VIOLET HAD NO IDEA whom to teach the stitches to. Her mother would never agree, Evelyn had too much to do, and Marjory was probably too young to master anything as complicated as the rice stitch. For a moment she wondered about her landlady, but Mrs Harvey did not seem the type to sit down with a needle. She might be able to convince one of her fellow lodgers, but wasn’t sure she wanted to. Violet had been careful to maintain her distance from Miss Frederick, an English teacher at a local girls’ school, and Miss Lancaster, who worked as a clerk at Winchester Crown Court. There was a certain kind of misery that hung about them, a wistfulness she hated to think clung to her as well. To become friends with them would only make that feeling more pronounced. Still, when several days had passed and she had still not found someone to teach, she realised she would have to break her ban and ask Miss Frederick. She pondered this one morning as she sat typing, two days before the next embroidery class. Her office mates had not yet arrived: they were rarely on time.
Mo sloped in as Violet was midway through her second contract, adding fire insurance to an existing policy on a house in Andover. Mo was never as loud and confident when Olive was not with her. Now she seemed even more downcast: head low, she muttered a hello into her collar and did not look up. Her dress mirrored her mood, puddle-brown, with a shapeless skirt and too much fabric hanging at the chest. Violet nodded hello, and after finishing the contract offered to make tea.
“Yes, please,” Mo answered in a small voice, and sighed. The sigh was the opening, her way of indicating that she was ready to be quizzed about what was wrong.
First Violet went to the kitchen and made a pot of tea, then brought it back to the office with a plate of Garibaldi biscuits – no one’s favourite, but that was all there was. “Right,” she said, placing a cup of tea in front of Mo and handing her the sugar bowl. “What is it?” She sat back in her own chair, hands on her cup to warm them, for it was one of those rainy June days that felt like early spring rather than summer. A cardigan day – she alternated between beige and tan. Today she wore tan; though she couldn’t afford new, she’d recently refreshed it by changing the buttons to a mother-of-pearl set she’d found in a secondhand shop.
Mo heaped several spoonfuls of sugar into her tea and frowned at the rectangular Garibaldis with their currants that looked like squashed flies. Violet did not press her. They had all day.
“O’s handing in her notice,” she said at last. “Effective immediately. Her mother is ringing Mr Waterman this morning.” She picked up a biscuit and took a vicious bite.
“I see.” This was not what Violet had been expecting. She’d assumed that Mo was moping because of something the bank clerk boyfriend had said or done, and that Olive was out on an errand for the long-off wedding – meeting with a vicar, finding a printer for the invitations, looking at dress fabric – using it as an excuse for a leisurely day out. Violet had expected there to be months, years of this nonsense before the big day itself. Only then would Olive leave; women always left work once they married, but not usually before.
“I may as well tell you – you’ll hear soon enough. People are such gossips,” Mo added, conveniently ignoring how much she and O discussed and spread rumours. “She’s – well, she’s getting married soon. Next weekend.”
“Ah.” Violet pushed at a pen on her desk so that it was square with a stack of paper. There was only one reason why a woman got married so quickly.
“It’s not what you think!”
Violet waited a moment, then said quietly, “Of course it is. Poor Olive.”
Mo stiffened, as if about to argue, but after a moment she slumped back in her chair and dunked the biscuit in her tea. “It’s not as if she didn’t want to marry him. Just not so soon, with everyone – talking.”
Violet lit a cigarette and felt old. “They’ll get over it.” And they would. Olive and her man would marry: “We just decided we wanted no fuss, just to be together, because we love each other so,” she would say. She would have her baby: “Premature, but look what a big bouncing thing he is anyway; you’d never guess he came two months early!” And people would forget the circumstances, because it happened often enough, and what did it matter anyway? Violet had been careful with her sherry men, using a Dutch cap she’d convinced a married friend to get for her from a doctor. But she’d had a few scares over the years, and knew how easily a girl like Olive could be caught out. At least her fiancé was being honourable. If he was anything like his sister Gilda, Violet suspected O was very lucky indeed.
At lunch it was raining too hard to go out, and Violet and Mo remained at their desks with their sandwiches, Mo flicking miserably through a magazine.
“I say,” Violet finally suggested, “shall I teach you something that will take your mind off of things?”
It turned out that Mo – or Maureen, for along with Olive’s abrupt departure went the nickname – was better at embroidery than Violet, even though she had never done it before. She had the knack of remaining focused and somewhat dogged – qualities Violet had never seen her display while typing. But then, Olive had always been around to distract her. She was also easily pleased with the results. “Look at my rows of Gobelin,” she announced possessively as they sat stitching. “Straight as straight!”
Miss Pesel was right: teaching someone else did help you to learn the stitches yourself, as your pupil’s questions forced you to think through why you were doing what you were doing, and expose the things you didn’t really understand. “Why does the tension matter so much?” Maureen demanded as she frowned at her green wool.
“Because – look –” Violet pointed at a rogue stitch – “see how that sticks out? You haven’t pulled it tight enough. It will always be like that, unless you unpick it.”
“Why does it matter if the stitches on the back are straight or diagonal?”
“Because stitches on the diagonal pull the canvas so it’s distorted. You want the cushions and kneelers to be squared.”
“And why must the back be so neat?”
“If there are too many loose threads you may accidentally pull them through the front with your stitches.” Violet could feel herself parroting Miss Pesel. So far she had managed to answer all of Maureen’s questions, but she expected eventually to be caught out.
“Perhaps you should come along to the meeting before the broderers break for the summer,” she suggested as they stitched again during their afternoon tea break. It was a remarkably quick transition from being ignored and pitied to becoming Maureen’s teacher, and even suggesting an activity together. She could not picture them ever being good friends – Maureen was fifteen years younger – but the atmosphere in their office was already transformed.
“Mr Waterman won’t let us both go,” Maureen replied, holding her canvas piece close to her face to peer at her stitches. She was practising rice, with two different colours of wool. “Oh, blast! I forget which direction to take the overstitches in. Does it matter, clockwise or anti-clockwise?”
“No, as long as you stitch each square the same way, so it’s consistent.” Violet studied her own rice stitches. There seemed to be a lot of canvas showing. “Mr Waterman might let us go for the morning if we work through lunch and stay late to make up some of the hours.”
“With Olive gone,
