A Random Act of Kindness

by Sophie Jenkins

  This is what happens when I big myself up; it’s very misleading. ‘Dinah, I’m so sorry, I’ve given you the wrong impression,’ I confess. ‘I don’t sell couture. I sell vintage, retro, ready-to-wear.’

  ‘Ready-to-wear?’ Dinah recoils and cups her hand around her throat. For a moment she sounds like my mother. She sits back, dismayed, breathing in heavily through her nose before coming to a decision. ‘Well, look at you, you’re just starting out, you’re young. No problem. Here’s how I can help you. No – hear me out. This is what I’m suggesting,’ she says, clicking her rows of faux pearls like worry beads. ‘You could offer a bespoke service for your clients to get the perfect fit for their ensembles. Moss knows how frocks are made, the generous seams for alterations. He can let things out and take them in, no problem. His shop has a dressing room and a nice golden looking-glass. You can bring your clients to him to be measured. This will suit my husband because he’s a friendly man – not too friendly,’ she says hastily, ‘don’t worry about that; naturally, he’s respectful.’

  The perfect fit, I think, watching the steam rise from my tea. The tea is marbling the inside of the china cup. ‘Dinah—’

  ‘You’d be bringing in work for him, you see? And he’d have the company. He likes company. You get to our age and our friends are dropping dead, or they’re not allowed to drive, or they move in with their middle-aged children, or they lose their minds entirely and dribble all day. You can put the cost of the alterations on the price of the garment. Bespoke fitting. What do you say?’ she asks eagerly, raising her fine black eyebrows in a question.

  I glance over at the polished dining table with all those chairs around it, getting caught up in her vision. But with a surge of excitement, I think: actually, it’s not a bad idea. Bespoke fittings could be my USP. ‘I love the idea, Dinah, and it’s definitely something I’m interested in,’ I say carefully, ‘but since the fire I’m a bit low on stock.’

  The sun comes out from behind a cloud and for a moment as she holds her cup her hands are bathed in light, her veins purple under her translucent skin. She stares at them without expression for a moment and she sighs deeply. ‘I’m old, and all I have left is my beautiful wardrobe,’ she says sadly, appealing to me directly with her bright eyes. ‘It’s everything to me. Dahlink, you must understand, I need someone to look after it when I’ve gone; someone who’ll love and appreciate it.’

  My heart leaps in shock. Does she mean me?

  I know I’m being manipulated, even though she’s doing it so charmingly. She knows my weaknesses; she’s called me perfectly by letting me try on the Grès gown. I try not to think about it and, mustering up all my integrity, I tell her, ‘Museums and private buyers would pay a fortune for your collection.’

  She bangs her cup down in a sudden flash of anger. ‘Museums and private buyers? My gowns need to be worn, not stared at!’

  ‘You’re right.’ Deeply uncomfortable and out of my depth, I finish my tea. ‘Okay, well, I’ll keep the alterations idea in mind,’ I tell her and I pick my bag up from the floor.

  ‘Of course!’ she agrees graciously. ‘Naturally, you must see his shop first, before you make a decision. Go any time. Anytime you like. He’ll be there.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She tugs at my arm. ‘But why wait? Go now. I’ll call and tell Moss to expect you,’ she replies firmly as she sees me to the door.

  The reason I go directly to Morland Street is out of curiosity. Moss has worked for Chanel and Hartnell, and my vision of the tailor’s shop is entirely influenced by Dinah’s throwaway line about the dressing room and the golden mirror. I’m intrigued.

  This is the reality of it: the shop is a large space cut in half along its width by a full-length wooden counter on which there’s a handwritten sign on a piece of card: cash payment only. The dressing room is in the left-hand corner, with a faded velvet curtain for privacy and a faded red rug on the floor. There’s a long rail affixed to the wall on the other side of the counter and hanging on the rail there’s a fake fur coat. Behind the counter is Moss’s cutting table with a modern sewing machine and a quantity of brilliant coloured threads. The place is shabby rather than elegant.

  Moss greets me morosely. His hair is longish, coarse, collar-length, brushed back from a face dominated by dark bushy eyebrows. He’s overweight, but on the other hand, in his black jacket and tie, he has the upright bearing of someone important, some who knows he is someone.

  ‘Hello, I’m Fern Banks,’ I tell him. ‘Your wife—’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, looking at me from under his wild eyebrows without enthusiasm. ‘She told me to expect you.’ His voice, like Dinah’s, is heavily accented and his face is stern. He has a jug of filter coffee brewing and he pours two cups for us then leans on the counter and sighs deeply. ‘What’s the weather like now?’

  For some reason I feel obliged to look through the window, even though I’ve only just come in from the street. ‘It’s a bit chilly, for May.’

  ‘Chilly, is it? It’s quiet. So, tell me,’ he says softly, confidingly, as if it were a secret just between the two of us, ‘how’s business with you?’

  I shrug. ‘Not great.’

  ‘Dinah tells me you buy cheap and sell cheap.’

  It sounds awful put like that and I feel I have to defend myself. ‘I buy cheap and I sell competitively,’ I tell him, but it doesn’t come across any better. I look up at the lonesome fur coat while Moss gazes out of the window at the passing cars.

  ‘It’s easy come, easy go,’ he says. ‘People buy rubbish these days and if it doesn’t fit properly, who cares?’

  ‘I know. Crazy, right?’ I’m totally with him on this subject. ‘Why buy cheap and mass-produced when you can buy quality vintage?’ I literally drool over some of the details on the clothes that I sell; for instance, the little tabs that hold the bra strap in place under the dress – how lovely, how thoughtful is that?

  ‘Huh.’ Moss leans on the counter heavily and gives a long and heartfelt sigh.

  His eyes are distant, as if he’s remembering better days.

  Neither of us says anything and the silence seems to drag on. It’s so quiet that I can hear his watch ticking.

  ‘See what I’m telling you? How quiet it is?’

  He sounds defeated and it’s a feeling that I’m beginning to recognise. ‘Dinah asked me to come because—’

  Unexpectedly, he chuckles. ‘Yes, she saw you in the paper, saving all of your frocks from the fire. Exactly the kind of thing she, herself, would do. Her clothes are her babies. “Look, Moss, this Fern Banks, she’s a woman who loves her clothes,” she tells me.’

  I laughed dryly. ‘I didn’t manage to save all of them.’ I find myself telling him about the Twenties and Thirties cocktail dresses whose sequins have dissolved or melted, and the wool suit that has shrunk to a smaller size than the lining.

  ‘A tragedy,’ he comments.

  ‘Yeah,’ I agree, straightening my teaspoon in the saucer.

  ‘To fix them is almost impossible. Who has the time to sew sequins?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘It is a challenge.’

  ‘I know.’ But something in his tone makes me look up at him.

  His face is impassive, but there’s a gleam in his eye. He straightens a cufflink and says, ‘You need a good tailor.’

  He’s right. With a sudden epiphany, I say, ‘I do need a good tailor!’

  For the first time since I entered the shop, he smiles. ‘Obviously, to make a judgement I’d have to see these garments for myself. To you, they’re ruined, but,’ he shrugs in an exaggerated way that reminds me of Dinah, ‘maybe for me I’ll see a solution. For example, I can re-line the suit, alter the seams, maybe put a little contrasting panelling in, that won’t be a problem. The sequins, well, it depends.’

  ‘I’ll bring them in for you to look at. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course,’ he says.

  ‘Okay, then.’ I pick
up the cup and sip it. ‘Blimey.’ The coffee gives me an instant hit and makes me shudder.

  Moss has gone all morose on me again. ‘This shop is in a busy street and look at it,’ he points out, even though the street is empty. ‘My wife didn’t tell me about the repairs. She tells me that you want to bring your clients here for a bespoke fitting. And also while they’re here you may bring items for them to look at, in addition, to catch their eye.’

  Eh? ‘I didn’t exactly say that. That’s not how my business works,’ I explain to him. ‘I sell things online and in Camden Market and that’s my living.’

  ‘Women buy frocks from you without trying them on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He stares at me for a moment and shakes his head in disbelief.

  I glance around the place again, trying to see how it could be with a bit (a lot) of money thrown at it. There’s the huge window front, which is a plus. The wooden floors are scuffed, but they could easily be polished. The large rug is faded but it could be replaced. Maybe a couple of mint green bucket chairs and a little glass-topped table for coffee – or prosecco. It just needed a little TLC. New drapes on the dressing area would make a big difference and maybe if he propped another mirror against the wall – it’s all about the look, right? The trouble is, it costs money and by the looks of it, Moss hasn’t got any, either. ‘What do you usually charge?’

  ‘Who can say? It depends on the amount of work. Someone’s paying a hundred pounds then a little more on top of that is easy to find. Bring your damaged frocks in, I’ll tell you what I can do.’

  And there it is again – the spark of ambition fizzing in my head; something different that I’d have to offer, that’ll make my business stand out from the rest. ‘That sounds fair enough.’

  We shake hands and I glance surreptitiously at the fur coat on the rail.

  I hesitate by the door. I change my mind about asking him how many alterations he does in a week because I suspect the answer is going to embarrass us both.

  KIM

  There’s a picture of Fern Banks in the Camden Journal. She’s surrounded by billowing smoke and hugging her saved frocks to her heart, and she has that look in her eyes that I recognise from the couple of times I’ve met her; the look that says she knows me better than I know myself.

  Staring at Fern in the paper, I’m trying to avoid seeing the hearse through the window.

  The undertakers have come to take Enid. She went quietly in the night with no fuss and no last words. But when she didn’t say good morning to me, I knew.

  They’re moving about upstairs. There’s no point in me getting in the way. That’s that, then. I am eighty-five and a widower.

  I’m frightened of being alone. I’m a widower and I’ve lost my wife. What I need to do is, I need to get a new one. I know a lot of widows. All of Enid’s friends are widows. I don’t mind which one it is. I’m not looking for love or looks or even conversation, I just want someone in the house, moving about, someone to put the kettle on for. I do my own laundry. I don’t need looking after.

  What the bloody hell is all that bumping?

  Aye, the stairs are narrow, I should have told them about that. Didn’t think to. They can see it for themselves.

  ‘Kim?’

  Kim, is it now?

  The lad comes into the sitting room. Young enough to be my grandson; bright, healthy-looking, and he’s working in the undertakers. Says cheerfully, ‘Sorry to trouble you, but we might have to take that door off the bottom of the stairs to get her out. It’s that right-angled bend.’

  If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

  ‘Rubbish, lad! I’ve taken wardrobes and beds up and down these stairs without taking the door off. You telling me you can’t get my wife down here? There’s nothing of her.’

  He looks at me with sudden concentration as if he’s translating my words from a foreign language.

  ‘Yeah. Okay. We’ll have another go.’

  I follow him into the dining room, where the door to the stairs is open and the edge of a trolley is wedged in the doorframe.

  I stand on the bottom step next to the lad and take a quick look. Enid’s strapped tightly to the trolley, underneath a red blanket, as if she’s not dead but just chilly and likely to spring off it at any minute, protesting at the damage to the paintwork. I shake my head – if she were alive now, there’d be ructions.

  ‘You want to back up a bit, you won’t get it through at that angle,’ I tell the lad.

  He gets hold of the trolley. ‘Back up a bit,’ he tells his dad.

  They back up and disappear from view.

  A muffled voice asks impatiently, ‘Now what?’

  I’ve never had a high opinion of myself. Didn’t make it to grammar school – it was the technical college for me. But the older I get, the more faith I have in myself because people don’t know how to think for themselves anymore. That’s what’s wrong – they don’t have to figure things out – they get a google to do their thinking for them. I haven’t got a google. I do things the old way. ‘Hold her vertically,’ I say.

  ‘Okay, Kim. Gotcha. You go back in the sitting room, leave it to us. We’ll call you when we’re done.’

  I smooth my hand down the waxed woodgrain of the door. Take the door off? How did they think that would help? The door opens outwards. They’d have to take the doorframe off.

  Standing in the dining room, I can hear grunts and curses up the stairs; they’re more like builders than undertakers. To them, it’s just a job.

  ‘You’re having the funeral in the crem,’ the lad says when he reappears in the doorway and sees I’m still there.

  ‘The crem?’ I say. He’s too lazy to stick another four syllables on it.

  ‘Crematorium,’ he says helpfully and he backs up the stairs again.

  Enid would have hated them.

  She always thought that I’d go first. We both did. All her friends are widows and some of them had a new lease of life after their loss. I’m not saying she was looking forward to her widowhood, but she was pragmatic about it. She liked to make the best of things.

  The husbands went in various different ways in their own time: heart attack, cancer, mobility scooter accident. Stan broke his hip on a golf course after Christmas. He’d tripped over the rake in the bunker, stayed there overnight and got hypothermia while his wife, Betty, thought he was in bed with her all the time. She’d been at watercolour classes, painting flowers. She’d undressed in the bathroom, tiptoed into bed, woke up the next morning, made him a cup of tea and saw he wasn’t there, after all. Surprise of her life, she said, to see his side of the bed empty.

  Enid thought it was the way he’d have wanted to go, on a golf course. She was wrong about that. I know Stan. Stan wouldn’t have chosen to die in a bunker, out of all the ways to go.

  On a green, maybe. Stan was competitive.

  But if he’d broken his hip on a green somebody would have seen him and there wouldn’t have been a rake to trip over in the first place.

  Betty had a shock when she read through his will, because he wanted his ashes scattered in the Himalayas. But by the time she read it, he’d been buried in East Finchley Cemetery.

  It was a bit of a puzzler why he wanted to be scattered in the Himalayas. Betty couldn’t fathom it. He didn’t like heights or travelling. I think it was Stan’s way of having an adventure to look forward to.

  Enid thought he’d wanted to spite Betty, because even if Betty had read the will earlier, she’d have had all the worry of getting him there. Enid had a cynical view of people. She was always alert to people’s motives.

  In a marriage, it rubs off.

  Stan was happily married to Betty, though.

  Perhaps I could be happily married to her, too.

  There’s a thud then a rattle from somewhere in the house.

  ‘Nearly done,’ the lad tells me as they push Enid through the hall.

  There we are, then. I sigh.

  Since Enid di
ed, I’ve sighed a lot. I’ve caught myself doing it.

  The boss comes back for a last word to tell me that Enid will be available for viewing twenty-four seven until the funeral.

  ‘Viewing?’ I say. I don’t want to view her. After she passed I couldn’t even recognise her. Her face had relaxed and smoothed out, and she didn’t look herself at all. I tried to find some features I was familiar with, but even her nose looked different.

  I’m not saying there was anything funny about it; she was in her bed and it was her all right, but she just didn’t look anything like my wife, Enid.

  ‘Sometimes people like to say goodbye,’ the undertaker points out, leaning against the door. ‘So that option is available if needed.’

  It was possible that her friends would want to say goodbye. I could take Betty and Mercia to see her. I’m not sure she’d like it. It would be personal, like watching her sleep.

  I watch the undertakers drive away and I go back into the house.

  It’s proper empty now.

  On the table there’s a glossy business card that reads: House Clearance. Proprietor: Cato Hamilton.

  I face life head on, always have. I go back upstairs to the bedroom and look at the empty space. Then I push my feelings aside and I think right, okay, let’s get on with it. Her bed can go, for a start. I could get rid of both the beds and buy a new double for myself to sprawl around in.

  I open the wardrobe and swish my hand against her pleated skirts. Her clothes can go, too. I sigh because it feels as if I haven’t got enough air in my lungs to breathe; I have to keep gulping it in and letting it out.

  Enid was always very particular about her clothes. She hung them up on silky padded coat hangers and she never wore slacks, always skirts and dresses. She thought of slacks on a woman as sloppy dressing. I was glad about that because I like the dresses. Trousers hold no novelty to me, but looking at her dresses was always a thrill.

  I can wear any of her clothes now without her catching me or finding out. Looking in her wardrobe, though, they are still her clothes. There’s a difference between looking at them and claiming them. Everything that used to be Enid’s belongs to me now, but they’re still Enid’s really, even though she’s no longer got any use for them.