She kicked off her shoes in the passage, and charged into the front room, which she filled: six feet, and her crinkly hair gave her another inch. Her perfume mated with every gassy particle. She scraggled the cat.

  ‘We’re so lucky to be just outside the Blackout, the girls and me, but I thought to myself, Well, GoGo will be able to do hand-sewing. Am I right?’

  She plopped the carton on the floor. I think I nodded.

  ‘I have these gorgeous, gorgeous things!’ Mabel lifted shapes from the carton. They were organza, like filtered light. Drenched colours: green, salmon pink, butter yellow, a blue. ‘Aprons! Welcome to the Fifties Housewife.’

  With Mabel there was always a reference. I guess they’re all like that, designers. I’d seen Mabel do the Seventies, War, Peace, War and Peace (big skirts, double-breasted coats). Never just clothes. Why not? (I really mean that.)

  ‘Don’t you love those colours?’ said Mabel. ‘You can almost taste them. In fact I can. I can taste them.’

  The aprons were lovely. I fingered one, and saw the faint bluish markings where a few whorls of embroidery (executed by yours truly) would go.

  ‘These are so post-war it’s not funny,’ Mabel was saying. ‘It’s tied-to-the-apron-strings colonial culture, of course, can’t deny it, but also about reclaiming the fifties housewife. The lino-ed kitchen, kitchen table, lots of kids, veggie patch sort of thing. Tu comprends?’ Mabel held an apron around her waist. It looked short on her statuesque figure. ‘I can just remember all this,’ she went on. ‘The hand-knitted cardigan, the pleated kilt, the homemade biscuits. People think they were bad days, the fifties, and I do remember my mother taking things, pills, you know, but there were a lot of freedoms those women had that we haven’t got. They didn’t have to earn a goddamn living, for a start! I don’t suppose your mother had an apron—you’re too young.’

  Actually—I told Mabel—there was an apron in the bundle of linen embroidered by my great-aunt (more on that later), but I don’t think Mary-France would ever have worn it. It would’ve been a joke.

  Mabel hurried on. ‘There’s another interesting angle to all this, a bit of social history. The rise of the washing machine—it was responsible for aprons dying out, did you know that? Before washing machines, if you spilled something on your dress you had to wash it by hand and it was such a bloody chore. By the fifties, aprons were getting decorative. You could just chuck your dress in the washing machine. It probably mashed it to pieces, of course. How’s your husband anyway?’

  Mabel could never remember Art’s name.

  I told her Art was fine and asked after Bill.

  ‘Fantastic,’ said Mabel. ‘He’s fantastic.’

  Mabel showed me where she wanted a few threads of colour, in a koru shape across the corners of the aprons. They were like spring. The spring that came after the winter of war and before the high summer of 1968. The blue embroidery lines were like veins. Mabel shook a semi-transparent plastic box full of stardust. ‘I hope you won’t mind,’ she said coyly. ‘Some beading.’ I’d done beading for her quite recently (hence the beads that the client had knocked off the worktable), and I hadn’t enjoyed it. It wasn’t me. Seeing I didn’t immediately object, Mabel charged on. ‘A bead every so often, entirely up to you. Just to give them a bit of three-D. I’m thinking dew in the garden.’ It wasn’t really ‘beading’. There was a man in Auckland did beading, ball gowns with thousands of sequins and seed pearls. That was beading. This was just the odd bead.

  ‘Only fifty aprons,’ said Mabel. ‘To start with, anyway. It’s not every girl in town will want one, only the adventurous spirits. The show’s at the end of March, so no desperate hurry. Autumn’s just gone. Gone to bed.’ Mabel was always two seasons ahead. ‘So, whaddaya reckon? The aprons.’ The ‘whaddaya’ was an affectation, like ‘tu comprends’.

  Of course I agreed to do them. It’d be almost pleasant. And I had my income to consider, though I never had before. Earning is strangely addictive.

  ‘Fantastic,’ said Mabel. She tenderly wrestled open a plastic box and dipped her finger in. Pale amber beads stuck like pollen. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’

  ‘Good for intruders,’ I said.

  ‘The old beads-on-the-floor trick,’ said Mabel. ‘Oh, I almost forgot.’ She dug into a plastic bag and pulled out a long gunmetal skirt, tight and wrinkly like a cocoon, and one of her long dark jerseys with fur polka dots. ‘For you.’ She tossed the clothes on the couch as if they were rubbish. They were samples. I had stacks of Mabel’s samples. They were gorgeous. I never quite knew what to team them with, but I must’ve ended up looking as if I was at the cutting edge of fashion, because sometimes people stared at me in the street.

  I fingered the fur polka dots and thanked Mabel.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said on the way out the door, suddenly strangely shy. ‘Last season’s, but it’ll look good on you.’

  •

  Change of subject but not entirely: do you know the story about the three sisters and the pair of trousers? Ah. A man bought a new pair of trousers because he had a job interview to go to, but the trousers were an inch too long. He lived with his three sisters. He asked his oldest sister if she’d take up the trousers by an inch. This was in the days before the sister would say, Go and do it yourself, you chauvinist bastard. Instead she said she was too busy making bread. He asked the second sister, and she too said she was busy, she was pruning the roses. The man asked his youngest sister if she’d take up his trousers by an inch, and she said she was too busy, she was starching the linen. So the man thought he’d have a go at taking up the trousers himself. He sat at the dining room table, threaded up a needle, and made an okay fist of it, for a man. He left the trousers hanging over a chair ready for the morning, and went to bed.

  Late that night, the oldest sister decided she really should help her brother, and before she turned in for the night, she went to the dining room and took up the trousers by an inch. The second sister was just getting into bed when she remembered the trousers and thought she should do them after all. She took them up by an inch. The youngest sister woke in the middle of the night, troubled by something, and realised it was her brother’s trousers, which he would need for his interview in the morning. She got out of bed, went down to the dining room, and took up the trousers by an inch. In the morning the brother put on his trousers and discovered they came down to just below his knees.

  The moral of the story (which I was told by my aunt, Sister Jude (more on her later)), is blinking obvious of course: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. But I always wondered about the man—and here’s where we’re privileged as readers and listeners, and the poor old character has to take what’s coming to him. The poor sucker, if he never found out that his sisters also took up the trousers, would’ve spent the rest of his life thinking he was crap at hems, and probably never attempted another one.

  •

  When Mabel had gone I folded the aprons into a pile. Tomorrow. An apron wasn’t for protecting a dress anymore, and sometimes a coat wasn’t for keeping you warm. You could get sleeves that were just sleeves, no body. Sometimes I lay in bed and counted the garments that were becoming vestigial. Not really. I might do that now. I went to make a cup of tea. The kitchen was not quite the kitchen without the hum of the fridge. Afternoon didn’t seem like afternoon when it grew its own long shadows. In the Blackout, everything seemed transient, and I liked it. I was in the interstitial space, I was in the Wahi, the Va—the Samoan space in between—not to put too fine a point on it.

  I tried to remember how I had come to hide the man. I must have looked at him so that he stopped right there, motionless inside my workroom. Perhaps I pushed him back gently with my hand, but I don’t think so. All I could remember exactly was standing close without breathing just inside the door, a hundred tiny beads under our feet.

  Good afternoon light

  11

  That evening the client turned up to collect the costume he’d forgotten, or I had. I showed him in, he shook his umbrella, and when he was standing in the front room I told him the costume wasn’t ready. He was, I have to say, speechless. Instead he turned one palm outward. I noticed it was pinkish, as if he stored a lot of blood there, more than usual. In the other hand he held a dripping briefcase. His dark, rectangular suit made him look a different person from the one in the new jeans, but still dishevelled. The suit behaved as if there was a wind in the front room. We stood in silence, flanking the table, me in my Mabel skirt, him in his means-business suit. The ball was in my court; I needed to tell him when to come back, that was the way the transaction should proceed.

  I’m a terrible blusher. I don’t need blusher, I can do it for myself, thanks very much. I could feel myself steaming and smiling stupidly, I didn’t know why. Well, I did know. Rain was battering the iron roof, as it had the day before.

  ‘I thought it was ready yesterday,’ he said.

  His high forehead had the look of a terrace house. People with foreheads are meant to be brainy, but that’s a bit unfair on people with low foreheads.

  ‘Yesterday?’ My cheeks raving like a lava lamp.

  ‘Or whenever it was.’ Quickly, to get on with it.

  ‘The day your’—I had to think—‘wife was here?’

  He half smiled, half pursed his lips. ‘Yeah. That day.’

  This is how he looked: like Mr Rochester. Read Jane Eyre. Like that. Craggy. What anyone would see in him, let alone two women.

  ‘It wasn’t ready,’ I said.

  His face went squarer. ‘But it was. You wrapped it, remember?’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘But when I looked at it again, I saw that in fact it wasn’t ready. After all.’

  I was being an idiot, a clown. I should give him his fucking costume and book in for therapy. I don’t even swear. But there was something about the situation made me twitchy. I mean, I’d met the mistress and the wife. It was suddenly so transparent. I’d been doing this very thing, on and off, for three years, counting New York, but, well, maybe I shouldn’t.

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘I mean, why not?’

  I blundered on. ‘Because I didn’t do a good-enough job on it. I can make it better.’

  ‘Look, I’ve come from work,’ he said. He looked tired, come to mention it; the eyes. ‘It’ll be fine as it is. Didn’t you say it was invisible?’

  I hesitated. I suppose we’d had the invisibility conversation—I did with most clients. It was all relative, it depended on circumstance. ‘Almost invisible,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, almost.’

  ‘But not to someone looking closely.’

  He shook his head, which was a little shaggier than you’d expect with a suit. ‘It looked fine to me. I’ll just take it anyway.’

  Something occurred to me. ‘But you didn’t look at it yesterday.’

  He looked slightly taken aback. I smiled, but put it out like a small fire. He propped his briefcase against a chair. His hand looked stiff from it. ‘I don’t know anything about this sort of stuff.’

  I said to myself, GoGo, just give him the costume. ‘It’s the Blackout,’ I said. ‘I don’t have my electric light. I did this job under the kerosene lamp, but I should’ve done it in daylight.’

  He followed my logic, looking from table to window.

  ‘That’s what I’ll do next time,’ I apologised, if not profusely.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll just come back.’

  I hadn’t planned this. I’d give him the thing the next day, untouched of course. But if I had planned it (and I don’t know why the hell I would), I would’ve expected him to put up more of a fight.

  ‘Tell me when,’ he said.

  He was a pushover. A tower of jelly, or jello as they say in America.

  ‘I’ll look in my book.’

  Oh, I’d look in my book.

  I ran my finger down the columns of the workbook, over the garments. The subtitles in my head, like the subtitles of the essays I used to write, the bits that told you what it was actually about. Coat, brown, woman’s: desperate hurry, sex. Trousers, black, man’s: drunk, sex. My finger came to the end of the list. Ah. I didn’t tell him the jobs before the costume had all been done and that there were no new ones apart from the aprons. I could see him out of the corner of my eye squinting at the page. ‘But it must’ve been,’ he began, and stopped. I knew he wouldn’t ask why the costume seemed to have slipped down the queue. He was like a man in a clothes shop, helpless—only worse, because this wasn’t menswear, it was a fucking dress! Stop swearing, GoGo. I don’t know where I got this habit. I’m really a polite person. Despite the pole house. I never wanted to be a raving lunatic. That’s what I’ve always admired about Art. Nothing of the nutcase about him.

  I told the client not to worry, that it wouldn’t take long.

  He nodded. ‘When?’

  ‘Couple of days. That wouldn’t be too late to’—I took my finger off the page and looked up at him—‘trick her, would it?’ I was waiting for him to tell me to back off. He said nothing. I continued: ‘What I mean is, are you still thinking you can . . . hide all this from her?’ I could hear a lightness oozing out of my voice: contempt. The truth was, I was having a blast toying with the investment banker. I was a cat with a mouse.

  ‘Hide the costume?’ He was playing dead.

  ‘Well, the lack of a costume was more what I was thinking.’

  After a second he decided this was funny, and gave a short laugh. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m still thinking that.’

  ‘That you can just put it back, and she’ll never know the difference?’

  ‘Yup, that’s what I’m thinking.’ He picked up his briefcase. His tight hand.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s positive thinking. I was thinking it might be too late already.’ GoGo, shut up, I was saying to myself, like a subtitle. Shut Up.

  ‘No, it’s not too late. She’s in Wellington for a few days. Her firm relocated because of the Blackout. She’s an accountant.’

  Oh. This was a new development. Since yesterday. This was a bit unfair. ‘I’m sure we can have it done by the time she gets back.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it.’ Polite. Formal. Slightly nervous.

  I closed my book, formal too, prim. I was Jane blinking Eyre. He was moving across the room. I told him he’d have it back in time. ‘That would please both of them, wouldn’t it?’ I could barely contain my distaste for him. ‘Your wife, and Trisha?’

  He shot a look from the doorway, the name of the other woman seemingly jarred from his mouth. ‘Trisha?’

  ‘Trisha. She’d be off the hook.’

  ‘It won’t “please her,”’ he said tightly.

  ‘Oh.’ I was following him out into the mandolin, i.e. passage. The rain was fading away, some handfuls on the iron roof. ‘She seemed to be, you know, keen to see it all fixed.’ A lie, of course. She hadn’t given a rat’s arse about it. She was just going through the motions. If I remembered rightly.

  He said over his shoulder, ‘She’s gone.’

  I had a new, odd sensation in my cheeks: buzzing. ‘Gone?’

  He turned but I couldn’t see his face in the dark passage, which was made so much darker by the low cloud. I’d never asked questions of my clients, not once. They offered me information, too much, about their complicated lives. Their eyes would start out of their head with the need to tell. It was gory. They told me so much I sometimes wanted to put my hands up to their mouths, crisscrossed like a bandage, and stop their no choice, out of my hands. But a man standing in the half-dark of the Blackout, he was hard to see, and it was just possible to ask a question of someone almost invisible.

  ‘Gone where? Back to Ireland?’

  I thought he cocked his head, its shape, in the dark. ‘No idea. Why?’

  ‘No reason. She seemed like a nice person.’ Another lie. She was ghastly.

  He ignored this, and peered back into the nothingness of the passage. ‘Did you get all the beads up the other day, yesterday?’

  I followed his gaze to the place where the beads had run under the door. Like honey. ‘Yeah I did, most of them.’

  In the grey light from the front door he looked blank. He didn’t want to know about the beads, of course, it was just something to say.

  ‘Tomorrow then,’ I said.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ He seemed surprised, pleased. I suppose her nibs might be home for the weekend. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ I might be able to manage, seeing it was already finished. This was hilarious.

  ‘Okay, tomorrow.’

  He stomped down the overgrown steps, the slightly shambolic walk, and I watched him flicker away across the street. He had a car parked somewhere. The rain had gone off and the atmosphere was whitish, washed clean. The bougainvillea daubed its drenched magenta petals over the picket fence. Wildflowers and weeds poked at the dusk. That banker’s wife—or whoever she was, in 1900—must have gone crazy with her forget-me-nots and daisies, her dandelions and lavender, in the unaccustomed heat while her husband was down in the city. Perhaps even during her lifetime she regretted planting so many English flowers in the semi-tropical hothouse of Auckland.

  12

  I learned ‘almost invisible’ in New York.

  Oh, New York?

  A bit of a long story. Art got a Fulbright to do his doctorate at Columbia. I know! Victoria University didn’t stack up. You’d be able to think much more deeply at Columbia. I thought I may as well go too, for the ride. Joking. We were in love. Before I booked my ticket, I’d have to do two things: drop out, and get married, in that order.