One Day I Shall Astonish the World, page 3
‘Thank you for letting me know about the cat,’ I said, outside my house, and we went on chatting for a while until my brother, James, tapped on the passenger window with one finger. I alighted from the car and looking at the house, saw my mother peering out and through the gap in the curtains I could see she was in her underwear.
Roy leaned right over and looked at us both through the open door, and James said, ‘At least park round the corner next time, can’t you,’ and, to prevent Roy replying, I slammed the door shut, and the car moved slowly away.
James was dubious about Roy. ‘Isn’t he a gardener at the golf club?’ he said.
‘Yes, but he’s planning to take over the running of the place, in due course,’ I said and laughed at the pun.
Roy called for me at the shop almost every weekday night over the summer, for beer and kissing and home early, so as not to be too exhausted for work the next day (him) and not to upset my mother who liked to lock up at nine. I was sorry for Norma going upstairs to her parents every evening, but, quite honestly, a whole day with her was enough.
2
Norma had come in above me, as manageress, in spite of having no idea at all how the shop worked, or how to cut fabrics – how, with some types, you can make an initial snip with the scissors and run them along, half-cutting, half-tearing, for a good line, and how satisfying that is, the noise, the sensation of the rending, the slight dust remaining on the scissor blades. And how you must always let the customers have a few inches to play with, and never reveal that we keep rolls of fabric in the toilet and sometimes dry our hands on it. Norma was actually hopeless except for measuring, and in her authoritative manner with the customers, not caring what they thought of her. She once told a lady trying to buy snow-washed denim for a sexy trouser suit, ‘I don’t understand the fascination with this fabric – it’s uncomfortable, expensive, scruffy, unwieldy to work with, a faff to wash and dry, it shrinks, wears badly, and is worn exclusively by idiots.’ The customer took it all in and switched to a cotton moleskin in a silvery brown. I wasn’t unaffected myself and soon shared her attitudes about cheesecloth and, for a while at least, loved anything spotty, until she went off it and said people who wore polka dot had something wrong upstairs. I came to sympathize with her squeamishness regarding velvet; the way it felt cool then warm to the touch, changed colour at a stroke, its tendency to baldness suggesting decay, and though I’d loved it as a child, I joined her in rejecting it, to the extent that we never had it on display, even at Christmas when customers went mad for it.
Norma telephoned me at home every Sunday evening, at seven on the dot, to read me the rota for the following week. This became a ritual for us.
‘Hello,’ she’d say, ‘how are you?’
And I’d reply, ‘Fine, thanks. How are you?’
And she’d reply, ‘I’m ringing with the rota, do you have a pencil?’ and then she’d begin, always ending on a forecast. ‘It’s the Harborough show a week on Saturday, so I expect they’ll all be in for fancy-dress materials.’ Or, ‘It’s going to be hot, we’ll probably have the sun-dress crew in.’
As the summer went on Norma and I had a lot of fun, and if Mrs Pavlou hadn’t said on that first day that we wouldn’t be friends I’d have thought we very much were. Norma didn’t laugh easily but if something amused her properly she might need her inhaler. Such as the time I’d pluralized the word ‘bust’ to ‘busts’ and she almost died of oxygen starvation and I’d had to turn the sign round on the door until she recovered. Or the time I realized that when Norma said ‘Lippety Print’ she meant Liberty Print, our stock being ‘slight seconds’, the selvedge smudged and the B looking like a P. I knew the brand not because I was a fabric expert but because we had curtains at home in Strawberry Thief, and my mother was always collecting nick-nacks to match (handkerchiefs and an egg cosy). And the time I’d thought Norma’s gloved hand was a pin cushion and tried to stick a needle into it and, hearing her scream, a customer knocked the spinner over in her dash for the door, thinking a violent robbery was under way.
Or the times customers dragged husbands in to choose trouser fabric and Norma would ask them, ‘Are you sure the inside leg measurement is accurate, madam?’ before she’d take them seriously, and the wife might say, ‘I think so?’ with a tiny note of doubt in her voice, and Norma would grab the tape measure and say, ‘Shall I just…’ and the wife would step away from the man and look at the sequins out of decency, and we’d hear Norma ask, ‘Which side do you dress, sir?’ And the man would say, ‘Oh, um –’ and have to imagine the precise location of his genitals, at that moment, in relation to the crotch seam on his trousers, and slightly shift his weight from one leg to the other, to make certain of it, and then he’d sometimes say, ‘To the left.’ But more often, ‘To the right,’ and Norma would bob down, all the time looking him in the eye. Once she’d said, ‘Oh! I thought you said the left, sir,’ and the man said, ‘Sorry, I get mixed up with my left and right.’ And Norma insisting there was nothing remotely amusing about this procedure when I’d have the giggles afterwards, asking, ‘What’s so special about men that you fall about laughing? Perhaps you’re not suited to haberdashery.’ A rebuke I’d throw back at her when she failed to be at all delighted by our matrimonial fabrics and appurtenances.
Weddings were laughable to her: ‘Spending hundreds of pounds to get trussed up like a virgin, it’s idiotic,’ she’d say and the fact that our white and ivory silks were double the price of silk in any other colour seemed to corroborate this. She refused to wear cotton gloves to handle the ceremonial fabrics, and, when a bride-to-be stepped up onto the bridal stool to have the proper adjustments made to an unfinished dress and Mrs Pavlou, talking through pins, might say, ‘Oh, yes, this is really so beautiful,’ with the mother-of-the-bride in tears, lips trembling, hands fanning her hot face, Norma would clear her throat and move around noisily to make the moment mundane and ordinary. But she also used to claim not to believe in sex before marriage.
I asked her one day, ‘When are you going to have sex then, seeing as you’re so against marriage?’
And she said, ‘I’m all for marriage, I’m against the absolute nonsense of weddings.’
One day a middle-aged man came in, on his own, and that was unusual – him a man and old and in a business suit – and he was looking at sewing patterns for glamorous nightgowns and we were assuming they were for his own use and sniggering, because back then, I’m sad to say, people were prone to laugh at things of this kind, it being a mainstay of television comedy etc. and he left the shop and Norma, overcome with shame at our behaviour, had run out after him to apologize, and had caught up with him in the butcher’s, waited behind him and while the butcher sliced him a quarter-pound of ham, wafer thin, she told him we stocked all sizes and could advise on fabrics, etc. and invited him back to browse. And then, finding herself at the front of the queue, unable to avoid it, bought some lard. The man (known as ‘the Ham Man’ after that incident) called in occasionally to browse, and apart from the time he bought some tailor’s chalk, said not one word to us.
We always had a box of Maltesers on the go and made them last all day, taking them few and far between and not just guzzling them, as one would bored to death at the theatre. For some while, almost daily, a dear little old woman would come in and ask us to thread a needle for her because of arthritic fingers and poor eyesight. Norma, one day, very sweetly, gave her a little felt book she’d made, containing a line of needles ready threaded with different-coloured cotton.
‘This should keep you going,’ she’d said.
Afterwards I said, ‘That was kind of you, Norma, but I think she liked the excuse to come in for a chat and a Malteser.’
And Norma said, ‘Well, she should say so and not waste our time pretending she needs help.’
Towards the end of the summer, in spite of not being officially friends, we started to have occasional outings which involved driving into Leicester just as the night clubs were opening – admission being half-price and the music down low – where we’d dance in front of the few old men at the bar and allow them to buy us Britvic juices, and then leave, before it got too frenetic. One club was called Norma Jeane’s and another Bailey’s but Norma’s favourite was Genevieve’s because of its clean lavatories and secure cloakrooms. She would always smooch with one or two of the men after requesting the DJ play ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted’ or some equally slow song, especially for the purpose, and I’d wait on a bar stool with our coats ready and try not to catch anyone’s eye. It really was very odd but for a while I said nothing, thinking that as she’d driven us there I should be grateful. But later when I felt I knew her well enough, I thought it my duty and after a few weeks I said, ‘You can’t just dance with men like that, looking furious – you have to smile and look reasonably happy.’
‘Why should I?’
‘You just should – it has to seem as though you’re enjoying yourself, but don’t laugh.’
‘I am enjoying myself,’ she said. ‘I’m doing it for me, not for them.’
‘It doesn’t look like it,’ I said. ‘It seems as though you want a fight.’
Soon Norma and I reached the stage that married couples do, where their principal joy is in the condemnation of others. In the shop we derided the customers who came in to ask for samples, and returned wanting boudoir brocade for curtains, or robust fabrics for upholstery in reds and oranges. We scorned anyone wanting patterns with large flower heads, especially poppies. And we criticized our neighbours too; the florist next door for sticking pins into tulip stems to prevent them drooping, when any fool knows the whole point of a tulip is the way they lean away from the vase, and being able to see inside them – and Norma should know, being half Dutch. We sneered at the Brankham Arms for their ploughman’s lunch with the brown-mottled, insufficiently pickled onions, and the Two Swans for their notice tacked up above the counter, ‘One serviette per customer ’.
Our favourite person to dislike was a man called Hugo Pack-Allen, whom I’d never met in person, but whom the Pavlous had got talking to in the Brankham Arms earlier that summer, and Mrs Pavlou had asked him to consider investing in the Pin Cushion and he’d agreed, paperwork pending. Further meetings ensued and soon without anything being signed, he had the authority to rethink our opening hours, to demand that we stock novelty items such as the Ronco Buttoneer and other gadgets, glues, kits and nasty things that would diminish us in the eyes of our traditional and loyal clientele, and display them in the window instead of beautiful printed silks. I’d not even met the man and he was knocking my professional esteem.
In early September, Norma told me she’d been invited to take tea in the Two Swans with her parents and this silent partner and we’d laughed at the idea of him ordering a fondant fancy and eating only the icing. When the day came, Norma put on a show of reluctance, but I felt left out as I locked up and watched them cross the road with their hair brushed. Mr Pavlou muttered something to Norma, presumably along the lines of ‘Try to be nice, Norma.’ And Mrs Pavlou was looking nervous.
When Norma telephoned me the following Sunday evening with the rota, she told me all about the tea. How Hugo Pack-Allen had invested not only in the Pin Cushion but that he also had a financial interest in the Two Swans and to prove it, he’d torn down the notice about serviettes, saying it looked common. Not the notice, the word ‘serviette’. Also, that the teatime meetings were to be weekly events while the business settled and I was to attend the next one.
The following Friday, we all four of us went over to tea and sat at the same window table I had sat at that first time I’d met Roy Warren. While we waited and the Pavlous tried to remember what type of tea or coffee Mr Pack-Allen had ordered the previous week, I gazed out into the street hoping to see him rushing along. Instead I saw a man looking at our window display, and taking photographs. I nudged Mrs Pavlou. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘that’s Mr Pack-Allen,’ and as he turned to cross the street I saw that he was the man who had come in for nightwear patterns, whom Norma had run after and caught up with in the butcher’s. He was none other than the Ham Man. He’d not come in to buy anything, he’d come in to spy on us and the stock, and Norma, I guessed, had suddenly realized and that was why she’d chased him to apologize.
‘Why didn’t you tell me he was the Ham Man?’ I said.
Norma shrugged. ‘I didn’t think it was important.’
Soon he appeared with a briefcase and said he was delighted that we were all present as he wanted to tell us about the exciting new partnership he had formed with a franchise called Curtains For You which ran national advertisements for drapes, nets and blinds for windows, doors and conservatories. ‘From blackout curtains to drapes so sheer you feel your home breathe.’ We would be required to do home consultations across a twenty-mile radius, he told us.
‘Home consultations? You mean go to people’s houses?’ said Norma, aghast. ‘Could the customers not phone their measurements through to us?’
‘No,’ said Hugo Pack-Allen, ‘the accuracy of the measurement is paramount and it is the Curtains For You USP.’
‘I can’t go round to people’s houses,’ she said. ‘I’m studying.’
‘Well,’ said Hugo Pack-Allen, ‘maybe other staff will fulfil our obligations.’ And it was left like that.
That was how we went on: me doing the shop work while she read the classics in preparation for interviews at English departments across the Midlands, in which she’d call John Donne ‘emotional’ but quote by heart ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’, and if questioned about her science background, knew to say, ‘Where would Milton and Tennyson be without their fascination with earth sciences, where Thomas Hardy without the Jurassic coast? And Blake without his love of the earth itself? Where the Brontës without the uniqueness of the moorland? Dickens without the Kentish marshes?’ Though it was all a bit rum, you must admit, it sounded learned.
Occasionally the phone rang and Norma would tell the caller, ‘There’s a six-month waiting time for curtain consultations.’ And they’d ring off with instructions on how to measure their own window frames.
Mrs Pavlou offered to come downstairs from time to time on the days that Norma had university interviews and other engagements. If we had a rush of customers, I was to ring the little handbell on the stairs and she’d pop down to help. I did ring it one day and she attended to a cluster of children needing kilts, blouses and hockey socks, her shop being the sole supplier of uniform for Brankham House School for Girls. Afterwards, instead of going back upstairs to her dressmaking, she stayed with me, chatting. She apologized for Norma.
‘You mustn’t take it personally,’ she said, and I said I didn’t know what she was referring to and she said, ‘That she can be a bit brittle in her manner.’
I laughed it off. ‘Oh, I like her directness,’ I said.
And Mrs Pavlou with tear-filled eyes said, ‘She was snatched, you know, at Disneyland when she was eight years old—’
‘Oh, no,’ I gasped, interrupting.
‘No, no, she came to no harm, don’t worry – but she poked the man’s eye out with her fingers and left him in a heap.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said, and remembered with a chill Norma’s fascination at the ‘Out, vile jelly’ scene from King Lear.
‘Yah, it left her a little cynical, you know,’ said Mrs Pavlou.
‘About men?’
‘About all things – life, love, Disney, everything.’
I didn’t ring the bell again, and by the end of the summer holidays Norma had secured offers from three institutions and eventually settled for the English MA at the University of Rutland, just up the road from the shop.
And then, later, just as I was about to go back to university and Norma to start her Master’s, she learned that she’d earned more money than I had (having nominally been manageress) and insisted on sharing the difference of just over two hundred pounds, but, not wanting to let me ‘waste the windfall’, she took me to a gallery and in the shop attached told me to choose something. I couldn’t decide between an embroidery of some strawberries which I could give to my mother, or a still life of a Savoy cabbage cut in half. I didn’t particularly want an artwork and would have preferred the cash. It reminded me of the time my father and I had walked past a homeless man and I’d wanted to give him my loose change. ‘No,’ my father had said, ‘money is no good, he’ll spend it on drugs.’ And instead he bought a Scotch egg and, as we passed again, handed it to the man, who threw it after us as we walked along, and my father turned, just in time, to kick it away into the gutter with the toe of his shoe. ‘What a waste,’ he said under his breath, and I thought he meant the man’s life but now, thinking about it, he probably meant the egg. Anyway, I chose the still life of the cabbage and still have it and, yes, it reminds me of Norma, but also the homeless Scotch egg.
3
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Roy Warren was more fun than Norma, but he was easier to talk to – and whereas Norma was going to disappear off and become a Professor of Geology or Literature, whichever got the better of her, I felt sure Roy and I could make a life together. He’d grown up in some rough suburbs and on the few occasions he’d been allowed out of the house he’d had to dodge gangs of kids, and negotiate roads of four and six lanes. One morning, while fishing in an urban setting, he and a pal had seen two men throw a body into the canal.
‘We called 999,’ he said, ‘but when the policemen turned up at my house, they were the same two men and so we had to agree that we’d probably imagined it – but we hadn’t.’
Sensing him getting emotional, I changed the subject abruptly. ‘Did you have any pets as a child?’ I asked, because really, what can you say about murder and corruption in someone else’s distant past? And I didn’t want him crying on me, plus, I knew how soothing a list of dog names could be and that interesting animal facts – a dog can be allergic to thirteen different types of grass, and cats, fewer than five – can be quite diverting. And though Roy had little interest in the subject compared with that of ball sports, he remembered two pets and talked quite nicely about them.
Roy leaned right over and looked at us both through the open door, and James said, ‘At least park round the corner next time, can’t you,’ and, to prevent Roy replying, I slammed the door shut, and the car moved slowly away.
James was dubious about Roy. ‘Isn’t he a gardener at the golf club?’ he said.
‘Yes, but he’s planning to take over the running of the place, in due course,’ I said and laughed at the pun.
Roy called for me at the shop almost every weekday night over the summer, for beer and kissing and home early, so as not to be too exhausted for work the next day (him) and not to upset my mother who liked to lock up at nine. I was sorry for Norma going upstairs to her parents every evening, but, quite honestly, a whole day with her was enough.
2
Norma had come in above me, as manageress, in spite of having no idea at all how the shop worked, or how to cut fabrics – how, with some types, you can make an initial snip with the scissors and run them along, half-cutting, half-tearing, for a good line, and how satisfying that is, the noise, the sensation of the rending, the slight dust remaining on the scissor blades. And how you must always let the customers have a few inches to play with, and never reveal that we keep rolls of fabric in the toilet and sometimes dry our hands on it. Norma was actually hopeless except for measuring, and in her authoritative manner with the customers, not caring what they thought of her. She once told a lady trying to buy snow-washed denim for a sexy trouser suit, ‘I don’t understand the fascination with this fabric – it’s uncomfortable, expensive, scruffy, unwieldy to work with, a faff to wash and dry, it shrinks, wears badly, and is worn exclusively by idiots.’ The customer took it all in and switched to a cotton moleskin in a silvery brown. I wasn’t unaffected myself and soon shared her attitudes about cheesecloth and, for a while at least, loved anything spotty, until she went off it and said people who wore polka dot had something wrong upstairs. I came to sympathize with her squeamishness regarding velvet; the way it felt cool then warm to the touch, changed colour at a stroke, its tendency to baldness suggesting decay, and though I’d loved it as a child, I joined her in rejecting it, to the extent that we never had it on display, even at Christmas when customers went mad for it.
Norma telephoned me at home every Sunday evening, at seven on the dot, to read me the rota for the following week. This became a ritual for us.
‘Hello,’ she’d say, ‘how are you?’
And I’d reply, ‘Fine, thanks. How are you?’
And she’d reply, ‘I’m ringing with the rota, do you have a pencil?’ and then she’d begin, always ending on a forecast. ‘It’s the Harborough show a week on Saturday, so I expect they’ll all be in for fancy-dress materials.’ Or, ‘It’s going to be hot, we’ll probably have the sun-dress crew in.’
As the summer went on Norma and I had a lot of fun, and if Mrs Pavlou hadn’t said on that first day that we wouldn’t be friends I’d have thought we very much were. Norma didn’t laugh easily but if something amused her properly she might need her inhaler. Such as the time I’d pluralized the word ‘bust’ to ‘busts’ and she almost died of oxygen starvation and I’d had to turn the sign round on the door until she recovered. Or the time I realized that when Norma said ‘Lippety Print’ she meant Liberty Print, our stock being ‘slight seconds’, the selvedge smudged and the B looking like a P. I knew the brand not because I was a fabric expert but because we had curtains at home in Strawberry Thief, and my mother was always collecting nick-nacks to match (handkerchiefs and an egg cosy). And the time I’d thought Norma’s gloved hand was a pin cushion and tried to stick a needle into it and, hearing her scream, a customer knocked the spinner over in her dash for the door, thinking a violent robbery was under way.
Or the times customers dragged husbands in to choose trouser fabric and Norma would ask them, ‘Are you sure the inside leg measurement is accurate, madam?’ before she’d take them seriously, and the wife might say, ‘I think so?’ with a tiny note of doubt in her voice, and Norma would grab the tape measure and say, ‘Shall I just…’ and the wife would step away from the man and look at the sequins out of decency, and we’d hear Norma ask, ‘Which side do you dress, sir?’ And the man would say, ‘Oh, um –’ and have to imagine the precise location of his genitals, at that moment, in relation to the crotch seam on his trousers, and slightly shift his weight from one leg to the other, to make certain of it, and then he’d sometimes say, ‘To the left.’ But more often, ‘To the right,’ and Norma would bob down, all the time looking him in the eye. Once she’d said, ‘Oh! I thought you said the left, sir,’ and the man said, ‘Sorry, I get mixed up with my left and right.’ And Norma insisting there was nothing remotely amusing about this procedure when I’d have the giggles afterwards, asking, ‘What’s so special about men that you fall about laughing? Perhaps you’re not suited to haberdashery.’ A rebuke I’d throw back at her when she failed to be at all delighted by our matrimonial fabrics and appurtenances.
Weddings were laughable to her: ‘Spending hundreds of pounds to get trussed up like a virgin, it’s idiotic,’ she’d say and the fact that our white and ivory silks were double the price of silk in any other colour seemed to corroborate this. She refused to wear cotton gloves to handle the ceremonial fabrics, and, when a bride-to-be stepped up onto the bridal stool to have the proper adjustments made to an unfinished dress and Mrs Pavlou, talking through pins, might say, ‘Oh, yes, this is really so beautiful,’ with the mother-of-the-bride in tears, lips trembling, hands fanning her hot face, Norma would clear her throat and move around noisily to make the moment mundane and ordinary. But she also used to claim not to believe in sex before marriage.
I asked her one day, ‘When are you going to have sex then, seeing as you’re so against marriage?’
And she said, ‘I’m all for marriage, I’m against the absolute nonsense of weddings.’
One day a middle-aged man came in, on his own, and that was unusual – him a man and old and in a business suit – and he was looking at sewing patterns for glamorous nightgowns and we were assuming they were for his own use and sniggering, because back then, I’m sad to say, people were prone to laugh at things of this kind, it being a mainstay of television comedy etc. and he left the shop and Norma, overcome with shame at our behaviour, had run out after him to apologize, and had caught up with him in the butcher’s, waited behind him and while the butcher sliced him a quarter-pound of ham, wafer thin, she told him we stocked all sizes and could advise on fabrics, etc. and invited him back to browse. And then, finding herself at the front of the queue, unable to avoid it, bought some lard. The man (known as ‘the Ham Man’ after that incident) called in occasionally to browse, and apart from the time he bought some tailor’s chalk, said not one word to us.
We always had a box of Maltesers on the go and made them last all day, taking them few and far between and not just guzzling them, as one would bored to death at the theatre. For some while, almost daily, a dear little old woman would come in and ask us to thread a needle for her because of arthritic fingers and poor eyesight. Norma, one day, very sweetly, gave her a little felt book she’d made, containing a line of needles ready threaded with different-coloured cotton.
‘This should keep you going,’ she’d said.
Afterwards I said, ‘That was kind of you, Norma, but I think she liked the excuse to come in for a chat and a Malteser.’
And Norma said, ‘Well, she should say so and not waste our time pretending she needs help.’
Towards the end of the summer, in spite of not being officially friends, we started to have occasional outings which involved driving into Leicester just as the night clubs were opening – admission being half-price and the music down low – where we’d dance in front of the few old men at the bar and allow them to buy us Britvic juices, and then leave, before it got too frenetic. One club was called Norma Jeane’s and another Bailey’s but Norma’s favourite was Genevieve’s because of its clean lavatories and secure cloakrooms. She would always smooch with one or two of the men after requesting the DJ play ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted’ or some equally slow song, especially for the purpose, and I’d wait on a bar stool with our coats ready and try not to catch anyone’s eye. It really was very odd but for a while I said nothing, thinking that as she’d driven us there I should be grateful. But later when I felt I knew her well enough, I thought it my duty and after a few weeks I said, ‘You can’t just dance with men like that, looking furious – you have to smile and look reasonably happy.’
‘Why should I?’
‘You just should – it has to seem as though you’re enjoying yourself, but don’t laugh.’
‘I am enjoying myself,’ she said. ‘I’m doing it for me, not for them.’
‘It doesn’t look like it,’ I said. ‘It seems as though you want a fight.’
Soon Norma and I reached the stage that married couples do, where their principal joy is in the condemnation of others. In the shop we derided the customers who came in to ask for samples, and returned wanting boudoir brocade for curtains, or robust fabrics for upholstery in reds and oranges. We scorned anyone wanting patterns with large flower heads, especially poppies. And we criticized our neighbours too; the florist next door for sticking pins into tulip stems to prevent them drooping, when any fool knows the whole point of a tulip is the way they lean away from the vase, and being able to see inside them – and Norma should know, being half Dutch. We sneered at the Brankham Arms for their ploughman’s lunch with the brown-mottled, insufficiently pickled onions, and the Two Swans for their notice tacked up above the counter, ‘One serviette per customer ’.
Our favourite person to dislike was a man called Hugo Pack-Allen, whom I’d never met in person, but whom the Pavlous had got talking to in the Brankham Arms earlier that summer, and Mrs Pavlou had asked him to consider investing in the Pin Cushion and he’d agreed, paperwork pending. Further meetings ensued and soon without anything being signed, he had the authority to rethink our opening hours, to demand that we stock novelty items such as the Ronco Buttoneer and other gadgets, glues, kits and nasty things that would diminish us in the eyes of our traditional and loyal clientele, and display them in the window instead of beautiful printed silks. I’d not even met the man and he was knocking my professional esteem.
In early September, Norma told me she’d been invited to take tea in the Two Swans with her parents and this silent partner and we’d laughed at the idea of him ordering a fondant fancy and eating only the icing. When the day came, Norma put on a show of reluctance, but I felt left out as I locked up and watched them cross the road with their hair brushed. Mr Pavlou muttered something to Norma, presumably along the lines of ‘Try to be nice, Norma.’ And Mrs Pavlou was looking nervous.
When Norma telephoned me the following Sunday evening with the rota, she told me all about the tea. How Hugo Pack-Allen had invested not only in the Pin Cushion but that he also had a financial interest in the Two Swans and to prove it, he’d torn down the notice about serviettes, saying it looked common. Not the notice, the word ‘serviette’. Also, that the teatime meetings were to be weekly events while the business settled and I was to attend the next one.
The following Friday, we all four of us went over to tea and sat at the same window table I had sat at that first time I’d met Roy Warren. While we waited and the Pavlous tried to remember what type of tea or coffee Mr Pack-Allen had ordered the previous week, I gazed out into the street hoping to see him rushing along. Instead I saw a man looking at our window display, and taking photographs. I nudged Mrs Pavlou. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘that’s Mr Pack-Allen,’ and as he turned to cross the street I saw that he was the man who had come in for nightwear patterns, whom Norma had run after and caught up with in the butcher’s. He was none other than the Ham Man. He’d not come in to buy anything, he’d come in to spy on us and the stock, and Norma, I guessed, had suddenly realized and that was why she’d chased him to apologize.
‘Why didn’t you tell me he was the Ham Man?’ I said.
Norma shrugged. ‘I didn’t think it was important.’
Soon he appeared with a briefcase and said he was delighted that we were all present as he wanted to tell us about the exciting new partnership he had formed with a franchise called Curtains For You which ran national advertisements for drapes, nets and blinds for windows, doors and conservatories. ‘From blackout curtains to drapes so sheer you feel your home breathe.’ We would be required to do home consultations across a twenty-mile radius, he told us.
‘Home consultations? You mean go to people’s houses?’ said Norma, aghast. ‘Could the customers not phone their measurements through to us?’
‘No,’ said Hugo Pack-Allen, ‘the accuracy of the measurement is paramount and it is the Curtains For You USP.’
‘I can’t go round to people’s houses,’ she said. ‘I’m studying.’
‘Well,’ said Hugo Pack-Allen, ‘maybe other staff will fulfil our obligations.’ And it was left like that.
That was how we went on: me doing the shop work while she read the classics in preparation for interviews at English departments across the Midlands, in which she’d call John Donne ‘emotional’ but quote by heart ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’, and if questioned about her science background, knew to say, ‘Where would Milton and Tennyson be without their fascination with earth sciences, where Thomas Hardy without the Jurassic coast? And Blake without his love of the earth itself? Where the Brontës without the uniqueness of the moorland? Dickens without the Kentish marshes?’ Though it was all a bit rum, you must admit, it sounded learned.
Occasionally the phone rang and Norma would tell the caller, ‘There’s a six-month waiting time for curtain consultations.’ And they’d ring off with instructions on how to measure their own window frames.
Mrs Pavlou offered to come downstairs from time to time on the days that Norma had university interviews and other engagements. If we had a rush of customers, I was to ring the little handbell on the stairs and she’d pop down to help. I did ring it one day and she attended to a cluster of children needing kilts, blouses and hockey socks, her shop being the sole supplier of uniform for Brankham House School for Girls. Afterwards, instead of going back upstairs to her dressmaking, she stayed with me, chatting. She apologized for Norma.
‘You mustn’t take it personally,’ she said, and I said I didn’t know what she was referring to and she said, ‘That she can be a bit brittle in her manner.’
I laughed it off. ‘Oh, I like her directness,’ I said.
And Mrs Pavlou with tear-filled eyes said, ‘She was snatched, you know, at Disneyland when she was eight years old—’
‘Oh, no,’ I gasped, interrupting.
‘No, no, she came to no harm, don’t worry – but she poked the man’s eye out with her fingers and left him in a heap.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said, and remembered with a chill Norma’s fascination at the ‘Out, vile jelly’ scene from King Lear.
‘Yah, it left her a little cynical, you know,’ said Mrs Pavlou.
‘About men?’
‘About all things – life, love, Disney, everything.’
I didn’t ring the bell again, and by the end of the summer holidays Norma had secured offers from three institutions and eventually settled for the English MA at the University of Rutland, just up the road from the shop.
And then, later, just as I was about to go back to university and Norma to start her Master’s, she learned that she’d earned more money than I had (having nominally been manageress) and insisted on sharing the difference of just over two hundred pounds, but, not wanting to let me ‘waste the windfall’, she took me to a gallery and in the shop attached told me to choose something. I couldn’t decide between an embroidery of some strawberries which I could give to my mother, or a still life of a Savoy cabbage cut in half. I didn’t particularly want an artwork and would have preferred the cash. It reminded me of the time my father and I had walked past a homeless man and I’d wanted to give him my loose change. ‘No,’ my father had said, ‘money is no good, he’ll spend it on drugs.’ And instead he bought a Scotch egg and, as we passed again, handed it to the man, who threw it after us as we walked along, and my father turned, just in time, to kick it away into the gutter with the toe of his shoe. ‘What a waste,’ he said under his breath, and I thought he meant the man’s life but now, thinking about it, he probably meant the egg. Anyway, I chose the still life of the cabbage and still have it and, yes, it reminds me of Norma, but also the homeless Scotch egg.
3
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Roy Warren was more fun than Norma, but he was easier to talk to – and whereas Norma was going to disappear off and become a Professor of Geology or Literature, whichever got the better of her, I felt sure Roy and I could make a life together. He’d grown up in some rough suburbs and on the few occasions he’d been allowed out of the house he’d had to dodge gangs of kids, and negotiate roads of four and six lanes. One morning, while fishing in an urban setting, he and a pal had seen two men throw a body into the canal.
‘We called 999,’ he said, ‘but when the policemen turned up at my house, they were the same two men and so we had to agree that we’d probably imagined it – but we hadn’t.’
Sensing him getting emotional, I changed the subject abruptly. ‘Did you have any pets as a child?’ I asked, because really, what can you say about murder and corruption in someone else’s distant past? And I didn’t want him crying on me, plus, I knew how soothing a list of dog names could be and that interesting animal facts – a dog can be allergic to thirteen different types of grass, and cats, fewer than five – can be quite diverting. And though Roy had little interest in the subject compared with that of ball sports, he remembered two pets and talked quite nicely about them.
