22

Fabric and Notions

THOMASINA HAD WRITTEN Wally Michelin a different kind of postcard from Bucharest than the one she had written to Wayne. By the time she wrote Wally’s card she had been in Bucharest for months. She no longer liked the chaos, the noise and dirt, or the old concrete-block buildings, and had decided to book a train and a boat to England.

“I want to go and sit in the park in London,” she wrote. “I can stay at the Cale Street Hostel for August and half of September for practically nothing, and when I get sick of the young Australian backpackers I intend to try and get room 118 at the Cadogan Hotel on Sloane Street. It will cost nearly a hundred pounds a night but I want to spend at least one night in the room where Oscar Wilde was arrested, and then I might go to another hotel near Poet’s Corner and go visit the monuments to my old friends the Brontë sisters, and Wordsworth. I wish they had a monument to Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy. If no one is looking I might leave a small memorial to her in some old crevice or another. A petal from one of the Queen’s roses, or a violet from one of the gypsies in Trafalgar Square. Someone needs to leave something in memory of Dorothy.”

Wally Michelin had not loved Tim McPhail, the boy who had taken her to her high school prom. She had loved the French composer Gabriel Fauré, and she had loved her music studies. When she arrived in Boston to work in her aunt’s shop after graduation, her aunt had been kind. She gave Wally a room that had belonged to her grown daughter, and she had bought Wally her own record player and told her she could go down to the Berklee College of Music bookstore on Boylston Street if she wanted to buy books or records. It was at that bookstore, on the bulletin board, that Wally read about the Harley Street Voice Clinic in London.

Her aunt Doreen’s shop was a fabric and notions store on Brattle Street, and Wally liked it. She liked the precision with which she learned to cut yards of linen and jersey from big rolls, using a yardstick on the long counter. She loved it when her aunt taught her how to pull a single thread from the weave so that the line marking its absence became your guideline for cutting. That seemed like a neat, graceful trick to her. She also liked the wall on which hung a collection of mysterious tools: bobbins for Singer sewing machines, long pins, and pearl-handled awls for punching holes in paper to transfer patterns. She liked Boston itself, so sedate and shadowed. It would have been sombre, she thought, were it not for the students who spilled into its streets in late August, enlivening the red brick and sharp angles of the sun as they swarmed Harvard Square and the surrounding streets with their armloads of textbooks and their young, intense faces that held adventure and studiousness alike.

In her years of high school, Wally Michelin’s teachers and the guidance counsellor had tried to show her university calendars and had given her tests that showed she had academic aptitude in all kinds of directions. They had not done this for every student but they had done it for the ones they felt had the intelligence and the money to go places. She had resented this, and wondered why they had singled out her and a few others such as Tim McPhail when students like Wayne Blake were ignored and left to fend for themselves. One of the teachers had asked Wally to write a list of the relatives she had in Boston, as if they were part of the qualifications that gave her special academic ability. She had replied that she had no relatives in Boston, just to shut the teacher up, and it had worked that day: the teacher had walked away disappointed. What the teacher had not known, and what Wally had not told the guidance counsellor or anyone else, was that if she could not study music she was not going to study anything at all. She would work in her aunt’s shop and would learn how to tell the difference between French and American ribbon, and to discern which buttons were long lasting and valuable and which were cheap, and in her spare time she would turn on her record player or go to free student concerts and listen to the music other people made.

Wally’s mother and her aunt Doreen were sisters, but Wally thought her aunt looked happier than her mother. She had her hair done more often, and she had pedicures too. Her toenails were painted a warm pink. It was nothing for her to go out to a restaurant three times a week. Wally had heard her mother say that Doreen’s shop and her husband together made more money than Doreen knew how to spend, and now Wally wondered if it were just that Aunt Doreen was more prosperous or whether she was happier by nature. The living room had a bay window, and in the bay part was a basket lined in satin, and on the satin lay a white mother poodle and five puppies. There was a piano in the living room, and on a shelf Doreen had a collection of dolls that were not toys but were dressed in elaborate garments. Wally knew from a catalogue her aunt kept in a drawer of her china cabinet that the dolls cost more than a hundred dollars each, some up to three hundred and beyond. Their shoes alone were little works of art.

But it was not just that her aunt had a piano and purebred puppies and her shop and the dolls; her aunt Doreen was interested in things. She knew when an operatic star was coming to town or when a new Italian film was on at the repertory cinema, and she loved to get any kind of news, and to think about it and talk about it in a lively way. After the quietness of Croydon Harbour, Wally loved the bustle and activity of Boston, as well as this lively way her aunt Doreen had of making every ordinary thing in life an event. When the mail brought a postcard for Wally from Thomasina in Paris, then another from Bucharest, Doreen made an event of standing it on the table in the hall, against the vase she kept filled with carnations and white iris. There was music in the house, and there were books, and there was always a cake in a box from the Modern Pastry shop on Hanover Street.

Aunt Doreen was a person to whom you could mention things, and the day Wally saw the notice about the Harley Street Voice Clinic at the college bookshop, she told her aunt about it. The cake in that day’s box was a Swiss roll spread with jam and studded with coconut, and Wally marvelled at its sponginess as her aunt cut them each a piece to have with tea in English teacups.

If you did not know that Wally had had an injury to her voice in junior high school, you would think she was a girl with a slightly softer than normal voice. You might think her voice had a beauty, that it crumbled in a way that sounded inviting to the ear. In a world of harsh voices Wally’s injured voice was quiet, but this was no blessing to Wally herself, and her aunt knew it.

The Harley Street Voice Clinic, Wally said, was not on Harley Street at all, but on a street called Wimpole Street. It had a team of doctors who did nothing else on this earth except repair vocal cords that had nodules on them or that had been strained or torn or otherwise injured. They did it for people who had devoted their lives to singing but who could not sing because something had injured their instrument. Their voices were their instrument. Wally told her aunt this, and her aunt — who had wanted to play piano but who had not been taught it when she was young enough — this aunt understood what Wally was telling her. Her aunt knew all about Wally’s injury, about what had happened to her at Donna Palliser’s party years ago. Everyone in the family did.

“I suppose,” Wally said, “it’s expensive to go have that done. And it’s so far away. Maybe there’s a place in Boston.”

“If there were a place in Boston, the Berklee College of Music would not have information about the place in London on the bulletin board in the bookstore. They have it there because they know that is the place to go.”

“I wish it wasn’t all the way to London. If there was something like that here, I could get on a bus and go visit it and see for myself.”

“If we knew anyone in London we could ask them to go and have a look. Then you would know. You would know what kind of feel the Harley Street Voice Clinic has. If they have a serious atmosphere, if they are able to do what they say they can do.”

“Thomasina Baikie said she was going to London in her last postcard, remember? She was tired of Bucharest and looking forward to going to her favourite part of London and eating fish and chips and staying in that hostel and that other place.”

“Get her postcard off the table.”

They read the postcard again.

“She’s there now,” Aunt Doreen said. “If she did what she said she was going to do, she’s still there. She’s at that hostel or one of the hotels. We can phone them and leave a message for her to call us.”

“Call us from England?” Wally could not imagine imposing on Thomasina by asking her to make a telephone call over thousands of miles of ocean. But her aunt was excited. She was a woman who became enthusiastic about things, and now she took three of the puppies in her arms and fed them pieces of cake.

“Collect, silly,” she said. “We’ll leave a message asking her to call us collect, and we can ask her to go visit Harley Street.”

“Wimpole Street. The Harley Street Voice Clinic is at number thirty-five Wimpole Street.”

“Wimpole Street then. And she’ll go. This woman will do that for you. She’ll go and check it out. We’ll talk to her and give her the exact information that is on the records your doctor sent when you came here from home, and she can show it to those doctors on Wimpole Street and they can tell her what they think. And then you’ll know.”