Morning light waited, importantly empty, in the cheval glass.
Ann and Kit had made gold velvet curtains for the fitting-room windows and covered a chaise longue in matching velvet on the white walls there were prints of paintings by Klee and Utrillo and a gilt antique mirror with a plant trailing round it. The Third Programme helped drown out the sound of his drill when clients came for fittings. They had a sewing room and a fitting room and a little windowless kitchenette and a lavatory a dentist on the ground floor used the front basement rooms for storage, and they sometimes heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs. “Look, why don’t you come on in for ten minutes. Hesitating, Ann looked at her wristwatch. Perhaps when Nola knew their prices she’d be put off. She and Kit needed the work, but Kit said that if they were seen to be sewing for just anyone they’d never get off the ground with the right people. There had been other girls from her Fishponds past who’d wanted her to do this-it wasn’t even, strictly speaking, her past, because for the moment she was still living there, at home with her family. Nola had trained to be a district nurse when she left school, and Ann didn’t often cross paths with her now she guessed, with a sinking heart, that Nola had come to ask her to make her wedding dress. She’d hoped that Nola understood about her need to make new friends and leave Fishponds behind. Nola was already in her third year when Ann started, but Ann had ignored her overtures of friendship and avoided sitting next to her on the bus that took them home. “But do you mind if I ask a quick question?”Īnn and Nola had grown up on the same street in Fishponds and had both won bursary places at the same girls’ grammar school. “I know I shouldn’t have turned up without an appointment,” she apologized cheerfully. Nola Higgins stood with military straightness, shoulders squared she was buttoned up into some sort of navy-blue uniform, unflatteringly tight over her heavy bust. Some clients pushed their faces up against the door and rattled the handle if they were kept waiting for even a moment. She was too bulky, planted there too stolidly, with an unassuming patience. Kit said that they should always switch over to the Third Programme when clients came-it was more sophisticated-but there wasn’t time, and Ann could make out enough through the bubbled glass to know that the woman standing on the other side wasn’t sophisticated anyway. Someone came down the steps to the side entrance, then tapped on the opaque glass panes of the door Ann looked up, irritated at being interrupted.