The Dressmakers of London

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Izzie awoke on Wednesday morning with a start. It took her a moment to realize that it hadn’t been the harsh ringing of her alarm clock that had woken her but rather a vehicle in the road.

“The newspaper,” she muttered, falling back onto her pillow.

She considered for a moment pulling the covers over her head and retreating to the land of nod, but she knew it was unlikely she’d get any more sleep. Already she was thinking about the day ahead. Two women were coming into the shop for fittings and—with any luck—Mrs. Evesham would finally come by and pay her bill and collect her winter coat, as she’d been promising for the past week and a half.

With a groan, Izzie swung her legs out of bed and slid on her slippers and quilted navy dressing gown. It was cold in the flat even for the third of December, but she was loath to light the fire in her bedroom. A reliable source of coal was hard to come by, and she needed whatever she could find for the dressing room downstairs, because it wouldn’t do for customers to shiver.

She yawned as she shuffled to the door of the flat and let herself out onto the landing. Half awake, she tried to remember what was in the larder for breakfast.

At the bottom of the stairs, she walked past the door to the shop and to the flat’s front door. She opened it and stooped to pick up the morning’s edition of the Daily Telegraph . Dad had subscribed to the newspaper, and Mum had kept the subscription long after his death, although she’d rarely had time to read it. Izzie glanced at the headline as she often did, clucking her tongue as she read:

brITISH REINFORCING LIBYAN ARMIES

NAZIS brEAK THROUGH TObrUK CORRIDOR

It seemed that every bit of good news these days was accompanied by something negative.

She stepped back inside, but just as she was reaching to close the flat’s door, a headline on the far-right column of the front page stole her breath. Underneath an advertisement for Gordon’s gin, it read:

UNMARRIED WOMEN TO BE CONSCRIPTED

20 TO 30 AGE GROUP

“No,” she murmured as her eyes quickly scanned the text.

All unmarried women between 20 and 30 are to be conscripted. Married women will not be compelled to join the Services, though the power to direct them into industry will continue, the article read.

Izzie read it twice, desperate to find some loophole. There was the possibility of exemptions, the article said, but only in the case of extreme hardship, if a woman was caring for children or dependents, or in the case of conscientious objectors. Apparently there were special penalties for women who refused to comply with the new rules.

In the road behind her, someone honked their horn, reminding her she was standing in her dressing gown and slippers for all the world to see. With a shaking hand, she shut the door behind her and sagged against it.

“What am I going to do?”

She was twenty-eight years old, unmarried, and with no children or elderly relatives to care for. She was healthy and physically capable of serving in one of the military’s women’s auxiliary services or doing farm work for the Women’s Land Army. She would have to go.

Panic began to climb up her chest. What would happen to Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions if she was conscripted? Miss Reid had never expressed an ounce of interest in the business of the shop, refusing to see clients unless it was for a fitting. Maybe she could apply to a committee, arguing a hardship case because she was the sole proprietor of her family’s shop.

Except she wasn’t.

Sylvia owned half of Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions.

Izzie groaned. If Sylvia owned half of the shop, she would never be able to convince a committee that keeping a dress shop open was more important than serving.

Sylvia owns half the shop.

An unwanted thought began to form in her mind, but she didn’t know what else she could do. She was desperate. She couldn’t lose Mum’s shop, not after all the years she’d put into it. Not after finally having the chance to prove to everyone that she could run it.

Izzie forced herself to walk to the shop’s telephone. She steeled herself and then picked up the receiver. After giving the operator the exchange, she waited for the call to be connected.

There were three rings on the line and then she heard her sister say, “Pearsall residence.”

“Sylvia.”

“Izzie?”

She swallowed and forced herself to say, “I need your help.”

Sylvia looked up at the front of the two-story building that contained her family’s dress shop and flat for the first time since she’d left fourteen years ago.

“I need your help.”

They were four words she never thought she’d hear her sister say, and the shock of them that morning had compelled her to respond “Tell me what I can do” before she’d even stopped to consider what it all might mean.

She glanced down, checking that her outfit still looked as pristine as when she’d left the flat. She’d put on a navy wool crepe dress, and on top of her carefully brushed pageboy she’d placed a cream hat held in place with a pearl-topped hatpin. Her coat was of inky black boiled wool, and she hesitated for a moment before pinning to it the sapphire brooch Hugo had given her for their fifth wedding anniversary. Since the weather looked cold but not particularly wet, she’d risked a pair of black suede heels that matched her structured black leather handbag, which opened with a gold clasp, and her black leather gloves.

She hoped that the clothes would hide the deep smudges of purple under her eyes. She hadn’t slept much since Hugo had returned home, instead lying as still as she could because she didn’t dare touch him. In the mornings, she’d wait until he rose and left the flat before leaving bed. When he would come home to change for his club, she would stay in the sitting room, exchanging only the simplest of pleasantries with him. She didn’t try to convince him to stay home for supper or bring her along on a night out for fear that he would reject her once again. She hated not knowing where he was or who he was with.

Every afternoon he was away, she would check his desk and count the love letters. Perhaps some women might have taken comfort in the fact that their number never changed, but she resented that they were still there, a keepsake from his affair.

Their own courtship had been too swift and all-consuming to necessitate letters back and forth. Instead, their first months had been full of flowers and treats and time spent together. Hugo would pick her up in his Frazer Nash Fast Tourer, whisking her away from the back roads of Maida Vale to the theater in the West End, supper at the Ritz, or dancing at The 43 on Gerrard Street—sometimes all three in one evening. Then there were the parties hosted by his school friends that featured lashings of champagne and caviar, wild dancing, and cavorting of all kinds. On Hugo’s arm, she’d been drunk on a kind of glamour she’d only dreamed of.

He’d carried her along with him on a wave of love and excitement that hadn’t stopped when they’d married. If anything, he’d been even more perfect, pulling her deeper into his world until, one day, she began to notice he sent her fewer bouquets. Their holidays were no longer spent mostly in bed, drinking one another in, but rather with a gathering of Hugo’s friends, who played tennis, swam, and drank with equal fervor. It was the natural way of things, she told herself, this sinking into the comfortable routine of a married couple. He was busy at his surgery, and she had plenty of things to occupy her time. They still were invited everywhere. They still made a handsome couple.

It had been enough, until she’d learned of his infidelity.

She shook her head. There was no time for that sort of thinking now. She had an appointment to keep.

Sylvia opened the door of Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions, the familiar bell jangling to announce her arrival. No one was in the front of the shop. Uncertain whether or not she should allow herself through to the back rooms, she lingered, taking in the dressmaker’s form on display. It was clothed in the same solid, dependable type of dress her mother had been turning out for years. It was the sort of thing that sold well to an older, conservative clientele, if memory served, neither highlighting nor hiding the body too much. She cocked her head to one side and decided that it was… fine. Unexciting, uninteresting, and perfectly fine.

“You’re here.”

Sylvia turned to find her sister watching her from the door to the back.

“You’ve oiled the hinges,” she said, nodding to the door. “It always used to squeak when it opened.”

“We have put some work into the place since you left,” said Izzie.

Sylvia’s heart broke a little at her sister’s sharpness. She hated how stilted every conversation between them seemed, full of weight and meaning. She felt like a general with a battlefield map, trying to figure out what each sentence might mean, how it would be interpreted and twisted to deepen her sister’s disdain for her.

She cleared her throat. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me what you need my help with.”

Izzie rolled her shoulders as though preparing to do something odious. “Why don’t you come back? We can sit in Mum’s office.”

She followed her sister down the narrow passageway to the back of the shop and through the door to the workshop. The whir of the sewing machine stopped as Miss Reid looked up.

“Hello,” she said with a nod to the seamstress before glancing around with a frown. All of the other machines were empty. It was strange. She remembered the workroom as a vibrant space, filled with work and chatter punctuated by the hum of sewing machines and the snip, snip, snip of dressmaker’s shears.

Without a word, Miss Reid lifted her nose and went back to her sewing, the thrum of the machine filling the lonely space once again.

When Izzie opened the door to Mum’s office halfway, Sylvia’s stomach sank. Every surface was covered with paper. There were shoe boxes spilling over with receipts, books crammed so full that their pages no longer closed properly, and what looked like order sheets everywhere. The bookcases that had once housed neat rows of box files she’d worked so hard to order were stuffed to the brim with all manner of things.

“Watch the door,” said Izzie as she entered sideways.

“Doesn’t it open any farther?” she asked.

“No.”

Sylvia angled her body to slip in, staring at the mess around her in despair.

“I haven’t had a chance to properly tidy since the funeral,” said Izzie quickly.

“It looks just like it did when I started doing the accounts. Do you know how long it took me to put everything in order and set up a system that our mother could follow?” she asked.

“It’s just a little messy,” said Izzie, immediately defensive. “Mum had a lot of things to do, and so do I.”

Sylvia picked up what looked like an invoice. It was for fourteen yards of patterned cotton lawn ordered from Liberty of London and dated nearly five years ago. There were none of the marks on the top that Sylvia had used to keep track of when an invoice had been received, whether the goods were acceptable, and when it had been paid. Looking at it, she couldn’t tell whether her mother had seen it let alone settled it.

“I left our mother with clear instructions—”

“Fourteen years ago,” Izzie cut her off. “You can’t expect everything to be the same after all that time.”

Sylvia pursed her lips, not wanting to admit that it felt strange that Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions hadn’t remained frozen in amber just as she’d left it.

“And why do you keep calling her ‘our mother’?” Izzie continued. “You used to call her Mum.”

“You can’t expect everything to remain the same. Didn’t you just say so yourself?”

Izzie sniffed before shutting the office door and scooping up a pile of papers off one of the two wooden chairs squeezed into the small space in front of their mother’s desk.

“You’re not going to take her chair?” Sylvia asked, nodding to the worn leather chair behind the desk.

“No,” said Izzie.

A petty part of Sylvia thought for a moment about taking the chair for herself, but then she remembered all of the times she’d seen her mother in it, hunched over the books or counting out notes and coins to make a deposit at the bank. Instead, she sat facing her sister, primly crossing her ankles and folding her hands one over the other.

They sat for a moment in silence, the only sound the ticking of old pipes in the building’s walls. Finally, Sylvia asked, “What did you want to see me about?”

Izzie seemed to brace herself. “Have you read the newspaper this morning?”

“I haven’t had the time,” she lied. The truth was that until Izzie’s telephone call she hadn’t even emerged from her bedroom because she’d been waiting for Hugo to leave. Mrs. Atkinson had only just brought her first cup of tea when the telephone rang. The paper, which was usually laid next to her place at the table when Hugo was not at home, had been untouched.

“Then you don’t know?”

“I don’t know what?” she asked.

“I’m being conscripted.”

Her brows shot up. “What?”

“All women between twenty and thirty are being conscripted. I need to register by mid-month. You do too, actually—you’re under forty—but you won’t be required to serve. At least not yet.”

They couldn’t call Izzie up. They just couldn’t. Her sister was meant to be here at Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions, the one place in the world Izzie loved.

But instead of saying all that, Sylvia asked, “What about the shop?”

Izzie started to speak but then stopped herself.

“Perhaps Miss Reid could take it on?” Sylvia asked.

Izzie shook her head. “Not Miss Reid. She’s already working flat out as it is. If we want to have any hope of staying open, it’s vital that she remain focused on sewing.”

The way Izzie said “we” didn’t pass Sylvia by, but she pressed on. “Then you’ll need someone from the outside. Perhaps I could help you hire someone.”

“I can’t hire someone. There isn’t time, and besides”—Izzie cleared her throat—“I don’t know if we could afford to pay another member of staff.”

“Is the shop not doing well?” she asked with surprise.

Izzie shifted in her seat. “I don’t know.”

“Haven’t you had the chance to look at the account books yet?” she asked, looking around.

“I haven’t found them.” Izzie opened the top drawer of the desk, drew out a ledger, and dropped it on the desktop. “Until then, you’re welcome to work through the orders and try to make sense of it.”

Sylvia’s stomach soured. “What do you mean, ‘make sense of it.’?”

“It looks as though Mum kept a good record of orders, but I have no idea what expenses have been paid. To find out what the business actually has by way of funds will require going through orders placed, inventory, invoices, and wages and reverse engineering the lot,” said Izzie.

“But she must have been keeping records. How else would she know how much she has to pay in tax?” she asked, panic rising in her voice.

“Sylvia, I can’t even find Mum’s post office savings book to see what she had in her personal account.”

Sylvia stared at her sister, aghast. “What happened?”

Izzie sighed. “The war. We were doing well enough, I think, then war broke out and two of our girls left to join up. They said they wanted their choice of service. Clever of them, really.

“Then rationing started and everything became harder. Orders began to slow when people started to have to use coupons.”

“Can the business even survive?” Sylvia asked.

“Yes, of course it can,” Izzie snapped. “We still have orders from our loyal customers. Maybe not as many as before, I’ll grant you, but business will pick up again once rationing ends.”

“And when will that be?” she asked.

Izzie’s expression hardened. “We just have to weather things for a little bit longer.”

Sylvia sat back heavily in her chair. “Did you know?”

“What?” Izzie asked.

“Did you know before Mum died how dire things had become?”

“Things are not dire, Sylvia.” Izzie sniffed. “And this line of questioning does not solve the problem of me having to go off to serve.”

“No. No, of course not,” she said, backing away from the topic.

“Could you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Run Mrs. Shelton’s,” said Izzie.

She stared at her sister. “Are you serious?”

“You said yourself that you practically used to run the business for Mum.”

She held a hand up. “I did not say that. I said that I did the accounts. There were a number of things that Mum never let me do. I wouldn’t know the first thing about running a dress shop.”

“Miss Reid can take care of the customers,” Izzie insisted. “She might not like it, but she’ll become accustomed to it. You would only need to pay the bills as they come in.”

Sylvia began to shake her head. “You know that’s not true, Izzie. Making sure that a business stays on its feet, especially when we have no idea what the state of it really is? That’s a huge job. I’m not the right person for it.”

“But Sylvia, there isn’t anyone else.”

For the first time since Sylvia had spoken to Izzie by their mother’s grave, Izzie sounded defeated.

“Is there really no one else?” Sylvia asked.

“No one.”

She sighed. “Tell me how you think it would work.” When Izzie straightened, she added, “I’m not saying that I will do it. Just explain it to me.”

“Right,” said Izzie, taking a deep breath. “I have to register and then wait to be called up. I don’t know when that will happen. I can work up until that moment and leave you notes or, if you really think that it would help, you could come in a few times and I could show you where things are.

“Then, while I’m serving, we can write each other. You can send me questions about anything I haven’t explained, and I can tell you what to do. You don’t have to do much,” Izzie promised.

A plan that simple would never be foolproof. There would be problems at the shop that needed sorting, or Miss Reid would need guidance, and Sylvia would inevitably find herself back where she had been at eighteen.

But then she thought about Hugo, who had been so dismissive when she told him about her inheritance. Hugo, who had turned up his nose at anyone in “trade,” managing to insult Izzie, their mother, and Sylvia in the process. Hugo, who hadn’t even had the decency to offer her his condolences when she’d told him that her mother had died.

She looked up and found Izzie watching her with an expression that was at once guarded yet desperate.

“I suppose that all of this means that the sale is off,” Sylvia said.

“Only until the war ends,” said Izzie.

“Fine,” she said.

“Fine?” Izzie asked, her eyes widening.

“I’ll do it. I’ll run the shop. We can correspond via letter, and whenever you can take leave, you can come and check up on me, since I know you’ll be itching to do that.”

Izzie gave a little laugh of disbelief. “You really mean it?”

“Don’t you?”

“Trust me, if I had any other options, I would have exercised them. You’re certain Hugo won’t object?”

Oh, she had no doubt that her husband would have all manner of objections, but she had no intention of telling him. His assignment in London was temporary, and soon he would be off on whichever base or ship the Royal Navy decided needed him.

“Leave Hugo to me,” she said.

There was a pause as they simply stared at one another.

“I feel as though we should shake hands or something,” she said.

“I don’t think that will be necessary, do you?” asked Izzie.

“No.” Sylvia sighed. “No, I don’t suppose it will be.”