at everything else.”
“At school needlework was pretty much the only thing I was any good at.” I smoothed out the creases on my lap and prepared to refold a jacket.
“I was just the same,” she said. “By thirteen, I was making all my own clothes. My mother showed me how to cut a pattern and that was it. I was away. I became obsessed with fashion.”
“What was it you did, Margot?” I put down my stitching.
“I was fashion editor of theLadies’ Look. It doesn’t exist now—never made it into the nineties. But we were around for thirty years or more, and I was fashion editor for most of that.”
“Is that the magazine in the frames? The ones on the wall?”
“Yes, those were my favorite covers. I was rather sentimental and kept a few.” Her face softened briefly and she tilted her head, casting me a confiding look. “It was quite the job back then, you know. The magazine company wasn’t terribly keen on having women in senior roles butthere was the most dreadful man in charge of the fashion pages and my editor—a wonderful man, Mr. Aldridge—argued that having an old fuddy-duddy, who still wore suspenders to hold up his socks, dictating what fashion meant simply wouldn’t work with the younger girls. He thought I had an eye for it, promoted me, and that was that.”
“So that’s why you have so many beautiful clothes.”
“Well, I certainly didn’t marry rich.”
“Did you marry at all?”
She looked down and picked at something on her knee. “Goodness, you do ask a lot of questions. Yes, I did. A lovely man. Terrence. He worked in publishing. But he died in 1962, three years after we married, and that was it for me.”
“You never wanted children?”
“I had a son, dear, but not with my husband. Is that what you wanted to know?”
I flushed. “No. I mean, not like that. I—gosh—having children is—I mean I wouldn’t presume to—”
