Ghost Moth Read online

  Katherine reached the door that the gray-haired woman had indicated to her and pushed it open, moving to stand just inside the door frame. It was darker in this anteroom than the room from which she had come, but her eyes adjusted quickly.

  A tailor was sitting at the worktable at the far end of the room. His head was bowed over a logbook and his shoulders were slouched. His right arm was bent, his elbow placed on the table, his head resting on his softly folded fist, his shortish fair hair sticking up untidily. His other arm was hanging loosely by his side. His table lamp was the only source of light, casting rich coppery shadows around the room.

  Katherine coughed in an attempt to distract him from his work. When that failed to get his attention, she offered a cautious “Excuse me,” but still he did not move to address her. She stood in the doorway of the room for at least thirty or forty seconds before he eventually lifted his head up off his hand. He looked at her with a curious, solemn intensity, as if he were concentrating on something else entirely, as if he were trying to retrieve the detail of something lost. His eyes wandered lazily from her and moved slowly to the space behind her.

  Moments passed before the tailor visibly roused himself and turned his head to look around him, to where a clue might lurk as to the nature and purpose of this woman who had appeared in the room. Katherine noticed how his hair was disheveled only on one side of his head. His hair on the other side was perfectly neat. There was also a deep red mark across his cheekbone, stretching down to the cusp of his jaw. It dawned on her then that he had been sleeping—his head on his hand—and that she had woken him by her presence in the room.

  With a quick intake of breath he said, “Yes,” not as a question as to why she should be standing there in front of him but as confirmation that he was remembering his appointment, gradually. He stood up from his worktable and made his way over to a chestnut cabinet on which were stacked boxes of ribbons and rolls of lining and fabric. His shoelaces were untied, as though he had intended to slip off his shoes before sleep had overtaken him. His trousers were creased around his calves. He pulled open the top drawer of the cabinet and took out a small black notebook that had two long black ribbons attached to its spine. Katherine chanced conversation,

  “I’m Katherine Fallon. I’m here for the fitting.”

  “You are,” he said simply. He turned to her. His movements toward her were full of the effort of efficiency now that she had woken him from his sleep. His disorientation had made a boy of him.

  “If it’s a bad time, I can always come back,” she said.

  “No, that won’t be necessary.”

  The tailor didn’t wear his measuring tape around his neck, as seemed customary with the other tailors, but instead took out of his trouser pocket a small tan leather case. He bent his knees and knelt at her feet. Without measuring anything for a moment, he opened his small black notebook, which he then placed on the floor beside him, and glanced at his notes. Quietly, he stretched out his tape measure in front of her as though she were a foreign visitor to his country and he were offering her a welcome garland.

  “Rehearsals going well?” He looked up. He appeared almost doleful to her from where he sat hunkered, still like a boy, still wearing the asymmetry of his sleep on his face, in his eyes, in his hair. He smiled tentatively at her. It was difficult for Katherine to judge exactly what age he was. She guessed that he was perhaps in his late twenties, but that youthful, boyish quality of his could well be making him appear younger than he was—she was not sure. He gently raised the tape measure to her waist. She automatically lifted both her arms upward and outward a little.

  “Oh fine.” She felt her initial flush of giddiness wane, and the very brief conversation between them came to a halt.

  The clock in the far corner of the room ticked. The tailor stretched his hand around her waist to catch the tape measure in his left hand. He pulled the tape measure gently, teasing it from the small tan box that housed it. The back of his left hand brushed ever so lightly against her hip. The tailor conveyed, she thought, none of the impatience that some of the seamstresses in the past had shown her at similar fittings for other shows, nor none of the rudeness that one particular senior tailor had displayed to her by merely looking at her coldly over the top of his pinze-nez and flicking scant figures into the large book spread out before him like a dissected animal on a laboratory slab.

  The tailor checked the markings on the tape and, releasing it, sat back and noted the measurements in his small black notebook with his left hand, so that as he wrote, his hand slowly swallowed the ciphers of her shape. He rose from his sitting position and, lifting the tape measure, encircled her hips, taking particular care not to pull the tape too tightly. He then measured her waist to her hip and jotted both measurements down in the black notebook.

  “Could you please face away from me,” the tailor said quietly.

  The wall to which she turned was covered with designers’ drawings of costumes from different dramatic productions; Othello, La Bohème, Troilus and Cressida, La Traviata. Various certificates lined the wall, including one from the Royal Academy of Tailors’ Association, which said on it “Award of Excellence.” To the right of these, beside the chestnut cabinet, there were spools of thread on small shelves, wound and waiting, colors as varied and rich as ripe fruit—purple, blue, damson. These spools, side by side, were already a tapestry. Boxes of buttons were stacked along a higher shelf, numbered randomly in black ink. Some of the boxes had been torn open, revealing tiny landslides of navy satin circles and round nut-colored shapes. One box revealed a spill of checkered red buttons, each one with a painted cornflower on its surface, the blue delicately and exquisitely speckled with pink and maroon. They were like drops of meadow in a tweed red prairie.

  Then sweeping back her hair a little, and revealing to the world her pale, undiscovered skin, the tailor measured her from the base of her neck to the center of her back. She felt the nub of pressure from his fingers against her spine. His touch was as light as a barely spoken prayer. But the more still she was, the more intense it felt. In response, her breath released itself in a loud sigh—she could not help it. Out of her embarrassment, she quickly turned her head to look somewhere else, anywhere else in the room. Over the chestnut cabinet there was a framed newspaper clipping containing a photograph of Princess Elizabeth on her visit to Northern Ireland in 1946. The princess was shaking the hand of a woman in a bonnet, a bonnet so simple that it was just a black-and-white arc around her face, its black ribbon elegantly tied under her chin. The princess had an uncertain smile. The woman in the bonnet looked at the camera with a soft intent. The woman in the bonnet seemed to be looking straight at Katherine. Katherine concentrated hard on each and every detail of the newspaper clipping as she felt the tailor’s hand move once again across her neck. She slowly became aware that her arms were still held upward and outward, as if waiting for him to return to her waist, as if offering herself. She lowered both arms, but no sooner had she done so than he raised both of her arms up again, gently placing his thumb and index finger on each side of her wrists. This time as she held her arms out, they began to tremble a little. She stayed as still as she could, staring at the picture of the woman in the bonnet.

  “Who is the lady in the photograph?” she asked quickly, her own voice startling her a little in the quiet room. “The lady shaking the princess’s hand?”

  “I’ve no idea,” the tailor said simply. “I put the clipping up there because I like her hat. That’s a great hat she’s wearing, don’t you think?”

  Katherine stared at the clipping again but felt too flustered to determine whether it was a great hat or not. As she stared at the photograph, the tailor walked around in front of her and circled the tape measure around her back and under the swell of her upper arms; the slick of the tape grazed her left breast. His face was very close to hers. The smell of cedarwood, almonds.

  “I would have called that a bonnet,” Katherine said, not looking at hi
m.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Her hat—I would have called her hat a bonnet.” Katherine glanced up at the tailor. He smiled at her.

  “Would you now?” he said.

  She turned her head away from him and looked over again at the spools of thread, feeling a small pulse of adrenaline course through her. The clock ticked and the tailor continued to gather her piece by piece, placing one end of his tape measure in the center of her lower back and pulling it down to the floor, then measuring her from her waist down to her knee. He stood in front of her and stretched the measuring tape from her right shoulder to her left. Then as he moved behind her to measure the full width of her back, he put his lips very close to her ear and said almost in a whisper, “By the way, Miss Fallon, you woke me from a very deep sleep.”

  A week later, she was running up the stairs of Mr. Boyne’s premises, flushed and breathless. Window-shopping on her way to rehearsals, she had lost track of time and was now late. The clack of her heels echoed around the empty stairwell. Everyone else, she assumed, was already in the rehearsal room. Just as she approached the third return, she looked up and saw the tailor coming down the stairs toward her. She did not think of stopping but could feel her heart suddenly banging in her chest. It was all the running, she thought to herself, and climbing all the stairs so quickly; it was all the running and climbing that had made her heart beat so fast.

  She went to squeeze past him and was willing to offer him a perfunctory “Good evening” when she realized that she could not move, for the tailor had blocked her way. One of his hands rested on the balustrade; the other hand’s palm was spread flat against the wall. His body was angled a little, as though to let her past, but he was not giving her enough room to do so.

  “Miss Fallon,” he said softly. She lifted her eyes to look at him. “I’m sorry,” he continued. He was staring at her intently. “I’m Thomas McKinley . . . Tom. . . . I should have introduced myself at our first fitting.” He reached out to shake her hand in a gauche, almost childlike manner. She automatically responded, shaking his hand and feeling the warm, wide expanse of his palm. Wondering how such hands, such large hands did such precise and delicate work, pinning, threading, sewing.

  “Tom,” she repeated quietly, her heart still thudding in her chest, “I’m Katherine.”

  “Yes, I know your name. I have it written down in my black notebook under ‘Carmen.’ ”

  Despite only staggered pools of light on the stairwell, she held Tom McKinley’s gaze more firmly now than when they had first met in the tailors’ rooms. Now, his fair hair was neater, his eyes a brighter blue, his complexion fresher. Katherine noticed how his smile widened his features with a keen grace. She pulled her hand from his; in the strange configuration their bodies had created on the stairs, their handshake felt to her both puerile and slightly desperate.

  Tom McKinley placed the hand he had just offered to her back on the wall beside him and spread it slowly. He did not move otherwise. Was it the air in the stairwell that felt tense and thick with heat, she wondered, or just the air within her lungs? She felt her cheeks reddening as her thoughts raced. In the ghostly light, his body cast a broad, featureless shadow of swollen blues on the wall behind him. As she stood close to and a little below him, her shadow was completely immersed in his, so that she could no longer see what mark she made on the world. What made him stay so long and so close to her?

  She looked up at Tom. The way he looked back at her, she felt, was as though he was already well familiar with her and perhaps, having stolen her every measurement at their first meeting, he was. And perhaps, for all she knew, he reassembled her over and over again in the privacy of the tailors’ rooms, when the starless evenings had sent all the junior tailors home and the world had become a quiet black.

  “It’s bad luck to cross on the stairs.” Tom smiled at her as he spoke.

  “Oh really, is it? I didn’t know.”

  Noises could be heard coming from the rehearsal room above them, the sound of chairs scraping along the wooden floor, the rumble of a baritone, the occasional high piping, dissenting sound of a female voice, but not enough to disturb this curious encounter.

  “So . . . what should we do?” She was surprised at how nervous she felt.

  Tom took his time to answer her. “Just stay here, I suppose.”

  “Yes, I suppose.” She could feel her blood pumping through her veins. “Or . . .” she continued, trying to appear matter-of-fact, “you could walk back up the stairs and wait, or I could walk down the stairs and I could wait and then you could go back up. . . .” Her words drifted. Tom moved his face a little closer to hers.

  “I’ll walk with you Katherine,” he said gently.

  They did not pull away from each other, but stayed in the soft, dark nearness, his face moving even closer. Their breath was mingling in the perfumed heat that now existed between them. Doubt coursed through her veins in hot flux.

  “So,” Tom whispered tenderly, and he waited.

  Suddenly, the door of the rehearsal room above them opened and the sound of voices spilled down the stairwell toward them. Footsteps could be heard on the stairs. As though guilty of a crime, Katherine reacted by clumsily pushing up into Tom in an attempt to move past him. He made no effort to make the passage any easier for her. On the contrary, as though out of his solicitude, he took some furtive pleasure in witnessing the tight swell of panic he saw rising within her and he placed his leg squarely and firmly on the step above her, widening his stance to curtail her movement. She continued regardless with an inappropriate and edgy determination and attempted to squeeze her body through the tiny gap that remained between Tom and the balustrade, placing her two hands on his chest and pushing herself against him. She made her way up the stairs and didn’t look back.

  On the night of the second costume fitting for Carmen, Katherine watched as Tom placed his hands on the costume templates on the table as though picturing their final arrangement and then lifted his head to look at her. He held his gaze on her. Had he scanned her body with his eyes, she would have assumed that he was, in fact, imagining her wearing the finished costume, assessing it, criticizing it. But his eyes rested only on her face. Just as it seemed he was about to say something to her, a junior tailor came into the room, loped straight over to the worktable and began inserting pins into the pieces of fabric.

  The young tailor turned to Katherine and asked her to remove her jacket, which he then proceeded to hang on the coatrack by the door. He lifted the costume templates from the table and placed them over her blouse and across her upper body. He pinned two or three of the pieces together, which appeared to form the basque of the costume, and then, unfolding a larger piece of cotton, asked her to step into it and to pull it up to her waist. This was the section that would form the skirt. She slipped off her shoes and stepped into the mock-up, taking care not to loosen the tacking. The young tailor worked away pinning and adjusting the material around her body while Tom watched. Even with her head lowered, Katherine could sense his eyes burning into her.

  When the mock-up costume had been fitted, albeit loosely, the young tailor stepped back to wait for the assessment from his senior.

  A moment or two passed before Tom spoke. “Now, the sleeves, Mr. Agnew. They mustn’t be too tight, too restricting, so make sure that when they’re attached that you leave room without losing the line.” Tom’s voice was animated as he stepped toward her. “The bodice needs reshaping just there for the skirt to flare out more at this point.” Here, Tom used his hands to indicate to Mr. Agnew exactly how and where the material should be gathered and contoured at Katherine’s waist. Then Tom knelt down at Katherine’s feet to examine the length of the skirt. “Bring the hem of the skirt to mid-calf. We can get a proper sense of that later when we have the shoes, and”—he stood up again—“now the overskirt—the overskirt should fall no lower than here.” Again he indicated what he wanted to Mr. Agnew by placing his hands on the cotton material and pul
ling it close against Katherine’s legs. Tom’s hands brushed against her stockings and this time stayed awhile. Katherine felt a tender chill.

  Mr. Agnew nodded silently.

  Tom continued. “I want the buttons down the center and the trim around the hips to converge lower than where you have indicated here. The overskirt is not to conceal the buttons or the trim, but be brought underneath them, but still worked high at the back. See, see here.”

  Tom stretched over to the worktable, brushing back some layers of material, and thumped an urgent finger on the costume designs, which were revealed underneath. “See what I mean? I want the buttons echoed on the cuffs and the coat—do you have the rough cut of the coat?”

  “Not yet, Mr. McKinley,” muttered Mr. Agnew.

  “Why not?” asked Tom a little impatiently.

  “I’ve work to do!” Mr. Agnew replied, lifting his head to give his senior a hard stare. The door clicked open and in walked the young woman Katherine had seen sitting on the ledgers in the outer room. The young woman still wore her blouse with the ivy pattern on it. She held a cup of tea precariously in her hand, as though she were carrying something unpleasant that had to be disposed of.

  “Tea for the lady,” she said severely, hardly seeming to move a muscle on her face at all.