As I brought my gaze back down again I saw that, despite the hush, Bella Aitken and I were no longer alone on the floor of the atrium. Behind each of the maybe mahogany counters, girls and women had come to stand silently to attention, as uniform as so many tin soldiers. That is, some of them were freshly minted and some battle-scarred but they were turned out of just one mould. They were dressed, encased is perhaps a better way of phrasing it, in the kind of simple black frocks easily run up at home from a paper pattern and I wondered if they were handed bolts of cloth and told to make their own uniforms like the housemaids in my mother’s day. If so, then for the jubilee they had evidently been given extra rations. Some of them had run up ruffled collars, some had fashioned corsages, the less adept had plumped for sashes and bows in their hair, but one and all had touches of mauve and gold. I felt that I would see mauve and gold in my sleep that night, swimming and fluttering before my eyes in fish and feather form.
Little did I know what sight would indeed flash behind my closed eyelids that night and for many nights to come. In the first of my detecting adventures, one which I would hardly call a case since I slipped into it and was bobbing out of my depth before I had realised it had begun, I remember that there was an air of dread hanging around like the pall from a snuffed tallow candle, and it began long before the events which should have instigated it. I was almost tempted to call it a premonition once it had come true, but I resisted. For surely it is the mark of a fool to trumpet premonitions once they have been fulfilled. Surely, unless one has taken out a half-page announcement in advance, one really does have to keep one’s lip firmly buttoned afterwards too.
I digress. Alec is wont to murmur, ‘Yes, darling, you do rather,’ in response to that comment and so I try not to give him an opening. My point is that while in the first case there was dread far in advance of anything dreadful, the beginning of the Aitken affair – a young girl missing, her mother awash with unspoken terrors and her father so well-hidden behind his own secrets that all one could really see was the hiding – found me no more than intrigued and diverted by the prospect before me. Mary and Bella Aitken were entertaining, the jubilee promised more entertainment still of one sort or another, Dunfermline’s holiday mood was catching (and I was glad to know that flags and bunting still stirred a small corner of my girlish soul; of course, one must put away childish things as one is bidden, but I would not like to be quite beyond the reach of bunting).
Nor was I quite past being seduced by a wrapped and beribboned parcel, and the ‘pre-war overstock’ – I had been impressed by the way the term slipped from Bella’s tongue – was heaped up in tantalising abundance like fruit outside a greengrocer’s, except that instead of being in chip baskets at hip height – at Dalmatian’s muzzle height as I had had brought home to me one day when Bunty snaffled a ripe pear in Dunkeld’s High Street – the boxes were set out upon high circular stands, something like roulette wheels.
‘Lord above us,’ said Bella, ‘where did she unearth these, I wonder.’
‘What are they?’ I asked.
‘From the old food hall, I think,’ Bella said. ‘Repainted for the day. They must have been mouldering away up in the attics for twenty years at least.’
I tipped my head back to look at the ceiling again. I had never thought of a department store as a place which would have attics.
‘From the old days when the clerks lived in,’ said Bella. ‘A warren of nasty little cells and now they’re stuffed to the rafters with whatever Mary thinks she’ll find a use for one day.’ She stirred the heap of boxes in the roulette wheel and shook her head, laughing. They were, to be frank, a little battered-looking, slightly worn on the corners and slightly warped with damp or age. The ribbons tied around them, needless to say, were new. ‘At a guess,’ said Bella, ‘I’d say these are probably braces, or collars, or possibly sock suspenders. Jubilee notions!’
‘Mrs Aitken does seem to have a great deal of… um… zeal for… um…’ I said, a new low even for me, who am often pressed into impromptu diplomacy and found wanting. Bella Aitken gave me a conspiratorial look and leaned in closer before speaking again.
‘Forty-eight years since her ascension and she still can’t believe her luck,’ she said, in a murmur. I felt my eyes widen, but did not have time to pursue the hint, because Mary Aitken was crossing the shop floor towards us – the very shop floor from which I inferred she had been elevated to her current reign. She brought with her two groups of honoured guests. One group consisted of the Provost, red-faced, beaming, barrel-chested and in all his robes and chains, his good lady wife, equally red-faced, equally barrel-chested, in a costume and wearing a smile which put her husband’s ceremonial garments and expression effortlessly in the shade, and two youths who must be their sons – plain, round, tricked out in boys’ brigade uniforms for reasons best understood by their mama, and both with the same black hair as the Provost, flattened to their heads with such quantities of pomade that they appeared to be wearing little Bakelite skullcaps, with not a suggestion of individual strands of hair.
The other party were of quite a different order but were no less exemplars of their type; Lady Lawson and her three sons were very tall, very thin and had that worn, straggly look which comes either from avoiding any appearance of effort or from real hardship, gently being borne. I guessed that the Lawson specimens were probably impoverished rather than too grand to be seen trying; for why else would they be here if not for the buns?
There was a flurry of introductions and then a repetition of them all as Jack and Abigail arrived with yet more favoured guests. I nodded and smiled and was aware that all around us the haberdashery floor and the galleries above were filling with onlookers. The flag-wavers, the bearers of fifty-shilling tokens, were jostling for a view with much respectful whispering and smothered giggles, but it was with some surprise I realised that what they were jostling for a view of was us, standing there in the middle of the floor. There did not seem to be any dais or other indication that this spot was one where a drama was to be played, or so I thought until I saw, wound around a brass hook screwed into the edge of one of the old food-hall wheels, the tasselled end of a cord. Its other end was lost amongst the banners high above us. Balloons, I thought, or possibly confetti; someone would pull it and the jubilee would begin.
As I stood there, squinting up, our number was swelled by two more; not exalted customers these but a middle-aged man of military bearing with a purple and gold handkerchief sprouting out of his breast pocket and a middle-aged woman dressed in Aitkens’ black, most of her narrow bosom covered by a corsage which could have served as a table centrepiece for a large banquet. Mary Aitken welcomed these – they had to be the highest-ranking employees, surely – into the enclosure and introduced them around.
‘Mr Muir is the manager of the gentlemen’s side,’ she said, ‘and Miss Hutton for the ladies’.’
‘Where’s Mrs Lumsden?’ said Bella. Mary Aitken treated Lady Lawson to one of her smiles before turning to her sister-in-law.
‘The rest of our employees are watching from the upper gallery,’ she said.
‘Mrs Lumsden is in charge of Household,’ Bella began to explain to me, but was interrupted.
‘And what with curtains and upholstery being on the second and linens and housewares in the basement, I’m kept on my toes, eh?’ She was a tiny woman, almost completely spherical, with her gold and mauve ribbon wrapped around her head and tied under her chin in a bow. ‘Mrs, Mrs, Abigail dear, Jack son. Hello there, Netta.’ This to the Provost’s wife who at Mrs Lumsden’s entrance had brightened back into smiles (the Lawsons had had a dampening effect upon her, as I imagine they had meant to).