The Dressmakers of London

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

Izzie closed the latches on her case and straightened. She looked around her bedroom. This flat had been home for as long as she could remember, and it felt wrong to leave it.

She picked up her orders from off of the bed. She was to report to Innsworth in Gloucestershire, where she would join her fellow new members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. The orders had come faster than she’d imagined when she’d stood in the queue at the recruitment office and declared her preference to join the WAAF because that was the service that Miss Bell and Miss Parker had left Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions for, and a secret part of her liked how exotic anything to do with airplanes felt.

Then, shortly after she’d registered, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States had entered the war. On the same day that she received her orders, the Americans joined the war against Germany. Everywhere she went, it seemed that people were abuzz with the news that the Yanks would join the fight. The war was again inescapable.

Izzie folded her orders and tucked them into the pocket of her jacket. She’d worn her best suit even though she knew it wouldn’t really matter. Once she arrived on base, she would no doubt be issued the uniform that she would wear for who knew how long. Still, it felt right to leave the shop dressed in her best, a tribute to Mum’s insistence that the Shelton women always be well turned out no matter where they went.

She lifted her case and let herself out of the flat, locking the door behind her. The last time they’d met, she’d given Sylvia a set of keys along with those for the shop in case something went wrong, but she doubted her sister would ever venture upstairs. Although Sylvia had seemed intent on listening to what Izzie had had to say during those awkward afternoons of training, Izzie couldn’t let herself believe that her sister really cared what happened to Mrs. Shelton’s. Still, what other option did she have?

She made her way down the stairs and stopped. The interior door leading to the shop was ajar. She was certain she hadn’t left it like that the previous night, because she hadn’t wanted to give herself an excuse to go back inside, certain that if she did, it would be impossible to leave.

She was about to close the door when it swung wide and Sylvia appeared, still wearing her hat, gloves, and that enviable mink.

“What are you doing here?” Izzie asked.

“I’m going with you to the train station,” said Sylvia, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Izzie bristled. “I’m perfectly capable of taking myself.”

Sylvia sighed. “No one is saying you aren’t, but I woke up this morning with the strange feeling that if the last time I saw my sister during this war was over an old ledger, I’d regret it. Strange, I know, but it’s the truth.”

“So you broke into the shop?” she asked.

Sylvia held up her copy of the key. “I let myself in. Apparently that’s something I’m meant to do now, no later than ten o’clock in the morning.”

“Nine o’clock,” she corrected. “Earlier if you need to be here for deliveries and—”

“I know. I know. You’ve already told me all of this and left me extensive instructions so I don’t manage to run our mother’s shop into the ground within the first few days,” said Sylvia. “I did work here too, you know. I remember our mother’s rules.”

“It’s been so long, I thought you would have forgotten,” she said.

“I’ve tried to, trust me,” said Sylvia with a weary smile. “Now, come along or you’ll never catch your train.”

“You really don’t have to come,” she said.

Sylvia reached out to grasp her hand. Izzie started at the shock of it, but Sylvia didn’t let go.

“I’m going with you, Izzie. The matter’s settled, and there’s no use in trying to change my mind,” said Sylvia.

“Fine. We’ll take the bus.”

She waited to see if her sister balked at the suggestion of taking something so humble as the bus, but Sylvia simply nodded in the direction of the door and said, “Lead on.”

The sisters didn’t speak much on the bus ride from Maida Vale to Paddington Station, but that didn’t bother Sylvia. She was there, and that was the most important thing.

Izzie didn’t want her company—that much was clear—but Sylvia had kept imagining her little sister surrounded by dozens of other girls heading for Innsworth as friends and family embraced them and tearily told them to stay safe while Izzie stood alone.

The bus pulled up to a curb and Izzie began to gather up her things. “This is us.”

She followed Izzie as they squeezed down the aisle and stepped off onto the pavement in front of the station. The day was cold, a wind whipping around Paddington and creeping between the seams of her coat. She pulled the collar of her mink a little closer.

“Where do you suppose I’m meant to go?” asked Izzie, looking around as though the train station was completely foreign to her.

Sylvia realized that she didn’t know whether Izzie had ever left London outside of their summer day trips to the seaside when they’d been children. She herself had certainly never stayed in a hotel before she’d met Hugo, because there had hardly been anywhere to go and little money to spare. Maggie Shelton had had no family to speak of, and Papa’s family had made it clear that they were not interested in seeing their son’s widow and daughters.

“Which is your train?” Sylvia asked.

“The 10:04,” said Izzie.

“Let’s go in and check the boards.”

This time Sylvia forged ahead, weaving through people at the station entrance and into the station hall. It felt as though the entire world was at Paddington. Fresh-faced young soldiers with nary a crease in their uniform mixed with those who had the haunted look of men who had seen too far much over the past two and a half years. Mothers clung to children’s hands, a reminder of the mass evacuations that had taken place right as the war started and then again after the Blitz, and older men wore the uniform of the Home Guard with pride.

Sylvia stopped in front of the board and scanned until she saw it. The 10:04 train.

“Platform ten,” she said, trying to push down the panic tightening her chest.

What was she doing? She was supposed to be answering correspondence before bathing and dressing ahead of taking tea at her neighbor Mrs. Bellington-Norton’s flat, not standing in the middle of a train station, waiting to put her little sister on a train.

Every worry she had pushed aside while Izzie had trained her rose in her throat at once, choking her. Parliament might have put a ban on women serving in any role that resembled combat, but that didn’t mean that WAAFs and other women weren’t in danger all the time. Bombs and bullets and shrapnel didn’t discriminate.

Clearing her throat, Sylvia did her best to smile. “Right, I’m sure we can find platform ten somewhere—”

“Sylvia.”

She gestured over Izzie’s shoulder. “I think, if memory serves, it’s just over there beyond—”

“Sylvia, stop! Why are you doing this?” Izzie demanded.

She took a step back. “Why am I doing what?”

“This!” Izzie cried, sweeping her hand back and forth between them. “Taking me to the station. Playing at happy families.”

“But we are family. You’re my sister.”

Her little sister, the girl who had toddled after her when they were children, who had always wanted to do whatever Sylvia was doing. Four years the elder, it had been Sylvia who had comforted Izzie after Papa’s death when their mother had been too distracted with worry about how they could possibly live without his salary, let alone with the crippling interest on his debts. Sylvia had found Izzie shaking with fear when her sister had had her first monthly courses and had shown her how to wear a belt and what to do with her cloths. She’d been there for Izzie’s first date with a spotty boy from two roads over whose mother had her clothes made at the shop, and it had been Sylvia whom a tearful Izzie had come to after spotting that same boy kissing another girl a week later after he hadn’t even tried to kiss Izzie.

That that little girl was now going off to war petrified Sylvia.

“I appreciate you taking care of the shop while I’m gone, but I do not need you to escort me any farther,” said Izzie.

Sylvia scrambled for a way to explain but found herself falling short. She didn’t know how to speak to her sister with the frankness she once had without plunging them into the middle of an argument.

Finally, she said, “I thought you might want the company.”

“No. You thought that because Mum died and I need you, you get to be my sister again,” said Izzie, her voice icy enough to freeze the entire ticket hall.

“I’ve always been your sister,” she protested weakly.

“You chose to stop a long time ago,” said Izzie.

Sylvia’s natural defensiveness rose up in her. She’d done what she’d had to do, hadn’t she? She hadn’t had Izzie’s and her mother’s talent. All she’d had was youth and beauty and the good luck to meet a man who had loved her enough to overlook her background.

If the roles had been reversed, she was certain Izzie would have done the same.

Still, looking at her little sister with her case in her hand, waiting to board a train to join the WAAFs, she couldn’t bring herself to start that fight.

“I know you don’t believe me, but I’m trying to do the right thing,” she said.

Izzie closed her eyes for a moment as though finding strength. “I appreciate you coming to the train station with me. However, I think we should say goodbye here.”

Sylvia swallowed back the emotion rising in her throat. “Whatever you think is best.”

Izzie stuck out her free hand. “Goodbye.”

She took her sister’s hand. Leather gloves brushed each other, a brief squeeze, and then it was done.

“Good luck,” she said, stepping back. “I’ll write to you.”

“Thank you.”

Sylvia watched her sister walk away, people swallowing Izzie up.

She stood there, staring after her sister until well after the 10:04 train had blown its whistle and pulled out of Paddington on its way west.