Ann had started work at Hartnell the next Monday, and those first few months had been a blur. She had learned later that Miss Duley had chosen her because she knew nothing, so there was nothing for her to unlearn. Things were done a certain way at Hartnell, which is to say they were done to the highest conceivable standard, and anything less than perfection was unacceptable.
Miss Duley’s eye was infallible: if a bead sat in the wrong direction, or one strand of satin stitch sat proud of the rest, or even one sequin was duller than its neighbors, she would notice. She would notice, and her left eyebrow would arch just so, and she would smile in that confiding way she had. As if to say she, too, had once been an apprentice and had made her share of mistakes.
It was hard to imagine Miss Duley as a girl of fourteen, or indeed as anything other than the diminutive yet somehow towering figure who dominated the embroidery workrooms. She had bright blue eyes that noticed everything, the faintest echo of the West Country in her speech, and a calmly certain demeanor that Ann found immensely soothing.
“Attend to the work in front of you, and the rest will take care of itself,” Miss Duley was fond of saying. “Leave your cares at the door, and think only of Mr. Hartnell’s design.”
The years since had brought no end of cares to her door, and some days—some years—it had been almost impossible to follow Miss Duley’s advice. Her mother had died suddenly in the summer of ’39. Her heart, the doctor had said. Then the war, and the Blitz, and the horror of the night when her brother had been killed. Burned beyond recognition, they’d been told, with even his wedding ring melted away.
Then the spun-out wretchedness of the years that followed, and all the while her certainty had grown that this was all she would ever know. The house on Morley Road and the workrooms at Hartnell, and the anonymous spaces in between. This life, this succession of gray days and cold nights and loved ones forever lost, was the furthest her dreams would ever stretch.
The sitting room clock chimed seven, startling Ann from her reverie. Standing by the table, a bundle of cutlery clutched in her hand, she tried hard to summon up an appetite for the supper Milly had prepared. It was a struggle, for the gammon was little more than gristle and fat, and the vegetables had collapsed into a grayish sort of paste. Even the school dinners of her childhood had been more appealing.
“Weren’t you going to turn on the wireless?” Milly reminded her.
The wireless, a big old-fashioned model in a walnut-veneered case, sat in the sitting room to the right of the fire. Ann switched it on and quickly set the table, having left the door between the two rooms ajar. By the time they’d eaten and washed up, it might even be warm enough to spend an hour there before bed.
No sooner were they seated than the blandly inoffensive music of the BBC’s Light Programme gave way to the news.
“On the last day of the coldest January London has experienced for years, Their Majesties the king and queen and the two princesses set off for the first stage of their tour of South Afri—”
“I can hardly hear,” Milly said abruptly. “Let me turn up the volume.”
“Yes, yes. Shh . . .”
“—have gathered along the route to wave the royal family an affectionate farewell, every single member of those half-frozen crowds wishing that they, too, could be transported from the bitter January afternoon to the fabulous sunshine of South Africa—”
“You wouldn’t catch me lining up to wave at them,” Milly muttered. “Not in weather like this.”
As if responding to Milly’s complaint, the newsreader turned to that frosty subject.
“Temperatures in London at midnight last night had risen to twenty—seven degrees, more than ten degrees warmer than earlier in the week. By the middle of the night, when snow was falling on parts of the capital, the temperature had scarcely dropped. But the winter has yet another blow for British housewives: a mass shuttering of laundries across the nation is expected unless coal supplies are increased.”
The kettle had boiled, so Ann went to the cooker and busied herself with making tea for them both. Only a scant spoonful of tea leaves for the pot, as the tin was almost empty. And no sugar, for she and Milly had both learned how to do without that small luxury long ago.
“I wonder if those girls know how lucky they are,” Milly said.
“The princesses? You always say that. Whenever they’re in the news.”
“But they are. Just look at how they live. All those clothes and jewels, and never having to lift a finger to do anything. I should be so lucky.”