A Single Thread

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?”

“No.”

“Of course you don’t. Why do we attract so many volunteers who have never held a needle? It makes our work so much more time-consuming.”

“Perhaps you could think of me as a blank canvas, with no faults to unpick.”

Mrs Biggins’ tone softened. “There you may be right, Miss Speedwell. A blank slate can indeed be easier. Now, we hold meetings two days a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, from half past ten to half past twelve and then half past two to four o’clock, both days. Come along to the next and we’ll see what we can do. If nothing else we can get you helping out – copying designs, or tidying the cupboards, perhaps.”

Violet remembered what Gilda had said about cupboards. “Actually, I’m afraid I am not available then, Mrs Biggins. I work, you see.”

“You work? Where?”

“In an office.”

“Why, then, have you telephoned me? And so late in the evening, I might add. If your time is taken up elsewhere, then I’m afraid you are of no use to the Cathedral Broderers. We demand total commitment.”

“But—” Violet hesitated, wondering how to explain to this overbearing woman that she wanted to make a kneeler – one that kept knees from aching during prayers and that she could look out for specially in the Cathedral presbytery. One that might last long after she was dead. Over the centuries others had carved heads into the choir stalls, or sculpted elaborate figures of saints from marble, or designed sturdy, memorable columns and arches, or fitted together coloured glass for the windows: all glorious additions to a building whose existence was meant to make you raise your eyes to Heaven to thank God. Violet wanted to do what they had done. She was unlikely to have children now, so if she was to make a mark on the world, she would have to do so in another way. A kneeler was a stupid, tiny gesture, but there it was. “I would like to make a kneeler for the Cathedral,” she finally said in a small voice, then hated herself for it.

Mrs Biggins sighed. “Everyone would, my dear. But what we really need – not what you need – are skilled embroiderers to work on the cushions Miss Pesel has planned for the choir seats and benches. Not beginners looking to conquer the Cathedral with a simple kneeler.”

Violet was silent. From years of experience with her mother, she had learned that silence was often more effective than words.

“What company do you work for?”

“Southern Counties Insurance.”

“What, for Mr Waterman?”

“Yes.”

“There shouldn’t be a problem, then. He lives in our village. I know him from our local bird-watching society. You tell him Mrs Humphrey Biggins has asked for you to be allowed to take half a day’s leave to attend class.”

Violet was not at all sure she wanted to give up her precious annual leave to attend embroidery classes. “Are there no classes outside of work hours – in the evenings, or on a Saturday?”

Mrs Biggins snorted. “Do you think we’re organising meetings to suit you? Some of us have families to look after. Now, you ask Mr Waterman to let you take time off. I’ll expect to see you on Wednesday at half past ten, at Church House in the Inner Close. Good night.” She hung up before Violet could reply.

Whose telephone manner needs work? she thought.

It seemed Mrs Biggins’ rules about when to telephone others did not apply to herself. When Violet arrived at the office the next morning, Mr Waterman had already left a note on her desk giving permission for her to take Wednesday morning off. Despite the hour, Mrs Biggins must have telephoned him immediately after speaking to Violet, not trusting her to ask her supervisor herself. Later, Violet ran into him in the corridor and thanked him. A nondescript man with brown hair, pasty skin and a drooping moustache that partially covered his tentative smile, he ducked his head as if Mrs Biggins were lurking somewhere nearby.

“I don’t mind how you use your annual leave,” he replied, “and for a noble cause, too.” He paused, fiddling with his shirt cuffs, which were not as clean as they could be. Mrs Biggins would bleach them till they gleamed, Violet thought. “Take care, though, Miss Speedwell,” he added. “Once Mrs Biggins gets her claws in you, you’ll never be free!” He wheeled around and hurried back the way he had come, as if frightened he’d said too much.

Chapter 4

THOUGH ANNOYED BY MRS Biggins’ interference, as well as her mixed messages – Come on Wednesday but you won’t be much use to us – Violet found herself looking forward to the broderers’ meeting. Her brother had been pestering her ever since she moved to Winchester to join some groups – ramblers, historical societies, benevolent church funds, anything that would bring her into contact with potential friends and suitors. Now she could genuinely answer that she was doing just that – although suitors were rather unlikely at an embroidery group.

On Wednesday morning it felt odd to sleep in on a working day, to dawdle over breakfast and not have to join the queue to wash. Violet sat in her tea-coloured dressing gown, lit a cigarette and listened to the house empty of its inhabitants – the other lodgers to their various employments, her landlady to the shops. Eventually she got dressed, aware that the broderers would note her choice of clothes, her hair, her makeup. After some thought she donned a simple chiffon dress in pale green with yellow flowers, and her beige cardigan in case the embroidery room was chilly.

Church House was one of a row of houses in the Inner Close, to the south of the Cathedral. Violet had walked past the buildings before but had never considered what might be going on inside. She felt a little sick as she approached the entrance, a feeling similar to that on her first day of work at the Winchester office – the war in her gut between craving the new and clinging to the comfort of the familiar. The door had a bell to one side with a small handwritten sign that read, Ring the bell. That impertinent sign almost made Violet turn around and hurry away. But hurry away to what – an empty room? Window shopping with no money in her purse? The office, where they wouldn’t even notice she’d not been there?

She rang the bell. After a moment a girl answered, looked her up and down, and before Violet could say a word, commanded, “Up the stairs, right and all the way down the passage to the last room.”

How does she know? Violet thought, and suddenly wished she had worn something different – though what, exactly, she wasn’t sure. She found the room and forced herself to enter boldly, like plunging into the cold sea rather than hesitating on the shore. She was not late – as she walked down the corridor Violet had heard the Cathedral bells sounding the half hour – but the dozen chairs around the long table were almost full. Some women were already bent over pieces of canvas, glancing at patterns and needling coloured wool in and out of the tiny holes. Others were murmuring over embroidered work they held, presumably discussing a technique or comparing results.

No one looked up as she came in. Violet wondered if she had got the time wrong, if they had started at ten or nine-thirty. No, she was sure Mrs Biggins had said ten-thirty. These must be the keen ones. The feeling in the room was one of quiet purpose, tinged with a drop of self-satisfaction, which would be denied if anyone accused them of such a thing.

Even if she hadn’t recognised her from the broderers’ service, Violet immediately guessed who Mrs Biggins must be from her demeanour, so similar to her telephone manner. She wore a high-necked blouse and hair piled and puffed on top of her head, her style being stranded somewhere around 1910. She was not walking about to peer over each embroiderer’s shoulder at her work. Instead she sat at one end of the table, where the Chairman of the Board would be during meetings, and let workers come to her, placing their bit of stitching before her like an offering. There she scrutinised and pronounced. As Violet watched, she flattened three embroiderers in rapid succession. “No, no, no, you have only used two shades of blue in this corner. You must know Miss Pesel’s first principle of background work – three shades must be used throughout, to give texture and shading. You shall have to unpick your work and redo it.”

“See now, here you have pulled too hard, so that the stitches are too tight and the tension uneven. That will not do at all – you will have to unpick that section.”

“Have you mixed two stitches here? Is that cross-stitch and long-armed cross alternated? Oh my dear, no! Miss Pesel is encouraging us to become more adventurous with the stitches we use, but never on God’s green earth should you alternate those two. Start again!”

Each woman nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am, I’ll rework it,” or some similar response, then scuttled away like dogs scolded for stealing bones from the dinner table. Back at their seats, they frowned and muttered to their neighbours.

“Where is your work?” Mrs Biggins demanded as Violet approached.

“I’ve not done any yet. This is my first time. We spoke on the telephone.”

“Miss Speedwell, is it? No embroidery experience at all? All right, let’s get you started. You can work with Mrs Way. Mabel!” she called. “Here’s Miss Speedwell to help you sort the cupboard.”

A thin woman in a grey dress with hair to match stepped back from a large cupboard in the corner. It was the usher who had tried to keep Violet from the broderers’ service at the Cathedral. She started when she recognised the newcomer. “It’s not looking too bad, Mrs Biggins,” she insisted. “I don’t really need the help.”

“Nonsense. A tidy cupboard sets up the whole endeavour and helps us to work better.”

Violet took a deep breath. She had no choice but to stand up for herself, as she had with her mother when she moved to Winchester, and as she had with Mabel Way a few weeks before. Else there was no point being here.

“I was hoping to learn embroidery, not tidying.” She spoke in a low voice, but it seemed everyone heard, for the room went quiet.

Mrs Biggins sat up straight, as if to rearrange the rod up her back. “Miss Speedwell, I know you are keen to make your unique contribution to the Cathedral with your very own kneeler. But this is a cooperative operation, and in the spirit of cooperation, we all have tasks to perform here, many of which do not involve embroidering but are nonetheless essential to our endeavour. Now, you go over to the cupboard and help Mabel make it the tidiest cupboard in Winchester. Only then will we teach you to thread a needle.”

Violet turned red during this public dressing-down. If this was to be what embroidering for Winchester Cathedral was like – sorting cupboards and being condescended to – perhaps she should walk out and abandon the idea of a kneeler with her initials on it. She could leave the Cathedral Broderers in their room in Church House and go for a walk instead, along the river through the water meadows, admiring the harebells and poppies and campanula on the verges. Or watch the Winchester College boys playing cricket on their grounds. Or she could go home and reach for the bottle of cheap sherry she tried not to resort to too often. Or go to the Royal Hotel and have her sherry there, though she could not afford it, waiting for a man to sit down across from her and pay for another.

She did not have to do any of that, for at that moment the smiling woman who had been in the front bench at the Presentation of Embroideries service walked in. Immediately the tension in the room eased. Violet had never known one person to have such a marked effect on an atmosphere. She was a short woman in her early sixties, with spectacles and a soft double chin, her grey hair drawn back in a low, loose bun. Her wide mouth maintained a slight smile that reassured rather than judged. “Ladies, I am delighted to see you here,” was all she said, and yet somehow it was enough. As is often the case, a leader comfortable with her authority does not need to be strident, but can afford to be generous. It felt like being visited by the nicest, strictest mother possible.

The women who had been scolded went about unpicking their work with renewed energy, and others crowded around, calling, “Miss Pesel, may I have a word? Miss Pesel, I would be grateful if you could check my eyelets – I cannot get them to lie flat. Miss Pesel, have I mixed the yellows as you wanted? Miss Pesel …” They were like schoolgirls eager to please a favourite teacher. Even Mrs Biggins softened.

Eventually, Violet thought, she will get to me. In the meantime, helping Mabel Way with a messy cupboard suddenly did not seem so bad. She did not want Miss Pesel to find her idle. Even as Violet joined her by the enormous wardrobe set against the back wall, Mabel’s permanent frown lessened slightly, as if a rubber had been taken to the lines on her brow. “Perhaps it might help me to see what there is in here,” Violet suggested, “until I can begin learning to embroider.”

Mabel Way nodded, her eyes on Miss Pesel as she made her way around the room, like a bride at a wedding greeting her guests. “I have some work I want to show her. Why don’t you continue to separate the hanks of blue wool into piles, making sure they’ve not got mixed up? Look, I’ve made a start, light to dark.” She gestured at the wool sitting on the wide windowsill next to the wardrobe, then hurried off.

Violet gazed at the hanks. She had not handled wool since she was a girl and went through a phase of learning from her grandmother to knit and crochet. She had made her mother a bed jacket Mrs Speedwell never even tried on, and her father a muddy yellow-green scarf that he loyally wore to work for two weeks while her mother daily complained that he would be made fun of for humouring his daughter. When the scarf mysteriously disappeared, Mrs Speedwell denied all knowledge.

Mabel Way had removed the blues from the reds and yellows and oranges and browns, and it seemed to Violet that there were only two shades – light and dark blue – and they were already sorted. She was not sure what more she could do with them, and peered into the cupboard to see if there was anything else she might tidy – though organisation was not her forte. Her brothers had always kept their clothes and toys and books in better order than she. George had arranged his books in alphabetical order, Tom by colour and size. Violet’s ended up jumbled together, books she loved and despised side by side, books she hadn’t read next to those she had. Her clothes were similar: she brushed her dresses and skirts and hung them with care, yet somehow they became wrinkled and disordered. Her hair too would not stay in its waves, but went flat too easily. It hadn’t mattered so much at home, but now that she was trying to be independent, she noticed these small failures.

The embroiderers’ cupboard was a thing of beauty, if you liked your beauty labelled and tidy. It had been fitted out with numerous shelves, each with handwritten labels glued on: Kneelers; Choir Stall Seat Cushions; Choir Long Bench Cushions. There were boxes of various sizes, separating the coloured wools from one another, and stacks of designs. There were several boxes of Models, and rolls of Canvas made of hemp (Single-Weave or Double-Weave). If she studied the cupboard for half an hour, Violet would understand how the broderers’ project was set up. Perhaps that was why Mrs Biggins had assigned her to it.

The cupboard reminded her of the lessons on stationery at the secretarial college she had gone to a year or two after the War, when she’d finally accepted marriage was no longer a given and she needed to do something with her time other than be a companion to her mother. Mostly the girls were taught typing and shorthand, but there had also been a few sessions on organising stationery cupboards, with rules to learn such as always putting the heaviest, bulkiest things on the lower shelves, or using box lids to sort and keep pen nibs and rubber bands and paperclips in. Violet had thought it all beneath her dignity, yet she failed her first exam in stationery organisation. She chuckled now, remembering.