The Midnight Dress(20)

Rose starts to unpick. She gives the old woman nothing.

‘The great-great-great-great granddaughter’s name was Florence and she was the only daughter of Herbert Mercier of Herbert Mercier & Sons Gentlemen’s Outfitters, in George Street, Brisbane. There were three sons – Herbert, Frank and Arthur – and not one of them good with a needle. Sloppy is what their father called them. They were never paying attention, clowning around to their father’s despair. But Florence, she was different, she knew all the mysteries of folding and draping and the pleasant secrets of pintucking. Her hand was fine. Her father loved to watch her stitch, her solemness, which he thought was just as it should be.

So Florence’s brothers did the measuring and cutting and she sat in the back room all day, every day, and sewed. It was a small hot room with one window looking over a laneway where crows stood on the awnings and clicked and clacked their feet on the tin roof.

She had never been anywhere, Florence Mercier, not ever. Not counting the daytrips they sometimes made to her uncle’s house at Enoggera, where they swam in the creek. In the creek the current pulled against their legs. Her father had urged her to let go of the bank, he had shown her himself, how there was nothing to fear, the waters would only take her to the riverbend, where she could climb back out again. When she finally let go of the bank and floated away on the river’s back, it had terrified her but also filled her with awe: the way the world was always leaning someway, draining someway, pulling someway. The tides, the moon rising above the rooftops, the water flowing from the mountains to the sea.

Florence Mercier had a large and unsightly mole on her right cheek, the size of a fingernail, a dark velvety brown. She had a long calm face and a wide forehead, huge brown eyes. Her skin was smooth and very pale. She would have been a beauty, were it not for the mole, and its presence was commented upon in all the shops up and down the street.

She was pale from never going in the sun, Florence. Fragile.

She sewed and sewed and sewed. By hand often, and then by machine. They had a very good machine, a Varley Medium that Herbert Mercier had imported from Yorkshire. The machine said dig, dig, dig, diggity, dig all day long and it lulled her almost to sleep. She traced her fingers over pinstripes, slid her nails through hand-stitched buttonholes, stood up, sat down, barely breathed.

Jonathan Baker arrived the summer Florence turned twenty-two, which was very old in those days for a girl not to be married. Later she would say it was the heat, there was a heatwave at the time, you see, and the city was broiling in its own skin, all the shabby brown streets stinking with horse shit and the river turned grey. Horses hung their heads and dogs lay in shadows and women suffocated in their stays, no amount of fanning took that feeling of suffocation away.

Jonathan Baker had a head of lustrous black hair and his skin was a burnt biscuity brown. He had bright blue eyes. Florence had never seen anyone like him. He wasn’t like anyone from the city: he came into Herbert Mercier & Sons in his moleskins and chequered shirt and his voice was so quiet that it could barely be heard. And it wasn’t that she had never seen the sons of graziers or pastoralists before, she’d seen many, sewn them suits by the dozen, but this man was . . . What is the word she wanted? This man was gentle.

That would be how she described him then.

When she walked into the shop from the back room and saw him standing there, her heart leapt in her chest. That was always how she told the story. He was newly to the city and had money to burn. He was sorely in need of a new suit, being there to look at machinery and find a wife, and was staying with the honourable member for Toowong himself, his pocket filled with other letters of introduction.

Florence did her best to hide her mole. She was quite practised in the fine art of turning away, very good at looking at things that didn’t need to be looked at so that the horrible side of her face – that’s how she thought of it – was hidden from view.

‘Florence will make Mr Baker tea,’ said her father.

Florence served it carefully, keeping the right side of her face averted.

Her brothers slouched at their table, tape measures in their hands.

‘Where did you say you were from, the North? Was it cattle you said. Or cane?’ asked her father.

‘Cattle,’ said Jonathan Baker very quietly. ‘And cane.’

But all of it was there in his eyes, the towering sky and carpet of fields, the lazy rivers and the crocodiles. Florence shivered and met his gaze.

Who was this young lady with the disappointed face, Jonathan Baker thought. He watched her drift into the room and then out again, saw a large brown beauty spot just below her right eye. She kept hiding it from him, turning her face, again and again, as though she were playing a game.

A faint breeze stirred the curtain in the front room and everyone in the small gathering watched in anticipation.

It was the heat, Florence always said. It was the heat.

‘Wild country up there, I’ve heard,’ said her father.

‘Wild enough,’ said Jonathan.

‘How interesting,’ said Florence.

‘Yes,’ he replied.

These were the only words they spoke to each other before she sewed the secret pocket into the lining of his suit jacket. She made the suit with her very own hands, and in the stifling little room behind the shop thought about sewing the secret pocket.

Sitting before the sewing machine she undid her blouse buttons and rested back in her chair. His trousers hung with a perfect crease over the stand and before her lay the pieces of his jacket. She took off her shoes. The clock ticked on the wall and apart from her father moving in the next room, writing in his ledger, it was the only sound. She stood up and counted her steps around the perimeter of the room as though it were a cell. She cried, briefly, with her face in her hands, beside the window, but she could not stop what she knew she was about to do.