Her father had been even more distracted than usual for the past month. He didn’t really seem to listen when she talked about how Essie had got engaged to Vincent Jessop. More importantly, Essie was two years younger than she was — did you hear that? Two years younger. He would nod absently as she went on to tell him how Marjorie Hollings already had a baby that was six months old. He used to give her optimistic hugs and carefully kind words, but these days he mostly gave her preoccupied murmurs and inattentive nods. Edie had watched him, longing for him to think about her again. She knew, and she knew her father and mother knew, that now she was nineteen the chances of her finding a husband were dwindling fast. This was an urgent matter.
‘I think they’ve got the stitching uneven here,’ said Paul, and had held the umbrella out for inspection. ‘Does that look like an even quarter-inch spacing to you?’
Edie ignored the umbrella and said, ‘Well, if I can’t find a husband I might as well find work. Perhaps what you can give me is a job in your rooms?’ She knew the reaction she would get to this. Her mother had sighed and leant back in her chair and fussed over a drop of milk that had been spilt on the table. She’d whispered quietly to any spirits watching, ‘Here we go again.’ She had seen Paul and Edie have this same conversation many times.
Paul had snapped his head up quick smart, his eyes dark and blistering, and said what he always said, ‘No daughter of mine is going out to work as though I am too poor or too negligent to support her.’
‘You’re so, so …’
‘So what, Edie?’ he demanded.
‘Oh, I don’t know — impossible and … and old-fashioned,’ and she’d stormed off as she always did, leaving the perfect cup of tea lonely on the table before he could lecture her on his role as a father to provide and her role as a daughter to be provided for. She already knew his views on her working but as for his distractedness with that stupid umbrella — she really didn’t know what was going on with him these days, and put it down to a problem bothering him at work. It certainly couldn’t be a problem at home.
Her home — or rather, her father’s home, because that was how she, her mother Lucy, and their maid Beth thought of it — was a home with fine filigree cast-iron lacework and great leadlight windows. The house had its roots buried deep in the soil and it sprawled into four bedrooms and a sun-filled sitting room, a reading room, a formal dining room, her father’s study and the maid’s room. Its wide verandah stretched from the front right-hand corner of the house around to the far left-hand corner of the rear of the house, where it met the maid’s bedroom and the laundry. Jasmine clambered over the verandah railings and took its moment in spring with vigour, filling the house with gusts of perfumed air that promised anything was possible. There was an expanse at the side of the house large enough for two horses and carts to come right up to the verandah if they were so inclined, and there was a brick path that wound through the garden from the front gate to the verandah steps and up to the front door. The house was her father’s gift to her mother and was full of the sweet voice of her mother singing for her father.
Edie thought about the fabric that had built the home she lived in, she thought about it hard, the love her father and mother shared, and she yearned to share that love with someone of her own. She now sat cross-legged on the carpet, still in her nightie, hacking away at her best Sunday skirt with the enormous haberdashery scissors she had taken from Beth’s sewing drawer. Her fingers ached with the cold. It was chilly and every now and then she shivered, but she was too intent on what she was doing to notice the goosepimples on her arms and legs, her head filled with the cruel words of the women at church.
Edie had tried to convince herself that she didn’t care what the women said about her and tried to harden her heart, but she did care and her heart was soft and the women’s barbs pricked at her heart like a splinter she couldn’t scratch out.
‘I’ll show them,’ she said to the skirt crumpled unhappily in her lap.
Even though she tried not to think of them, the most hurtful scenes repeated themselves over and over. Edie saw Vera Gamble, who still had a little-girl voice she had chosen never to grow out of, whispering to Marjorie Hollings. Could you even call it whispering when everyone within ten feet of her heard? Vera had looked around her, not to make sure no one was listening but to make sure everyone was listening, then she’d leant over and in a big show of whispering confidentially had said to Marjorie, ‘What hope has Too Girl got of catching a husband with her looks?’
Edie had rushed home and stared at herself in the mirror for a good hour, wondering if she really did look that bad. There was no sister to tell her that Vera Gamble knew Edie could hear her rotten whispers that were bitter like mouldering oranges or that Vera was just being nasty for the sake of it to give herself a little thrill. Ever since that whisper Edie had accepted that at best her looks were unremarkable and at worst downright unpleasant to men.
She slashed at the material of her skirt with the scissors. She cared very deeply. It gave her a physical pain in her chest when she thought about it.
