Coffin in Fashion

She replaced the keys where they should go. One of those nights, she thought, when I took a sleeping tablet. No, not the night, doesn’t even have to be the night. Early morning would do. No one around. Perhaps this very morning.

With tears pouring down her cheeks and shaking with misery and rage, she found her handbag and the other car keys. At least they were where she had left them.

She went back to her mug of coffee and stood at the sink, crying and drinking. The coffee was no longer hot, it wouldn’t do her any good. She needed to be done good to, she knew that they were both in terrible trouble.

Ever since he had been born she had loved her son. But apparently she had not been very good at showing it or he would have loved her back, which he could not do. Not and behave the way he did to her.

She did not look at her morning paper nor listen to the radio as she drove to work, so she did not learn the news about the body in Mouncy Street. Afterwards she realized that Steve could not have known either when he set out. Poor kid, poor kid. What had he walked into? What had she, for that matter?

She knew the police would be into the factory: there was that matter of the silk. That put Belmodes right in the picture. She was surprised that the police had let them both go home. It had a just-for-the-time-being feel to it.

And then she had her own particular worry. Surely at her age she couldn’t be in the club again? She’d been so careful. God, if she escaped this time, she’d go on the Pill, in spite of the headaches. She knew a useful quack who would give her a prescription.

‘It was the night I tried cannabis.’ In the fashion world it was difficult to avoid cannabis at the moment without feeling you had got left behind. Rose never liked to get left behind.

She hung up her short lime-green linen coat and replenished her lipstick. It was pale, pale pink, very nearly the whitest shade of white, but all that fashion allowed at the moment. Nor did she wear powder and rouge, the shiny, natural face being required, although her eyelashes were false and long.

The tresses of blonde hair curling down her back were false too, her own hair would not grow beyond her shoulders. As a result, she envied Gabriel her shining mane and had more than once been tempted to give it a tug to see if it was artificial also.

She had met no one on her way in, but already, in a mad kind of way, she felt like Myra Hindley. Something bad had touched her and Steve and discoloured them.

She sat down at her desk to start work. It was necessary to consider her programme for the next two seasons. She knew how much she depended on Gabriel’s flair and taste. For years she had succeeded by quietly pilfering ideas from Paris or Rome. Now London was leading the way. Marvellous, good for trade. But it also meant you had to have some ideas of your own. Gabriel had the ideas.