Freda had quickly grown accustomed to gazing straight ahead and smiling serenely while members of the audience reached out and plucked a sleeve or pinched a rib-stitch hem or, occasionally, Freda herself—nipping the back of her hand or patting the calf that rose firm and inviting above her white socks and black patent shoes, shoes that were removed immediately afterwards, in case they got scratched, and replaced with her plain brown leather Oxfords.
Freda often received a smattering of applause which had nothing to do with the Knits but rather was on account of the way that she shone with the promise of a future, a future that would surely be better than the past. It sanctified her in the eyes of the audience. If they could have kept a piece of her as a relic—a finger bone, a lock of hair, even a pom-pom—they would have done.
Vanda was tall and raw-boned, with hair the colour of ginger nuts. Glamorous in a rather seedy way, she was always doused in Molinard’s Habanita, which could knock your socks off if you got too close. She even dabbed the perfume on the Sarony cigarettes that she smoked continually and that made her Teesdale accent as “hoarse as a crow,” as Duncan liked to say. Vanda was always offering Freda one （“Go on, treat yourself, pet”）， her hacking, phlegmy cough announcing her presence long before she became visible.
Duncan, who before the war had “trod the boards,” had once shared a stage with an ingenue Edith Evans at the Haymarket—“spear-carrying stuff,” he said dismissively. This entire sentence had been incomprehensible to Freda, but she learnt by a kind of osmosis and often things said one day made more sense the next. She thought “spear-carrying” sounded rather noble.
It was Duncan’s job to sport the pullovers, cardigans and waistcoats, many in complex Fair Isle patterns and often with the accessory of an unlit pipe to make him seem more manly. Even at her young age, Freda had been able to discern that manliness was not necessarily a quality Duncan strove for. He had a funny accent that was “posh Liverpool,” according to Vanda, which Freda rather liked and spent a good deal of time trying to imitate.
Vanda was a seasoned performer, too, having been on the stage herself once, in the music halls, as a magician’s assistant, levitated on a nightly basis.
“It’s not real, pet,” she said to Freda when she expressed admiration. “It’s a trick.” But that was even better than real!
Vanda paraded “women’s fashion items,” words, she said, that covered “a multitude of sins” from boleros to sweater dresses to matronly cardigans. Babies and toddlers were short-changed, although Vanda occasionally carried a large doll in full matinée fig. The doll appeared mysteriously from nowhere—too big, surely, for Adele’s suitcase. It was called Dorothy. “Nearest I’ll ever get to being a mother,” Vanda said, in triumph rather than sorrow, as she adjusted the ribbons on the inanimate Dorothy’s bonnet.
Unlike her mother, more ramshackle by the month, Freda was an exceptionally neat and tidy child. （“Fastidious,” Duncan said.） Every night before bed she tied her hair in rags and rubbed bicarb on her freckles as someone had told her once that it would make them fade. Before getting into bed, a bed often shared with Vanda, she would fold all her clothes and place them pyramidically on a chair—skirt at the bottom up to knickers at the top, coped by her socks, all ready for the next day when the pyramid was dismantled in reverse. “Aren’t you good!” Vanda said admiringly. They shared a bedroom in a variety of boarding houses. Vanda, like Freda’s mother, was slovenly, clothes dropped where they were removed, face powder spilt everywhere. Freda made no judgements. She was learning about womanhood. You take it where you can, as Duncan would say.
Freda was very good at packing, too, she could get twice as much in her little suitcase as Vanda did in her big one. Sometimes she took over Vanda’s packing for her. It was all in the folding. Like geometry, Duncan said. Freda’s understanding of geometry, or any branch of mathematics, was lamentable. Sometimes she wondered if she shouldn’t be in school more often.
“Don’t worry, pet, you only need to be able to count to eight if you’re going to be a dancer,” Vanda said.
Vanda owned a coat that she claimed had been given to her by an admirer and was stitched from the pelts of thirty-six ermine. It was like a great snowy cloud and Freda often found herself asleep on Vanda’s fur-clad shoulder in one train carriage or another. It was made from rabbits, not ermines, Duncan said. Freda had no idea what an ermine was. An animal, she knew that much, although her acquaintance with any kind of animal was limited. She had never owned a pet, never visited a farm or a zoo. Cows and sheep were merely ornaments that dotted the landscape of the north as it rolled past the train window. Although embarrassed by her ignorance now, she had been astonished when Vanda explained that sheep were the origin of the Knits.