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After attempt to kill Mary’s rapist father went wrong, her brother Mark went missing. Since his shoe washed up, he is presumed dead.
A Girl’s Job is Not to be Noticed
High summer. Disappointed bees in the pantry, swifts tumbling from the eaves.
Ma’s fingers have stopped working. Ma says it is her eyes. She must make three new shirts for Reverend Ashburner, and one for John Clowter, but they will only be made if shirts are made out of curses. Her stitches have grown large as insect legs, and she cannot thread the needle. She asks me, and when he is about, Mister Lampard, ‘Thread the needle please love, I can’t seem to. These new needles. Why would they make them with such small eyes?’ Her fingers tremble like spring leaves. When I come close to thread the needle, her breath is sour with what she calls her pick-me-up. Mister Lampard comes to supper less and less. Sometimes there is no supper at all. When there is, it tends to the measly and mean. Hard bread that next-door brings over when they have baked fresh. Grey soup. No one mentions you. Your name is worse than a curse word in this house. Say it and get a thick ear. No one need say it though, when it’s everywhere. In her tremble, in her shouting, in her eyes that can’t look into the needle’s eye, or mine. She is fills the hole you left with gin.
Mister Lampard is not the same. His presence feels like something you don’t want to put any weight on, a stone in your shoe. He still holds Ma when she’s crying. One time, afterwards, he comes to me outside on the step where I’m sitting.
‘Tyke,’ he says, ‘you need to pick up your Ma’s sewing.’
I look around me, but can’t see where she’s left it.
‘You need to finish those shirts,’ he says, ‘if you’re to have any food at all next week.’
I look at his face, to see if there’s a trick hidden there. But his brow is heavy as a spade that’s about to bury someone. Seeing he is serious, I spit out what he must surely know.
‘Sewing is for girls.’
‘Tyke —’
‘For girls,’ I repeat. But the look on him is troubling. Though we’re alike as two peas, and I’ve never pulled on a pair of breeches that wasn’t first yours, and though Ma never made any difference between us except liking you not me, there was one thing that marked us apart.
‘Must I be a girl now, I ask?’
‘You don’t have to change a thing about yourself,’ he says, and before I can rise to protest he adds, ‘only do the sewing. You can thread a needle, your hands are small, and it’s fine work.’
‘Women’s work. I’m not a woman.’
‘You’ll be a woman soon enough,’ he says. ‘A good woman too if you are anything like your Ma. Now go inside,’ he says, ‘and say to your mother you would like to help.’
Lie to her, he is saying. Again, I know not to speak, because no grown up likes to be told they’re wrong. And he is wrong, I am nothing like our Ma. But I go in and lie to our mother, committing myself to a prison of needle and thread. A life spent in the freedom of anthills and dew ponds is captured and bridled, forced inside to the gloom.
Sewing is a tedious business. It must be done indoors because outdoors is dusty, even though that’s where the light is. She will not have me dragging the cuffs on the step. I must make my stitches near invisible, small as the threads of the fabric itself, as though it is held together by desire. Women have fashioned themselves like sewing, too. So-called good women, like good stitching, make themselves small enough to be invisible, with not a scrap of rough seam to be shown, every cut turned in on itself and hemmed, like the tight lips of the church wives, hem, hem, hem. Visible women are said to be whores.
Sometimes when I am sewing I make myself so small that the needle is a tiny sword. A slender epee like the French use, which we saw in a duel once on the harbourside, flashing through the air until the French sailor’s opponent was cut so badly that his sleeve turned completely red. Women ran for their needles to sew his arm skin back together, because the man would not have survived a day’s ride to the doctor. And Sarah Foxwill said, ‘What a fuss these men make!’ but I could see she liked it. Something more than the flashing of swords in sunlight glittered in her eye.
I don’t like what the needle does to the ends of my fingers. A thimble protects my left thumb from being sewn into the fingers holding the needle, which rely on the feeling of flesh, get sore and put-upon. Nor do I like the quiet sit-stillness of the seamstress, the eye for only one thing, and that thing the smallest detail that no one will notice. Indeed, if your work is noticed, you have failed. This is women’s work, to make things no one notices. Or things that vanish into people’s mouths so there is nothing to show for it tomorrow, and to do the same chore over and over again, only to have it undone the same day by somebody else. Whereas a man might build a chair or a house or ship: something that might be of use for a lifetime or more.
Our mother pretends she made the shirts herself. She delivers them personally to John Clowter, and to the Reverend Ashburner’s housekeeper Mrs Weevill. She comes back to the cottage with some new calico and a wrapper of chops. She even gives me a little ale at supper, but it makes my mouth sour. Mister Lampard sits across the table looking as though he has already moved away.
Because this is the summer he moves away. He tells her one night after I’m sent to bed. She says,
‘Please don’t leave. Hywel. Hywel.’ And even his name in her mouth is saying ‘You Will, You Will.’
What follows Mister Lampard’s leaving does not deserve too many words. I tell her I won’t be sewing any more shirts. She knocks me to the hearth with the kettle.
When I wake up, some strange calm has come over her.
‘You’re the spit of your brother,’ she says. ‘The spit.’
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