Tess put the unopened bottle in the fridge beside her lunch.
“Don't you like it?” Rachel asked.
“I haven't had any.”
“I mean blackcurrant.”
“I haven't thought about it.”
Tess shut the fridge. Rachel heard the correction and tried to leave the bottle alone.
The customer waiting at the door was a woman who needed a dress taken in before Saturday. She had lost weight she hadn't wanted to lose and said this quietly, while Tess held the coat. Rachel didn't ask how much. She took the woman to the mirror, found where the seams could be moved and asked about the occasion.
“My brother's wedding.”
“Do you like him?”
“Most days.”
“Good enough.”
The woman smiled. Tess held a sleeve aside while Rachel put in the pins. They worked without discussing Anna.
Rachel could feel Tess thinking near her. She was usually good at knowing when a person wanted to be left until they found their own first sentence. Today every minute of patience seemed like a minute wasted.
The fitting ended. The woman asked if she ought to buy a new dress instead.
“This one fits your shoulders,” Rachel said. “That's the difficult part. We can do the rest.”
Tess gave her the coat and wrote the collection time.
When the woman had gone, Tess went to the sink.
“Are you making coffee?” Rachel asked.
“No. Washing this.”
She held up the bottle.
“What for?”
“It was sticky round the cap.”
Rachel returned to the worktable. Tess had touched an object Anna brought her. It should have been enough information to make the morning easier. Rachel wanted to know what it meant.
Tess came back with the bottle and put it on the shelf.
“She was nervous.”
“I think so.”
“She didn't know what to ask.”
“It was a lot to do at once.”
“I know.”
Rachel smoothed the wedding dress.
“How did you find it?”
Tess sat on the stool.
“I keep hearing my own voice.”
“Saying what?”
“Everything. Like I'd been asked to explain being a person.”
Rachel waited.
“She asked what I had for breakfast. I said toast and then sat there wishing I could think of an interesting breakfast.”
“You weren't being examined.”
“I know that as well.”
Tess laughed, without pleasure, then looked at the chair where Anna sat.
“I thought she'd be different.”
“In what way?”
“I don't know. More like the photo.”
“The trial one?”
“Probably.”
Rachel knew the photograph: Anna being led between men in coats, mouth tight, eyes looking past the camera. People brought it out again for every article. Rachel herself appeared sometimes in another picture, wearing a dark coat, someone reliable coming down the steps.
“She looked frightened,” Tess said. “Today. Then she laughed at the bass thing.”
Rachel had been answering the customer at the door during that part of the video.
“What bass thing?”
“In the video. She thought Eli was making the low sound on purpose because someone had made a rude noise near the camera. I didn't know whether to tell her it was the actual song.”
Rachel laughed. Tess did, too, relieved perhaps to find it could be funny to someone else.
“Did you?”
“Eventually. She said he ought to get paid more if it was that difficult.”
Tess shook her head. She looked amused and a little shy about the amusement.
“You could send her another one,” Rachel said.
“I might.”
“One where she can hear it properly.”
“I haven't got one where you can hear it properly. That's the whole problem.”
“Then invite her to hear it.”
Tess looked up.
“Would that be weird?”
“For you?”
“For everyone. Ruby'll start asking her if she has opinions about the set list.”
“Does she ask everyone?”
“She likes being told she's right. She's very democratic about where it comes from.”
Rachel could see the rehearsal room in the building near the station, Tess disappearing into an ordinary Saturday she no longer had at the shop. She'd taken fabric there once when Ruby needed to check a colour under their lights. The group were kind to her, in the hurried way people were kind to a person visiting a thing she didn't need to understand.
Anna could enter it through Tess.
“It might be easier than sitting in chairs,” Rachel said.
“Maybe.”
Tess lifted the wedding dress, looked at the pinned waist and put it down without disturbing anything.
“I don't know if I want her hearing us yet.”
“Then wait.”
Tess's phone sounded. She looked at it and smiled faintly.
“Her?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
Tess put the phone against her chest, thoughtlessly guarding it.
“Just thank you.”
Rachel felt herself being given less than Tess's whole attention and took the dress to the machine.
That afternoon the blue dress was ready. The girl came in with a friend this time, not her mother. Rachel watched her look at herself in the mirror, then turn so the skirt moved.
“Well?” the friend asked.
The girl had an answer. She didn't ask Rachel to give her one.
When they went out, Tess stood by the counter, pleased.
“I like that bit.”
“Which?”
“When they stop making you tell them.”
Rachel snipped the thread on the machine. It left a short blue curl on the table.
Tess left at four. She had work at the rehearsal room to do, though not a rehearsal, she explained. A drum stand had started slipping. Eli said he'd help and Ruby said helping was allowed as long as they actually fixed something.
“Can you do it?” Rachel asked.
“We can tighten a stand.”
“Of course.”
“Granddad thinks all the gear wants oil. He keeps threatening to come over with a can.”
“Hide it.”
“I have. He says I've interfered with a system.”
Tess fetched the bottle from the shelf, looked at it for a moment and put it in her bag.
“I'll try it,” she said.
Rachel nodded. She didn't ask whether Tess meant now or in the presence of her mother.
When the shop closed, the third chair was still at the back. Rachel pushed all three beneath the table, then drew Anna's out again because it wouldn't fit. She was annoyed with the legs, the uneven arrangement, the absurd physical remains of a meeting she wanted to have been successful.
Leonard rang while she was making supper.
“How did it go?”
“Better than I expected.”
“She came home briefly. Didn't say much.”
“She stayed a little longer than the half hour.”
“Did she?”
“They watched something on the phone. Her band.”
He was quiet.
“I remember Anna hating loud music.”
“People change.”
“So I keep hearing.”
Rachel stirred the onions. They were catching at the edge of the pan.
“It's early, Leonard.”
“I know. She wanted a copy of a photograph.”
“Anna?”
“Tess at the leavers' dinner. I said I'd print one.”
“That would be kind.”
He breathed out, a little irritated.
“Yes. It would.”
Rachel lowered the heat.
“I'm sorry. I wasn't telling you.”
“No.”
After they ended the call, she sat at the little kitchen table and ate. She had made too much. Martin liked onions cooked slowly, until they lost their edges. She liked them with something left to bite. For years she'd begun the pan earlier than she wanted and listened to him say she was spoiling him.
There were nights she still started it at his time.
She finished the food, washed the pan and opened the window. The alley below smelled of hot pavement and somebody else's supper. Across the roofs, a strip of water caught the late sun.
In the sitting room, an old box of photographs stood on top of the bookcase. Rachel brought it down looking for something she couldn't have named without making the search stop.
Celia at twenty-nine, wearing a green jacket she said was too expensive and bought anyway. Rachel beside her at the shop opening, trying to keep the wind from lifting the skirt of her dress. A photograph taken from the other side of a restaurant table: Celia had a fork in her hand, Martin was talking, Rachel was laughing at him.
Rachel remembered the meal. Oranges in the salad, too much bread before the main course, a waiter Celia claimed would marry her if she stayed for pudding. Martin went to the bar to pay because he liked to look as if money was a private matter he could settle before anyone else noticed.
Celia followed him.
Rachel had thought she was complaining about the bill. She'd stayed at the table, finishing the wine, and watched her friend lean against the bar. Celia's hand lay near Martin's on the polished wood.
In his letter he said the affair began that spring.
Rachel set the photograph on the table.
There were memories she had tried to alter after reading the letter. A joke which couldn't have been a joke, a dinner which should have looked different, a touch she ought to have seen. But the evening remained pleasurable in her memory. She had loved these people and enjoyed being loved by them. Nobody had stopped laughing to let her know which part was untrue.
She remembered Martin coming home one winter before he was ill, smelling of rain, carrying a little packet from the hardware shop. The desk drawer had started sticking even then. He knelt, took a screw out, examined it and said they'd need another size. She teased him for making a diagnosis without a cure. He pulled her down beside him and kissed her with the screw still in his hand.
The drawer was still broken. She had let that become endearing.
Rachel picked up the restaurant photograph again. Celia's fork hung above her plate. Her mouth was open, waiting to complete a sentence which nobody remembered now.
A phone sounded in the kitchen.
Rachel set the picture down and went to it.
Anna had messaged. Thank you for this morning. I mean that.
She read it twice. The relief was more bodily than she expected, a loosening behind her ribs. Anna had been given a morning worth thanking somebody for. Rachel had made it happen.
She wrote: I'm glad it helped.
Then she added: If you need anything practical, ask.
She looked at the second sentence before sending. It was the sort of thing she said when she meant it. She meant it now. Anna needed clothes, work, the ability to arrive somewhere without preparing herself for a refusal. Rachel had a shop full of things that could make a person feel less wrong.
She sent both.
Anna replied a few minutes later. A job would be practical. I'm trying the Anchor tomorrow. If they laugh me out, I'll come and borrow a better shirt.
Rachel smiled. Celia would have enjoyed the sentence, then said something about paying for the shirt. Rachel could remember the edge in her friend's voice and still miss it.
Come anyway, she wrote. We have better shirts than the Anchor deserves.
She put the phone down. Anna's message remained visible. A woman she had last seen across a courtroom was making a joke with her now.
Rachel carried the photographs back to the sitting room. She put the restaurant picture in the box, the shop opening above it, then replaced the lid.
At the desk she stopped. She could reach down, lift the drawer, take out three pages and ruin the arrangement she'd made that morning.
The kitchen phone sounded again.
Tess had sent a short video. A drum stand turned, somebody swore, the camera shook with laughter. Rachel could hear Tess close to it and Eli farther away, protesting that he wasn't making it worse.
She watched it twice. Then she went downstairs for a little packet of spare safety pins Tess said she'd need, and left the drawer closed.