But Jean couldn’t seem to settle. Every time she sat down she would jump up again, needing her glasses or remembering some urgent unfinished chore elsewhere. She prowled from room to room, bored and restless, and finally found what she was looking for—an old leather manicure set of pearl-handled implements, with which she began to trim and neaten nails coarsened by housework. This task done, she leapt up again and hurried from the room.
“Where are you off to now?” Her mother’s plaintive voice followed her up the stairs.
In Jean’s bedroom was a dressing-table drawer filled with things too precious ever to be used. Soaps, cosmetics, perfume, stationery—mostly gifts, or the occasional rash purchase—they had been accumulated and hoarded over many years. The contemplation of these treasures, still pristine in their packaging, gave Jean far more satisfaction than using them ever could. A leather notebook with marbled endpapers and gold-tipped pages was a thing of beauty only so long as its pages remained blank. A lipstick was spoiled the moment it touched her lips—unused, its potential was infinite.
Tonight, though, Jean opened a pot of rich hand cream, releasing a gust of rose-scented air, and drew her finger across the surface with only a faint tremor of regret. As she rubbed her hands together her crumpled skin seemed to soften and uncrease. She knew the transformation was only illusory and fleeting, but for a moment she felt a rare kinship with those legions of women who bother with such things and take pleasure in them.
“What’s that smell?” her mother asked on Jean’s return. Her nose had become keener lately, perhaps acquiring territory from her hearing, which was in brisk retreat.
“Pink roses.”
“I thought so. You usually smell of the office.” Her mother’s face puckered. “Cigarettes and newsprint and work. I prefer the roses.”
“Well, I haven’t been in the office this afternoon. I’ve been to visit a jeweler’s near Covent Garden.”
“Jewish?”
“I’ve no idea. I didn’t ask.”
“I expect so. They usually are.”
“His name was Tilbury. He showed me his workshop where he does all the repairs. It was rather interesting.”
“I should think it was. I wonder if he’d be able to mend this.” She began to drag at the garnet-and-pearl cluster ring on her middle finger, forcing it over her knotted knuckle. “There’s a stone missing.”
“It would be expensive to replace a stone.”
“Well. It’s valuable. And it will be yours one day.”
All her geese are swans, thought Jean.
“Don’t take it off now—it’ll only get lost. I might not be seeing him again for some time, if ever.” But as she said this she felt sure that she would, and soon.
“Shall we wind this wool, then?” she said, drawing up her chair so that they sat opposite each other, knees nearly touching.
From her knitting bag her mother produced the front panel of Dorrie’s jumper and unhitched it from its holding pin. It took no more than a gentle tweak to begin the process of unraveling months of painstaking work. Jean held out her arms and watched with secret satisfaction the scribbled wool turning and turning around her tiny, delicate hands.
* * *
To keep your fingers white and soft, dig your nails into the pith of an old lemon skin after completing any dirty jobs at the kitchen sink.
* * *
5
The former matron of St. Cecilia’s clinic in Broadstairs was called Alice Halfyard, for which curious and memorable name Jean was very grateful, as it made the job of tracing her considerably easier. Jean had made inquiries ahead of her visit and discovered that St. Cecilia’s itself was no longer a convalescent home of any kind but a boy’s prep school on the south side of the town, on Ramsgate Road.
Less than a year after Gretchen Edel’s residency, the boys’ school around the corner had looked to expand into new premises and made an offer for the large Edwardian villa. The patients were sent home or dispatched to other sanatoriums along the coast, and what were once wards and treatment rooms for the sick now held desks and chairs, blackboards and coat hooks.
The headmaster of this establishment, now Anselm House, had a wooden leg and walked with an ebony cane. He offered to take Jean on a tour of the building before showing her the St. Cecilia’s archive. It was lesson time and the school was quiet; the classroom doors were open because of the heat and as they passed along the corridor the murmured voices within fell silent at the tap and shuffle of his approaching footsteps.