CHAPTER NINE
Although Daphne arrives at the frock shop around nine thirty each day she’s there, it officially opens at ten o’clock. At a quarter to the hour Adelaide arrives. It’s her third week and fifth shift, and Daphne has been glad of her company if not her expertise – for Adelaide has plenty when it comes to music and very little when it comes to clothes.
‘Good morning,’ Adelaide says cheerily. She’s bearing a cake tin.
‘Morning. What’s that?’ Daphne nods at the tin.
‘No prizes for guessing.’ Adelaide raises an eyebrow.
‘All right, smarty-pants – whatsortof cake?’
‘A sponge.’
‘A sponge! Good God, you’ve outdone yourself.’ Daphne smiles affectionately. She loves sponge cake, and Adelaide knows it.
‘I’ll put it out the back,’ Adelaide says, going into the office.
She re-emerges, patting her short-clipped hair as if she’s forgotten it’s there. She’s only had it cut like that recently and Daphne isn’t sure it was a wise move. Adelaide’s face is round, and short cuts suit a more angular look.
Daphne’s high cheekbones are accentuated by the loose bun she has favoured for the last decade or so. It allows her to keepher hair long, which she likes, yet not wear it long and loose, which would definitely not be Ophelia-approved on a woman of her age.
What would be Ophelia-approved are the clothes Daphne has chosen for herself today. Ophelia was a fan of women dressing appropriately for their age and the needs of their daily life, although she was never a fan of women wearing pants.
‘Why do they want to be likemen, Daph?’ she would say if a customer dared to cross the shop’s threshold wearing trousers. ‘Irealisethe pants arepracticalbut they’re sougly. The lines on them! I can’t imagine a woman alive who is flattered by a pair of trousers.’
Daphne has never once worn trousers, but isn’t sure if it’s because Ophelia’s voice is stuck in her subconscious or because she hasn’t found either the need for them nor a pair that have appealed to her. However, Adelaide is wearing pants – and not a flattering pair at that, although with her height she can just pull off the look.
Today Daphne is in a dark-green skirt with two pleats on each side facing forward and the hem at mid-calf, a navy short-sleeved top and navy cotton cardigan. Her mother’s verdigris-coloured brooch of a teapot is pinned to the cardigan.
‘A brooch is such alovely,simpleadornment,’ Ophelia used to say, often to customers who baulked at paying for a piece of clothing but wanted to take home something. Ophelia commissioned a local artist to make brooches and rings, and could barely keep stock in the shop to meet the demand.
Each time Daphne feels as though she doesn’t have the creative oomph to choose jewellery – which is happening more and more these days – she goes for her collection of brooches, most of them inherited from her mother. So today the verdigris teapot is herlovely,simpleadornment – and she sends a smile heavenwards, hoping that Ophelia, wherever she is, agrees.
The first prospective customer arrives at ten thirty, followed by two more. Adelaide stays at the till while Daphne flutters around, offering advice or acclaiming something as a good choice.
When there’s a lull, she goes to the back room and has a good look at a stain on a lovely lilac dress that’s just arrived. It’s hard to tell what caused the stain as it looks quite aged, but perhaps some baking soda paste will work. That or Softly. Softly is her secret weapon on stubborn stains, but she doesn’t have any at the shop.
Soon enough they hear the lunch bell ring at the high school across the road and two minutes after it Lucy arrives, breathless and grinning, swiping an orange blouse off the rack as she walks in.
‘I saw this the other day,’ she says by way of greeting, bearing the blouse aloft then sweeping into the tiny changing room, emerging a minute later with the blouse hanging over her school skirt.
Daphne is used to this routine by now, as Lucy visits at least once a week and obviously feels comfortable enough that she doesn’t need to say hello or ask permission to try something on.
A few weeks ago Lucy had confided in Daphne that she wanted to be a fashion designer when she leaves school. ‘My parents will hate it,’ she said, but Daphne encouraged her to pursue her passion.
Teenage girls need encouragement in Daphne’s view. There are so many people who will tell them they’re too fat, too thin, too tall, too short, too freckled, too pale, too ugly, too pretty – and that’s before they start on what girls should and shouldn’t do with their lives. Be ambitious but only for a limited amount of time because at a certain point you need to be married and having babies. Be accomplished but only a little bit, lest you scare off a man who may wish to marry you. Have a full life but not so full that you can’t fit in all the requests that others make of your time.
Daphne has seen it all develop, and she knows if she told the girls that it wasn’t like that in her day, they probablywouldn’t believe her. Except it wasn’t. The human race was so busy trying to make it through world wars and the Depression, then sorting out what was what and who was who in the years afterward, that opinions about girls and women were confined to busybodies with too much time on their hands.
It is, Daphne has thought before, a symptom of a peaceful society – that is, one not in wartime – that attention can be turned to trying to constrain the womenfolk. When a war’s on – and the Depression was like living in wartime with its deprivations and constrictions – there’s too much to think about and the stakes are so different that women are left alone to get on with the business of keeping society going. Now that they’re almost half a century clear of the last great war, everyone has an opinion about how everyone else should live. And Daphne thinks the girls are unfairly targeted; made to feel like they’ll never be good enough. She doesn’t stand for it. So when young Lucy comes into the shop and asks about the clothes and tells Daphne about her dreams, Daphne listens.
‘Where will you wear this blouse?’ she asks Lucy now as the girl turns this way and that in front of the mirror.
Lucy shrugs. ‘Dunno.’ Then she grins. ‘Does it matter?’
‘It does if you’re not to wake up tomorrow and regret the purchase.’
Daphne knows Lucy works at her parents’ dry-cleaning business so her money is hard-earned. She peers at the girl’s reflection. The colour suits her – surprisingly, as oranges are tricky and can make even handsome women look sallow if they pick the wrong shade. If Lucy makes some alterations to the sides of the blouse it will look better on her slender figure. Daphne knows that she’s capable of this because Lucy has also told her about how she’s modified clothes she’s bought elsewhere, ‘to make them more like mine’.