‘This is very kind of you,’ Peter said. ‘Kinder than I deserve.’
‘It isn’t kind,’ she said. ‘You said you had a garment to inspect. You had me interested, that’s all.’
She led him down the stairs, past the shop and through the door to the basement. The workroom was too personal a space, with too much of herself in it, while down here nothing much happened except overnight. He was allowed to see how she worked, not how work overlapped with how she lived. He did not seem to notice.
There had been a great misty cold outside, which made the interior of the basement seem warm as well as stark in the neon light and the blue of the insect repellent lamp that stayed on all the year round. It was entirely without the comfort of the sewing room. Upstairs was for creating; downstairs was for cleaning and destruction. There were two large tanks of stainless steel, one long enough to hold a body, the other smaller and deeper. The shallower tank held a piece of lace, soaking in solvent. The tanks had drainage pipes leading below the floor. Hen knew how to filter the used solvent, to examine the dirt it displaced. The whole place smelled cleanly of benign chemicals, acceptable, useful poisons. There were gallons of solvents in plastic barrels, and a stone sink with smaller barrels of liquid detergent. A workbench, also stainless steel, half covered with a dress. A ventilator, a low-wattage heater which kept the room no more than warm, but not warm enough to tempt Peter to take off his coat. The smaller tank reminded him of a deep fat fryer in a fish and chip shop. On top of it, sitting in a basket-like sieve, sat two antique teddy bears, drying out like freshly draining deep-fried chips. They were bedraggled and defiant and they delighted him. He liked the smell and feel of the place: it seemed to clear his head. He put down the suitcase and went towards them, stooping down to speak.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. There was no reply.
‘They’ve been dunked,’ Hen said, touching them affectionately. ‘Moth got them. Remarkable survivors, moths. If you soak them in solvent long enough, you deprive the eggs of the oxygen they need, kill them and dislodge them, so their dear little carcases should be dropping into the filter, right now. But moth eggs are pernicious little buggers, they seem to be able to live for years, and some of them might come back. So Gilbert and Bob have to stick around while I see what I collect and what happens next. At least they have one another.’
Peter Friel fondled the ears of the teddies and looked. He seemed to have forgotten his mission in his curiosity, or maybe he just liked the smell.
‘Dry cleaning’s a bit of a misdescription, isn’t it?’ was all he said. ‘Everything seems to have to get wet.’
He was peering into the tank which held the lace, then looking above him to the wooden three-tiered hanging frame suspended from the ceiling over the sink and the freezer. He grinned at her, inviting explanations, and she warmed to him for actually wanting to know. He remembered Marianne Shearer in court. You’re a dry cleaner, Ms Joyce? No wonder you wanted something else to do, or do you just love meddling in other people’s dirt?
‘No, it isn’t dry, not in any sense of the word, but solvents act differently to water. Water swells the fabric, and then shrinks it in the drying. Solvents are less invasive, stay where they touch, dry quicker. Colours remain stable in the right solvent, but you still have to soak the thing in liquid for long enough for it to work. More than once, sometimes, until you get it right. If you can cut out a piece and test, you do that first. Again and again. Sometimes water’s best. Like this…’
She loved to explain and he wanted to listen. She could lose herself in her own excitement, as long as someone would listen. Angel never listened. That was her problem. Hen was by the workbench, pointing at the dress. ‘Water damage,’ she said. ‘I tried everything. Solvents didn’t work. But if I put a towel underneath and drip boiling water on to the stain, it begins to go. Like with like.’
The enthusiasm began to feel out of place. He stopped looking around and remembered that the errand was more than an excuse to see her again.
‘If this is too difficult,’ he began, awkwardly, ‘perhaps you could recommend someone else.’
‘It isn’t difficult, although I’m not an expert, yet. I often deal with dead people’s clothes, although I don’t usually know how they died. Museums do the same, don’t they? It doesn’t affect me. Put it here, let’s see.’
He put the suitcase on the table, opened it and let her do the rest. He had twisted the skirt to contain the buoyant folds of it, watched as she lifted it out, and saw how it expanded as soon as it was freed.
‘Oh,’ Hen said. ‘Oh.’
‘Could you describe it in words?’ Peter asked. ‘Only I couldn’t begin to do that.’
The skirt seemed to fill the room, as it had in Thomas’s office. She handled it confidently, the way he had seen a dealer in antiquities handle a precious object. In the bright light, the skirt looked durable and strong and Hen’s pleasure in it was obvious and slightly repellent.
‘It’s really rather fantastic.’ She turned the cloth, held it this way and that and her voice was high. ‘Look, it’s made of hundreds of ribbons, stitched together vertically with the tiniest of seams to make the basic material, and then pleated. Four, no five, different colours of ribbon to give this effect, all in these stiff, accordion pleats, so that it flares out, structured and full, if you see what I mean. There must be a thousand seams in this cloth, and there’s metres and metres of fabric compressed into these pleats. It’s made for twirling round, because it moves, and then comes back and falls straight back in shape. No wonder it seems to bounce, no wonder it seems to float. It’s like a pleated rainbow. Description in words? Exhibit A consists of silk grosgrain ribbons, artfully combined for stunning effect. How marvellous that it survived such a fall. It’s delicate, but tough, like the best silk is. Would you like a drink? I would.’
She put the skirt down, carelessly, over a chair. Delicate but tough, like she was. It shocked him a little that she should be so objective and yet so welcoming, but if clothes were Frockserve’s business, as they were according to her website, he supposed it followed that they were more important than their own, personal associations and whoever the hell had worn them, dead or alive. Didn’t matter whether worn by a dictator, sadist, pope, social butterfly or executioner. They were all pieces of cloth.
He said, yes, please, and sat, feeling strangely at home in her laboratory, hardly conscious of the suitcase between them. Hen was easy to watch and did not seem to mind being watched as she fetched wine from a shelf and presented him with a glass of deep red. The colour of it reminded him of the predominant colour in the skirt and he looked at it again, sitting there, over the chair, like a second guest. No, red was not the colour that predominated: they all did. Dark crimson, burgundy, purple, maroon, and it made him dizzy. Hen sat too, raised her glass to the skirt, nodding towards it deferentially, entirely without sentiment.
‘I’ve seen a cape made out of material like that, once,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you to see it, if you like. I doubt if anyone’s ever patented that use of material. The design of the thing I saw was American, 1940s, real haute couture. You couldn’t put a price on this skirt, you know. It’s precious and unique, might have taken a year to make. It’s built, rather than simply made. It would have cost a bomb. So, was she rich, or did she inherit it?’
Peter sipped the wine that tasted good. Must not spilclass="underline" must listen to her closely and must explain.
‘The thing is, I told you on the phone, I have to find out what Marianne Shearer was up to, and that’s my job at the moment. All her records are missing: there’s no record of what she might have been thinking, except, perhaps, this. Her executor got hold of the clothes she was wearing in the vain hope there was some message hidden somewhere in them; well, there isn’t, is there?’