that case, we have this plain glacé silk in over thirty shades of color, commencing at only two pounds, fifteen shillings, and sixpence for the extra full dress.”
I give an impatient cluck. “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear—”
She shakes her curls. “Madam, you made yourself perfectly clear.” She rolls away the blue silk and puts out a green muslin. I touch it. Stiff as a board. “This is French organdy, one of last year’s designs, which we are giving away at the very reduced price of one pound, six shillings, and sixpence for the extra full dress.”
I put my hand under my chin and tap my lip with a finger, as if considering. “Do me one without the frills and I’ll give you a pound for it.”
“Without the frills, madam?”
“None of those ridiculous trimmings you have in the window there. All that unnecessary bib and tucker.”
“We have other models we can—”
“I want it plain, plain as can be.”
“You don’t want to see—?”
“Do you understand the word plain, young lass?”
“Of course.”
“Well, that’s what I want. And I want it for a pound.”
“I shall have to speak to—”
“Speak to whomsoever you like. Mrs. Engels is the name. One-two-two Regent’s Park Road. I’ll be here.”
Curly curtsies and goes into the back room. Pinch forces a smile into her cramped little face and goes to busy herself with the show dummies. I turn my gander to the carpet to keep from catching myself in the looking glasses that leer from every side.
“All right, Mrs. Engels,” says Curly when she comes back, “that should be fine. If you would like to come this way, we shall get you measured up.”
“That won’t be needed, I can tell you straight off what I am.”
“I do not doubt it, Mrs. Engels, but at Barrow’s we like to measure all our customers to ensure the best style and fit.”
“Listen, chicken, do you have a book to write in?”
“Of course.”
“Well, put this down.”
Flushing, she picks up her feather. Dips it.
“Bust thirty-four, hips thirty-six, length-to-foot just as you see me.” I step back to give her a full view. She frowns at me and scribbles down. “I’ll be back at five tomorrow to pick it up.”
“Tomorrow?”
“That’s right.”
“Madam, I’m sorry, but we usually need at least three working days. We could have it ready by close of business Monday.”
I pick a sovereign out of my reticule and put it down on the page of the book.
She waves her hands over it as if to magic it away. “No, madam, please, you can pay when you come to collect it.”
“Take it now and be done with it. And I’ll be seeing you tomorrow.”
I find a cookshop a little up the road and order a chop and a pint of Bass’s ale, and now a slice of plum pudding and a cup of ready-made coffee with cream and sugar. I take the table in the window, for I like to look out.
Passing by, streams of people with bags and boxes: gone out for a ribbon and coming home with the stock of an entire silk mercer’s. These places, they do it on the cheap and make their capital out of pressure and high prices. It takes cleverness and steel for a woman to get her fair portion.
Exhausted, I look into my cup and try not to feel like the only one fighting.
VII. The Party
When it comes to the dangers of a bit of food, the Germans can be as afraid as the English, so I eat before we leave. Spiv heats me up a kidney pudding, and I have a glass of milk with it to line the gut, and after that some cold saveloy and penny loaf.
As it happens, I needn’t have ruined my stomach, for there’s vittles enough to feed a battalion: tables of meat and fowl and fish and cheese, salvers of delicates and dumplings carried by livery servants in silk hose, all sorts of strong-tasting aliments smelling up in our noses. Who’s died? I think as I marvel the fare.
Tussy appears beside me. “I’ve been looking all over, Aunt Lizzie.”
Embarrassed to be the only one grazing, I drop my pastry roll onto the damask. “Tussy, my sweet darling.”
“Come on, I want to present you.”
She takes a glass of red from a tray, puts it in my hand, and pulls me with her into the crush. “I don’t think I have ever been in a room with so many interesting people at once,” she says.
The men have changed the usual shab-and-drab for frilled shirts. The women are in clothes above the ordinary but not showy. I feel in tune, glad to have put my foot down at the dressmaker’s. Tussy introduces me to everybody, even to those I’ve met and know.
“This is Mr. Engels’s wife, Mrs. Burns. An Irishwoman and a true proletarian.”
The strangers bow. The familiars wink and smile along. There’s more women than I expected to see. One sitting beside Karl on the couch. A pair by the window, looking foreign and bored. And by the chimneypiece, in a circle around Jenny and Janey, several gathered. Frederick—no surprise—has dug out the one with the lowest neckline.
“I’m not going to remember all these new names,” I whisper to Tussy, mortifying of the fuss.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “What’s important is that they remember yours.”
From where he’s sat, Karl makes a big act of twisting his monocle in to show he has it tied on a new ribbon. Janey’s wearing the Celtic cross I sent her. Jenny has made more of an effort than anyone else to draw attention onto herself: a feather in the hair, yards of a color not found in the wild.
“Oh, ladies, please,” she’s saying to her audience, the lush sending her voice up a pitch. “Before the illness, I had no gray hair and my teeth and figure were good. People used to class me among well-preserved women! But that’s all a thing of the past.”
Loud protests.
“Come now, ladies, I am not looking for your reassurance. I speak from a place of solemn awareness. I can see the reality. When I look in the glass now I seem to myself a kind of cross between a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus whose place is in Regent’s Park Zoo rather than among members of the Caucasian race!”
Reddening for her, I busy myself with the only bow on my bodice.
“Now, Lizzie,” she says when the required objections die down, “I’d like you to meet some extraordinary women. Mrs. Marie Goegg, chairman of the International
