down Regent Street, his head inclined a notch too high to seem natural.
Beyond the Albert Street intersection, shops reappeared on the left of the high street, though they too had closed for the day. He turned to look behind him. Josephine was a dozen paces behind, keeping her distance but still following. He stood with his hands on his hips and eventually she drew level with him again.
‘What do you think of these windows, Mr Kemp? Aren’t they dreary compared with the big stores?’
‘Dreary?’ he said. ‘That’s one word for it.’
They walked on, past Professor Healey’s store of smoker’s requisites and Mr Kriss’s bakery, which emitted the heavy tar smell of the black bread that he baked for holidays—his mother’s recipe—though no one else in town could stomach it.
‘Look at this,’ Kemp said, pointing at Sandy Chase’s window, stocked with ales, porters, wines and spirits. ‘The bottles are still wreathed in tinsel from Christmas. And the McNeils’ window . . . Well, a fine coat of dust hardly entices the potential buyer of a pair of boots, does it?’
Josephine thought hard before responding, ‘No.’
‘Now Mr Ikin, on the other hand,’ he said and turned square to the bookseller’s window, ‘I suspect he wears his dust with pride.’
He looked around and found Josephine in front of the bright white display of the next store over, which belonged to the town’s purveyor of pills and sundries, Mr Fricker.
‘Have any of these stores ever asked you to rig up a display for them, Mr Kemp?’
‘They’re above that sort of thing, or so they say. But let’s see how long they can hold out, eh? Let’s see how long till they’re boarding up their windows like the shops on Stirling Road and queuing for a job selling perfume or minding the books at Donaldson’s or that other store.’
‘You mean Hercus & Barling?’
‘I know what it’s called.’
The commerce on the beach side came to a halt once more at the grounds of St Paul’s, the tallest of the town’s three churches. He could smell the fishmonger’s shop on the other side of grounds. The reek seemed the final word on religion, no matter how much the vestments, stained glass and ceremony might appeal to the aesthete inside any window dresser.
He leant on the church’s wrought iron gate, another of Jolly Bannerman’s pieces, and looked across at Donaldson’s, square and tall, its black verandah of corrugated iron stretching out to the street. The masonry facade sought to announce quality, class, permanence. The tall windows of the upper floors were bound by Roman arches, each capped with a keystone bearing a white rosette. But he knew it was all for nought without a decent display in his windows, the only windows that counted.
He had started as a stock boy seven years earlier, back when it was Donaldson’s Drapers two doors further down Regent Street and old man Donaldson still ran the roost. As the store had grown, expanding the range of goods offered—millinery, gardening tools, sheet music—so too had Kemp’s role. He was responsible for all elements of display inside the store and had two stock boys beneath him when Charlie Begg came out from Nottingham in ’99 to oversee the move to the new premises. Four storeys, replete with Lamson tube system and twenty feet of plate glass either side of the main entrance. A proper department store, one to rival any in the South Island.
‘You say you’re responsible for display,’ Begg had said at their first meeting. ‘What exactly does this encompass?’
‘Putting the wares out and making them look nice, sir.’
‘Well, we can’t have those front windows bare for the grand reopening, can we? Sketch a few ideas and show them to me tomorrow morning.’
Until then, Kemp’s idea of window dressing had been to cram as much merchandise as possible into the old store’s small dark window and send a boy in there with a feather duster every three months. There hadn’t been the space for mannequins. Instead the few that Donaldson’s possessed were dotted inside the store. Now he was to come up with ideas to fill the expanse of plate glass and provide sketches? He couldn’t wield a pencil for any purpose beyond words and numbers.
At home that evening he’d shared his predicament with Louisa.
‘But you must have ideas, Col. You’re around the goods all day. Just put them together to make a scene. Tell a story.’
‘But half our dummies are missing arms. They look as if they’ve just come back from fighting the Boers.’
‘What about a battle scene?’ she asked mischievously.
‘That may be in poor taste.’
‘If there was some way of hiding the missing parts,’ Louisa said and looked down at the threadbare tablecloth. ‘Flossie cannot for the life of her draw hands, so her damsels are always holding mufflers, her dashing knights crossing their arms. Perhaps you could hide the missing parts? Prepare a forest scene. The trees could hide the shortcomings of the dummies.’
‘A forest? That sounds like a fair amount of work.’
‘Not if you’re smart,’ said Louisa and reached for her sketchbook.
The next morning he’d shown Louisa’s drawing to Begg, acting as if it were his own.
‘And how much will you need for incidentals?’
‘Perhaps one and sixpence?’ he’d offered. He planned to cut actual saplings from his own property and install them in the display.
‘A miser? My estimation of you grows by the minute, Mr Kemp.’
With time he and Louisa became expert at recognising stories from the newspaper or details from their own lives that could form the basis of a new display. A jail break. A night at the theatre. Bringing home the latest addition to the family—all the while trying to start their own.
Though he no longer had to show Begg his idea before producing a display, he still had Louisa prepare a sketch on a piece of foolscap, which he then replicated in the windows of Donaldson’s.
It was Louisa who suggested he carve his own mannequins, sick of his continual complaints about the state of the store’s dummies and the cost of ordering new ones from overseas. Louisa who urged him on. Louisa who bandaged his damaged fingers.
He looked across the street at his latest window and saw too much of Louisa in it. The ghost of her face in the four mannequins. The echo of her voice, the shade of her pencil in the layout. The numerals ‘1902’ cut from large shards of broken looking-glass (quite how ladies broke mirrors in the confines of a dressing room was still a mystery to him). The black ropes against the black background, invisible to the casual onlooker, which would hoist the ‘2’ up into the false ceiling and replace it with a ‘3’. His best mannequins forming happy couples either side of the sparkling numbers, dressed in their finest theatre clothes, who would turn to each other as the ‘3’ descended and almost clink their champagne flutes, thanks to individual turntables concealed in the false floor. All the movement rigged up to the same gas engine that powered the pneumatic Lamson tubes that sent money and receipts around the store.
‘I can see the ropes,’ Josephine said. He had almost forgotten she
