The Complete Short Stories (25 page)

‘Few people,’ says the
young man, in lucid but foreign French, ‘realize that pasteurized milk comes
from Pasteur.’

‘True,’ says the guide.

The couple leave together.
Outside in the rain she says, ‘It’s time for you to stop following me.

‘I’m not following you,’
he says, ‘I’m following our ambition. It’s for you to go back where you came
from. It was you who broke away.

‘There is no contract,’
she says. ‘No pledge. It was you who provoked the rift. We never had a marriage
that you could call a marriage. As I’ve told you, I have always intended to
open Father’s house to the public after Father’s death.’

‘You’ll never do it,’ he
says. ‘Not without me. I’m part of the ambition. I have to go on.

‘You’re the ghost of an
ambition,’ she says.

‘So are you, the ghost
of a dream and a plan.’

He gets into his car and
drives off leaving her in the wet, old street.

Dora opened the door of her father’s study
and closed it again. It was two years since he died. Her new young man was the
third in the series and, like his two predecessors, his enthusiasm for helping
to put the papers in order and setting up the house as a museum, had waned or
perhaps was never there. But unlike the others he has had a good effect on
Dora. This young man was in the wholesale fashion business; his attempts to
smarten up Dora’s appearance had been successful. In her fifties Dora looked
healthy for the first time in her life. His devotion to her, or rather, his
quite eccentric passion, always did wonders for her morale, as she herself put
it.

‘Apart from being Henry
Castlemaine’s daughter, what is there in me for you?’ she once asked the new
young man.

‘You’re fascinating by
yourself.’

It was, in a way, all
she wanted to hear or know from him. The very next day she had telephoned to
Ben. A woman’s voice answered the phone, a silly voice. ‘Who’s speaking?’ — ‘His
wife.’ — ‘Oh, wife.’ — ‘Yes, wife.’ (Voice off ‘Ben, it’s for you. She says she’s
your wife.’) — A pause and Ben is on the phone. ‘Yes, Dora, what do you want?’
— ‘Lionel and I have to make a decision about Father’s papers. I think you
could be helpful.’ — ‘Who’s Lionel?’ — ‘My friend.’ — ‘I thought he was Tim.’ —
‘No, Tim was last year. Anyway…’ — ‘I’ll come round one day.’ — ‘Better make
it soon.’ — ‘Some time in the next couple of weeks, I can’t manage sooner.

She is appalled to see him at the Brontës
house of doom and dread, at Haworth in Yorkshire.

‘This is where they
walked up and down at night, after dinner, here in this dining-room, planning
the future —’

Outside, in the
graveyard among the tombstones, there by Emily Brontës grave, she turns and
says,

‘Stop following me.’

A small group of
American visitors are watching them. They see a neurotic-looking woman in her
mid-forties apparently trying to shake off a bewildered man in his late
twenties or early thirties, both slightly outmoded in their appearance.

‘People are looking at
us,’ he says.

‘It is my one hope,’ she
says, ‘that we should open the house for Father. I’ve been round so many
houses. They are all so bleak. Museums have no heart.’

‘Stop haunting them,’ he
says. ‘That’s what I’ve come to tell you.’

‘Then you’ll be free, is
that it?’

‘Don’t tell me,’ he
says, ‘that you’re free, wandering around in this timelessness, as you do.’

They walk away, he to
his car and she to nowhere. The American group are already standing before the
solemn Brontë graves, reading the inscriptions.

It is at Lamb House, Rye, in East Sussex
that the ghosts of their ambition finally reach a decision.

‘Would you like to sign
the book?’ says the curator. ‘This is where James received his visitors; yes,
it is rather small, quite poky; yes, indeed with his bulk he must have found it
quite cramped. But upstairs —’

Out in the garden beside
the graves of Henry James’s dogs Ben says,

‘I don’t know how you
could bear to open your old home to the public. It’s so charming as it is.’

‘If it wasn’t for Father
I would feel the same,’ Dora says. ‘But Father’s ambition was always for his
fame to be perpetuated, for ever and ever, it seems, elongated, on and on into
the future.

‘The future has arrived,’
he says, ‘and you’ve done nothing about it but sit around drinking with your
young men, thinking of your father.’

‘And what have you been
doing?’

‘Sitting around drinking
with my girls, thinking of your father.

‘To hell with Father,’
she says.

Dora opened the door.

‘Lionel was desolate,’
she said. ‘I was a bit sad myself, for he was the best of the lot. But he knew
he had to go.’

‘You’ve got a new
haircut,’ he said.

‘Have you come for
Father, his papers?’

‘No, I’ve come for you.

She led the way upstairs
in the new freedom of her trousers, and opened the door to the hopeless study,
with its piles of archives going back to 1890 or worse.

‘I suppose we should
give them to a university,’ she said.

‘We would never be free,’
he said. ‘Those ghosts, those ghosts, would never let us go. Letters from
students, letters from scholars. It would be the same old industry.’

They lit a bonfire in
the garden that night. It took them many hours to burn all the Castlemaine
papers. But they sat around drinking in the back wash-house, watching the
flames curl round the papers and going out every now and again to feed the fire
with a new armful, until they were all consumed.

The Dragon

I was standing talking at a cocktail party
when I was saddened to see that everybody formed a forest. I felt defeated. The
Dragon had taken over.

No sooner did I feel
this, than I decided it was only a temporary defeat, for that is what I am
like. I didn’t see then how I could possibly do it, but certainly, I decided, I
was going to stop the Dragon. The party was people again. I picked up the
conversation at the point where a man in the group was talking. He was good-looking,
about sixty. ‘My address book,’ he was saying, ‘is becoming like a necropolis,
so many people dying every month, this friend, that friend. You have to draw a
line through their names. It’s very sad.’

‘I always use pencil,’
said a lady, a little younger, ‘then when people pass on I can rub them out.’

We were in a shady part
of the garden. It was six o’clock on a hot evening in the north of Italy. It
was my garden, my party. The Dragon came oozing through the foliage. She was
holding her drink, a Pimm’s No. 1, and was followed by a tall, strikingly
handsome truck-driver whom she had brought along to the party on the spur of
the moment. To her dismay, discernible only to myself, he was a genial,
easy-mannered young man, rather amused to be taking half-an-hour off the job
with his truck parked outside the gate. I knew very well that when she had
picked him up at the bar across the street she had hoped he would be an
embarrassment, a nuisance.

Oh, the Dragon! Dragon
was what it was her job to be. She had been highly and pressingly recommended
by one of my clients, the widow of a well-known dramatist. It didn’t occur to
me, then, that the vertiginous blurb that was written to me about the girl was
in fact so excessive as to be suspicious. Perhaps I did feel uneasy about the
eulogies that came over the telephone, and the letters which the widow wrote to
me from Gstaad about the Dragon and her virtues as such. Perhaps I did. But, as
often when I want to believe something enough because I am in need of help, I didn’t
listen to the small inner voice which said, Something is wrong, or which said,
Be careful. I was optimistic and enthusiastic.

I was first and foremost
a needlewoman. I have been called a
couturier,
a dressmaker, a designer.
But it was my fascination with the needle and thread that earned me my
reputation. I could have gone into big business, I could have merged with any
of the world’s famous houses of
haute couture.
But I would have none of
that. I preferred to keep my own exclusive and small clientele. It wasn’t
everybody I would sew for.

When I left school at
the beginning of the sixties there were two things I could do well. One was
write a good letter in fine calligraphy, and the other was sew, by hand, with
every stitch perfect. I worked as a seamstress, in the alterations department
of a London store. This taught me a lot, but it didn’t satisfy me. At home, I
started making my own clothes. I had learned at my evening classes how to make
an individual working dummy for each client. I was very careful about this, and
I practised on my grandmother with whom I lived. You cut a length of buckram
into a body-shape and sew your lady into it over the minimum of underwear. I
did this with my grandmother, basting the buckram on her body with only an
exact inch to spare. She thought she would never get out of it again. Then, I
sit it up the front with my scissors, sewed it up again the exact one-inch
seam. When I had perfected the sewing on the buckram with even, small,
back-stitching I filled the shape with fine-teased raw wool. There was my
grandmother’s perfect shape to set on my stand. Some dressmakers use synthetic
fabrics, if they still employ this process, but I wouldn’t touch them.

I made my grandmother a
dress she was proud of to the day she died. It was velvet lined with silk,
every inside-seam edged with narrow lace, both dress and lining. Nobody could
see how beautifully it was finished inside. I have always stitched lace to my
inside seams. Even if nobody ever saw the reverse side, my clients were the
sort of women who are satisfied with the knowledge that they are beautifully
dressed in garments made by hand and edged inside with very narrow lace, even
when a silk lining hides the whip-stitched lace-edged seams. Hem-stitch,
back-stitch, cross-stitch, slip-stitch, buttonhole-stitch — I can do them to
perfection. No sewing machine has ever stood in my workshop. You might say it
was my obsession to turn out a hand-made dress. My clients would say, ‘Do you
mean that you even do the long seams by hand?’

‘Everything by hand,’ I
replied. It’s been the secret of my success. You would be surprised at the
demand for dresses and blouses and skirts and underwear all made by hand — I’ve
accomplished entire
trousseaux
for clients who were prepared to give me
time and pay the price.

A long time has passed
since I made my grandmother’s dress, and since I set up on my own. My
reputation as a superb seamstress was growing all the time, so that I no longer
made clothes from paper patterns but employed my own men as cutters and
designers. For cutting and designing you can’t beat a man; and the clients
prefer them, too. The cutters and designers have come and gone over the years.
I never married any of them although I came near to doing so very often.
Something within me told me not to make a permanent life with any of the
cutters and designers. Fashions change so much from season to season, year to
year. Cutters and designers often get stuck in a certain period, and never move
on; their best work is over. Needleworkers, on the other hand, never go out of
date, and I was always a needlewoman with a difference. There is a big
difference between the seams that are right for velvet and those for chiffon,
and I have devised ways of sewing a lace dress where you wouldn’t know there
was any seam at all. Lately I got my needles from Frankfurt, and my threads
from London. My speciality was in the textiles that I obtained from all over
the world.

So I had come to Como
for silk, and was already fairly comfortably placed with my exclusive
clientele. Like my textiles, they came from all parts of the world, even the
wives of ambassadors from Eastern Europe. I saw a lovely house for sale on the
shores of Lake Como and decided to settle there, and make a new workshop.

Now I was so well known
for my hand-made dresses that I had to have some sort of protection. It takes a
long time to make one hand-made evening dress or wedding-gown, so I couldn’t
possibly answer the telephone to all the millionairesses and their
secretaries, who wanted me to work for them. Ordinary maids and
au pair
helpers
were very weak, and easily bribed. They would let people in or call me to the
phone just when I was stitching a circular piece or a corner — very much
precision-work. My temperament wouldn’t stand it. At the same time, I had
learned over the years that the more you discourage your prospective clients
the more they want your work, and the higher the price they are prepared to
pay.

I decided to take on a
Dragon, whose job it was to keep new clients at a distance, to tell them that
they must write for an appointment; and she was to be very firm about this. Her
other job was to look after the files of all my clients of the past, so that my
business could go forward in good order, with that personal touch of remembering
small items when the client finally succeeded in making an appointment. At this
time I had a brilliant cutter called Daniele; he couldn’t design originals, but
that is a small matter; Daniele could copy and adapt. I would advise him a
little — which materials to cut on the bias and which to cut, for instance,
with the patterns not matching at the seams, to make an intriguing change. I
usually did the fittings and pinnings myself, because I have that very exact
eye. Daniele was well-paid. He was inclined to be arrogant; he felt the
traditional
couture
business, where the designers employ the cutters and
seamstresses, was the true thing, and that my method was the wrong way round.
But I soon let him know how to mind his business, and the pay kept him quiet.