The Complete Short Stories (26 page)

I started to interview
Dragons. A sewing assistant, I explained, was out of the question for me. All
the more did I need protection, and time, long stretches of time all to myself.
Every stitch had to be perfect, I explained, small and perfect. Even the
basting and tacking stitches, which later had to be drawn out, had to be done
by me, or I could not sleep at night. Sometimes, to make an elaborate dress, I
needed two clear months, working on that one dress alone. With embroidery, I
needed three or four months. All this I explained to the candidates for the
job. There were eight. I brought them out from England to be interviewed on the
spot where the job was offered. A frightened bunch, with one exception. The
others were glad to get away after the interview and profit by their trip to
Italy to go and see the sights and have a good time. The eighth looked more
suspicious than afraid while I explained what the job was to be. She frowned a
lot. Emily Butler. Tall, skinny, with her top teeth protruding, and a lot of
red hair. She understood a little Italian and spoke French, as indeed had the
other girls whom I’d brought out to be interviewed, otherwise I wouldn’t have
brought them. But Emily: I thought she would make a good Dragon. She was to
keep everybody away from me except an approved short list of clients, or people
highly recommended by the clients. Even then, I was never to be called to the
telephone. The client must either write or leave a number for me to call back
at my leisure. Emily had brought an additional good reference from an opera
singer she had worked for; she seemed to understand what was wanted. I
remembered having heard somewhere that women with protruding teeth are very
attractive to men, but I didn’t see that this was a factor that mattered,
anyway. In fact, what happened had nothing to do with Emily’s teeth.

The Dragon was a marvel
that spring and early summer. I worked without a break, seven days a week,
sometimes twelve hours a day, frequently in a summer-house in the garden except
during the very hot hours of the day when I kept to my air-conditioned
workroom. I must tell you about the garden and about the house.

The house was set well
back from the road on a high cliff looking over the lake. It had been built at
the turn of the century with many features of
art-nouveau,
such as
stained-glass windows, curly banisters, and fruity decorations above the doors.
From the outside, the villa seemed to have more colonnades, arches, terraces,
bow-windows and turrets than its size really warranted; this means, for
instance, that there were two turrets, and none would have been enough. The
garden was large, really out of proportion to the house; but this suited me
very well. I liked to sit and sew in the garden, especially under a mighty
cedar tree that had become my banner; you could see it from the opposite shore
of the lake, you could look down on it from the cliff-road; wherever you were,
or from wherever you approached in those parts you couldn’t miss the cedar
tree. It soared above the statues in the garden. There, on the garden seat I
would do my buttonholing in tranquillity — for I would never sew a zip fastener
into a dress — looping the thread as I made each stitch; and if it was a blouse
to be embroidered I used to sit coolly and do my satin-stitch or split-stitch.

In the garden were white
stone statues of the period. They represented the Four Seasons and Four Arts
(Painting, Sculpture, Music and Literature). The Seasons were female figures
and the Arts, male, but all garbed so that it made very little difference. The
Painter held a palette in one hand and a paint-brush in the other; the Sculptor
worked on a stone lion; the Musician held a flute in his left hand, with his
arm stretched out, and with the other, corrected a music score that was
cleverly set up in stone in front of him; the Writer reclined, making notes in
a book. The Seasons were garlanded according to the time of year they
represented; their hair flowed; Winter was adorned with holly and icicles;
Spring with flowers of the field; Summer with roses and cherries; Autumn had a
necklace of grapes, and leaned on a sheaf of corn. The garden was very
striking. Some of my clients would exclaim over it, with delight; others would just
stare and, with a strange silence, say nothing at all. As for the statues, they
struck me as odd sometimes when I turned suddenly and looked back at them. They
looked exactly the same as before; that is, they seemed to have recomposed
their features. What had been their expression behind my back?

The Dragon erupted in
her spare time with Daniele the cutter, and they made love after lunch in the
room off the cool back kitchen where the Dragon slept. Her red hair was growing
longer and she kept it flying loose. She said it was Pre-Raphaelite, to go with
the house.

In August came
extraordinary rains, leaving the air between downfalls soporific and
bewildered. The Dragon said to me, ‘Why do you work so hard? What is it all
for?’ Nobody had ever before asked me a question like that. It seemed
sacrilegious. I began to notice that my clients arrived late for their
fittings. When you live out of town, you must expect certain delays. But, in
fact they didn’t come so very late to the house; rather, they were kept
gossiping with the Dragon in her office, no matter that I was kept waiting in
my workroom. Later, she wouldn’t tell me what my clients had to say to her or
she to them. I noticed that, with me, curiously enough, people started to speak
in a low careful voice after they had first talked to the Dragon. When the
Dragon took a boat out on the lake with Daniele, her red hair blew over her
face; mostly, she came back drenched from the rain. Now, one day, I observed
that she was breathing fire.

‘Emily,’ I said, ‘I
think you’re not very well.’

‘Can you wonder?’ she said;
and the smoke rose from her nostrils, flaming like her hair. ‘Can you wonder?
Always no, no, no on the telephone. Always, keep away, nobody come here, Madam
is busy, have you an appointment? It wears you down,’ she said, ‘always playing
the negative role.’ Her nose was perfectly cool by now as if there had been no
smoke, no flame flaring.

I agreed to let her
invite the local people for an evening party. She brought a group from the
smart hotel across the lake whom she had somehow got friendly with. She brought
a number of Spaniards who were touring the lake, to make Daniele happy, and
Daniele’s sister from Milan also arrived. I noticed that three of my most
exclusive clients were among the women who came to that party. And there was
the handsome truck-driver. The Dragon had called in a caterer of the first
importance and ordered refreshments of the last rarity. She was efficient.

The Dragon had taken
over, and I knew it when the forest formed around me. She came through the
people, the trees, towards me, blowing fire. Then I saw that the statues, the
Four Seasons, the Four Artists, were wearing materials from my workroom. They
were pinned and draped as if the statues were my working manikins, and my
guests marvelled at them. One of the statues, the Winter one, was actually
wearing an evening dress that I was in the process of sewing. I looked round
for Daniele. He was entertaining the boat-officer from the little lake port by
blowing smoke through two cigarettes stuck one in each of his nostrils. The
Dragon was drinking her Pimm’s, green-eyed, watching me. I went up to the
good-looking truck-driver who was standing around not knowing what to do with
himself, and I said, ‘Where are you going with your truck?’ He was going to
Düsseldorf with a load, and back again across Europe. His name was Simon K.
Clegg, the ‘K’ standing for Kurt. For a few moments we discussed the adventures
of heavy transport in the Common Market. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s go.’

I left the party and
climbed into the truck beside him and off we went. Suddenly I remembered my
raincoat and my passport, the two indispensable vade-mecums of travel, but
Simon Kurt said, for a raincoat and a passport leave it to him. The Dragon ran
up the road after us a little way, snorting and breathing green fire from her
mouth — perhaps it had a copper sulphate or copper chloride basis; I have heard
that you can get a green flame from skilfully blowing green Chartreuse on to a
lighted candle. She was followed by Daniele. However, off we went, waving,
leaving the Dragon and Daniele and the party and all my household to sort out
the mess and the anxiety, and the stitching and matching, forever.

Forever? Before we
reached the city of Como, nearly twenty-five miles from my house, my
conversation with Simon K. Clegg had turned on the meaning of forever. We
parked the truck and went for a walk into town to a bar where we ordered coffee
and ice-creams. Simon said he definitely felt that he didn’t understand ‘forever’,
and doubted if there was any such thing as always and always, if that’s what it
meant. I told him that so far as I knew to date, forever was slip-stitch,
split-stitch, cross-stitch, back-stitch; and also buttonhole and
running-stitches.

‘You’ve got me guessing,’
said Simon. ‘It’s above my head, all that. Don’t you want a lift, then? Get
away from the party and all?’

I explained that the
Dragon was in my home, questioning the value of all the materials and the
sewing, the buckram, the soft, soft silk; and the run-and-fell seams, the fine
lace edging. Buttonholes. Satin-stitch. I told him about her liaison with
Daniele the cutter.

‘Her what?’

‘Her love affair.’

‘They should go away on
holiday,’ was Simon’s point of view.

‘There’s too much work
to do.’

‘Well, if she’s the lady
in charge, it’s up to her what she does in business hours. The garment industry’s
flourishing.’

‘I am the lady in
charge,’ I said.

He was taken aback, as
if he had been deceived.

‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that
you were some sort of employee.’

Really, he was a
nice-looking truck-driver. He pushed away his glass of ice-cream as if he had
something newly on his mind.

He said, ‘My sister
works in a textile and garment factory in Lyons. Good pay, short hours. She’s a
seamer.’

‘A seamstress,’ I said.

‘She calls it seamer.’

‘I sew my seams by hand,’
I said.

‘By hand? How do you do
that?’

‘With a needle and
thread.’

‘What does that involve?’
he said, in a way that forced me to realize he had never seen a needle and
thread.

I explained the
technique of how you use the fingers of your right hand to replace the needle
and shuttle of the sewing machine, while holding the material with your left
hand. He listened carefully. He was almost deferential. ‘It must save you a lot
of electricity,’ he observed.

‘But surely,’ I said, ‘you’ve
seen someone sewing on a button?’

‘I don’t have any
clothes with buttons. Not in my line.’

But he was thinking of
something else.

‘Would you mind lying
low in the cabin of the truck while I pass the customs and immigration?’ he
said. ‘It’s quite comfortable and they won’t look in there. They just look at
my papers. I’ve delivered half my load and I’ve got to take the rest across the
St Gotthard to a hotel at Brunnen in Switzerland. Then on to Düsseldorf. Health
crackers from Lyons.’

But I, too, was thinking
of something else, and I didn’t answer immediately.

‘I thought you were an
employee,’ he said. ‘If I’d known you were the employer I’d have thought up
something better.

It saddened me to hear
the anxiety in his voice. I said, ‘I’m afraid I’m in charge of my business.’ I
was thinking of the orders mounting up for next winter. I had a lady from
Boston who was coming specially next Tuesday across the Atlantic, across the
Alps, to order her dresses from my range of winter fabrics which included a
length of wool so soft you would think it was muslin, coloured pale shrimp, and
I had that deep blue silk-velvet, not quite midnight blue, but something like
midnight with a glisten of royal blue which I would line with identical
coloured silk, for an evening occasion, with the quarter-centimetre wide lace
hand-sewn on all the seams. I had another client from Milan for my grey
wool-chiffon with the almost indiscernible orange stripe, to be made up as a
three-piece garment flowing like a wintry cloud; I had the design ready for the
cutter and I had matched all the threads.

I was going on to think
of other lengths and bales and clients when Simon penetrated my thoughts and
ideas with his voice. ‘Look, you’re breathing fire. You must have some sort of
electricity,’ he said; and he stood up and took the check off the table. He
looked shaken. ‘I can see that you could be a Dragon in your way.

I slipped out of the bar
while he was paying the bill at the counter. I waited till after dark and hired
a car to take me back to my villa. Everyone had gone home. The statues in the
garden stood again unclothed. Emily Butler was in the living-room talking to
Daniele. I had been sorry to part with the nice-looking truck-driver. He seemed
to have a certain liking for me, a sympathy with my nature and my looks which I
know are very much those of the serious unadorned seamstress. Some people like
that sort of personality. But when I thought of how, as Simon had observed, I
was really the Dragon in the case I couldn’t have gone over the border with
him. Perhaps forever. Neither my temperament nor my temperature would stand
it.

I stood, now, at the
living-room door and looked at Emily and Daniele. Emily gasped; Daniele sprang
to his feet, his eyes terrified.

‘She’s breathing fire,’
said Emily, and escaped through the french windows. Daniele followed her quickly,
knocking over a chair as he went. He looked once over his shoulder, and then he
was away after Emily.

I went to the kitchen
and made some hot milk. I waited there while the sound of their creeping back,
and the bumps of hasty packing went on in Daniele’s room upstairs and Emily’s
at the back of the house.