‘Mrs Ninian,’ said Elsie in a tiny voice, all relish gone, ‘we can’t go in. We’re on our way to the bank with the deposit.’
‘On your way?’ The black column spoke in a tone which should have cracked the tiles beneath her feet and caused the plate glass to fall to the pavement in shards like icicles. ‘It would be bad enough loitering on the way back,’ she said, ‘but standing there goss-’ She looked at me again and swallowed her words. ‘Standing anywhere, doing anything with the deposit still on you.’ She snapped her head round and looked along the street to the tolbooth clock which was showing twenty minutes past three. ‘Get there now and get straight back again.’
Mima and Elsie bobbed and scuttled off like a pair of beetles, leaving Mary glaring after them.
‘And I’ll have their half-week’s pay-packet made up for them,’ she said, spitting the words through clenched teeth. I could not let this pass, in all conscience.
‘Please don’t blame the girls,’ I said. ‘I waylaid them. They were most anxious to be on their way but they could hardly cut and run, now could they?’
Mary said nothing.
‘They’ll make it,’ I went on. ‘How far away is the bank?’ I could not help glancing across the street to where there was a branch of the British Linen into which Aitkens’ cashiers could have shied their deposits from the Emporium windows. Mary caught my look and her eyes narrowed to slits.
‘We have nothing to do with that place,’ she hissed – I had never seen such a blameless institution engender such venom – then she blinked.
‘You waylaid them?’ she said. ‘Didn’t you receive my telegram?’
‘Certainly I did,’ I said, thinking furiously. ‘Yes, indeed.’ What excuse could I possibly come up with for being here? Then inspiration dawned upon me. ‘I’m here as a customer today, Mrs Aitken. I waylaid the girls, checking that the store was open.’
Her black eyes could narrow no further but her lips all but disappeared.
‘Really?’ she said.
‘Of course, I feel quite dreadful now,’ I said, truthfully enough as it happened. ‘I never would have dreamed that any of the family would be here.’ I was getting into my stride. ‘In fact, I didn’t suppose for the moment that any of the family actually worked in the store at all.’ I gave the tape measure a little glance and let my gaze travel up the long arc of pins on her bosom.
‘I only came in for Lady Lawson,’ she said, forced into explanation. ‘I take care of a very few, very special ladies myself.’
‘But Lady Lawson surely can’t have expected you to be here today,’ I said. All the wisps of suspicion I had felt about the pair of them on the day of the jubilee were back, thicker than wisps now.
‘I insisted,’ she said. Was it my imagination that she shifted her feet a little? ‘Lady Lawson herself has been nothing but gracious and kind.’ She spoke in definite, or one might almost say, defiant, tones.
‘Well, it’s very kind of you,’ I said, smiling.
‘Not really,’ Mary said. She turned and looked into the window behind her at the empty space and the wreath of flowers where the display of stock should be. ‘They say life goes on, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘And that time heals all ills. But I don’t agree. Time unfilled is a burden. Work is the thing. Work goes on and work fills up time. I am seventy-four years old and I have filled my life with work. It has never failed me. My daughter has never worked, nor Jack, although he is a director, of course. A businessman, like his father. The devil makes work for idle hands.’
I started at that and regarded her very closely. Did she know about Jack and Hilda Hepburn?
‘What I mean to say, Mrs Gilver, is that they have no duties to help them through difficult times. If they were kept busy in this place like I am…’ She gestured towards the window, looking pained as she did so. I thought the wreaths and black velvet had suddenly reminded her of her loss, but when she spoke again she revealed the true source of her distress; a most surprising one. ‘I let myself be talked into this but I’m not happy. They look too much like those clever-clever windows you see now.’
‘Like Hep-’ I bit it off just in time.
‘One glove and a scrap of chiffon,’ said Mary, with icy scorn. ‘Frenchified. Aitkens’ goes in for a good, honest, selling window, always has done. I like to see them decked out properly, not done up in that wheedling, arty way.’
I recalled the mannequins standing in the sand and although I could not agree with Mary, I did loathe Hilda Hepburn – if it were she behind them – for such teasing of a family she had secretly wronged.
‘And speaking of good honest selling, madam,’ she said, ‘what is it you’re looking for?’ She folded her hands together at one side of her waist and inclined her head, looking every bit the perfect assistant, but the way her eyes glinted showed me that she did not believe for one minute that a shopping list had brought me here today.
I smiled confidently back at her; for I was getting good at this. Then my smile faltered. Actually I was hopeless at it. That is, I was very proud of having hit upon the strategy, thinking it a perfect way to start conversations in quiet shops and tearooms, but the only time I had put it into practice I had asked an antiques dealer if he had such a thing as a tip-top tea-table, while actually resting my elbow on one. I had to pretend I wanted it in oak and Alec had to walk out of the shop to hide his smirking. Surely, though, I could think of something beyond Aitkens’.
‘Opera gloves,’ I said, trying not to show too much of my triumph.
‘Certainly,’ said Mary, not bothering to hide any of hers. ‘Let me show you to our glove department. Miss Torrance will be delighted to take care of you.’ Who would have thought, I asked myself, following her, that one could buy opera gloves in Dunfermline?
I have always had a great affection and affinity for a gloves counter, from the days when I was taken to Liberty’s twice a year to try on white kid and cotton in spring, brown leather and fur-lined velvet in autumn (gloves being the one garment which even my mother conceded could not be run up in the village or by nursemaids at home). I thrilled when the ‘old lady’ as I called her to myself, although she could not have been thirty-five in reality, stepped into the backroom and brought out the high chair for me to sit on during my fitting, and even though it was a sign of approaching maturity and these were usually welcome I was sorry the year I grew tall enough to sit on the ordinary chair like all the grown-up ladies. Only having had two sons of my own, of course, I could not say whether the chair still existed, with its dark green paint, its green and purple striped cushion and the scuff marks on the spars where generations of little girls had wound their feet for purchase as they struggled with those tiny pearl buttons, but I like to think so.
As we swept beyond the haberdashery, through one of the arches, I noticed a stout individual busy at the stationery drawers who had no fewer than three pencils sticking out of her bun and who had tucked a great many paper chits of some kind into the belt of her serge dress in the way a bookie’s runner will stuff tickets into his hatband.
‘Slips, Miss Armstrong,’ Mary snapped as we drew close to her. The woman started, letting a handful of card samples burst out of her grasp and clatter to the floor. They must, I had time to think, be very good quality card to make that sound instead of fluttering. ‘Slips belong in the order book,’ Mary went on to the top of Miss Armstrong’s head as she bent to retrieve them. ‘Not about the person.’
‘Of course, Mrs Ninian,’ said the woman from her position on the floor. ‘Sorry, Mrs Ninian.’ Mary swept past and the woman shot her a look of such dislike that I was startled. I would make sure to talk to Miss Armstrong in the course of my day, I thought, as I hurried on.