From amongst the black garments which were not really black, she pulled a Victorian maid’s dress with a boned bodice of bombazine and a full wool skirt which fell in stiff, pockmarked folds, the severity of it softened by the addition of cream lace at the neck and wrist. The hooks and eyes fastening the front were orange with rust.
‘Don’t know what the hell I can do with it. It’s a learning garment, like a sampler. I’ve ruined it, really. I tried freezing it to get rid of an infestation, which did the trick, but moth eggs are organic, they rot, so when you freeze them and they dry out, you get mould spots.’
She could see the girl hesitate.
‘It’s sort of… quaint.’
‘Not very comfortable unless you happen to be a Victorian midget and don’t mind the same dress every day. It’s been mended almost to death and it’s the oldest dress I’ve got. I’m not into costume, although you never know. The kettle’s over there. I’ll put it on. May as well start as we mean to go on. Tea, every hour at least.’
Ann wrinkled her nose, crossed her arms and shivered in pleasure, forgetting that unpleasant word infestation.
‘A dressing room,’ she said. ‘With its own stage.’
Hen laughed.
‘Well, I’m glad you like it, because I love it, but I’m afraid when the sun comes out you might see it for what it really is, which is one big room full of tat. Second-hand rubbish of no value to anyone but the owners, a scrapyard really, but the scrap’s made of cloth rather than metal. It looks better in the dark, in winter. This is the fun side, where I try and make something out of nothing for people who want it. The business end’s in the basement. Everything that comes in here is already damaged, but it has to go through the basement, first, to be cleaned. Only comes here when either it’s fit to mend or fit to turn into something else. This room’s for sewing or trying things out. Downstairs is more serious: other people’s clothes. Do you have milk and sugar in your tea?’
Ann nodded, still looking round. A nice, insecure girl, with a mother who despaired of her and wanted to find her something to do. She likes sewing, the mother said in disgust; she wants to learn to sew. Nice girl or not, Hen reckoned she would get through the day and no longer. Not every teenager could stand a job in a room with no company other than a grown-up and the radio. What had been Hen’s idea of heaven might become Ann’s idea of hell, especially when Hen gave her the first task. Which would be to unpick the bodice of the Victorian maid’s dress, let out every seam and put it back together again a whole size larger. That way, they would see if she could sew.
Making the tea, sitting down at the table in the wardrobe room, Hen felt a moment of uncomplicated contentment, because although in this room she might make mistakes, she could do no wrong to anyone, except perhaps mislead a newcomer to her own black arts about the financial prospects of sewing and cleaning for a living. They were as doubtful as they always had been. She frowned to herself. It wasn’t quite right that she could do no harm to anyone in here, and she looked at the girl with a touch of worry, because she did not want to care for her. She did not want responsibility for another human being, however temporarily, and she did not want to have to be cheerful. Too late, the girl was here; she had promised, and that was that.
‘I don’t exactly know what you do with all this,’ Ann said. ‘Only Mummy says what you do with stuff is priceless.’
‘Priceless? As in ridiculous?’
‘No… no, I think she meant beyond price.’
‘What a kind woman your mother is, but I doubt it’s true, and it’s probably a bit of an exaggeration to call it a business, more like a surgery, but such as it is, it’s based on sentiment as well as frustration. Because your modern man and woman seem to have all the choices in the world when it comes to clothes, but they don’t really. Enough people want what they simply can’t find in a shop or a catalogue, some people don’t know what they want, and a lot of people just like old stuff, or want back what they’ve seen, or owned before. And some yearn for haute couture, I know I do, or they want old things made new, or they want a clean slate. I’m not doing very well here, am I? That’s what I want the business to be, but the bare bones of the thing is all about dealing with rot, stains and bugs and that’s in the basement. I just love old clothes. I can’t bear them dying.’
Mustn’t lecture her, Hen told herself. I’ve nothing to lecture about, because I really don’t know enough. I’ve learned on the hoof, and from Jake and it’s all my mother’s fault. Ann was looking at the maid’s dress.
‘I think it’s been let in and let out lots and lots of times.’
‘Exactly. Probably had a dozen wearers and none of them owned it.’
If ever Hen was asked for her job description, she either said she messed about with clothes or that she was a cleaner of clothes, both accurate. There was, she would say if asked, a difference between conservation and preservation; you conserved a thing for further use, while you preserved it for posterity. She was never sure if she had the definitions right, but what she meant was that she was making things wearable again, even in another form. She was giving garments another lease of life, and if they were really at the end of their natural span, turning them into something else. There was a customer who mourned the loss of a red moth-ridden skirt and a blue cashmere coat, both beyond redemption, so she used the surviving material from both to make a patchwork waistcoat now worn with jeans. The remnants of a favourite silk dress, faded with age and hopelessly torn and stained, had the makings of a scarf or a sash. Old could be restored or incorporated with new; an old quilted jacket could be lined and bordered with emerald silk, radically revamped with buttons. Hen had an ongoing love affair with buttons. Buttons had weight; she had thousands of buttons. She would rescue, redeem, conserve anything for anybody, let out, let in, remodel, persuade against remodelling, recreate, tear apart, treasure and above all, clean. She would also buy what she could. This room was not a museum, it was a tailor’s shop where someone might also come and find something which suited what they were, or what they had been, or what they might become, rather than what current fashion said they should be. I rescue things, she said. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry that did not lead to this, and I blame it all on part-time jobs and my mother’s dressing-up box.
Hen sat, in her favourite room of all time, sewing. She had coveted Peter Friel’s linen napkin as the perfect lining for a small pouch of a handbag made out of a badly perished embroidered linen jacket. What are you, Hen? What do you do for a living, Hen, with all your qualifications? I’m a scavenger, trying to make a business out of doing what I like, and today, for the first time in ages, I feel content. I think I’ll stop doing wedding dresses, though. They simply don’t adapt; too many dreams attached.
‘How did you start?’
‘My mum teaching us to sew, and then her dressing-up box, I suppose. Then I was a dogsbody in a theatre for a while and I liked the costumes more than the plays. I met a man in the wardrobe room who cleaned the clothes they wore on stage. He was the real expert with a little business at home. A specialist cleaner. He owns this house; he set it up for cleaning. He’s retired, now, but he persuaded me into this because he needed help and I hated the job I had. Like I said, the bare bones of this is cleaning rather than making. Restoring rather than creating; I’m not a designer. But cleaning’s the basis. Only it has to be expanded, even Jake agreed on that. Cleaning doesn’t pay the bills, however much fun it is.’