On Tuesday morning a bride called Tess took off her dress, her shoes and most of her patience in Mara's workroom.
“I'm sorry,” she said, climbing into the dress again. “I've put weight on.”
“Have you?” Mara bent to turn the lining before it caught beneath Tess's heel.
“I don't know. It won't close.”
“Those aren't the same thing.”
Tess's sister, who had arrived carrying a flat white and an expression of determined helpfulness, said, “She's been really good.”
Mara looked up. “Has she been biting people?”
There was a short silence. Tess laughed, abruptly and with relief, and her sister discovered a need to put the coffee down.
“The zip was under strain at your first fitting,” Mara said. “I allowed for it. Stand how you usually stand. You aren't at an inspection.”
She had let the side seams out the previous evening, with the envelope from the hotel on a high shelf above her. For three hours it had remained in the corner of her eye. At home she had put it beside the bed, which was worse. She had slept turned away from it like an angry wife.
Now she closed the zip easily, making no occasion of it. Tess watched herself in the mirror. Her shoulders lowered.
“Oh,” she said.
“Walk to the door.”
The workroom wasn't big enough for much of a procession. Tess passed the ironing board and the rack of garments waiting to go home; her sister had to lift a chair out of the way. A delivery van reversed outside, emitting three loud warnings that rather spoilt the effect.
“Sit down.”
“In this?”
“You'll presumably be sitting at some point in the marriage.”
Tess sat. She spread her knees a little and looked startled by the freedom.
“Can I eat?”
“I recommend it.”
“There's going to be pasta.”
“Then we've made the correct decision.”
Mara crouched to check the hem. Tess rested a hand briefly on her shoulder, not to steady herself but in thanks, a warm, unconsidered pressure. For a moment Mara wanted to tell her about the other dress. She wanted someone who had no opinion of Clara Vale to say that finding a note after fourteen months was strange and that she was allowed to feel strange about it.
Instead she took two pins out of her mouth and asked which shoes Tess intended to wear for the dancing.
By noon both sisters had gone and the coffee had made a ring on a piece of calico. Mara ate half a cheese sandwich over the sink, then washed the crumbs off the plate before they had a chance to harden. Her mother used to say that was the trick to living alone: clean things before they became a job. Her mother had not mentioned how often the clean plate would be the only proof someone had had lunch.
She put the other half in the fridge and opened the old laptop.
Her current address was Mara Bell Alterations. The earlier one still held a business name she could not see without wincing: Bell Made. She had paid for a logo. She could remember the designer asking whether she wanted the lettering warmer and replying that she wanted it legible, as though she were already too successful to bother about such things.
Clara had written to that address fourteen months earlier.
Dear Mara, I wonder if you might be available for a paid consultation on the wedding dress. Monday, 10.30, at the hotel? An alteration made for the anniversary portrait needs looking at. I'd value your opinion. C.
Mara's reply had been professional and cold. She had quoted a consultation charge and asked Clara to confirm it. Clara had confirmed within seven minutes.
Then, on Sunday evening, the cancellation from the hotel office. Due to a bereavement, Mrs Vale's appointments would not take place. Apologies for the inconvenience.
She had learned whose bereavement it was from the news. Clara's car had gone off the coast road in rain. Witnesses, the inquest, an accident. Mara remembered setting the phone down and leaving it facedown for the rest of the evening. Her then husband had asked whose name she'd seen. She had said, A customer.
It had seemed both a truthful and a merciful answer.
The portrait had been on Thursday. An appointment for Monday. Four days, not a grand gesture waiting patiently to bloom after death. Clara had expected to be standing beside her when the pocket opened.
Mara stared at the email until the screen dimmed. Then she touched the trackpad and read “I'd value your opinion” again.
She could have tried asking for it before she stole it.
The thought arrived with sufficient heat to make her push her chair back. In the mirror her own face looked cross and a little ridiculous above a blouse with the cuff turned under. She'd meant to shorten that cuff for three years. Women paid her to solve things she tolerated indefinitely on herself.
Her phone rang. The florist on the other side of the wall wanted to know whether Mara had seen the missing step ladder.
“It's in here. You left it when you changed the bulb.”
“Can I come in?”
“I'm fully dressed, if that's what you mean.”
The door opened. A forearm and a bunch of greenery appeared first. The ladder departed with a promise to bring back the bulb that had been bought in the wrong fitting. Mara closed the laptop. She was due to deliver two altered staff jackets to the hotel; she had taken the small job before agreeing to the large one. Keeping ordinary promises suddenly seemed a useful activity.
She drove back with the jackets hung across the rear seat and the key heavy in her handbag. At the hotel she used the side entrance, where the carpet gave way to durable grey flooring and the air smelled of toast. Nobody met her. A woman with a clipboard stood at the open office door, speaking to someone Mara couldn't see.
“You can fund the preview or you can pay the kitchen,” the woman said. “You cannot keep giving me the same money twice.”
“The contribution is scheduled before then.” Elias's voice.
“Scheduled isn't in the account.”
“Inez.”
“Don't say my name as though it's the problem.”
Mara stopped. The jackets rustled against each other. She ought to move away, but there was nowhere to move that didn't announce how long she had been standing there.
Elias appeared in the doorway. His jacket was off and his shirtsleeves were rolled by different amounts.
“Ms Bell.”
“Mara. If you call me Ms Bell I start wondering which bill I haven't paid.”
Inez came out behind him. She was a compact woman in her fifties with a streak of white hair at one temple and the expression of someone who had recognised an additional item on an already full list.
“Those are mine,” she said, taking the jackets. “Thank you. Do I owe you?”
“An invoice went to the office.”
“I'll find it.”
Inez felt the reinforced lining beneath one sleeve. She knew where the old tear had been, then. “That's better.”
“You can reach the top cupboard now. Although I'd get someone taller.”
“I generally try.” Inez glanced at Elias, who offered no defence. She carried the jackets away.
For the first time Mara saw him in a place that didn't look as though he owned it. The office behind him was cramped, with a kettle on a filing cabinet and a box of breakfast cereal beside a printer. A handwritten note on the wall asked people to replace the paper, please. The please had been underlined in red.
“I found the appointment,” she said.
He stepped out of the doorway. “Which appointment?”
“Clara asked me to look at the dress. The Monday after the portrait.”
She showed him the email. He held the phone lightly at its edges, keeping his fingers off the screen. He had a small cut on one knuckle. She wondered why she noticed the cut before she remembered he was reading the words of his dead wife.
“I didn't know she was seeing you.”
“She wasn't. It was cancelled.”
“Yes. Of course.”
He returned the phone. She could have offered a gentler answer. He had not deserved the sharp one, and she disliked the defensive desire to prove that somebody had.
“Sorry,” she said. “That came out wrong.”
He shook his head once. From inside the office the kettle began to boil. Neither of them moved toward it.
“What were you expecting to find tomorrow?” she asked.
“I don't know.”
“You've been in there.”
“To look for an insurance schedule. To collect personal things. Noel's been arranging the archive. I haven't searched her drawers.”
His voice made the last phrase unexpectedly intimate. Searching someone's drawers: the little violence of becoming the person who decided what their private things were worth. Mara had packed the shared bathroom before leaving the marriage. Her husband had taken her hand cream out of the box because he used it too. They had stood looking at the tube for a long time.
“You don't have to come with me,” Elias said.
“I know.”
“I meant, if you would rather go in with someone from the exhibition.”
“I understood.”
He waited. A door slammed deeper in the building. The kettle switched itself off.
She could leave the hotel, send back the first instalment less her hours, and keep making sleeves shorter. The letter might turn out to be another rich person's unfinished intention. It would be no great shock. She had a living that depended on being reasonably quick, reasonably kind and never suggesting a customer needed more room with the wrong expression on her face. She was good at that living.
“I'll come at ten,” she said. “I'd like you there.”
Something moved in his face, too slight for her to name.
“Ten,” he said.
On the way out she passed Inez holding one of the repaired jackets up against a staff member. The young man put both arms over his head and grinned. Mara kept going before either could thank her again.
In the car she took the envelope from her bag. She didn't open it. She rested it on her knee for a moment, letting the small familiar outline of the key press through the paper.
Then she put it somewhere safe enough to disappoint her.