A Single Thread

“Oh, I was terrible at the start!” Gilda interrupted Violet’s reverie over the ham. She seemed gleeful about her shortcomings. “I thought I’d be stuck on borders and hanking wool forever. But eventually the stitches become second nature and you can relax as you work. I’ve noticed that if I’m tense, my embroidery becomes tense too. And we can’t have a tense cushion in the Cathedral choir, can we? Those choristers need well-made cushions to sit on!”

Violet couldn’t help it – she reached for another ham sandwich, though it went against the usual etiquette of sharing where one alternated for an even distribution. Again Gilda did not seem bothered, but proceeded to quiz Violet on her family, her life in Southampton, and what brought her to Winchester.

“My father died two years ago and it became harder to live with my mother,” Violet replied to the last.

“Is your mum awful?”

“She is, rather. She never really recovered from my brother’s death during the War.” There, she had said it.

Gilda nodded. “Joe came through the War all right, but then we lost Mum to the Spanish ’flu right after he got back. He said he went all the way through the War without crying once, but to get back and lose Mum – that was too much.”

“Did you lose … anyone else?”

Gilda shook her head, and looked around, as if shrugging off the attention. No fiancé, then, Violet thought.

“Arthur!” Gilda jumped up and waved at two men pushing bicycles along the tree-lined path towards the Cathedral entrance. Both had their right trouser legs tucked into their socks to keep them from getting caught in the chains. One was the man with the white hair and moustache Violet had seen at the Cathedral during the broderers’ service. At the sound of Gilda’s voice he stopped, then wheeled his bicycle over to them, followed by a younger, shorter man. Violet scrambled to her feet.

“Hello, Gilda.” The man raised his hat at Gilda, then nodded at Violet. His eyes were bright chips of blue, his gaze warm and direct. She felt herself flush red, though she was not sure why: he was much older than she, and – she automatically glanced – he wore a wedding ring.

“Are we going to hear you soon?” Gilda demanded.

“Not this afternoon. We’re just meeting with the verger to go over the summer schedule. Beyond the normal, there are a few weddings, and the royal birthdays, of course. This is Keith Bain, often our tenor. I’m not sure if you’ve met – he’s lived in Winchester for two years.”

The younger man, small and wiry, with ginger hair and a carpet of freckles, nodded at them.

“This is Violet Speedwell. She’s just joined the Cathedral Broderers, haven’t you, Vi?”

Violet flinched. No one had called her Vi since Laurence died; her family had instinctively understood that his nickname for her was now off-limits. She tried to cover her discomfort by holding out her hand, but as Arthur shook it she suspected he was filing away in his mind: Don’t call her Vi.

He smiled at her. “Your name – that was very clever of your parents.”

“Clever how?” Gilda wanted to know.

“Speedwell is the common name for veronica, a kind of purple flower. And they named her Violet.”

“It was my father’s idea,” Violet explained. “My brothers have – had – have more traditional names.” She did not name them – she did not want to say George’s name aloud.

“Good thing they didn’t name you Veronica!” Gilda laughed. “Veronica Veronica.”

“I see you’ve chosen Thetcher to sit by.” Arthur nodded at the gravestone.

“I’d never seen it before,” Violet admitted.

“Ah, then you must not be from Winchester.”

“No. Southampton. I moved here seven months ago.”

“I thought not. I would have known you otherwise.” His tone was neutral but somehow the words were not. Violet’s cheeks grew warm again.

“Arthur and I went to the same church for a long time,” Gilda explained. “I played with his daughter at Sunday school. She’s in Australia now, and Arthur’s moved to the country. To Nether Wallop, the most beautiful village in England, and with the funniest name.”

Even as Arthur was correcting her – “Technically our cottage is in Middle Wallop” – Violet was remembering a visit to Nether Wallop with her father and brothers when she was a girl. “I have been there,” she said. “The Douce pyramid.”

Keith Bain and Gilda looked puzzled, but Arthur nodded. “Indeed.” He turned to the others. “In the churchyard at Nether Wallop there is a pyramid on the grave of Francis Douce. Apparently the family liked pyramids, as other relatives had them built as well, such as at Farley Mount.” He smiled again at Violet, and she silently thanked her father for plotting the route of their short walking holiday so that they passed through Nether Wallop. She would have been eleven, Tom seven, and George thirteen. Mrs Speedwell had not come with them, which made the holiday more relaxed and put them all in good moods as they’d taken the train to Salisbury and a cart up to Stonehenge, then began walking through woods and skirting newly planted fields of wheat. At Nether Wallop they stayed at the Five Bells, and went to look at the church, where George had got a leg-up from their father so he could grab the stone flame that topped the pyramid tombstone, and declared himself the King of Egypt. If any of them had been told that day that eleven years later he and hundreds of thousands of other British men would be dead, they would not have believed it.

To her mortification, sudden tears pricked Violet’s eyes, spilling over before she could hide them. She rarely cried over the loss of George and Laurence. Mrs Speedwell had always been the town crier of the family loss, leaving little room for Violet or Tom or their father to voice their own feelings. When Laurence died a year after George, Mrs Speedwell not once expressed sorrow or tried to comfort Violet, but managed to make it into a competition, reminding anyone who would listen that a mother’s loss of her son was the worst loss there was, the implication being that this trumped a girl losing her fiancé. Violet did not want to play that game, and stifled any tears.

Arthur was holding out a handkerchief with quiet understanding. Even almost fourteen years after the War’s end, no one was surprised by sudden tears.

“Thank you.” Violet wiped her eyes. “I’m terribly sorry.” Arthur and Keith nodded, and Gilda patted her arm just the right amount. Then they carried on, because that was what you did.

“I haven’t been to Farley Mount in years,” Gilda remarked. “We used to go all the time on a Sunday afternoon.”

“What’s Farley Mount, then?” Keith Bain spoke for the first time. To Violet’s surprise, he had a Scottish accent.

Gilda and Arthur chuckled. “Beware Chalk Pit!” Gilda cried.

“Unlikely as it sounds, Beware Chalk Pit is a horse’s name,” Arthur explained. “A relative of the Douces built a pyramid on top of a hill a few miles from Winchester, in honour of his horse who had won a race. Before the race the horse had fallen into a chalk pit, hence the name.”

“Maybe I’ll walk out to it,” Keith Bain said. “I’ve only been up St Catherine’s Hill. Want to see more of the countryside. Where is it?”

“About five miles west of here. If you fancy a longer walk, you can go straight across the fields to Salisbury. That’s twenty-six miles. I call it the Cathedral Walk. You can stay the night at mine in the Wallops en route if you like.”

“I may well do that.”

“We’d best get on to see the verger.” Arthur turned to Violet. “Very good to meet you, Miss Speedwell.”

“And you.” Violet watched him wheel his bicycle towards the side of the Cathedral. His brief attention had steadied her, like a hand reaching out to still a rocking chair that has been knocked.

Only after he’d gone did she realise she was still clutching his handkerchief. The initials AK had been embroidered in an uneven blue chain stitch in one corner. She could run after him, or give it to Gilda to give to him. Instead she waited until her new friend wasn’t looking, then tucked it in her handbag.

“Are they in a choir of some sort?” she asked when the handkerchief was out of sight.

“Not at all,” Gilda replied, folding the waxed paper from the sandwiches. “What made you think that?”

“He mentioned being a tenor.”

“No, no, they’re bellringers! For the Cathedral. Now, shall we have a coffee? Then I’m going to find a telephone and tell your office you’ve taken ill – fainted on the Outer Close!”

On their return, Violet found that her privileged position as Miss Pesel’s new pupil had been usurped. Several other broderers were crowded around her; indeed, two who saw Violet enter pushed closer, as if to defend their positions and their teacher.

“Which stitches was she going to teach you?” Gilda asked, frowning at the scrum.

Violet picked up the model. “This one … Rice, I think. And eyelets.”

“I can teach you those. Miss Pesel always likes us to teach others, says the best way to set in your mind what you’ve learned is to explain it to someone else.”

Both stitches were fiddly but not hard to learn. Then, before she went to consult Miss Pesel about her own work, Gilda suggested Violet make a sampler of the six stitches she had mastered, to show to the teacher at the end of the day.

It was calmer now, more settled. A dozen women – some from the morning, others new – worked around the big table, with Miss Pesel and Mrs Biggins fielding questions and making suggestions. Violet focused on her sampler, concentrating on getting each stitch uniform, the tension consistent. After a time she found she could work and also listen to the conversations around her. Mostly the embroiderers talked about their children and grandchildren, their neighbours, their gardens, the meals they made, the holidays they might take. All listened politely; none really cared. They were simply waiting their turn to speak. And, as was usual in these situations, the married women spoke more than the spinsters, assuming a natural authority and higher place in the hierarchy of women that no one questioned. Only Gilda spoke up from time to time, and was tolerated because she was entertaining, and knew everyone – though some glanced at each other behind her back. Most were of a certain class, and Violet guessed that they looked down on a family who ran a garage and serviced their motor cars. She herself had become less judgemental, however, for she had discovered that when you were a single woman living on your own on a small salary, background meant little. Gilda might be from a different class, but with her family backing her she could afford to eat much better sandwiches than Violet.

What would happen, she wondered, if I changed the subject and asked the room who they think will form the new German government now that the current Chancellor has resigned? Would anyone here have an opinion? She was not sure she herself had one, but the room was beginning to feel a little airless with its insularity. Perhaps she just needed to get to know the women better.

Mrs Biggins clapped twice. “All right, ladies, that’s enough for today. Leave your place as tidy as it was when you arrived. We don’t want bits of wool left behind. Mrs Way will sign out the materials to you.”

The others began lining up by Miss Pesel, who inspected their work before they left. Violet watched, suddenly shy about showing her sampler. She did not want to be told to unpick it again, or to be put on record-keeping alongside Mabel Way. Finally, however, she joined the queue behind Gilda and listened as she and Miss Pesel discussed the difference between upright and oblique Gobelin stitches. Then Louisa Pesel held out her hand for Violet’s piece. “You have come along nicely,” she declared, running a finger over the stitches. “Do be careful on the long-armed cross to pull the long stitch tight; otherwise it puffs out, as it does here. But not too disgraceful – no need to unpick since it’s a sampler, and the mistake will serve to remind you.” She handed it back. “For next Wednesday, teach someone else the stitches and come back to show me what they’ve done. You can pick up some canvas and wool and a needle on your way out.”

Violet gaped. “Who shall I—” But Miss Pesel had already turned to the next woman.

Gilda was grinning again. “Told you so!”

Chapter 6

VIOLET HAD NO IDEA whom to teach the stitches to. Her mother would never agree, Evelyn had too much to do, and Marjory was probably too young to master anything as complicated as the rice stitch. For a moment she wondered about her landlady, but Mrs Harvey did not seem the type to sit down with a needle. She might be able to convince one of her fellow lodgers, but wasn’t sure she wanted to. Violet had been careful to maintain her distance from Miss Frederick, an English teacher at a local girls’ school, and Miss Lancaster, who worked as a clerk at Winchester Crown Court. There was a certain kind of misery that hung about them, a wistfulness she hated to think clung to her as well. To become friends with them would only make that feeling more pronounced. Still, when several days had passed and she had still not found someone to teach, she realised she would have to break her ban and ask Miss Frederick. She pondered this one morning as she sat typing, two days before the next embroidery class. Her office mates had not yet arrived: they were rarely on time.

Mo sloped in as Violet was midway through her second contract, adding fire insurance to an existing policy on a house in Andover. Mo was never as loud and confident when Olive was not with her. Now she seemed even more downcast: head low, she muttered a hello into her collar and did not look up. Her dress mirrored her mood, puddle-brown, with a shapeless skirt and too much fabric hanging at the chest. Violet nodded hello, and after finishing the contract offered to make tea.

“Yes, please,” Mo answered in a small voice, and sighed. The sigh was the opening, her way of indicating that she was ready to be quizzed about what was wrong.

First Violet went to the kitchen and made a pot of tea, then brought it back to the office with a plate of Garibaldi biscuits – no one’s favourite, but that was all there was. “Right,” she said, placing a cup of tea in front of Mo and handing her the sugar bowl. “What is it?” She sat back in her own chair, hands on her cup to warm them, for it was one of those rainy June days that felt like early spring rather than summer. A cardigan day – she alternated between beige and tan. Today she wore tan; though she couldn’t afford new, she’d recently refreshed it by changing the buttons to a mother-of-pearl set she’d found in a secondhand shop.

Mo heaped several spoonfuls of sugar into her tea and frowned at the rectangular Garibaldis with their currants that looked like squashed flies. Violet did not press her. They had all day.

“O’s handing in her notice,” she said at last. “Effective immediately. Her mother is ringing Mr Waterman this morning.” She picked up a biscuit and took a vicious bite.

“I see.” This was not what Violet had been expecting. She’d assumed that Mo was moping because of something the bank clerk boyfriend had said or done, and that Olive was out on an errand for the long-off wedding – meeting with a vicar, finding a printer for the invitations, looking at dress fabric – using it as an excuse for a leisurely day out. Violet had expected there to be months, years of this nonsense before the big day itself. Only then would Olive leave; women always left work once they married, but not usually before.

“I may as well tell you – you’ll hear soon enough. People are such gossips,” Mo added, conveniently ignoring how much she and O discussed and spread rumours. “She’s – well, she’s getting married soon. Next weekend.”

“Ah.” Violet pushed at a pen on her desk so that it was square with a stack of paper. There was only one reason why a woman got married so quickly.

“It’s not what you think!”

Violet waited a moment, then said quietly, “Of course it is. Poor Olive.”

Mo stiffened, as if about to argue, but after a moment she slumped back in her chair and dunked the biscuit in her tea. “It’s not as if she didn’t want to marry him. Just not so soon, with everyone – talking.”

Violet lit a cigarette and felt old. “They’ll get over it.” And they would. Olive and her man would marry: “We just decided we wanted no fuss, just to be together, because we love each other so,” she would say. She would have her baby: “Premature, but look what a big bouncing thing he is anyway; you’d never guess he came two months early!” And people would forget the circumstances, because it happened often enough, and what did it matter anyway? Violet had been careful with her sherry men, using a Dutch cap she’d convinced a married friend to get for her from a doctor. But she’d had a few scares over the years, and knew how easily a girl like Olive could be caught out. At least her fiancé was being honourable. If he was anything like his sister Gilda, Violet suspected O was very lucky indeed.

At lunch it was raining too hard to go out, and Violet and Mo remained at their desks with their sandwiches, Mo flicking miserably through a magazine.

“I say,” Violet finally suggested, “shall I teach you something that will take your mind off of things?”

It turned out that Mo – or Maureen, for along with Olive’s abrupt departure went the nickname – was better at embroidery than Violet, even though she had never done it before. She had the knack of remaining focused and somewhat dogged – qualities Violet had never seen her display while typing. But then, Olive had always been around to distract her. She was also easily pleased with the results. “Look at my rows of Gobelin,” she announced possessively as they sat stitching. “Straight as straight!”

Miss Pesel was right: teaching someone else did help you to learn the stitches yourself, as your pupil’s questions forced you to think through why you were doing what you were doing, and expose the things you didn’t really understand. “Why does the tension matter so much?” Maureen demanded as she frowned at her green wool.

“Because – look –” Violet pointed at a rogue stitch – “see how that sticks out? You haven’t pulled it tight enough. It will always be like that, unless you unpick it.”

“Why does it matter if the stitches on the back are straight or diagonal?”

“Because stitches on the diagonal pull the canvas so it’s distorted. You want the cushions and kneelers to be squared.”

“And why must the back be so neat?”

“If there are too many loose threads you may accidentally pull them through the front with your stitches.” Violet could feel herself parroting Miss Pesel. So far she had managed to answer all of Maureen’s questions, but she expected eventually to be caught out.

“Perhaps you should come along to the meeting before the broderers break for the summer,” she suggested as they stitched again during their afternoon tea break. It was a remarkably quick transition from being ignored and pitied to becoming Maureen’s teacher, and even suggesting an activity together. She could not picture them ever being good friends – Maureen was fifteen years younger – but the atmosphere in their office was already transformed.

“Mr Waterman won’t let us both go,” Maureen replied, holding her canvas piece close to her face to peer at her stitches. She was practising rice, with two different colours of wool. “Oh, blast! I forget which direction to take the overstitches in. Does it matter, clockwise or anti-clockwise?”

“No, as long as you stitch each square the same way, so it’s consistent.” Violet studied her own rice stitches. There seemed to be a lot of canvas showing. “Mr Waterman might let us go for the morning if we work through lunch and stay late to make up some of the hours.”

“With Olive gone, he’ll need to hire someone else sharpish.”

Violet had an idea about that but kept quiet to allow the thought to mature.

Evoking her seemed to conjure up Olive herself, for Violet heard the distinctive click of her heels down the hall. Maureen – or perhaps she was back to Mo – looked up in panic. Throwing down her embroidery, she grabbed a magazine and her cup of tea, and turned her face away. Violet was more amused than hurt.

But Mo was not clever enough to conceal her new hobby. Olive appeared in the doorway, still looking like a sturdy, curvy pony, took in Maureen’s awkward pose behind the magazine, glanced at the embroidered sampler on her desk and the one Violet was holding, and snorted. “The second I leave you join the arty-and-crafty lot!” she smirked. “What’s this?” Before Mo could stop her, she’d picked up the sampler. The needle slid off the wool and tinkled on the floor.

“Tent, Gobelin, rice, cross, and long-armed cross,” Violet replied for Mo. “She’ll learn eyelets shortly.”

Olive dropped the embroidery as if it were infectious. “Knitting like an old maid!” she cried, gazing down on her erstwhile friend. “What’s happened to you?”

Mo lowered her magazine. “You left,” she said quietly.

“So? I was always going to leave once I got married. It’s just a little sooner, that’s all. You’ll leave too, one day.” Olive looked around and spied her bright chiffon scarf hanging on a hook on the back of the door. “There you are!” she announced in triumph, snatching it up. “Couldn’t leave you behind, could I?”

“I’ll still be your maid of honour, won’t I?” Mo’s voice was small and pleading. “Next week?”

“Oh, that. I don’t think so.” Olive spent a great deal of time tying the scarf around her neck and getting it to hang right. “It’s just a small, intimate wedding. Family only.”

Mo looked so miserable at this that Violet felt the unusual desire to intervene. “We are not knitting, actually,” she said. “We’re doing canvas embroidery. The contemporary version of spinning, you might say.” At Olive’s puzzled frown, she added, “Spinning wool. That’s where ‘spinster’ comes from.”

Olive rolled her eyes. “Lord, I’m glad I won’t be caught up in any of that.”

“Well, best of luck,” Violet remarked in her briskest voice, “with that.” She nodded at Olive’s still-flat belly.

Olive started, and turned bright red. “I don’t know what you mean! Really, that’s—” She stopped. Under the flush on her cheeks, she seemed to go green. “Just going up to wash!” She turned and hurried down the hall towards the lavatory.

With another kind of girl, Violet might have made fun of Olive and her abrupt departure. But she knew Mo would not laugh, especially not with the background accompaniment of Olive’s distant retching. Instead she said gently, “Shall we move on to eyelets?”

After a moment Maureen leaned down to look for her needle on the floor. “Yes.”

Violet fortified herself with a tea biscuit, then went to speak to Mr Waterman. It was best if she laid out her ideas all in one go – the work and the broderers’ classes and Maureen. She was not one to make suggestions at work, but she had not needed to when she lived at home and did not have to pay for her upkeep. If she did not say something now while there was an opportunity, she would slowly starve.

When she knocked on his open door Mr Waterman was gazing out of the window at the rain. “Hello, Miss Speedwell, I was just admiring the rain. The garden needs it. Now, what can I do for you? Is that a cup of tea you’ve brought me? Just the ticket, thank you! Take a seat.”

Violet knew little about her supervisor’s personal life other than that he had a wife and child he never talked about, he liked cricket, and he did not like hot weather. She didn’t know what he had done during the War. She could not make small talk with him based on so little. Now as he sat sipping his tea, she chose her words carefully. “Thank you very much for allowing me to take time off to attend Mrs Biggins’ embroidery meeting last week,” she began.

At the mention of Mrs Biggins, Mr Waterman sat up straight. “Of course, of course. She was happy, was she? Happy to teach you?”

“Yes, indeed. In fact—”

“But wait: weren’t you ill that afternoon? She didn’t make you ill, did she?”