Claire Fox Baron

The Seamstress

Novel extract

1.

At Warren Street, I open my eyes to see a man in an Aran jumper and very deep turn-ups getting on. There is rustling and a degree of effort to this because in one hand he is holding a rucksack and in the other a plastic bag containing five rolls of Christmas paper. It is March. I begin to examine him for clues as to why he is carrying the paper out of season, but I am immediately distracted. In the process of sitting, his rucksack has landed on his neighbour’s knee and arm.

I estimate that the man with the paper is in his sixties. He is studying the tube map above my head. He hasn’t noticed the location of his rucksack. 

Even more incredible is that the younger man sitting next to him, who has an eye-catching red enamel badge pinned to his lapel, doesn’t move either. He doesn’t even flinch when the bag lands, and remains, on him. I am aghast. I look down at my book, and then back at the scene.

There is no movement. The bag’s oblivious owner scratches his beard as he works out his route. The rolls of paper are wedged between his knees and jut towards me. The cardboard in their centres is weak and some of them are squashed nearly flat. Red Badge is still reading from his mobile phone as if nothing unusual has taken place. He is wearing a black polo-neck jumper which seems in keeping with this alarming indifference. I feel myself getting agitated and pull down the zip on my coat slightly. 

Why is he pretending it isn’t happening? What kind of person allows this sort of infraction? I look for the answer in his shoes. I believe you can tell a lot about someone from their footwear. His black polished formal shoes, worn with jeans, suggest he shops in expensive independent boutiques. I run through a few careers and try to match him to a job that would allow him to excel with a permissive attitude. Nothing presents itself. 

I imagine him living his life on the fence, saying what people want him to say. 

I have noticed that people who do this are more popular. They have a knack of saying things they don’t mean without coming across as liars. Having too strong an opinion, which veers too far from the consensus, doesn’t go down well. Being interesting enough, yet not too quirky, is a fine balance. 

This rulebook for fitting in appears to come naturally to the majority of people. Everywhere I go they are comfortably chatting about nothing in particular, flaunting a blandness agreeable to most palates. Smiling too is important I have observed recently, and I have begun to try it out to gauge the effect.

I have always strived to achieve this accepted normality and assume I have largely failed, given that I have few friends. 

‘We should all get together more often,’ I said enthusiastically to the mother of one of my daughter’s classmates after a mums’ night at her house before Christmas. Catching snippets of conversations in the playground the following week, I realised that she in fact did regularly have people over, I just hadn’t been invited. When I discovered this, I recalled the face of one of the mums who was standing next to her as I left that night in this new context. She must have felt embarrassed for me, knowing it when I did not. 

Over the last few months, I have developed a better understanding of what it is to be different through the way the school has handled my daughter’s difficulties. I have tried to explain that when something as insignificant as a misplaced tie can send her bawling into a locked bathroom shouting that she cannot go to school, no amount of quoting attendance rates is going to get her there. Faced with the teachers’ apparent belief that the only course of action for anything that interrupts their plans for the day is punishment, I have been forced to fight her corner. But the head of year obdurately insists that the usual rules apply and continues to try to press her into what I had thought was fairly obviously the wrong-shaped hole. I have begun to realise I am also irregularly shaped. When I look back, from this distance I see that the general populace has always been inflexible to difference. Thankfully not everyone fits the mould. Frida Kahlo didn’t and look at the mark she left on the world. 

At the next stop, the bearded man gets off, taking both his bags with him. Red Badge doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t look up, doesn’t reposition his arm. 

It’s as if it never happened. 

I am, as Pippa would say, shook.

*

When we pull into Oxford Circus, Red Badge stands up too. As I walk in his draft towards the exit, I catch the familiar scent of something subtle and lemony. It is Acqua di Parma, the scent Sally used to wear which triggered my headaches before we banned perfumes from the workshop. 

I notice that Red Badge’s gait is very similar to Colin Firth’s as Mark Darcey in Bridget Jones’ Diary; long-strided and elastic. I wonder if that is how Colin Firth walks in real life or if he adopted the walk he thought Darcey would have especially for the film, and that in fact, Colin Firth walks differently in every role. That should be how it is. Everyone’s individual walk is a curation of personality traits and lived experience. For example, so many women walk with their shoulders rounded because of an insecurity originating in their teens about the size of their breasts. Also, I am noticing a few boys in Pippa’s year adopting a gait that they think makes them look meaner or more manly. So if actors do not consider this when embarking on every new part, I would say it was a huge oversight. 

As I follow him up the escalator, placing just the heel of my hand on the handrail to avoid germs, I picture Colin Firth walking into the restaurant to propose to the Portuguese girl in Love Actually. I think that character’s walk is the same as Darcey’s. Colin Firth has gone down in my estimation.

Outside the station, a scruffy dog passes me, trotting next to their owner. I admire their happy tail feathers waving to and fro until I am bumped forward by a bag. When I continue on my route I see Red Badge on the other side of Oxford Street, heading north up Regent Street. He is going in my direction and so I cross over in hot pursuit. 

On the tube, the answer to the question of what kind of man passively allows a stranger’s bag to rest on his knee appeared to be unanswerable. It hadn’t occurred to me to follow him, but now I may have a chance to find out. 

Where Top Shop used to be, a swarm of teenagers emerges from the other station exit and blocks my path. I try to elbow my way through, but they seem to be Italian and do not understand what I thought was universal sign language for ‘get out of my way.’ I see him ahead, at the crossroads of Great Castle Street but when I finally emerge through the muddle of backpacks he has disappeared. 

I walk to his last seen spot, the London tourist tat stall on the corner, and look up and down the street. Nothing. I had expected to follow him to a location where the cloak concealing his true self would fall and everything would become clear. 

I realise that the mystery of his behaviour on the tube will remain unsolved. I exhale deeply to push away the pink appearing in my peripheral vision. 

*

The north side of Regent Street is always quiet which is why I walk this way to work. You can’t move at Oxford Circus but ten steps past the tube it is practically deserted. Great Castle Street is just off this less popular end of Regent Street, one road from the main drag too many for tourists. Londoners are the only people who take this route, a shortcut towards Cavendish Square, Harley Street, or Marylebone. 

The Italian restaurant Ponti’s is here. It has been my secret for the twenty years I have lived in London. I am off-kilter after the morning’s events. By wanting to know, and knowing I will never know. I cannot go into the workshop like this. Sue has a key, and I am always early anyway, so I take a table outside and order a coffee. 

Something irritating often happens on the tube which is why I try to wear earplugs to take the edge off the noise and close my eyes for as much of the journey as possible. Stills of the episode glide through my mind. The bag, the five rolls of wrapping paper, Red Badge fixated on his phone, his right foot in mid-air stepping off the escalator, the flash of his leather sole as he disappears around the corner. They come one after the other and end in black. 

When my cappuccino arrives, I think about the years I have spent stitching together and unpicking, letting down hems or turning them up, moving buttons, mending holes. 

Although the sky is blue, it is a cold day – still winter after all – and my coffee cools quickly.

*

I cross Cavendish Square and the familiarity is soothing. It is an exciting day today; we have a new woman, April, starting. 

When I started at Bennet’s eight years ago, Sewing Services was much bigger. Now there are only five of us. Sue has been there longer even than I have and is the most exquisite hand stitcher. Customers come from far and wide for her invisible zip work. Patience is a solid quick machinist and does all the made-to-measure curtains, which Bennet’s is renowned for. Shobha is the first port of call for occasion wear and the taming of difficult fabrics like chiffon, velvet, and silk. April will bolster our expertise in tailoring but is a good all-round seamstress, like me. We used to have Sally, but she left under a bit of a cloud after the perfume episode and wasn’t replaced. 

It will be great to have a new recruit so I have more time to ensure our processes are tip-top. But I am also slightly anxious about her fitting in. Change can be unsettling. 

Sewing Services has been the name of the department since the shop opened in 1910, but when Sam took over HR (her only qualification being that she was married to a Bennet) she managed to get us renamed ‘Alterations’. I still refer to us as Sewing Services in all communications. 

Our section of the business, although small, is one of the reasons Bennet’s has survived. Most other departments disagree with me on that and do not value what we do. But I have studied the figures and know that over the last five years our revenue has shrunk less than other departments who sell products that can be acquired more cheaply online. What we do cannot be bought on Amazon. Despite this, I constantly feel like I have to justify our existence, particularly since Sam arrived, but I know our customers come specially for the service. We are one of the only stores in the West End that still offers it.

Bennet’s is one of the few remaining original department stores in London, and family-run too, which is even rarer. I have an extreme fondness and nostalgia (even though of course I did not witness it in person) for the heyday of those mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century shops. We have beautiful black and white photos of the original shop front, bomb damage on Oxford Street, and adverts from newspapers and magazines for dainty tea frocks, feather boas, and petticoats. They have been moved in and out of public view for decades, depending on whether management wants the shop to be seen as a modern establishment with no ties to the past, or one with longevity and traditional values. They found their new home in the staff room when Debenham’s went bust last year after nearly two hundred and fifty years in business. 

Of the eight or nine department stores around Oxford and Regent Street in the early twentieth century, only Selfridges, John Lewis, and Liberty now survive. One of my favourite facts is that in the 1850s, the young John Lewis worked as a drapery assistant at Peter Robinson’s – ‘the birthplace of the blouse’ – at Oxford Circus, before setting up his own shop a few doors up.

Faced with this competition, it was a brave John Bennet who opened his business a stone’s throw from Debenham’s first home on Wigmore Street. Nonetheless, the local clique of doctors, opticians, and politicians and their wives was loyal and liked not having to venture into the hustle and bustle of the main drag. 

There have been other benefits of being slightly off the beaten track: Bennet’s was one of the few large-windowed stores in the area that was not targeted by the Suffragettes during their window-smashing spree on 21 November 1911. Liberty and Selfridges were not so lucky. Another of my favourite facts is that Harry Selfridge did not press charges for the breaking of his shop’s windows. What a thrill that day must have been; more than a hundred women hurling stones and hammers, knowing what they wanted and being prepared to risk everything to achieve it.

The history of this institution is part of what keeps me here after all these years. But of course, the remaining shops are nothing like they were in that golden age. Gone are the polished marble floors, the sumptuous staircases, and the oak display cabinets. Harry Selfridge made a point of creating a welcoming, relaxing space to spend time (and money) in his own store. God knows what he would think about the sensory assault of today’s shopping experience. 

Despite my detour this morning, it is still only nine-thirty. The security guard lets me in. The girls in Beauty are dousing themselves in perfume so I keep my head down to avoid speaking to anyone and hold my breath all the way to the workshop.

*

I feel I am a good manager. I have worked at places in the past where exacting bosses have wanted to account for my every second, interfere in the decisions I make, and overrule me even when I am more expert than they are. I cannot stand to be watched over as I work. I expect my manager to trust me to do the role they have assessed me to be suitable for and, based on that assessment, hired me to carry out. I take this approach with the people I manage in Sewing Services, and I am clear with them that this is my approach. I will not ask them to account for their time, but I will have questions if an order isn’t finished or is sub-standard. I allow them the autonomy to let their own pride in their work be their guide, and their satisfaction their marker of a job well done. I explain this to April so she knows where she stands.

She is about my age – mid-forties – and very experienced. I have timetabled for her to shadow me for the first week, but I really don’t think she’ll need it. I introduce her to everyone and then run through the foibles of the machine she will use, particularly when it comes to the presser feet and the feed-dogs. While I am going over the labelling system of altered garments, every so often she gets distracted and looks behind her, towards the door which opens onto Lingerie. 

Midmorning, we go to make coffee. I show her where everything is and explain our rule that no drinks are to leave the kitchenette area of the workshop. I am relieved that she nods and says she’s pleased we have that rule. I didn’t want to have to justify it to another person who says they are always very careful, like Sally. She is telling me about a disaster they had at J— with a black coffee and a bridesmaid’s dress when she breaks off and turns to stare at the door.

‘What is that noise?’ she says.

I tune into the hum of the only machine running, but it sounds as it should.

‘What noise?’ I say, stirring first my mug, then hers.

She is quiet for a few seconds, and when I finish and place the spoon in the sink, I say again,’ What noise?’

She holds a finger up to me and I stop to listen again. She is right. There is the faintest whine coming from Patience’s direction which means she will need to oil the Janome early. I’m impressed. Normally I am the only one to notice these things. But a moment later April jerks her head to the left, away from Patience. ‘There,’ she says, lowering the finger she had been holding up to silence me and pointing to the wall with the other hand instead. She has long, pointed nails. I had noticed this in her interview and hoped they wouldn’t ever catch on some of the delicate and expensive fabrics we have to handle. I keep mine short and smoothly filed for that reason. A second later, she jabs her finger into the air again and says, ‘There!’

‘You mean the squeak from the Janome?’ I say and pick up the mugs, feeling she is being overdramatic.

I walk past her expecting her to follow but when I realise she hasn’t I turn back. Her hands are resting by her sides and she stares at me, forlorn.

‘You can’t hear that?’‘I think she means the toilets,’ says Sue.