There’s one old lady who brings in all her clothes for washing or dry-cleaning, and she has frocks from the 1950s and the decades since. Lucy wants to ask her about them – where she bought them, where she’s worn them, where she wears them still – but the lady, Mrs Rosen, tends not to talk. They all know her name so she doesn’t need to speak to them when she drops off, and they send her a monthly account so she doesn’t need to do anything when she picks up either. Whoever is at the counter just hands over the clothes.
Lucy gets most of her information about clothes from Daphne at the charity shop. Daphne talks to her, doesn’t treat her like she’s an annoying kid. She gives her good advice about items of clothing and Lucy pays attention, because Daphne is always so nicely dressed. She has interesting jewellery too.
Daphne’s who Lucy wants to be when she grows up. That’s because Daphne told her that she used to design dresses, although she couldn’t get them made. Lucy wants to design clothes too –andget them made. She wants to be able to go back to the shop and show Daphne that she’s done it for both of them. Because she knows girls – women – don’t always get what they want.
Her mother wanted to be a ballerina. She was dancing a lot – Lucy’s father saw her in a production, that’s how they met – but once she became pregnant she had to stop. Then she had to look after Lucy. Then they started the dry-cleaning business. Sometimes Lucy hears classical music playing in the house and wonders if her mother is thinking about ballet, but when she asks about the music her mother always says, ‘It was just the radio.’ Except the radio lives in the kitchen and the music comes from the sitting room.
‘I’m going out,’ her mother says now, pulling her handbag from under the counter. She kisses Lucy on the cheek. ‘Your dad’s out the back with Russell.’
Lucy nods and smiles. She glances at the clock: three twenty. They’ll get the after-school rush soon – mothers sending in their kids to pick up dry-cleaning, some of them kids Lucy has no wish to see. At least it’s her second-last year at school. She can’t wait for it all to be over.
The door closes behind her mother and Lucy puts her elbows on the counter, her long blonde-brown plait falling over one shoulder. She picks it up and starts chewing on the ends. It’s a bad habit and she should really stop it.
So she takes the hair out of her mouth and reaches under the counter for the basket she keeps there with clothes she likes to work on when there’s a quiet patch. Russell is mostly confined to the back of the shop so she doesn’t worry about him finding her projects and ruining them. Which he would if he knew how much they mean to her.
She pulls out a houndstooth jacket from a suit she bought at the op shop a few weeks ago. It’s a little too big for her but Daphne told her that if she adds some shoulder pads and nips it in at the waist, it could make for an interesting silhouette.
The skirt is too long for Lucy as well, so she’s going to take up the hem. ‘Don’t cut it off if you can avoid it,’ Daphneadvised her. ‘Better to keep the material there in case you ever want to let it down again.’
Lucy’s hemming it by hand – it’s a good activity to do at the counter because she can quickly put it away if a customer comes in.
She could use the sewing machine out the back, but that almost feels like cheating. Plus she’d have to find a time when there’s no one else out there, and that’s not likely.
So she lays the skirt on the countertop, threads her needle and gets to work on making the houndstooth suit her own.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bach’s cello suites are part of Adelaide’s usual routine. Warm up with scales, even though she doesn’t really need to, then a concerto or two or three. They’re so familiar to her now she doesn’t need sheet music and that’s just as well, for she couldn’t find it if she did. When she moved back to Australia she left some things behind in London, including sheet music she hadn’t glanced at for years. Perhaps that was reckless – now that she’s begun her eighth decade, there’s a decent chance she will begin to lose her marbles and it might have been wise to keep the marbles close to hand just in case. It’s done now, though.
The light into her sitting room is soft and reassuring. Not the bright light of winter or the often punishing light of summer. It’s spring in Sydney and she’s missed it all these years of being abroad.
Her house in Botanic Road, close to Balmoral Beach, is one she purchased years ago, guided by her brother’s advice that she could invest some of her money and also make sure there was a home there for her if she ever returned to Sydney. Her years of living on the Continent and in London, playing in orchestras, travelling, experiencing so many different countries and cultures, were exhilarating – and they are over now. There is no place for a 71-year-old cellist in the world’s great orchestras.
In the last few years of her career Adelaide played in chamber orchestras, the rough and tumble of full-sized companies too much for her ageing sensibilities. Then even that work started to be offered to her less and less. Retirement was inevitable, of course, and when she looks back she can see that it crept up on her. At the time, however, it felt sudden. She was irrelevant in the world she had built around her talent and work ethic.
Sudden too was her feeling that she belonged at home. She’d left Australia decades before and thought the country too provincial to hold her ever again. Yet there she was, dreaming of the Sydney light and missing the harbourside suburb she grew up in. So back she came, to the country that had transformed itself in her absence. To the city that had always been a sparkling jewel with its harbour and the foreshore covered in trees, and which had added tall buildings glinting in that light she missed. The Opera House too had been built while she was abroad, and sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she’d just stayed: would the Sydney Opera House have been her workplace? She would have loved that. Loved to have taken the ferry across the harbour and stepped inside that singular building each day.
Life is not for wondering, though – it’s for doing. Wondering is wandering, her father used to say, and he didn’t have time for either. He had to work too hard to look after them all, guarding his cash when the Great Depression came, living frugally as most others did but never out of work, luckily.
With her pot of tea by her side, and some Brahms on the stereo, Adelaide knows she should feel content, yet … has she ever? Does she deserve to?
The telephone rings and she picks it up quickly because it too is next to her.
‘Hello?’
‘Addy.’
Only one person calls her that.
‘Daph,’ she replies.
‘How’s tricks?’
Adelaide sighs, wanting to have something interesting to tell her lifelong friend. ‘Not so tricksy,’ she says.
‘Bored, are we?’
‘I could be less bored, yes.’