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A woman in the seat in front of them turned her head as if listening, and Violet’s neighbour went quiet. A minute later she began again, more softly. “Are you working on a kneeler?”
Violet shook her head.
“What, your stitching wasn’t good enough?” The woman made a sympathetic moue. “Mine was returned to me three times before they were satisfied! Have they put you on hanking instead? Or straightening the cupboards? The cupboards always need that, but it’s awfully dull. Or maybe you keep records for them. I’ll bet that’s what you do.” She glanced at Violet’s hands as if searching for telltale signs of inky fingers. Of course she would also be looking for the ring, just as Violet had already noted that she didn’t wear one. “I said no straight away to record-keeping. I do enough of that the rest of the week.”
The woman ahead of them turned around. “Shhh!”
Violet and her neighbour smiled at each other. It felt good to have a partner in crime, albeit one who was a little eager.
By the time the service dragged to its conclusion with the end of the Dean’s address, another hymn (“Oh holy Lord, content to dwell”), and more blessings, Violet was very late and had to rush away, her thin-faced neighbour calling out her name – “Gilda Hill!” – after her. She ran across the Outer Close, a patch of green surrounding the Cathedral, and up the High Street to Warren’s stationers, then hurried with the typewriter ribbon back to Southern Counties Insurance, arriving flushed and out of breath.
She needn’t have run: the office she shared with two others in the typing pool was empty. When Violet had worked in the larger offices of the same company in Southampton, the manager had been much stricter about the comings and goings of the workers. Here, where the office was so much smaller and more exposed, you might think Violet’s absence would be noted. But no. Though she didn’t want to be reprimanded, she was mildly disappointed that no one had noticed her empty chair and her black Imperial typewriter with its cream keys so quiet.
She glanced at her office mates’ vacant desks. Olive and Maureen – O and Mo, they called themselves, laughing raucously about their nicknames even when no one else did – must be having tea down the hall in the staff kitchen. Violet was desperate for a cup, and a biscuit to plug the hole in her stomach. For lunch she’d had only the Marmite and margarine sandwiches she’d brought in. They were never enough; she was always hungry again by mid-afternoon and had to fill up with more cups of tea. Mrs Speedwell would be appalled that Violet had a hot mid-day meal only once a week. She could not afford more – though she would never admit that to her mother.
For a moment she considered joining her colleagues in the kitchen. O and Mo were two local girls in their early twenties, and although they were nice enough to Violet, they came from different backgrounds, and treated her like an African violet or an aspidistra, the sort of house plant a maiden aunt would keep. Both lived at home and so had a more carefree attitude towards money – as Violet herself had once had. One sexy, one plain, they wore new dresses as often as they could afford to, and lived for the dance halls, the cinema dates, the parade of men to choose from. There were plenty of men their age; they didn’t walk into a dance hall as Violet had done a few times after the War to find the only dancing partners were old enough to be her grandfather, or far too young, or damaged in a way Violet knew she could never fix. Or just not there, so that women danced with each other to fill the absence. As they typed, O and Mo talked and laughed about the men they met as if it were assumed men should be available. They had each gone through several boyfriends in the six months Violet had worked with them, though recently both had become more serious about their current beaux. Sometimes their high spirits and assumptions made Violet go and boil the kettle in the kitchen, even when she didn’t want tea, waiting until she had calmed down enough to go back and carry on with her rapid typing. She was a far more efficient typist than the girls – which they seemed to find funny.
Only once had Mo asked her if she’d had a chap, “back then.” “Yes.” Violet clipped her reply, refusing to make Laurence into an anecdote.
This week had been worse. Even the prospect of tea and a biscuit did not outweigh the dread Violet felt at having to watch tiny, buxom Olive straighten her fingers in front of her face for the umpteenth time to admire her engagement ring. On the Monday she had come into the office walking differently, pride setting her shoulders back and lifting her tight blonde curls. She had exchanged a sly, smug smile with Mo, already installed behind her typewriter, then announced as she shook out her chiffon scarf and hung up her coat, “I’m just off to speak to Mr Waterman.” She pulled off her gloves, and Violet couldn’t help it – she searched for the flash of light on O’s ring finger. The diamond was minute, but even a tiny sparkle is still a sparkle.
As O clipped down the hall in higher heels than the court shoes Violet wore, Mo – smarter than her friend but less conventionally attractive, with colourless hair, a long face and a tendency to frown – let her smile fade. If she were feeling kind at that moment, Violet would assure Mo that her current boyfriend – a reticent bank clerk who had stopped by the office once or twice – was sure to propose shortly. But she was not feeling kind, not about this subject; she remained silent while Mo stewed in her misery.
Since that day and O’s triumphant display of her ring, it was all the girls talked about: how Joe had proposed (at a pub, with the ring at the bottom of her glass of port and lemon), how long they would wait to save up for a proper do (two years), where the party would take place (same pub), what she would wear (white rather than ivory – which Violet knew was a mistake, as white would be too harsh for Olive’s complexion), where they would live (with his family until they could afford a place). It was all so banal and repetitive, with no interesting or surprising revelations or dreams or desires, that Violet thought she might go mad if she had to listen to this for two years.
She lit a cigarette to distract herself and suppress her appetite. Then she fed a sheet of paper through the typewriter rollers and began to type, making her way steadily through an application from Mr Richard Turner of Basingstoke for house insurance, which guaranteed payment if the house and contents were lost to fire or flood or some other act of God. Violet noticed that “war” was not included. She wondered if Mr Turner understood that not all loss could be replaced.
Mostly, though, she typed without thinking. Violet had typed so many of these applications to insure someone’s life, house, automobile, boat, that she rarely considered the meaning of the words. For her, typing was a meaningless, repetitive act that became a soothing meditation, lulling her into a state where she did not think; she simply was.
Soon enough O and Mo were back, their chatter preceding them down the hall and interrupting Violet’s trance-like peace. “After you, Mrs Hill,” Mo stood aside and gestured Olive through the door. Both wore floral summer dresses, O in peach, Mo in tan, reminding Violet that her plain blue linen dress was three years old, the dropped waist out of date. It was difficult to alter a dropped waist.
“Well, I don’t mind if I do, Miss Webster – soon to be Mrs Livingstone, I’m sure.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Mo looked eager, though.
Olive set down her cup of tea by her typewriter with a clatter, spilling some into the saucer. “Of course you will! You could marry sooner than I do. You may end up my matron of honour rather than my maid!” She held out her hand once more to inspect her ring.
Violet paused in her typing. Mrs Hill. It was a common enough name. Still … “Does your fiancé have a sister?”
“Who, Gilda? What about her? She’s just a warped old spins—” Olive seemed to recall whom she was talking to and bit her words back with a laugh, but not before Violet took in her dismissive tone. It made her decide to like Gilda Hill.
Chapter 2 (#u67e98e71-6368-5293-bbd7-c3ac7ddb6bc0)
VIOLET LIVED FIFTEEN MINUTES from the office in an area called the Soke, on the eastern side of Winchester just across the River Itchen. On a single typist’s salary, she could not afford the nicer areas in the west with their larger houses and gardens, their swept streets and well-maintained motor cars. The houses in the Soke were smaller yet had more inhabitants. There were fewer motor cars, and the local shops had dustier window displays and sold cheaper goods.
She shared the house with two other women as well as the landlady, who took up the ground floor. There were no men, of course, and even male visitors other than family were discouraged downstairs, and forbidden upstairs. On the rare occasion there were men in the front room, Mrs Harvey had a tendency to go in and out, looking for the copy of the Southern Daily Echo she’d left behind, or her reading glasses, or feeding the budgies she kept in a cage there, or fiddling with the fire when no one had complained of the cold, or reminding them to be in good time for the train. Not that Violet had any male visitors other than her brother Tom; but Mrs Harvey had given him this treatment until Violet showed her a family photo as evidence. Even then she did not leave them alone for long, but popped her head around the door to remind Tom that petrol stations shut early on Saturdays. Tom took it as a comic turn. “I feel I’m in a play and she’ll announce a body’s been found coshed over the head in the scullery,” he remarked with glee. It was easy for him to enjoy Mrs Harvey as entertainment since he did not have to live with her. Occasionally Violet wondered if in moving to Winchester she’d simply exchanged her mother for another who was equally tricky. On the other hand, she could go upstairs and shut her door on it all, which was harder to do with her mother. Mrs Harvey respected a closed door, as long as there was no man behind it; in Southampton her mother had sometimes barged into Violet’s bedroom as if the door did not exist.
Back now from work, she declined tea from her landlady but smuggled some milk up and put the kettle on in her own room. This was her seventh cup of the day, even having been out part of the afternoon at the Cathedral. Cups of tea punctuated moments, dividing before from after: sleeping from waking, walking to the office from sitting down to work, dinner from typing again, finishing a complicated contract from starting another, ending work from beginning her evening. Sometimes she used cigarettes as punctuation, but they made her giddy rather than settling her as tea did. And they were more expensive.
Sitting with her cup in the one armchair by the unlit fire – it was not cold enough to justify the coal – Violet looked around her cramped room. It was quiet, except for the ticking of a wooden clock she’d picked up at a junk shop a few weeks before. The pale sun sieved through the net curtains and lit up the swirling red and yellow and brown carpet. “Thunder and lightning carpet,” her father would have called it. Fawn-coloured stockings hung drying on a rack. In the corner an ugly battered wardrobe with a door that wouldn’t shut properly revealed the scant selection of dresses and blouses and skirts she had brought with her from Southampton.
Violet sighed. This is not how I was expecting it to be, she thought, this Winchester life.
Her move to Winchester last November had been sudden. After her father’s death Violet had limped along for a year and a half, living alone with her mother. It was expected of women like her – unwed and unlikely to – to look after their parents. She had done her best, she supposed. But Mrs Speedwell was impossible; she always had been, even before the loss of her eldest son George in the War. She was from an era when daughters were dutiful and deferential to their mothers, at least until they married and deferred to their husbands – not that Mrs Speedwell had ever deferred much to hers. When they were children, Violet and her brothers had avoided their mother’s attention, playing together as a tight gang run with casual authority by George. Violet was often scolded by Mrs Speedwell for not being feminine enough. “You’ll never get a husband with scraped knees and flyaway hair and being mad about books,” she declared. Little did she know that when the War came along, there would be worse things than books and scrapes to keep Violet from finding a husband.
As an adult Violet had been able to cope while her father was alive to lighten the atmosphere and absorb her mother’s excesses, raising his eyebrows behind her back and smiling at his daughter, making mild jokes when he could. Once he was gone, though, and Mrs Speedwell had no target for her scrutiny other than her daughter – her younger son Tom having married and escaped years before – Violet had to bear the full weight of her attention.
As they had sat by the fire one evening, Violet began to count her mother’s complaints. “The light’s too dim. The radio isn’t loud enough. Why are they laughing when it’s not funny? The salad cream at supper was off, I’m sure of it. Your hair looks dreadful – did you try to wave it yourself? Have you gained weight? I am not at all sure Tom and Evelyn should be sending Marjory to that school. What would Geoffrey think? Oh, not more rain! It’s bringing out the damp in the hall.”
Eight in a row, Violet thought. What depressed her even more than the complaints themselves was that she had counted them. She sighed.
“Sighing makes your face sag, Violet,” her mother chided. “It does you no favours.”
The next day at work she spied on the notice board a position for a typist in the regional Winchester office, which was doing well despite the depressed economy. Violet clutched her cup of tea and closed her eyes. Don’t sigh, she thought. When she opened them she went to see the manager.
Everything about the change was easier than she had expected, at least at first. The manager at Southern Counties Insurance agreed to the move, Tom was supportive (“About bloody time!”), and she found a room to let at Mrs Harvey’s without much fuss. At first her mother took Violet’s careful announcement that she was moving to Winchester with a surprising lack of reaction other than to say, “Canada is where you should be going. That is where the husbands are.” But on the rainy Saturday in November when Tom drove over with Evelyn and the children and began to load Violet’s few possessions into his Austin, Mrs Speedwell would not get up from her armchair in the sitting room. She sat with a cold, untouched cup of tea beside her and with trembling fingers smoothed the antimacassars covering the arms of the chair. She did not look at Violet as she came in to say goodbye. “When George was taken from us I never thought I would have to go through the ordeal of losing another child,” she announced to the room. Marjory and Edward were putting together a jigsaw in front of the coal fire; Violet’s solemn niece gazed up at her grandmother, her wide hazel eyes following Mrs Speedwell’s agitated hands as she continued to smooth and re-smooth the antimacassars.
“Mother, you’re not losing me. I’m moving twelve miles away!” Even as she said it, though, Violet knew that in a way her mother was right.
“And for the child to choose for me to lose her,” Mrs Speedwell continued as if Violet had not spoken and indeed was not even in the room. “Unforgivable. At least poor George had no choice; it was the War, he did it for his country. But this! Treacherous.”
“For God’s sake, Mum, Violet’s not died,” Tom interjected as he passed by with a box full of plates and cups and cutlery from the kitchen that Violet hoped her mother wouldn’t miss.
“Well, it’s on her hands. If I don’t wake up one morning and no one discovers me dead in my bed for days, she’ll be sorry then! Or maybe she won’t be. Maybe she’ll carry on as usual.”
“Mummy, is Granny going to die?” Edward asked, a puzzle piece suspended in the air in the clutch of his hand. He did not appear to be upset by the idea; merely curious.
“That’s enough of such talk,” Evelyn replied. A brisk brunette, she was used to Mrs Speedwell, and Violet admired how efficiently she had learned to shut down her mother-in-law. It was always easier when you weren’t related. She had sorted out Tom as well, after the War. Violet appreciated her sister-in-law but was a little too intimidated to be true friends with her. “Come, give your Auntie Violet a kiss goodbye. Then we’ll go down to the shops while Daddy drives her to Winchester.”
Marjory and Edward scrambled to their feet and gave Violet obedient pecks on the cheek that made her smile.
“Why can’t we come to Winchester?” Edward asked. “I want to ride in Daddy’s car.”
“We explained before, Eddie. Auntie Violet has her things to move, so there’s no space for us.”
Actually, Auntie Violet didn’t have so very much to move. She was surprised that her life fitted into so few suitcases and boxes. There was still space on the back seat for another passenger, and she rather wished Edward could come with them. He was a spirited little boy who would keep her cheerful with his non-sequiturs and shameless solipsism. If forced to focus on his world, she would not think of her own. But she knew she could not ask for him to come along and not Marjory or Evelyn, and so she said nothing as they began to pull on their shoes and coats for their expedition in the rain.
When it became clear that Mrs Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. “Goodbye, Mother,” she murmured. “I’ll see you next Sunday.”
Mrs Speedwell sniffed. “Don’t bother. I may be dead by then.”
One of Tom’s best qualities was that he knew when to keep quiet. On the way to Winchester he let Violet cry without comment. Cocooned by the steamed-up windows and the smell of hot oil and leather, she leaned back in the sprung seat and sobbed. Near Twyford, however, her sobs diminished, then stopped.
She had always loved riding in Tom’s handsome brown and black car, marvelling at how the space held her apart from the world and yet whisked her efficiently from place to place. “Perhaps I’ll get a car,” she declared, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief embroidered with violets – one of Evelyn’s practical Christmas presents to her. Even as she said it she knew she could afford no such luxury: she was going to be dreadfully poor, though as yet that felt like something of a game. “Will you teach me to drive?” she asked, lighting a cigarette and cracking open a window.
“That’s the spirit, old girl,” Tom replied, changing gears to climb a hill. His affable nature had helped Violet to cope with her mother over the years, as well as with the War and its effects. Tom had turned eighteen shortly after news of his brother’s death came through, and joined up without hesitation or fuss. He never talked about his experiences in France; like Violet’s loss of her fiancé, they took a back seat to their brother’s death. Violet knew she took Tom for granted, as older children always do their younger siblings. They had both looked up to George, following his lead in their play as children. Once he was gone they had found themselves at sea. Was Violet then meant to take on the role of the eldest, to assume command and set the example for Tom to follow? If so, she had made a poor job of it. She was a typist at an insurance company; she had not married and begun a family. Tom had quietly overtaken her – though he never gloated or apologised. He didn’t need to: he was a man, and it was expected of him to achieve.
After they had moved her things in under Mrs Harvey’s watchful eye, he took her for fish and chips. “Mum’s a tough old boot, you know,” he reassured her over their meal. “She got through George, and Dad too. She’ll survive this. And so will you. Just don’t stay in your room all the time. Don’t want to be getting ‘one-room-itis’, isn’t that what they call it? Get out, meet some people.”
Meet some men, he meant. He was more subtle than her mother about the subject, but she knew Tom too wished she would miraculously find a man to marry, even at this late age. A widower, perhaps, with grown children. Or a man who needed help with injuries. The War might have ended thirteen years before, but the injuries lasted a lifetime. Once married, she would be off Tom’s hands, a niggling burden he would no longer have to worry about. Otherwise Violet might have to live with her brother one day; it was what spinsters often did.
But it was not easy to meet men, because there were two million fewer of them than women. Violet had read many newspaper articles about these “surplus women”, as they were labelled, left single as a result of the War and unlikely to marry – considered a tragedy, and a threat, in a society set up for marriage. Journalists seemed to relish the label, brandishing it like a pin pressed into the skin. Mostly it was an annoyance; occasionally, though, the pin penetrated the protective layers and drew blood. She had assumed it would hurt less as she grew older, and was surprised to find that even at thirty-eight – middle-aged – labels could still wound. But she had been called worse: hoyden, shrew, man-hater.
Violet did not hate men, and had not been entirely man-free. Two or three times a year, she had put on her best dress – copper lamé in a scallop pattern – gone alone to a Southampton hotel bar, and sat with a sherry and a cigarette until someone took interest. Her “sherry men”, she called them. Sometimes they ended up in an alley or a motor car or a park; never in his room, certainly not at her parents’. To be desired was welcome, though she did not feel the intense pleasure from the encounters that she once had with Laurence during the Perseids.
Every August Violet and her father and brothers had watched the Perseid showers. Violet had never said anything to her father during those late nights in the garden, watching for streaks in the sky, but she did not really like star-gazing. The cold – even in August – the dew fall, the crick in the neck: there were never visions spectacular enough to overcome these discomforts. She would make a terrible astronomer, for she preferred to be warm.
The Perseid showers she remembered best were in August 1916, when Laurence had got leave and come to see her. They’d taken a train out to Romsey, had supper at a pub, then walked out into the fields and spread out a rug. If anyone happened upon them, they could be given a mini-lecture by Laurence about the Perseids, how the earth passed in its orbit through the remnants of a comet every August and created spectacular meteor showers. They were there in the field to watch, merely to watch. And they did watch, for a short while, on their backs holding hands.
After witnessing a few meteors streak across the sky, Violet turned on her side so that she was facing Laurence, her hipbone digging into a stone under the blanket, and said to him, “Yes.” Though he had not asked a question aloud, there had been one hanging between them, ever since they had got engaged the year before.
She could feel him smile, though she couldn’t see his face in the dark. He rolled towards her. After a while Violet was no longer cold, and no longer cared about the movement of the stars in the sky above, but only the movement of his body against hers.
They say a woman’s first time is painful, bloody, a shock you must get used to. It was nothing like that for Violet. She exploded, stronger it seemed than any Perseids, and Laurence was delighted. They stayed in the field so long that they missed any possibility of a train back, and had to walk the seven miles, until a veteran of the Boer Wars passed them in his motor car, recognised a soldier’s gait, and stopped to give them a lift, smiling at the grass in Violet’s hair and her startled happiness.
Only a week later they received the telegram about George’s death at Delville Woods. And a year later, Laurence at Passchendaele. He and Violet had not managed to spend more time properly alone together, in a field or a hotel room or even an alley. With each loss she had tumbled into a dark pit, a void opening up inside her that made her feel helpless and hopeless. Her brother was gone, her fiancé was gone, God was gone. It took a long time for the gap to close, if it ever really did.
A few years later when she could face it, she tried to experience again what she’d had with Laurence that night, this time with one of George’s old friends who had come through the War physically unscathed. But there were no Perseids – only a painful awareness of each moment that killed any pleasure and just made her despise his rubbery lips.
She suspected she would never feel pleasure with her sherry men. She had laughed about them with scandalised girlfriends, for a time; but some of her friends managed to marry the few available men, and others withdrew into sexless lives and stopped wanting to hear about her exploits. Marriage in particular brought many changes to her friends, and one was donning a hat of conservatism that made them genuinely and easily shocked and threatened. One of those sherry men could be their husband. And so Violet began to keep quiet about what she got up to those few times a year. Slowly, as husbands and children took over, and the tennis games and cinema trips and dance hall visits dried up, the friendships drifted. When she left Southampton there was really no one left to regret leaving, or give her address to, or invite to tea.
“Violet, where have you gone?” Tom was studying her over the remains of his chips.
Violet shook her head. “Sorry – just, you know.”
Her brother reached over and hugged her – a surprise, as they were not the hugging sort of siblings. They walked back to Mrs Harvey’s, where his motor car was parked. Violet stood in the doorway and watched his Austin hiss away through the wet street, then went upstairs. She had thought she might cry when finally alone, in her shabby new room, with a door she could shut against the world. But she had cried her tears out on the trip from Southampton. Instead she looked around at the sparse furnishings, nodded, and put the kettle on.
Chapter 3 (#u67e98e71-6368-5293-bbd7-c3ac7ddb6bc0)
VIOLET HAD NOT REALLY understood how hard it would be to get along on her own on a typist’s salary. Or she had, but vowed to manage anyway – the price she paid for her independence from her mother. When she’d lived with her parents, she handed over almost two-thirds of her weekly salary to help with the running of the household, keeping five shillings back for her own expenses – dinner, clothes, cigarettes, sixpenny magazines – and putting another few shillings in the bank. Over the years her savings had gradually built up, but she assumed she would need them for her older years when her parents were gone. She had to eat into them more substantially than she’d expected to pay for the deposit on her lodgings in the Soke, and for some bits and pieces to make the room more comfortable. Her mother had plenty to spare in the Southampton house, but Violet knew better than to ask. Perhaps if she were moving to Canada to find a husband, Mrs Speedwell would have been willing to ship furniture thousands of miles. But sending anything twelve miles up the road was an affront. Instead Violet had to scour the junk shops of Winchester for a cheap bedside table when there was a pretty rattan one sitting in her old bedroom, or a chunky green ashtray rather than an almost identical one in the Southampton sitting room, or a couple of chipped majolica plates for the mantelpiece when her mother had any number of knick-knacks in boxes in the attic. It had not occurred to her to take such extras when she moved out, for she had never had to make a strange room into a home before.
Violet was still earning thirty-five shillings a week at the Winchester office, the same as her Southampton salary. It was considered a good one for a typist – she had been at the company for ten years, and her typing was fast and accurate. It had felt generous when she lived at home; she could have a hot dinner most days and not think too hard before buying cigarettes or a new lipstick. But it was not a salary you could easily live on alone; it was rather like a pair of ill-fitting shoes that could be worn, but that pinched and rubbed and left calluses. Now that Violet had to survive on it she understood that, proud as she had been to earn and contribute to the running of the house, her parents must have regarded what she handed over almost as pocket money.
The same amount she’d given to her parents now went to her landlady, and it only covered breakfast; she paid for and cooked her own supper, and she had to pay for laundry and coal – things she’d taken for granted at home. Whenever she left the house she seemed to spend money – just little bits here and there, but it added up. Living was a constant expense. Violet could no longer put aside any money to save. She had to learn to make do, and do without. She began wearing the same clothes over and over, and washing them under the tap to avoid an excessive laundry bill, mending tears and hiding worn patches with brooches or scarves, knowing that whatever she did would never refresh the shabbiness. Only new clothes could do that.
She stopped buying magazines and papers, relying on O and Mo’s cast-offs, and did not replace her lipsticks. She began to ration her cigarettes to three a day. Many evening meals consisted of sardines on toast or fried sprats rather than a chop, for meat was too dear. Violet was not keen on breakfast – she would have preferred toast and marmalade – but since she was paying for it she forced herself to eat the poached egg Mrs Harvey served every morning, afterwards arriving at work faintly queasy. She took herself to the cinema every week – her one indulgence, which she paid for by going without a meal that day. The first film she saw in Winchester was called Almost a Honeymoon, about a man who had to find a woman to marry in twenty-four hours. It was so painful she wanted to leave halfway through, but it was warm in the cinema and she could not justify sacrificing a meal only to walk out early.
Every Sunday she took the train to Southampton to accompany her mother to church, the money for the ticket coming from her slowly diminishing savings. It would never have occurred to Mrs Speedwell to offer to pay. She never asked Violet about money, nor about her job nor Winchester nor any aspect of her new life, which made a two-way conversation difficult. Indeed, Mrs Speedwell just spent the afternoons complaining, as if she had been saving up all of her grievances for the few hours her daughter was with her. If Tom and Evelyn and the children weren’t there, Violet almost always made an excuse and took an earlier train back, defiant and guilty in equal measure. Then she would sit in her room reading a novel (she was making her way through Trollope, her father’s favourite), or go for a walk in the water meadows by the river, or catch the end of Evensong at Winchester Cathedral.
Whenever she walked through the front entrance below the Great West Window and into the Cathedral, the long nave in front of her and the vast space above bounded by a stunning vaulted ceiling, Violet felt the whole weight of the nine-hundred-year-old building hover over her, and wanted to cry. It was the only place built specifically for spiritual sustenance in which she felt she was indeed being spiritually fed. Not necessarily from the services, which apart from Evensong were formulaic and rigid, though the repetition was comforting. It was more the reverence for the place itself, for the knowledge of the many thousands of people who had come there throughout its history, looking for a place in which to be free to consider the big questions about life and death rather than worrying about paying for the winter’s coal or needing a new coat.
She loved it for the more concrete things as well: for its coloured windows and elegant arches and carvings, for its old patterned tiles, for the elaborate tombs of bishops and kings and noble families, for the surprising painted bosses that covered the joins between the stone ribs on the distant ceiling, and for all of the energy that had gone into making those things, for the creators throughout history.
Like most smaller services, Evensong was held in the choir. The choir boys with their scrubbed, mischievous faces sat in one set of stall benches, the congregants in the other, with any overflow in the adjacent presbytery seats. Violet suspected Evensong was considered frivolous by regular church goers compared to Sunday morning services, but she preferred the lighter touch of music to the booming organ, and the shorter, simpler sermon to the hectoring morning one. She did not pray or listen to the prayers – prayers had died in the War alongside George and Laurence and a nation full of young men. But when she sat in the choir stalls, she liked to study the carved oak arches overhead, decorated with leaves and flowers and animals and even a Green Man whose moustache turned into abundant foliage. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the looming enormity of the nave, but sitting here with the boys’ ethereal voices around her, she felt safe from the void that at times threatened to overwhelm her. Sometimes, quietly and unostentatiously, she cried.
One Sunday afternoon a few weeks after the Presentation of Embroideries service, Violet slipped late into the presbytery as a visiting dean was giving the sermon. When she went to sit she moved a kneeler that had been placed on the chair, then held it in her lap and studied it. It was a rectangle about nine by twelve inches with a mustard-coloured circle like a medallion in the centre surrounded by a mottled field of blue. The medallion design was of a bouquet of branches with chequer-capped acorns amongst blue-green foliage. Chequered acorns had been embroidered in the four corners as well. The colours were surprisingly bright, the pattern cheerful and un-churchlike. It reminded Violet of the background of mediaeval tapestries with their intricate millefleurs arrangement of leaves and flowers. This design was simpler than that but nonetheless captured an echo from the past.
They all did, she thought, placing the kneeler on the floor and glancing at those around her, each with a central circle of flowers or knots on a blue background. There were not yet enough embroidered kneelers for every chair, and the rest had the usual unmemorable hard lozenges of red and black felt. The new embroidered ones lifted the tone of the presbytery, giving it colour and a sense of designed purpose.
At the service’s end, Violet picked up the kneeler to look at it again, smiling as she traced with her finger the chequered acorns. It always seemed a contradiction to have to be solemn in the Cathedral amidst the uplifting beauty of the stained glass, the wood carving, the stone sculpture, the glorious architecture, the boys’ crystalline tones, and now the kneelers.
A hovering presence made her look up. A woman about her age stood in the aisle next to her, staring at the kneeler Violet held. She was wearing a swagger coat in forest green that swung from her shoulders and had a double row of large black buttons running down the front. Matching it was a dark green felt hat with feathers tucked in the black band. Despite her modish attire, she did not have the appearance of being modern, but looked rather as if she had stepped aside from the flow of the present. Her hair was not waved; her pale grey eyes seemed to float in her face.
“Sorry. Would you mind if I—” She reached out to flip over the kneeler and reveal the dark blue canvas underside. “I just like to look at it when I’m here. It’s mine, you see.” She tapped on the border. Violet squinted: stitched there were the initials and a year: DJ 1932.
Violet watched her gazing at her handiwork. “How long did it take you to make it?” she asked, partly out of politeness, but curiosity too.
“Two months. I had to unpick bits a few times. These kneelers may be used in the Cathedral for centuries, and so they must be made correctly from the start.” She paused. “Ars longa, vita brevis.”
Violet thought back to her Latin at school. “Art is long, life short,” she quoted her old Latin teacher.
“Yes.”
Violet could not imagine the kneeler being there for hundreds of years. The War had taught her not to assume that anything would last, even something as substantial as a cathedral, much less a mere kneeler. Indeed, just twenty-five years before, a diver, William Walker, had been employed for five years to shore up the foundations of Winchester Cathedral with thousands of sacks of concrete so that the building would not topple in on itself. Nothing could be taken for granted.
She wondered if the builders of the Cathedral nine hundred years ago had thought of her, standing under their arches, next to their thick pillars, on top of their mediaeval tiles, lit by their stained glass – a woman in 1932, living and worshipping so differently from how they did. They would not have conjured up Violet Speedwell, that seemed certain.
She put out a hand as “DJ” set her kneeler on a chair and made to move off. “Are you a member of the Cathedral Broderers?”
DJ paused. “Yes.”
“If one wanted to contact them, how …”
“There is a sign on the notice board in the porch about the meetings.” She looked at Violet directly for a moment, then filed out after the other congregants.
Violet did not intend to look for the notice. She thought she had set aside the kneelers in her mind. But several days later, out for a walk by the Cathedral, she found herself drawn to the notice board and the sign about the broderers, written in careful copperplate like her mother’s handwriting. Violet copied down a number for Mrs Humphrey Biggins, and that evening used her landlady’s telephone to ring.
“Compton 220.” Mrs Biggins herself answered the telephone. Violet knew immediately it wasn’t a daughter, or a housekeeper, or a sister. She sounded so much like Violet’s mother in her better days that it silenced her, and Mrs Biggins had to repeat “Compton 220” with increased irritation until she eventually demanded, “Who is this? I will not tolerate these silences. I shall be phoning the police to report you, you can be sure!”
“I’m sorry,” Violet stumbled. “Perhaps I have the wrong number” – though she knew that she did not. “I’m – I’m ringing about the kneelers in the Cathedral.”
“Young lady, your telephone manner is dreadful. You are all of a muddle. You must say your name clearly, and then ask to speak to me, and say what your call concerns. Now try it.”
Violet shuddered and almost put down the telephone. When the Speedwells first had a telephone installed, her mother had given her lessons in telephone etiquette, though she had often put off potential callers herself with her impatient manner. But Violet knew she must persist or she would never have her own kneeler in Winchester Cathedral. “My name is Violet Speedwell,” she began obediently, feeling like a small child. “I would like to speak to Mrs Biggins with regard to the embroidery project at the Cathedral.”
“That’s better. But you are ringing very late, and at the wrong time. Our classes finish shortly for the summer and don’t resume until the autumn. Miss Pesel and Miss Blunt need time over the summer to work on designs for the next batch.”
“All right, I’ll ring back then. Sorry to have troubled you.”
“Not so hasty, Miss Speedwell. May I assume you are a ‘Miss’ Speedwell?”
Violet gritted her teeth. “Yes.”
“Well, you young people are far too quick to give up.”
It had been a long time since Violet had been called a young person.
“Now, do you know how to embroider? We do canvas embroidery for the cushions and kneelers. Do you know what that is?”
