Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Tracy Chevalier 2019

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Shelley Richmond / Trevillion Images (woman) and Shutterstock.com (needle and thread)

“Love Is The Sweetest Thing” Written by Ray Noble

Published by Range Road Music and Bienstock Publishing

Company o/b/o Redwood Music Ltd

Rights administered by Round Hill Carlin, LLC

Tracy Chevalier asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008153816

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2019 ISBN: 9780008153830

Version: 2020-05-06

Dedication

For Morag

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Tracy Chevalier

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

“SHHH!”

Violet Speedwell frowned. She did not need shushing; she had not said anything.

The shusher, an officious woman sporting a helmet of grey hair, had planted herself squarely in the archway that led into the choir, Violet’s favourite part of Winchester Cathedral. The choir was right in the centre of the building – the nave extending one way, the presbytery and retrochoir the other, the north and south transepts’ short arms fanning out on either side to complete the cross of the whole structure. The other parts of the Cathedral had their drawbacks: the nave was enormous, the aisles draughty, the transepts dark, the chapels too reverential, the retrochoir lonely. But the choir had a lower ceiling and carved wood stalls that made the space feel on a more human scale. It was luxurious but not too grand.

Violet peeked over the usher’s shoulder. She had only wanted to step in for a moment to look. The choir stalls of seats and benches and the adjacent presbytery seats seemed to be filled mostly with women – far more than she would expect on a Thursday afternoon. There must be a special service for something. It was the 19th of May 1932; St Dunstan’s Day, Dunstan being the patron saint of goldsmiths, known for famously fending off the Devil with a pair of tongs. But that was unlikely to draw so many Winchester women.

She studied the congregants she could see. Women always studied other women, and did so far more critically than men ever did. Men didn’t notice the run in their stocking, the lipstick on their teeth, the dated, outgrown haircut, the skirt that pulled unflatteringly across the hips, the paste earrings that were a touch too gaudy. Violet registered every flaw, and knew every flaw that was being noted about her. She could provide a list herself: hair too flat and neither one colour nor another; sloping shoulders fashionable back in Victorian times; eyes so deep-set you could barely see their blue; nose tending to red if she was too hot or had even a sip of sherry. She did not need anyone, male or female, to point out her shortcomings.

Like the usher guarding them, the women in the choir and presbytery were mostly older than Violet. All wore hats, and most had coats draped over their shoulders. Though it was a reasonable day outside, inside the Cathedral it was still chilly, as churches and cathedrals always seemed to be, even in high summer. All that stone did not absorb warmth, and kept worshippers alert and a little uncomfortable, as if it did not do to relax too much during the important business of worshipping God. If God were an architect, she wondered, would He be an Old Testament architect of flagstone or a New Testament one of soft furnishings?

They began to sing now – “All ye who seek a rest above” – rather like an army, regimental, with a clear sense of the importance of the group. For it was a group; Violet could see that. An invisible web ran amongst the women, binding them fast to their common cause, whatever that might be. There seemed to be a line of command, too: two women sitting in one of the front stall benches in the choir were clearly leaders. One was smiling, one frowning. The frowner was looking around from one line of the hymn to the next, as if ticking off a list in her head of who was there and who was not, who was singing boldly and who faintly, who would need admonishing afterwards about wandering attention and who would be praised in some indirect, condescending manner. It felt just like being back at school assembly.

“Who are—”

“Shhh!” The usher’s frown deepened. “You will have to wait.” Her voice was far louder than Violet’s mild query had been; a few women in the closest seats turned their heads. This incensed the usher even more. “This is the Presentation of Embroideries,” she hissed. “Tourists are not allowed.”

Violet knew such types, who guarded the gates with a ferocity well beyond what the position required. This woman would simper at deans and bishops and treat everyone else like a peasant.

Their stand-off was interrupted by an older man approaching along the side aisle from the empty retrochoir at the eastern end of the Cathedral. Violet turned to look at him, grateful for the interruption. She noted his white hair and moustache, and his stride which, though purposeful, lacked the vigour of youth, and found herself making the calculation she did with most men. He was in his late fifties or early sixties. Minus the eighteen years since 1914, he would have been in his early forties when the Great War began. Probably he hadn’t fought, or at least not till later, when younger recruits were running low. Perhaps he had a son who had fought.

The usher stiffened as he drew near, ready to defend her territory from another invader. But the man passed them with barely a glance, and trotted down the stairs to the south transept. Was he leaving, or would he turn into the small Fishermen’s Chapel where Izaak Walton was buried? It was where Violet had been heading before her curiosity over the special service waylaid her.

The usher moved away from the archway for a moment to peer down after the man. Violet took the opportunity to slip inside and sit down in the closest empty seat, just as the Dean stepped up to the pulpit in the middle of the choir aisle to her left and announced, “The Lord be with you.”

“And with Thy spirit,” the women around her replied in the measured tempo so familiar from church services.

“Let us pray.”

As Violet bowed her head along with the others, she felt a finger poke at her shoulder. She ignored it; surely the usher would not interrupt a prayer.

“Almighty God, who of old didst command that Thy sanctuary be adorned with works of beauty and cunning craftsmanship, for the hallowing of Thy name and the refreshing of men’s souls, vouchsafe, we beseech Thee, to accept these offerings at our hands, and grant that we may ever be consecrated to Thy service; for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.”

Violet looked around. Like the choir’s, the presbytery chairs were turned inwards rather than forward towards the high altar. Across from her were ranks of women in facing seats, and behind them a stone parclose decorated with tracery in the form of arches and curlicues. On the top of the screen sat stone mortuary chests containing the bones of bishops and kings and queens – unfortunately jumbled together during the Civil War when Cromwell’s men apparently opened the chests and threw the bones about. During a tour that Violet dutifully took after moving to Winchester, the guide told her the soldiers threw femurs at the Great West Window and destroyed the stained glass. Once Charles II had been restored to the throne in 1660 it too had been restored using saved shards of glass, but it was remade higgledy-piggledy, with little attempt to recreate the biblical scenes originally depicted. Yet it looked orderly, as did the mortuary chests – so tidy and certain, resting above her head now, as if they had always been and always would be there. This building might look permanent, but parts of it had been taken apart and put back together many times.

It was impossible to imagine that such bad behaviour could have taken place in so solid a building, where they were now obediently reciting the Lord’s Prayer. But then, it had been impossible to imagine that solid old Britain would go to war with Germany and send so many men off to die. Afterwards the country had been put back together like the Great West Window – defiant and superficially repaired, but the damage had been done.

“In the faith of Jesus Christ we dedicate these gifts to the glory of God.” As he spoke the Dean gestured towards the high altar at the far end of the presbytery. Violet craned her neck to see what gifts he was referring to, then stifled a laugh. Stacked in even, solemn rows on the steps before the altar were dozens of hassocks.

She should not find them funny, she knew. Kneelers were a serious business. Violet had always been grateful for the rectangular leather kneelers the size of picture books at St Michael’s, the church the Speedwells attended in Southampton. Though worn and compacted into thin hard boards by years of pressing knees, they were at least not as cold as the stone floor. She had never thought they might require a benediction, however. And yet that appeared to be what this special service was for.

She glanced at her watch: she had left the office to buy a typewriter ribbon, with the tacit understanding that she might stop en route for a coffee. Instead of coffee Violet had intended to visit the Fishermen’s Chapel in the Cathedral. Her late father had been a keen fisherman and kept a copy of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler on his bedside table – though she had never seen him read it. Now, though, she wondered if kneelers were worth being late for.

The prayer over, she felt another sharp tap on her shoulder. The service might take longer than a coffee or a pilgrimage to Walton, but she could not bear to be bullied by this woman. “I’ve joined the service,” she muttered before the usher could speak.

The woman frowned. “You are a broderer? I haven’t seen you at the meetings.”

Violet had never heard the word and was not entirely sure what it meant. “I’m new,” she improvised.

“Well, this is a service for those who have already contributed. You will have to wait for the next service in October, once you have actually taken part and put in some work.”

If the usher hadn’t then glanced down at Violet’s left hand, she might have accepted that the service was not for her and departed. She should have done so anyway – gone for the typewriter ribbon and returned to the office in a timely fashion. Besides, services were often dull, even in a cathedral as magnificent as Winchester’s. But she hated the judgement that the usher was forming from her not wearing a wedding ring. She couldn’t help it: she glanced in return at the usher’s left hand. A ring, of course.

She took a breath to give herself courage. “I was told I could come.” Her heart was pounding, as it often did when she rebelled, whether on a large or a small scale. When she’d told her mother six months before that she was moving to Winchester, for instance, her heart had beat so hard and fast that she’d thought it would punch a hole through her chest. Thirty-eight years old and I am still afraid, she thought.

The usher’s frown deepened. “Who told you that?”

Violet gestured towards one of the fur-wearing women in the front choir stall bench.

“Mrs Biggins said you could come?” For the first time, the usher’s tone faltered.

“Mabel, shhh!” Now others were shushing the usher, who turned scarlet. After one last scowl at Violet, she stepped back to her place guarding the archway.

The Dean was midway through his address. “This magnificent Cathedral has been blessed with many adornments over the centuries,” he was saying, “whether in stone or wood, metal or glass. The effect has been to lift the spirits of those who come to worship, and to remind them of the glory of God here on Earth as in Heaven.

“To this abundance can now be added the kneelers you see before the altar – the start of an ambitious project to bring colour and comfort to those who come to services in the choir and presbytery. The Winchester Cathedral Broderers group was formed by Miss Louisa Pesel at my invitation last year. The word ‘broderer’ is taken from the Worshipful Company of Broderers – a guild of embroiderers established in mediaeval times. This new group of Cathedral Broderers reflects the noble history of this craft, brought forth by Miss Pesel to unite the past and present. Many of its members are here today. You have clearly been very busy with your needles, embroidering these splendid hassocks for the presbytery, and soon to commence on cushions for the seats and benches in the choir. Not only will we see glorious colours and patterns amongst the more sober wood and stone, but worshippers will find it easier to kneel as they pray.” He paused, with a smile that indicated he was about to make a small, Dean-like joke. “The cushions may well make it easier for congregants to sit and listen to my sermons.”

There was a sedate collective chuckle.

As he went on, Violet glanced at the woman next to her, who had laughed more openly. Her face was thin and angular, like a long isosceles triangle had unfolded between her temples and chin, and her brown hair was shingled into another triangle whose points stuck straight out from her cheeks. She turned to Violet with eager dark eyes, as if the glance were the calling card she had been waiting for. “I haven’t seen you before,” she whispered. “Are you from the Monday group? Is one of yours up there?”

“Ah – no.”

“Not done yet? I managed to finish mine last week – just before the cut-off. Had to run clear across town to get it to them. Miss Pesel and Mrs Biggins were that strict about it. Handed it straight to Miss Pesel herself.”

A woman in the seat in front of them turned her head as if listening, and Violet’s neighbour went quiet. A minute later she began again, more softly. “Are you working on a kneeler?”

Violet shook her head.

“What, your stitching wasn’t good enough?” The woman made a sympathetic moue. “Mine was returned to me three times before they were satisfied! Have they put you on hanking instead? Or straightening the cupboards? The cupboards always need that, but it’s awfully dull. Or maybe you keep records for them. I’ll bet that’s what you do.” She glanced at Violet’s hands as if searching for telltale signs of inky fingers. Of course she would also be looking for the ring, just as Violet had already noted that she didn’t wear one. “I said no straight away to record-keeping. I do enough of that the rest of the week.”

The woman ahead of them turned around. “Shhh!”

Violet and her neighbour smiled at each other. It felt good to have a partner in crime, albeit one who was a little eager.

By the time the service dragged to its conclusion with the end of the Dean’s address, another hymn (“Oh holy Lord, content to dwell”), and more blessings, Violet was very late and had to rush away, her thin-faced neighbour calling out her name – “Gilda Hill!” – after her. She ran across the Outer Close, a patch of green surrounding the Cathedral, and up the High Street to Warren’s stationers, then hurried with the typewriter ribbon back to Southern Counties Insurance, arriving flushed and out of breath.

She needn’t have run: the office she shared with two others in the typing pool was empty. When Violet had worked in the larger offices of the same company in Southampton, the manager had been much stricter about the comings and goings of the workers. Here, where the office was so much smaller and more exposed, you might think Violet’s absence would be noted. But no. Though she didn’t want to be reprimanded, she was mildly disappointed that no one had noticed her empty chair and her black Imperial typewriter with its cream keys so quiet.

She glanced at her office mates’ vacant desks. Olive and Maureen – O and Mo, they called themselves, laughing raucously about their nicknames even when no one else did – must be having tea down the hall in the staff kitchen. Violet was desperate for a cup, and a biscuit to plug the hole in her stomach. For lunch she’d had only the Marmite and margarine sandwiches she’d brought in. They were never enough; she was always hungry again by mid-afternoon and had to fill up with more cups of tea. Mrs Speedwell would be appalled that Violet had a hot mid-day meal only once a week. She could not afford more – though she would never admit that to her mother.

For a moment she considered joining her colleagues in the kitchen. O and Mo were two local girls in their early twenties, and although they were nice enough to Violet, they came from different backgrounds, and treated her like an African violet or an aspidistra, the sort of house plant a maiden aunt would keep. Both lived at home and so had a more carefree attitude towards money – as Violet herself had once had. One sexy, one plain, they wore new dresses as often as they could afford to, and lived for the dance halls, the cinema dates, the parade of men to choose from. There were plenty of men their age; they didn’t walk into a dance hall as Violet had done a few times after the War to find the only dancing partners were old enough to be her grandfather, or far too young, or damaged in a way Violet knew she could never fix. Or just not there, so that women danced with each other to fill the absence. As they typed, O and Mo talked and laughed about the men they met as if it were assumed men should be available. They had each gone through several boyfriends in the six months Violet had worked with them, though recently both had become more serious about their current beaux. Sometimes their high spirits and assumptions made Violet go and boil the kettle in the kitchen, even when she didn’t want tea, waiting until she had calmed down enough to go back and carry on with her rapid typing. She was a far more efficient typist than the girls – which they seemed to find funny.

Only once had Mo asked her if she’d had a chap, “back then.” “Yes.” Violet clipped her reply, refusing to make Laurence into an anecdote.

This week had been worse. Even the prospect of tea and a biscuit did not outweigh the dread Violet felt at having to watch tiny, buxom Olive straighten her fingers in front of her face for the umpteenth time to admire her engagement ring. On the Monday she had come into the office walking differently, pride setting her shoulders back and lifting her tight blonde curls. She had exchanged a sly, smug smile with Mo, already installed behind her typewriter, then announced as she shook out her chiffon scarf and hung up her coat, “I’m just off to speak to Mr Waterman.” She pulled off her gloves, and Violet couldn’t help it – she searched for the flash of light on O’s ring finger. The diamond was minute, but even a tiny sparkle is still a sparkle.

As O clipped down the hall in higher heels than the court shoes Violet wore, Mo – smarter than her friend but less conventionally attractive, with colourless hair, a long face and a tendency to frown – let her smile fade. If she were feeling kind at that moment, Violet would assure Mo that her current boyfriend – a reticent bank clerk who had stopped by the office once or twice – was sure to propose shortly. But she was not feeling kind, not about this subject; she remained silent while Mo stewed in her misery.

Since that day and O’s triumphant display of her ring, it was all the girls talked about: how Joe had proposed (at a pub, with the ring at the bottom of her glass of port and lemon), how long they would wait to save up for a proper do (two years), where the party would take place (same pub), what she would wear (white rather than ivory – which Violet knew was a mistake, as white would be too harsh for Olive’s complexion), where they would live (with his family until they could afford a place). It was all so banal and repetitive, with no interesting or surprising revelations or dreams or desires, that Violet thought she might go mad if she had to listen to this for two years.

She lit a cigarette to distract herself and suppress her appetite. Then she fed a sheet of paper through the typewriter rollers and began to type, making her way steadily through an application from Mr Richard Turner of Basingstoke for house insurance, which guaranteed payment if the house and contents were lost to fire or flood or some other act of God. Violet noticed that “war” was not included. She wondered if Mr Turner understood that not all loss could be replaced.

Mostly, though, she typed without thinking. Violet had typed so many of these applications to insure someone’s life, house, automobile, boat, that she rarely considered the meaning of the words. For her, typing was a meaningless, repetitive act that became a soothing meditation, lulling her into a state where she did not think; she simply was.

Soon enough O and Mo were back, their chatter preceding them down the hall and interrupting Violet’s trance-like peace. “After you, Mrs Hill,” Mo stood aside and gestured Olive through the door. Both wore floral summer dresses, O in peach, Mo in tan, reminding Violet that her plain blue linen dress was three years old, the dropped waist out of date. It was difficult to alter a dropped waist.

“Well, I don’t mind if I do, Miss Webster – soon to be Mrs Livingstone, I’m sure.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Mo looked eager, though.

Olive set down her cup of tea by her typewriter with a clatter, spilling some into the saucer. “Of course you will! You could marry sooner than I do. You may end up my matron of honour rather than my maid!” She held out her hand once more to inspect her ring.

Violet paused in her typing. Mrs Hill. It was a common enough name. Still … “Does your fiancé have a sister?”

“Who, Gilda? What about her? She’s just a warped old spins—” Olive seemed to recall whom she was talking to and bit her words back with a laugh, but not before Violet took in her dismissive tone. It made her decide to like Gilda Hill.

Chapter 2

VIOLET LIVED FIFTEEN MINUTES from the office in an area called the Soke, on the eastern side of Winchester just across the River Itchen. On a single typist’s salary, she could not afford the nicer areas in the west with their larger houses and gardens, their swept streets and well-maintained motor cars. The houses in the Soke were smaller yet had more inhabitants. There were fewer motor cars, and the local shops had dustier window displays and sold cheaper goods.

She shared the house with two other women as well as the landlady, who took up the ground floor. There were no men, of course, and even male visitors other than family were discouraged downstairs, and forbidden upstairs. On the rare occasion there were men in the front room, Mrs Harvey had a tendency to go in and out, looking for the copy of the Southern Daily Echo she’d left behind, or her reading glasses, or feeding the budgies she kept in a cage there, or fiddling with the fire when no one had complained of the cold, or reminding them to be in good time for the train. Not that Violet had any male visitors other than her brother Tom; but Mrs Harvey had given him this treatment until Violet showed her a family photo as evidence. Even then she did not leave them alone for long, but popped her head around the door to remind Tom that petrol stations shut early on Saturdays. Tom took it as a comic turn. “I feel I’m in a play and she’ll announce a body’s been found coshed over the head in the scullery,” he remarked with glee. It was easy for him to enjoy Mrs Harvey as entertainment since he did not have to live with her. Occasionally Violet wondered if in moving to Winchester she’d simply exchanged her mother for another who was equally tricky. On the other hand, she could go upstairs and shut her door on it all, which was harder to do with her mother. Mrs Harvey respected a closed door, as long as there was no man behind it; in Southampton her mother had sometimes barged into Violet’s bedroom as if the door did not exist.

Back now from work, she declined tea from her landlady but smuggled some milk up and put the kettle on in her own room. This was her seventh cup of the day, even having been out part of the afternoon at the Cathedral. Cups of tea punctuated moments, dividing before from after: sleeping from waking, walking to the office from sitting down to work, dinner from typing again, finishing a complicated contract from starting another, ending work from beginning her evening. Sometimes she used cigarettes as punctuation, but they made her giddy rather than settling her as tea did. And they were more expensive.

Sitting with her cup in the one armchair by the unlit fire – it was not cold enough to justify the coal – Violet looked around her cramped room. It was quiet, except for the ticking of a wooden clock she’d picked up at a junk shop a few weeks before. The pale sun sieved through the net curtains and lit up the swirling red and yellow and brown carpet. “Thunder and lightning carpet,” her father would have called it. Fawn-coloured stockings hung drying on a rack. In the corner an ugly battered wardrobe with a door that wouldn’t shut properly revealed the scant selection of dresses and blouses and skirts she had brought with her from Southampton.

Violet sighed. This is not how I was expecting it to be, she thought, this Winchester life.

Her move to Winchester last November had been sudden. After her father’s death Violet had limped along for a year and a half, living alone with her mother. It was expected of women like her – unwed and unlikely to – to look after their parents. She had done her best, she supposed. But Mrs Speedwell was impossible; she always had been, even before the loss of her eldest son George in the War. She was from an era when daughters were dutiful and deferential to their mothers, at least until they married and deferred to their husbands – not that Mrs Speedwell had ever deferred much to hers. When they were children, Violet and her brothers had avoided their mother’s attention, playing together as a tight gang run with casual authority by George. Violet was often scolded by Mrs Speedwell for not being feminine enough. “You’ll never get a husband with scraped knees and flyaway hair and being mad about books,” she declared. Little did she know that when the War came along, there would be worse things than books and scrapes to keep Violet from finding a husband.

As an adult Violet had been able to cope while her father was alive to lighten the atmosphere and absorb her mother’s excesses, raising his eyebrows behind her back and smiling at his daughter, making mild jokes when he could. Once he was gone, though, and Mrs Speedwell had no target for her scrutiny other than her daughter – her younger son Tom having married and escaped years before – Violet had to bear the full weight of her attention.

As they had sat by the fire one evening, Violet began to count her mother’s complaints. “The light’s too dim. The radio isn’t loud enough. Why are they laughing when it’s not funny? The salad cream at supper was off, I’m sure of it. Your hair looks dreadful – did you try to wave it yourself? Have you gained weight? I am not at all sure Tom and Evelyn should be sending Marjory to that school. What would Geoffrey think? Oh, not more rain! It’s bringing out the damp in the hall.”

Eight in a row, Violet thought. What depressed her even more than the complaints themselves was that she had counted them. She sighed.

“Sighing makes your face sag, Violet,” her mother chided. “It does you no favours.”

The next day at work she spied on the notice board a position for a typist in the regional Winchester office, which was doing well despite the depressed economy. Violet clutched her cup of tea and closed her eyes. Don’t sigh, she thought. When she opened them she went to see the manager.

Everything about the change was easier than she had expected, at least at first. The manager at Southern Counties Insurance agreed to the move, Tom was supportive (“About bloody time!”), and she found a room to let at Mrs Harvey’s without much fuss. At first her mother took Violet’s careful announcement that she was moving to Winchester with a surprising lack of reaction other than to say, “Canada is where you should be going. That is where the husbands are.” But on the rainy Saturday in November when Tom drove over with Evelyn and the children and began to load Violet’s few possessions into his Austin, Mrs Speedwell would not get up from her armchair in the sitting room. She sat with a cold, untouched cup of tea beside her and with trembling fingers smoothed the antimacassars covering the arms of the chair. She did not look at Violet as she came in to say goodbye. “When George was taken from us I never thought I would have to go through the ordeal of losing another child,” she announced to the room. Marjory and Edward were putting together a jigsaw in front of the coal fire; Violet’s solemn niece gazed up at her grandmother, her wide hazel eyes following Mrs Speedwell’s agitated hands as she continued to smooth and re-smooth the antimacassars.

“Mother, you’re not losing me. I’m moving twelve miles away!” Even as she said it, though, Violet knew that in a way her mother was right.

“And for the child to choose for me to lose her,” Mrs Speedwell continued as if Violet had not spoken and indeed was not even in the room. “Unforgivable. At least poor George had no choice; it was the War, he did it for his country. But this! Treacherous.”

“For God’s sake, Mum, Violet’s not died,” Tom interjected as he passed by with a box full of plates and cups and cutlery from the kitchen that Violet hoped her mother wouldn’t miss.

“Well, it’s on her hands. If I don’t wake up one morning and no one discovers me dead in my bed for days, she’ll be sorry then! Or maybe she won’t be. Maybe she’ll carry on as usual.”

“Mummy, is Granny going to die?” Edward asked, a puzzle piece suspended in the air in the clutch of his hand. He did not appear to be upset by the idea; merely curious.

“That’s enough of such talk,” Evelyn replied. A brisk brunette, she was used to Mrs Speedwell, and Violet admired how efficiently she had learned to shut down her mother-in-law. It was always easier when you weren’t related. She had sorted out Tom as well, after the War. Violet appreciated her sister-in-law but was a little too intimidated to be true friends with her. “Come, give your Auntie Violet a kiss goodbye. Then we’ll go down to the shops while Daddy drives her to Winchester.”

Marjory and Edward scrambled to their feet and gave Violet obedient pecks on the cheek that made her smile.

“Why can’t we come to Winchester?” Edward asked. “I want to ride in Daddy’s car.”

“We explained before, Eddie. Auntie Violet has her things to move, so there’s no space for us.”

Actually, Auntie Violet didn’t have so very much to move. She was surprised that her life fitted into so few suitcases and boxes. There was still space on the back seat for another passenger, and she rather wished Edward could come with them. He was a spirited little boy who would keep her cheerful with his non-sequiturs and shameless solipsism. If forced to focus on his world, she would not think of her own. But she knew she could not ask for him to come along and not Marjory or Evelyn, and so she said nothing as they began to pull on their shoes and coats for their expedition in the rain.

When it became clear that Mrs Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. “Goodbye, Mother,” she murmured. “I’ll see you next Sunday.”

Mrs Speedwell sniffed. “Don’t bother. I may be dead by then.”

One of Tom’s best qualities was that he knew when to keep quiet. On the way to Winchester he let Violet cry without comment. Cocooned by the steamed-up windows and the smell of hot oil and leather, she leaned back in the sprung seat and sobbed. Near Twyford, however, her sobs diminished, then stopped.

She had always loved riding in Tom’s handsome brown and black car, marvelling at how the space held her apart from the world and yet whisked her efficiently from place to place. “Perhaps I’ll get a car,” she declared, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief embroidered with violets – one of Evelyn’s practical Christmas presents to her. Even as she said it she knew she could afford no such luxury: she was going to be dreadfully poor, though as yet that felt like something of a game. “Will you teach me to drive?” she asked, lighting a cigarette and cracking open a window.

“That’s the spirit, old girl,” Tom replied, changing gears to climb a hill. His affable nature had helped Violet to cope with her mother over the years, as well as with the War and its effects. Tom had turned eighteen shortly after news of his brother’s death came through, and joined up without hesitation or fuss. He never talked about his experiences in France; like Violet’s loss of her fiancé, they took a back seat to their brother’s death. Violet knew she took Tom for granted, as older children always do their younger siblings. They had both looked up to George, following his lead in their play as children. Once he was gone they had found themselves at sea. Was Violet then meant to take on the role of the eldest, to assume command and set the example for Tom to follow? If so, she had made a poor job of it. She was a typist at an insurance company; she had not married and begun a family. Tom had quietly overtaken her – though he never gloated or apologised. He didn’t need to: he was a man, and it was expected of him to achieve.

After they had moved her things in under Mrs Harvey’s watchful eye, he took her for fish and chips. “Mum’s a tough old boot, you know,” he reassured her over their meal. “She got through George, and Dad too. She’ll survive this. And so will you. Just don’t stay in your room all the time. Don’t want to be getting ‘one-room-itis’, isn’t that what they call it? Get out, meet some people.”

Meet some men, he meant. He was more subtle than her mother about the subject, but she knew Tom too wished she would miraculously find a man to marry, even at this late age. A widower, perhaps, with grown children. Or a man who needed help with injuries. The War might have ended thirteen years before, but the injuries lasted a lifetime. Once married, she would be off Tom’s hands, a niggling burden he would no longer have to worry about. Otherwise Violet might have to live with her brother one day; it was what spinsters often did.

But it was not easy to meet men, because there were two million fewer of them than women. Violet had read many newspaper articles about these “surplus women”, as they were labelled, left single as a result of the War and unlikely to marry – considered a tragedy, and a threat, in a society set up for marriage. Journalists seemed to relish the label, brandishing it like a pin pressed into the skin. Mostly it was an annoyance; occasionally, though, the pin penetrated the protective layers and drew blood. She had assumed it would hurt less as she grew older, and was surprised to find that even at thirty-eight – middle-aged – labels could still wound. But she had been called worse: hoyden, shrew, man-hater.

Violet did not hate men, and had not been entirely man-free. Two or three times a year, she had put on her best dress – copper lamé in a scallop pattern – gone alone to a Southampton hotel bar, and sat with a sherry and a cigarette until someone took interest. Her “sherry men”, she called them. Sometimes they ended up in an alley or a motor car or a park; never in his room, certainly not at her parents’. To be desired was welcome, though she did not feel the intense pleasure from the encounters that she once had with Laurence during the Perseids.

Every August Violet and her father and brothers had watched the Perseid showers. Violet had never said anything to her father during those late nights in the garden, watching for streaks in the sky, but she did not really like star-gazing. The cold – even in August – the dew fall, the crick in the neck: there were never visions spectacular enough to overcome these discomforts. She would make a terrible astronomer, for she preferred to be warm.

The Perseid showers she remembered best were in August 1916, when Laurence had got leave and come to see her. They’d taken a train out to Romsey, had supper at a pub, then walked out into the fields and spread out a rug. If anyone happened upon them, they could be given a mini-lecture by Laurence about the Perseids, how the earth passed in its orbit through the remnants of a comet every August and created spectacular meteor showers. They were there in the field to watch, merely to watch. And they did watch, for a short while, on their backs holding hands.

After witnessing a few meteors streak across the sky, Violet turned on her side so that she was facing Laurence, her hipbone digging into a stone under the blanket, and said to him, “Yes.” Though he had not asked a question aloud, there had been one hanging between them, ever since they had got engaged the year before.

She could feel him smile, though she couldn’t see his face in the dark. He rolled towards her. After a while Violet was no longer cold, and no longer cared about the movement of the stars in the sky above, but only the movement of his body against hers.

They say a woman’s first time is painful, bloody, a shock you must get used to. It was nothing like that for Violet. She exploded, stronger it seemed than any Perseids, and Laurence was delighted. They stayed in the field so long that they missed any possibility of a train back, and had to walk the seven miles, until a veteran of the Boer Wars passed them in his motor car, recognised a soldier’s gait, and stopped to give them a lift, smiling at the grass in Violet’s hair and her startled happiness.

Only a week later they received the telegram about George’s death at Delville Woods. And a year later, Laurence at Passchendaele. He and Violet had not managed to spend more time properly alone together, in a field or a hotel room or even an alley. With each loss she had tumbled into a dark pit, a void opening up inside her that made her feel helpless and hopeless. Her brother was gone, her fiancé was gone, God was gone. It took a long time for the gap to close, if it ever really did.

A few years later when she could face it, she tried to experience again what she’d had with Laurence that night, this time with one of George’s old friends who had come through the War physically unscathed. But there were no Perseids – only a painful awareness of each moment that killed any pleasure and just made her despise his rubbery lips.

She suspected she would never feel pleasure with her sherry men. She had laughed about them with scandalised girlfriends, for a time; but some of her friends managed to marry the few available men, and others withdrew into sexless lives and stopped wanting to hear about her exploits. Marriage in particular brought many changes to her friends, and one was donning a hat of conservatism that made them genuinely and easily shocked and threatened. One of those sherry men could be their husband. And so Violet began to keep quiet about what she got up to those few times a year. Slowly, as husbands and children took over, and the tennis games and cinema trips and dance hall visits dried up, the friendships drifted. When she left Southampton there was really no one left to regret leaving, or give her address to, or invite to tea.

“Violet, where have you gone?” Tom was studying her over the remains of his chips.

Violet shook her head. “Sorry – just, you know.”

Her brother reached over and hugged her – a surprise, as they were not the hugging sort of siblings. They walked back to Mrs Harvey’s, where his motor car was parked. Violet stood in the doorway and watched his Austin hiss away through the wet street, then went upstairs. She had thought she might cry when finally alone, in her shabby new room, with a door she could shut against the world. But she had cried her tears out on the trip from Southampton. Instead she looked around at the sparse furnishings, nodded, and put the kettle on.

Chapter 3

VIOLET HAD NOT REALLY understood how hard it would be to get along on her own on a typist’s salary. Or she had, but vowed to manage anyway – the price she paid for her independence from her mother. When she’d lived with her parents, she handed over almost two-thirds of her weekly salary to help with the running of the household, keeping five shillings back for her own expenses – dinner, clothes, cigarettes, sixpenny magazines – and putting another few shillings in the bank. Over the years her savings had gradually built up, but she assumed she would need them for her older years when her parents were gone. She had to eat into them more substantially than she’d expected to pay for the deposit on her lodgings in the Soke, and for some bits and pieces to make the room more comfortable. Her mother had plenty to spare in the Southampton house, but Violet knew better than to ask. Perhaps if she were moving to Canada to find a husband, Mrs Speedwell would have been willing to ship furniture thousands of miles. But sending anything twelve miles up the road was an affront. Instead Violet had to scour the junk shops of Winchester for a cheap bedside table when there was a pretty rattan one sitting in her old bedroom, or a chunky green ashtray rather than an almost identical one in the Southampton sitting room, or a couple of chipped majolica plates for the mantelpiece when her mother had any number of knick-knacks in boxes in the attic. It had not occurred to her to take such extras when she moved out, for she had never had to make a strange room into a home before.

Violet was still earning thirty-five shillings a week at the Winchester office, the same as her Southampton salary. It was considered a good one for a typist – she had been at the company for ten years, and her typing was fast and accurate. It had felt generous when she lived at home; she could have a hot dinner most days and not think too hard before buying cigarettes or a new lipstick. But it was not a salary you could easily live on alone; it was rather like a pair of ill-fitting shoes that could be worn, but that pinched and rubbed and left calluses. Now that Violet had to survive on it she understood that, proud as she had been to earn and contribute to the running of the house, her parents must have regarded what she handed over almost as pocket money.

The same amount she’d given to her parents now went to her landlady, and it only covered breakfast; she paid for and cooked her own supper, and she had to pay for laundry and coal – things she’d taken for granted at home. Whenever she left the house she seemed to spend money – just little bits here and there, but it added up. Living was a constant expense. Violet could no longer put aside any money to save. She had to learn to make do, and do without. She began wearing the same clothes over and over, and washing them under the tap to avoid an excessive laundry bill, mending tears and hiding worn patches with brooches or scarves, knowing that whatever she did would never refresh the shabbiness. Only new clothes could do that.

She stopped buying magazines and papers, relying on O and Mo’s cast-offs, and did not replace her lipsticks. She began to ration her cigarettes to three a day. Many evening meals consisted of sardines on toast or fried sprats rather than a chop, for meat was too dear. Violet was not keen on breakfast – she would have preferred toast and marmalade – but since she was paying for it she forced herself to eat the poached egg Mrs Harvey served every morning, afterwards arriving at work faintly queasy. She took herself to the cinema every week – her one indulgence, which she paid for by going without a meal that day. The first film she saw in Winchester was called Almost a Honeymoon, about a man who had to find a woman to marry in twenty-four hours. It was so painful she wanted to leave halfway through, but it was warm in the cinema and she could not justify sacrificing a meal only to walk out early.

Every Sunday she took the train to Southampton to accompany her mother to church, the money for the ticket coming from her slowly diminishing savings. It would never have occurred to Mrs Speedwell to offer to pay. She never asked Violet about money, nor about her job nor Winchester nor any aspect of her new life, which made a two-way conversation difficult. Indeed, Mrs Speedwell just spent the afternoons complaining, as if she had been saving up all of her grievances for the few hours her daughter was with her. If Tom and Evelyn and the children weren’t there, Violet almost always made an excuse and took an earlier train back, defiant and guilty in equal measure. Then she would sit in her room reading a novel (she was making her way through Trollope, her father’s favourite), or go for a walk in the water meadows by the river, or catch the end of Evensong at Winchester Cathedral.

Whenever she walked through the front entrance below the Great West Window and into the Cathedral, the long nave in front of her and the vast space above bounded by a stunning vaulted ceiling, Violet felt the whole weight of the nine-hundred-year-old building hover over her, and wanted to cry. It was the only place built specifically for spiritual sustenance in which she felt she was indeed being spiritually fed. Not necessarily from the services, which apart from Evensong were formulaic and rigid, though the repetition was comforting. It was more the reverence for the place itself, for the knowledge of the many thousands of people who had come there throughout its history, looking for a place in which to be free to consider the big questions about life and death rather than worrying about paying for the winter’s coal or needing a new coat.

She loved it for the more concrete things as well: for its coloured windows and elegant arches and carvings, for its old patterned tiles, for the elaborate tombs of bishops and kings and noble families, for the surprising painted bosses that covered the joins between the stone ribs on the distant ceiling, and for all of the energy that had gone into making those things, for the creators throughout history.

Like most smaller services, Evensong was held in the choir. The choir boys with their scrubbed, mischievous faces sat in one set of stall benches, the congregants in the other, with any overflow in the adjacent presbytery seats. Violet suspected Evensong was considered frivolous by regular church goers compared to Sunday morning services, but she preferred the lighter touch of music to the booming organ, and the shorter, simpler sermon to the hectoring morning one. She did not pray or listen to the prayers – prayers had died in the War alongside George and Laurence and a nation full of young men. But when she sat in the choir stalls, she liked to study the carved oak arches overhead, decorated with leaves and flowers and animals and even a Green Man whose moustache turned into abundant foliage. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the looming enormity of the nave, but sitting here with the boys’ ethereal voices around her, she felt safe from the void that at times threatened to overwhelm her. Sometimes, quietly and unostentatiously, she cried.

One Sunday afternoon a few weeks after the Presentation of Embroideries service, Violet slipped late into the presbytery as a visiting dean was giving the sermon. When she went to sit she moved a kneeler that had been placed on the chair, then held it in her lap and studied it. It was a rectangle about nine by twelve inches with a mustard-coloured circle like a medallion in the centre surrounded by a mottled field of blue. The medallion design was of a bouquet of branches with chequer-capped acorns amongst blue-green foliage. Chequered acorns had been embroidered in the four corners as well. The colours were surprisingly bright, the pattern cheerful and un-churchlike. It reminded Violet of the background of mediaeval tapestries with their intricate millefleurs arrangement of leaves and flowers. This design was simpler than that but nonetheless captured an echo from the past.

They all did, she thought, placing the kneeler on the floor and glancing at those around her, each with a central circle of flowers or knots on a blue background. There were not yet enough embroidered kneelers for every chair, and the rest had the usual unmemorable hard lozenges of red and black felt. The new embroidered ones lifted the tone of the presbytery, giving it colour and a sense of designed purpose.

At the service’s end, Violet picked up the kneeler to look at it again, smiling as she traced with her finger the chequered acorns. It always seemed a contradiction to have to be solemn in the Cathedral amidst the uplifting beauty of the stained glass, the wood carving, the stone sculpture, the glorious architecture, the boys’ crystalline tones, and now the kneelers.

A hovering presence made her look up. A woman about her age stood in the aisle next to her, staring at the kneeler Violet held. She was wearing a swagger coat in forest green that swung from her shoulders and had a double row of large black buttons running down the front. Matching it was a dark green felt hat with feathers tucked in the black band. Despite her modish attire, she did not have the appearance of being modern, but looked rather as if she had stepped aside from the flow of the present. Her hair was not waved; her pale grey eyes seemed to float in her face.

“Sorry. Would you mind if I—” She reached out to flip over the kneeler and reveal the dark blue canvas underside. “I just like to look at it when I’m here. It’s mine, you see.” She tapped on the border. Violet squinted: stitched there were the initials and a year: DJ 1932.

Violet watched her gazing at her handiwork. “How long did it take you to make it?” she asked, partly out of politeness, but curiosity too.

“Two months. I had to unpick bits a few times. These kneelers may be used in the Cathedral for centuries, and so they must be made correctly from the start.” She paused. “Ars longa, vita brevis.”

Violet thought back to her Latin at school. “Art is long, life short,” she quoted her old Latin teacher.

“Yes.”

Violet could not imagine the kneeler being there for hundreds of years. The War had taught her not to assume that anything would last, even something as substantial as a cathedral, much less a mere kneeler. Indeed, just twenty-five years before, a diver, William Walker, had been employed for five years to shore up the foundations of Winchester Cathedral with thousands of sacks of concrete so that the building would not topple in on itself. Nothing could be taken for granted.

She wondered if the builders of the Cathedral nine hundred years ago had thought of her, standing under their arches, next to their thick pillars, on top of their mediaeval tiles, lit by their stained glass – a woman in 1932, living and worshipping so differently from how they did. They would not have conjured up Violet Speedwell, that seemed certain.

She put out a hand as “DJ” set her kneeler on a chair and made to move off. “Are you a member of the Cathedral Broderers?”

DJ paused. “Yes.”

“If one wanted to contact them, how …”

“There is a sign on the notice board in the porch about the meetings.” She looked at Violet directly for a moment, then filed out after the other congregants.

Violet did not intend to look for the notice. She thought she had set aside the kneelers in her mind. But several days later, out for a walk by the Cathedral, she found herself drawn to the notice board and the sign about the broderers, written in careful copperplate like her mother’s handwriting. Violet copied down a number for Mrs Humphrey Biggins, and that evening used her landlady’s telephone to ring.

“Compton 220.” Mrs Biggins herself answered the telephone. Violet knew immediately it wasn’t a daughter, or a housekeeper, or a sister. She sounded so much like Violet’s mother in her better days that it silenced her, and Mrs Biggins had to repeat “Compton 220” with increased irritation until she eventually demanded, “Who is this? I will not tolerate these silences. I shall be phoning the police to report you, you can be sure!”

“I’m sorry,” Violet stumbled. “Perhaps I have the wrong number” – though she knew that she did not. “I’m – I’m ringing about the kneelers in the Cathedral.”

“Young lady, your telephone manner is dreadful. You are all of a muddle. You must say your name clearly, and then ask to speak to me, and say what your call concerns. Now try it.”

Violet shuddered and almost put down the telephone. When the Speedwells first had a telephone installed, her mother had given her lessons in telephone etiquette, though she had often put off potential callers herself with her impatient manner. But Violet knew she must persist or she would never have her own kneeler in Winchester Cathedral. “My name is Violet Speedwell,” she began obediently, feeling like a small child. “I would like to speak to Mrs Biggins with regard to the embroidery project at the Cathedral.”

“That’s better. But you are ringing very late, and at the wrong time. Our classes finish shortly for the summer and don’t resume until the autumn. Miss Pesel and Miss Blunt need time over the summer to work on designs for the next batch.”

“All right, I’ll ring back then. Sorry to have troubled you.”

“Not so hasty, Miss Speedwell. May I assume you are a ‘Miss’ Speedwell?”

Violet gritted her teeth. “Yes.”

“Well, you young people are far too quick to give up.”

It had been a long time since Violet had been called a young person.

“Now, do you know how to embroider? We do canvas embroidery for the cushions and kneelers. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“Of course you don’t. Why do we attract so many volunteers who have never held a needle? It makes our work so much more time-consuming.”

“Perhaps you could think of me as a blank canvas, with no faults to unpick.”

Mrs Biggins’ tone softened. “There you may be right, Miss Speedwell. A blank slate can indeed be easier. Now, we hold meetings two days a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, from half past ten to half past twelve and then half past two to four o’clock, both days. Come along to the next and we’ll see what we can do. If nothing else we can get you helping out – copying designs, or tidying the cupboards, perhaps.”

Violet remembered what Gilda had said about cupboards. “Actually, I’m afraid I am not available then, Mrs Biggins. I work, you see.”

“You work? Where?”

“In an office.”

“Why, then, have you telephoned me? And so late in the evening, I might add. If your time is taken up elsewhere, then I’m afraid you are of no use to the Cathedral Broderers. We demand total commitment.”

“But—” Violet hesitated, wondering how to explain to this overbearing woman that she wanted to make a kneeler – one that kept knees from aching during prayers and that she could look out for specially in the Cathedral presbytery. One that might last long after she was dead. Over the centuries others had carved heads into the choir stalls, or sculpted elaborate figures of saints from marble, or designed sturdy, memorable columns and arches, or fitted together coloured glass for the windows: all glorious additions to a building whose existence was meant to make you raise your eyes to Heaven to thank God. Violet wanted to do what they had done. She was unlikely to have children now, so if she was to make a mark on the world, she would have to do so in another way. A kneeler was a stupid, tiny gesture, but there it was. “I would like to make a kneeler for the Cathedral,” she finally said in a small voice, then hated herself for it.

Mrs Biggins sighed. “Everyone would, my dear. But what we really need – not what you need – are skilled embroiderers to work on the cushions Miss Pesel has planned for the choir seats and benches. Not beginners looking to conquer the Cathedral with a simple kneeler.”

Violet was silent. From years of experience with her mother, she had learned that silence was often more effective than words.

“What company do you work for?”

“Southern Counties Insurance.”

“What, for Mr Waterman?”

“Yes.”

“There shouldn’t be a problem, then. He lives in our village. I know him from our local bird-watching society. You tell him Mrs Humphrey Biggins has asked for you to be allowed to take half a day’s leave to attend class.”

Violet was not at all sure she wanted to give up her precious annual leave to attend embroidery classes. “Are there no classes outside of work hours – in the evenings, or on a Saturday?”

Mrs Biggins snorted. “Do you think we’re organising meetings to suit you? Some of us have families to look after. Now, you ask Mr Waterman to let you take time off. I’ll expect to see you on Wednesday at half past ten, at Church House in the Inner Close. Good night.” She hung up before Violet could reply.

Whose telephone manner needs work? she thought.

It seemed Mrs Biggins’ rules about when to telephone others did not apply to herself. When Violet arrived at the office the next morning, Mr Waterman had already left a note on her desk giving permission for her to take Wednesday morning off. Despite the hour, Mrs Biggins must have telephoned him immediately after speaking to Violet, not trusting her to ask her supervisor herself. Later, Violet ran into him in the corridor and thanked him. A nondescript man with brown hair, pasty skin and a drooping moustache that partially covered his tentative smile, he ducked his head as if Mrs Biggins were lurking somewhere nearby.

“I don’t mind how you use your annual leave,” he replied, “and for a noble cause, too.” He paused, fiddling with his shirt cuffs, which were not as clean as they could be. Mrs Biggins would bleach them till they gleamed, Violet thought. “Take care, though, Miss Speedwell,” he added. “Once Mrs Biggins gets her claws in you, you’ll never be free!” He wheeled around and hurried back the way he had come, as if frightened he’d said too much.

Chapter 4

THOUGH ANNOYED BY MRS Biggins’ interference, as well as her mixed messages – Come on Wednesday but you won’t be much use to us – Violet found herself looking forward to the broderers’ meeting. Her brother had been pestering her ever since she moved to Winchester to join some groups – ramblers, historical societies, benevolent church funds, anything that would bring her into contact with potential friends and suitors. Now she could genuinely answer that she was doing just that – although suitors were rather unlikely at an embroidery group.

On Wednesday morning it felt odd to sleep in on a working day, to dawdle over breakfast and not have to join the queue to wash. Violet sat in her tea-coloured dressing gown, lit a cigarette and listened to the house empty of its inhabitants – the other lodgers to their various employments, her landlady to the shops. Eventually she got dressed, aware that the broderers would note her choice of clothes, her hair, her makeup. After some thought she donned a simple chiffon dress in pale green with yellow flowers, and her beige cardigan in case the embroidery room was chilly.

Church House was one of a row of houses in the Inner Close, to the south of the Cathedral. Violet had walked past the buildings before but had never considered what might be going on inside. She felt a little sick as she approached the entrance, a feeling similar to that on her first day of work at the Winchester office – the war in her gut between craving the new and clinging to the comfort of the familiar. The door had a bell to one side with a small handwritten sign that read, Ring the bell. That impertinent sign almost made Violet turn around and hurry away. But hurry away to what – an empty room? Window shopping with no money in her purse? The office, where they wouldn’t even notice she’d not been there?

She rang the bell. After a moment a girl answered, looked her up and down, and before Violet could say a word, commanded, “Up the stairs, right and all the way down the passage to the last room.”

How does she know? Violet thought, and suddenly wished she had worn something different – though what, exactly, she wasn’t sure. She found the room and forced herself to enter boldly, like plunging into the cold sea rather than hesitating on the shore. She was not late – as she walked down the corridor Violet had heard the Cathedral bells sounding the half hour – but the dozen chairs around the long table were almost full. Some women were already bent over pieces of canvas, glancing at patterns and needling coloured wool in and out of the tiny holes. Others were murmuring over embroidered work they held, presumably discussing a technique or comparing results.

No one looked up as she came in. Violet wondered if she had got the time wrong, if they had started at ten or nine-thirty. No, she was sure Mrs Biggins had said ten-thirty. These must be the keen ones. The feeling in the room was one of quiet purpose, tinged with a drop of self-satisfaction, which would be denied if anyone accused them of such a thing.

Even if she hadn’t recognised her from the broderers’ service, Violet immediately guessed who Mrs Biggins must be from her demeanour, so similar to her telephone manner. She wore a high-necked blouse and hair piled and puffed on top of her head, her style being stranded somewhere around 1910. She was not walking about to peer over each embroiderer’s shoulder at her work. Instead she sat at one end of the table, where the Chairman of the Board would be during meetings, and let workers come to her, placing their bit of stitching before her like an offering. There she scrutinised and pronounced. As Violet watched, she flattened three embroiderers in rapid succession. “No, no, no, you have only used two shades of blue in this corner. You must know Miss Pesel’s first principle of background work – three shades must be used throughout, to give texture and shading. You shall have to unpick your work and redo it.”

“See now, here you have pulled too hard, so that the stitches are too tight and the tension uneven. That will not do at all – you will have to unpick that section.”

“Have you mixed two stitches here? Is that cross-stitch and long-armed cross alternated? Oh my dear, no! Miss Pesel is encouraging us to become more adventurous with the stitches we use, but never on God’s green earth should you alternate those two. Start again!”

Each woman nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am, I’ll rework it,” or some similar response, then scuttled away like dogs scolded for stealing bones from the dinner table. Back at their seats, they frowned and muttered to their neighbours.

“Where is your work?” Mrs Biggins demanded as Violet approached.

“I’ve not done any yet. This is my first time. We spoke on the telephone.”

“Miss Speedwell, is it? No embroidery experience at all? All right, let’s get you started. You can work with Mrs Way. Mabel!” she called. “Here’s Miss Speedwell to help you sort the cupboard.”

A thin woman in a grey dress with hair to match stepped back from a large cupboard in the corner. It was the usher who had tried to keep Violet from the broderers’ service at the Cathedral. She started when she recognised the newcomer. “It’s not looking too bad, Mrs Biggins,” she insisted. “I don’t really need the help.”

“Nonsense. A tidy cupboard sets up the whole endeavour and helps us to work better.”

Violet took a deep breath. She had no choice but to stand up for herself, as she had with her mother when she moved to Winchester, and as she had with Mabel Way a few weeks before. Else there was no point being here.

“I was hoping to learn embroidery, not tidying.” She spoke in a low voice, but it seemed everyone heard, for the room went quiet.

Mrs Biggins sat up straight, as if to rearrange the rod up her back. “Miss Speedwell, I know you are keen to make your unique contribution to the Cathedral with your very own kneeler. But this is a cooperative operation, and in the spirit of cooperation, we all have tasks to perform here, many of which do not involve embroidering but are nonetheless essential to our endeavour. Now, you go over to the cupboard and help Mabel make it the tidiest cupboard in Winchester. Only then will we teach you to thread a needle.”

Violet turned red during this public dressing-down. If this was to be what embroidering for Winchester Cathedral was like – sorting cupboards and being condescended to – perhaps she should walk out and abandon the idea of a kneeler with her initials on it. She could leave the Cathedral Broderers in their room in Church House and go for a walk instead, along the river through the water meadows, admiring the harebells and poppies and campanula on the verges. Or watch the Winchester College boys playing cricket on their grounds. Or she could go home and reach for the bottle of cheap sherry she tried not to resort to too often. Or go to the Royal Hotel and have her sherry there, though she could not afford it, waiting for a man to sit down across from her and pay for another.

She did not have to do any of that, for at that moment the smiling woman who had been in the front bench at the Presentation of Embroideries service walked in. Immediately the tension in the room eased. Violet had never known one person to have such a marked effect on an atmosphere. She was a short woman in her early sixties, with spectacles and a soft double chin, her grey hair drawn back in a low, loose bun. Her wide mouth maintained a slight smile that reassured rather than judged. “Ladies, I am delighted to see you here,” was all she said, and yet somehow it was enough. As is often the case, a leader comfortable with her authority does not need to be strident, but can afford to be generous. It felt like being visited by the nicest, strictest mother possible.

The women who had been scolded went about unpicking their work with renewed energy, and others crowded around, calling, “Miss Pesel, may I have a word? Miss Pesel, I would be grateful if you could check my eyelets – I cannot get them to lie flat. Miss Pesel, have I mixed the yellows as you wanted? Miss Pesel …” They were like schoolgirls eager to please a favourite teacher. Even Mrs Biggins softened.

Eventually, Violet thought, she will get to me. In the meantime, helping Mabel Way with a messy cupboard suddenly did not seem so bad. She did not want Miss Pesel to find her idle. Even as Violet joined her by the enormous wardrobe set against the back wall, Mabel’s permanent frown lessened slightly, as if a rubber had been taken to the lines on her brow. “Perhaps it might help me to see what there is in here,” Violet suggested, “until I can begin learning to embroider.”

Mabel Way nodded, her eyes on Miss Pesel as she made her way around the room, like a bride at a wedding greeting her guests. “I have some work I want to show her. Why don’t you continue to separate the hanks of blue wool into piles, making sure they’ve not got mixed up? Look, I’ve made a start, light to dark.” She gestured at the wool sitting on the wide windowsill next to the wardrobe, then hurried off.

Violet gazed at the hanks. She had not handled wool since she was a girl and went through a phase of learning from her grandmother to knit and crochet. She had made her mother a bed jacket Mrs Speedwell never even tried on, and her father a muddy yellow-green scarf that he loyally wore to work for two weeks while her mother daily complained that he would be made fun of for humouring his daughter. When the scarf mysteriously disappeared, Mrs Speedwell denied all knowledge.

Mabel Way had removed the blues from the reds and yellows and oranges and browns, and it seemed to Violet that there were only two shades – light and dark blue – and they were already sorted. She was not sure what more she could do with them, and peered into the cupboard to see if there was anything else she might tidy – though organisation was not her forte. Her brothers had always kept their clothes and toys and books in better order than she. George had arranged his books in alphabetical order, Tom by colour and size. Violet’s ended up jumbled together, books she loved and despised side by side, books she hadn’t read next to those she had. Her clothes were similar: she brushed her dresses and skirts and hung them with care, yet somehow they became wrinkled and disordered. Her hair too would not stay in its waves, but went flat too easily. It hadn’t mattered so much at home, but now that she was trying to be independent, she noticed these small failures.

The embroiderers’ cupboard was a thing of beauty, if you liked your beauty labelled and tidy. It had been fitted out with numerous shelves, each with handwritten labels glued on: Kneelers; Choir Stall Seat Cushions; Choir Long Bench Cushions. There were boxes of various sizes, separating the coloured wools from one another, and stacks of designs. There were several boxes of Models, and rolls of Canvas made of hemp (Single-Weave or Double-Weave). If she studied the cupboard for half an hour, Violet would understand how the broderers’ project was set up. Perhaps that was why Mrs Biggins had assigned her to it.

The cupboard reminded her of the lessons on stationery at the secretarial college she had gone to a year or two after the War, when she’d finally accepted marriage was no longer a given and she needed to do something with her time other than be a companion to her mother. Mostly the girls were taught typing and shorthand, but there had also been a few sessions on organising stationery cupboards, with rules to learn such as always putting the heaviest, bulkiest things on the lower shelves, or using box lids to sort and keep pen nibs and rubber bands and paperclips in. Violet had thought it all beneath her dignity, yet she failed her first exam in stationery organisation. She chuckled now, remembering.

“You’re here! After the broderers’ service I wondered if you might come along to a meeting.” Gilda Hill had arrived, and hurried over to her. She wore a floral red and white dress with a V-neck that mirrored her triangular face. Her slash of bright red lipstick made Violet aware of her own chewed lips.

“Hello.” Violet felt almost shy as she held out her hand. “I’m Violet Speedwell.”

Gilda pumped her hand. “Gilda Hill, remember? We’ll have such fun together. Now, don’t tell me Biggins has put you on cupboard duty! And with Mabel, I expect. Is she having you sort wool? It’s best if you hold it in the natural light. That’s why Mabel was sorting it on the sill. Didn’t she say? Honestly, she’s hopeless! And her embroidery! I shouldn’t point fingers, as mine’s nothing special. Let’s just say there’s a reason Mabel gets assigned to the cupboard so often. Did she or Mrs Biggins explain the blues? No? You’d best have a look at what I’m working on; then you’ll understand better.” From a bag at her feet she pulled out a rectangular frame with canvas stretched across it. “I’m making a kneeler for the presbytery. Nothing fancy – not like the choir cushions.”

“What different things are being made?” Violet interjected, already exhausted by her new friend’s patter.

“Biggins didn’t tell you? Of course not – she’ll never tell you anything so practical, she’ll just assume you know it. The first thing we began working on was the kneelers for the chairs near the altar in the presbytery, like this.” Gilda patted the embroidered rectangle. “There are to be hundreds of them eventually. These are all variations on a theme – a sort of mediaeval-style knot in the centre, circular, with flowers or geometrical shapes in them, set on a background patterned in blue with crosshatching or zigzags. Miss Pesel says we are always to use at least three shades of blue for the background, to give it texture. Those are the blues you’re sorting – four there, so when making a kneeler you choose three of the four. Then there are borders, made up of red or brown and cream or yellow squares or rectangles, and the corners have little motifs. They’re not too difficult to make, and there’s a surprising amount of variety in stitch and tone, so that they feel individual but are harmonious when all together. Miss Pesel is a genius designer.”

Violet nodded, wondering if she would get to meet the genius.

“Then there are two types of cushions – stall seat cushions, which are smaller ones for the seats along the back of the choir; and bench cushions, which will be much longer. The bench cushions and some of the seat cushions will have a series of medallions in the centres that Miss Sybil Blunt is designing. She is a friend of Miss Pesel’s – she just does the designs, so you won’t see her much at these meetings. The medallions are to be scenes from English history, with a Winchester twist. So there will be kings who have ruled here or are buried here or have connections here, like Alfred and Canute and Richard the Lionheart, and one of King Arthur. And there will be famous Winchester bishops like Wykeham and Beaufort and Wodeloke.”

“Are there any women?”

“Wives. Emma and Mary Tudor. In terms of embroidery style, the history medallions will be a mix of large stitches and petit-point using finer wool and silk, and which require more skill. Only the more experienced broderers will work on them. The rest of us will fill in the backgrounds and borders. Miss Pesel has done the top of one of the history cushions to show us what we’ll be aiming to make. Would you like to see it?”

Violet nodded.

“Biggins will have stored it in the cupboard in the hall, I expect. You go back to your sorting and I’ll fetch it.” She pulled out two hanks of blue from the bundle. “Here’s your third and fourth blues.”

Violet stared. “They look the same to me.”

Gilda laughed. “Once you’ve worked with them for months you become intimate with each shade.” She winked as she hurried away.

Violet studied the wool, straining to distinguish between the different tones of blue. She closed her eyes for a moment, and thought about a drawing class she had taken several years before in Southampton. She had gone with a friend, who married the next year and disappeared into that life, keen not to be reminded by Violet of her previous surplus status. As they scraped their pencils over rough drawing paper, their teacher – a genial man who’d lost an arm in the War (“Not the drawing arm, mind – thank God for His small mercies”) – told them to be like soldiers and close the mind while opening the eyes.

It had made Violet wonder if Laurence had done that – followed orders and stopped thinking on the battlefield. There was no information about how he died, no account from his commanding officer or fellow soldiers, no small details (“He made the men smile with his imitations of the Kaiser”) or strong adjectives or adverbs (“Lieutenant Furniss fought bravely alongside his comrades and played a major role in defending the territory gained”). Perhaps the officer had written too many of those letters that day and had run dry of uplifting phrases and superlatives. Or maybe no one had seen what happened to Laurence Furniss: he was one of hundreds of British soldiers who died at Passchendaele on the 1st of August 1917. Presumably he had done nothing out of the ordinary; dying that day wasn’t special. Although no one said, Violet heard afterwards about the terrible mud there, and wondered if he had simply got stuck in it and become an easy target.

One evening at the drawing class the regular teacher was absent and a woman took his place for the evening. Her style was very different: while she set up the usual still-lifes of fruit and bottles and glasses, she had them draw quickly, then move around the room to another easel and draw quickly again, and again, then go back to their original easel and spend an hour on the drawing. Violet was not sure what she was meant to learn – that things looked different from different angles, she supposed. It made her want to go outside and smoke.

The new teacher prowled behind them, stopping to peer at their drawings and make comments – few of them complimentary. Violet tried to block the sound of her voice, retreating deep inside her thoughts. She heard her name being called from a distance, but only when a hand was waved in front of her barely-begun drawing did she listen.

“Miss Speedwell, what are you thinking of?”

“My brother,” she replied, surprised into honesty. George had had some words attached: “noble effort”, “stalwart in the face of enemy fire”, “died bravely defending the most sacred values of this country”. She could repeat these phrases because her mother had done so often over the years, sucking every drop of comfort from them until they were dry and meaningless as sticks.

“Stop thinking about him,” the teacher commanded. “He is not here.” She gestured at the still-life. “You should be thinking of nothing more than where the highlight is on the apple, or how to achieve the glassiness of the bottle. Your entire focus should be on what you are looking at – let the rest drain away. It will make for a better drawing – and it will be a relief to you too, to remain in the moment, not to dwell.” With these last words she gave Violet permission to set George and Laurence aside for the evening. She made her best drawing that night, and never felt the need to go back again.

Now, with the blue wools to sort, she tried to bring back that feeling of extraneous thoughts draining away to leave her vision clear. It was remarkable how much was knocking about inside her brain: curiosity about what Gilda was going to show her; anxiety that she would not be able to wield a needle well enough to embroider anything for the Cathedral; rage at Mrs Biggins for taking such satisfaction in belittling the workers; shyness at trying to find a place amongst all of these women who already knew what they were doing; concern that no one would even notice she was missing from work that morning; calculation about what she could have for supper that didn’t involve sardines, beans, or sprats, as she was so sick of them. There were probably more thoughts in there, but Violet cleared out most of her mind, looked at the wool again, and immediately recognised that one of the blues had a tinge of green in it, making it sea-like and murky, like her eyes, which she had always wished were a cleaner blue – like the light blue hank she picked out and dropped into its box. Light blue, mid-royal with a hint of grey, green-blue, and dark blue. Within a couple of minutes she’d sorted them, so that when Gilda came back, she had finished.

“Here we are,” Gilda said, setting down a rectangular piece of canvas embroidery about thirteen by thirty inches. In the central medallion were small, careful petit-point stitches done in subtle shades of brown and cream, depicting a tree, with two blue and tan peacocks standing in its branches, pecking at bunches of dangling grapes while a goat and a deer grazed below. The peacock feathers were intricately rendered, and the grapes expertly shaded with just a few dots of colour. Surrounding the medallion was bolder, cruder embroidery in a complicated pattern of bold stitches that created blue Celtic knots and red flowers on a background of yellow.

“This is exquisite,” Violet declared, tracing the peacock with a finger. “So beautifully done I can’t imagine anyone will actually sit on it when it’s in use.”

There was a laugh – not Gilda’s high tinkle, but lower and mellifluous. Violet looked up and found herself staring into two deep brown pools. Louisa Pesel’s gaze was direct and focused, despite the clamour in the room and Mrs Biggins hovering at her elbow. She looked at Violet as if she were the only person here who mattered.

“What part of Winchester history is this?” Violet asked. “I’ve not lived here long, and this is unfamiliar.”

“You must look further afield, to the Bible.”

“The Tree of Life?” Violet guessed. Like everyone else here, already she wanted to please Miss Pesel.

The older woman beamed. “Yes. The other historic medallions will be directly connected to Winchester, but I thought the first might be more universal. Luckily Dean Selwyn agreed with me, though I only told him after the medallion was half-done.” She chuckled. “This one and another will be for the vergers’ seats on either side of the central aisle when you enter the choir. They are just that bit longer than the rest, because the seats are wider. Perhaps vergers are wider than the rest of us!”

“Miss Pesel, this is Miss Speedwell, our newest recruit,” Mrs Biggins interjected. “Though it is rather late in the day for her to start.”

“It is never too late,” Miss Pesel rejoined. “We have hundreds of cushions and kneelers to make. We shall be stitching for years, and need to put every possible hand to the pump. I see Mrs Biggins has got you sorting wool. That’s all well and good, but if you are to start embroidering over the summer break, you must learn your stitches now. I shall teach you myself. Come and sit.” She led the way to two spaces that had miraculously opened up at the table without her having to ask. “Miss Hill, would you kindly fetch a square of canvas and a model for Miss Speedwell? No need for a frame just yet.”

Gilda grinned at Violet as she hurried away, her eyes disappearing into slits, her teeth bright and horsey.

“Now, Miss Speedwell, have you ever done any embroidery?” Miss Pesel tilted her head like a bird. “No cross-stitch at school?”

“I don’t—” Violet stopped. She could feel a dim memory emerging, of a limp bit of cloth gone grey with handling, scattered with crosses that made up a primitive house, a garland of flowers, the alphabet, and a verse. “‘Lord, give me wisdom to direct my ways …’” she murmured.

“‘… I beg not riches, nor yet length of days’,” Miss Pesel finished. “Quite an old-fashioned sampler. Very popular. Who taught you?”

“My mother. She still misses Queen Victoria.”

Miss Pesel laughed.

“My sampler was not very good,” Violet added.

“Well, we shall have to teach you better. We’ll start with the main stitches we use for the kneelers and cushions: cross, long-armed cross, tent, rice, upright Gobelin, and eyelets. Though we are adding as we go, for variety. I am determined that we avoid the domestic look of a woodland scene in green and yellow and brown cross-stitch on a chair seat.”

Violet smiled: Miss Pesel had accurately described the dining room chairs in use in Mrs Speedwell’s house.

Gilda returned with a square of brown canvas and a similar piece with several different patches of stitching done in blue and yellow.

“Italian hemp,” Miss Pesel explained as she handed the square to Violet. “And this is a tapestry needle, with a big eye and a blunt end.” She held it out, along with a strand of mid-blue wool. “Let’s see you thread it … Good, you remember that. This morning I’ll teach you tent, Gobelin, cross, and long-armed cross.” She tapped at each stitch on the model. “This afternoon, rice and eyelets. If all goes well you may have finished your own model of stitches by the end of the day!”

Violet opened her mouth to protest that she’d only taken the morning off from work, but then thought the better of it. Who would even notice or care that she was gone? O and Mo? Mr Waterman? She could make up her work easily enough. And if Mr Waterman complained, she could get Mrs Biggins to scare him.

“Now, some rules,” Miss Pesel continued. “Never use a sharp needle as it will fray the canvas; only a blunt one. Don’t leave knots, they will come undone or make a bump; tie one, stitch over it, then cut the knot – I’ll show you. Make your stitches close – you are covering every bit of the canvas, so that it is entirely filled in and none of the canvas weave shows. Any gaps between stitches will make the cushion or kneeler weak and it will not last. These cushions and kneelers will be used every day – sometimes two or three times a day – for at least a hundred years, we hope. That is many thousands of times they will be sat on or knelt on. They must be robust to withstand such use for that long.

“Finally, don’t forget the back of the canvas. You want the reverse to look almost as neat as the front. You will make mistakes that you can correct back there, and no one will be the wiser. But if it’s a dismal tangle at the back, it can affect the front; for instance, you may catch loose threads with your needle and pull them through. A neat back means you’ve worked a neat front.”

Violet recalled the back of her childhood sampler, tangled with wool, the front a field of irregular crosses, her mother’s despair.

“Think of your work rather like the services at the Cathedral,” Louisa Pesel added. “You always see an orderly show of pageantry out in the presbytery or the choir, with the processions and the prayers and hymns and the sermon all beautifully choreographed, mostly thanks to the vergers who run it all, and keep things tidy and organised in the offices away from the public eye as well, so that the public show is smooth and seamless.”

Violet nodded.

“All right, let’s start with the tent stitch, which you will be using a great deal.” Miss Pesel tapped a patch of yellow stitches beading up and down the model. “It is strong, especially done on the diagonal, and fills gaps beautifully.”

Violet wrestled with handling the unfamiliar needle and wool and canvas. Miss Pesel was patient, but Violet was clumsy and uncertain, and panicked whenever she got to the end of a row and had to start back up the other way.

“One stitch on the diagonal, then two squares down,” Miss Pesel repeated several times. “Now going back up the row it’s one diagonal and two across. Vertical going down the row, horizontal going up. That’s right!” She clapped. “You’ve got it.”

Violet felt stupidly proud.

Miss Pesel left her to practise several rows of tent while she went to help others. The backlog of broderers impatient to see her was a pressure Miss Pesel did not seem to feel, and no one dared to complain to her, but they frowned at Violet over the teacher’s shoulder.

She checked back after twenty minutes. “Very good,” she said, studying Violet’s rows. “You have learned where the needle must go. Now unpick it all and start again.”

“What? Why?” Violet bleated. She’d thought she was doing well.

“The tension in each stitch must be the same or it will look uneven and unsightly. Don’t despair, Miss Speedwell,” she added, taking in Violet’s rueful expression. “I can guarantee that every woman in this room has done her share of unpicking. No one manages it straight off. Now, let’s sort out what you’re doing at the ends of the rows. Then I’ll teach you upright Gobelin. That’s rather like tent but more straightforward.”

It was more straightforward and easy to master, so that before lunch Miss Pesel was also able to show her cross-stitch and long-armed cross. “I’m pleased with your progress,” she declared as she handed back Violet’s canvas. “This afternoon we’ll go over rice and eyelets, and then you’ll be ready. We start again at half past two.”

Violet found herself lapping up the praise like a child.

Chapter 5

AS THE BRODERERS GATHERED together their bits and pieces to go to lunch – some leaving for good, others going out to eat with the intention to return – Violet wondered for a moment what to do. She should go back to the office and ask Mr Waterman if she could take the afternoon off as well. Then Gilda was at her elbow. “Shall we eat on the Outer Close?” she suggested, as if they had been friends for years. “There’s a yew tree by Thetcher I like to sit under when it’s warm. Lets you see the comings and goings of the Cathedral, which is no end of entertainment.”

“Thetcher?”

“You don’t know? You’re in for a treat!” Gilda took her arm and began to lead her out. Violet was tempted to pull away: there was something in Gilda’s thin face, her prominent teeth, and the fine wrinkles around her eyes that telegraphed … not desperation, exactly, but an overpowering insistence.

“I’m meant to be back at work this afternoon,” she said as they descended the stairs. “I hadn’t realised I would be expected for the whole day. Mrs Biggins only mentioned the morning.”

Gilda grimaced. “Old Biggins probably didn’t want you for the day. Honestly, she acts as if a new volunteer is a burden God has placed at her feet, when actually we’re desperate for more broderers. Silly woman should be thanking you! Luckily you have Miss Pesel’s blessing. Anyway, couldn’t you take the afternoon off? Is your supervisor understanding? Where do you work?”

“Southern Counties Insurance.”

Gilda stopped in the middle of the Inner Close, the Cathedral looming behind her. A group of young scholars from Winchester College in their gowns and boaters parted in streams around them, clattering across the cobblestones on their way back to classes. “I suppose you know Olive Sanders,” she said, looking as if she had bitten into an anticipated apple and found it mushy.

“Yes, we’re both typists. We share an office.”

“Poor you! Oh, sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.” Gilda didn’t look sorry. “But really,” she added as they began walking again, “I can’t imagine being in a confined space with her. How do you cope?”

Violet thought of all the silly conversations she’d overheard between O and Mo, the shrieks, the braying laughter over nothing, the casual condescension, the over-sweet perfume, the half-filled teacups with cigarette butts floating in them. “It’s not for much longer.”

“No, because she’s marrying my brother! So the problem of Olive gets transferred to me. Do you know she had the gall to suggest she take over my job? I do the books and the appointments for my brother’s garage,” Gilda explained, guiding them through a passageway of arches made by the Cathedral’s flying buttresses that led from the Inner to the Outer Close and spat them out in front of the main entrance. “She knows nothing about numbers or motor cars! I put an end to that idea.” A seam of doubt running through her tone made Violet suspect that this was not the case, and feel for her. A spinster’s uncertainty, she thought. It is always there, underlining everything we do.

She glanced up at the Cathedral. Its exterior was always a surprise. Violet had visited several times since childhood, and knew what to expect, but each time she willed it to be spectacular and was once again disappointed. When she thought of a cathedral in the abstract, it always made a big, bold, dramatic entrance. Everything would be tall: the entrance, the body of the building, and especially the tower or spire. It would shout its presence, and its physical essence would not let anyone forget that it was there for the purpose of worship. Nearby Salisbury Cathedral did so with its impressive spire, the tallest in Britain; so did Chichester, which she had seen when visiting her grandparents. On holiday she had admired the handsome square towers of Canterbury Cathedral, and of Lincoln, which dominated and conquered that city as a cathedral should.

In reality Winchester Cathedral squatted like a grey toad in a forgettable green off the High Street. Given that the town had been the central base of power for many kings, the Cathedral was surprisingly easy to miss; Violet often had to direct tourists to it, even when it was just ahead of them. “Oh,” they would say. “Oh.” Where is the tower? she knew they were thinking. For the Cathedral had only a stubby one; it looked like a dog with its tail cut short, or as if the project had run out of funds before they could build higher. It seemed more like an oversized church than a grand cathedral.

“It is better inside,” she wanted to say. “It is spectacular inside.” But Violet was not in the habit of saying what she thought to strangers. Besides, they would find out soon enough.

The green Outer Close spread out around the Cathedral, crisscrossed by two paths lined with lime trees. Everywhere visitors and workers were taking advantage of the sunshine to sit on handkerchiefs or newspapers on the grass and eat sandwiches. A few old graves and tombs dotted the Close, and were given a respectful berth by the picnickers – apart from Gilda, who marched up to one about fifty yards from the Cathedral entrance, under a large yew tree, and dropped down beside it. “Thetcher,” she announced.

Violet studied the waist-high white gravestone. “‘Thomas Thetcher’,” she read aloud, “‘who died of a violent Fever contracted by drinking Small Beer when hot the 12th of May 1764’. Gosh.”

Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grenadier,

Who caught his death by drinking cold small Beer.

Soldiers be wise from his untimely fall

And when ye’re hot drink Strong or none at all.

Gilda was able to recite the words from memory rather than looking at the gravestone. “Forget the Cathedral,” she added. “This is the true Winchester landmark.” She patted it fondly, as if it were the family cat, then opened a wax paper packet and laid it out between them. “Share?”

“Oh. All right.” Violet reluctantly pulled out her offering from her handbag. Gilda’s sandwiches contained thick slices of ham and were spread generously with butter rather than the slick of cheap margarine and the meagre layer of fish paste Violet had used for her own.

But Gilda didn’t seem to notice. “I always find sandwiches others have made much more interesting,” she declared, popping a triangle of fish paste sandwich in her mouth. “Like being made a cup of coffee – it always tastes better when someone’s made it for you, don’t you think?”

“I suppose.”

“So, how did you get on with your stitches? Miss Pesel is a brilliant teacher, isn’t she? She makes you want to do well.”

“She is very good. I’m not sure that I am, though.” Violet bit into the ham. It was sweet and delicately smoked, and so delicious she almost cried. The only time she ate well was on the rare occasion she had Sunday lunch at Tom’s, when Evelyn cooked a vigorous roast. At home her mother seemed to relish burning the joint, serving too few potatoes and making watery custard, as a continuing punishment for Violet abandoning her. The succulent, abundant ham made her realise: she was starving.

“Oh, I was terrible at the start!” Gilda interrupted Violet’s reverie over the ham. She seemed gleeful about her shortcomings. “I thought I’d be stuck on borders and hanking wool forever. But eventually the stitches become second nature and you can relax as you work. I’ve noticed that if I’m tense, my embroidery becomes tense too. And we can’t have a tense cushion in the Cathedral choir, can we? Those choristers need well-made cushions to sit on!”

Violet couldn’t help it – she reached for another ham sandwich, though it went against the usual etiquette of sharing where one alternated for an even distribution. Again Gilda did not seem bothered, but proceeded to quiz Violet on her family, her life in Southampton, and what brought her to Winchester.

“My father died two years ago and it became harder to live with my mother,” Violet replied to the last.

“Is your mum awful?”

“She is, rather. She never really recovered from my brother’s death during the War.” There, she had said it.

Gilda nodded. “Joe came through the War all right, but then we lost Mum to the Spanish ’flu right after he got back. He said he went all the way through the War without crying once, but to get back and lose Mum – that was too much.”

“Did you lose … anyone else?”

Gilda shook her head, and looked around, as if shrugging off the attention. No fiancé, then, Violet thought.

“Arthur!” Gilda jumped up and waved at two men pushing bicycles along the tree-lined path towards the Cathedral entrance. Both had their right trouser legs tucked into their socks to keep them from getting caught in the chains. One was the man with the white hair and moustache Violet had seen at the Cathedral during the broderers’ service. At the sound of Gilda’s voice he stopped, then wheeled his bicycle over to them, followed by a younger, shorter man. Violet scrambled to her feet.

“Hello, Gilda.” The man raised his hat at Gilda, then nodded at Violet. His eyes were bright chips of blue, his gaze warm and direct. She felt herself flush red, though she was not sure why: he was much older than she, and – she automatically glanced – he wore a wedding ring.

“Are we going to hear you soon?” Gilda demanded.

“Not this afternoon. We’re just meeting with the verger to go over the summer schedule. Beyond the normal, there are a few weddings, and the royal birthdays, of course. This is Keith Bain, often our tenor. I’m not sure if you’ve met – he’s lived in Winchester for two years.”

The younger man, small and wiry, with ginger hair and a carpet of freckles, nodded at them.

“This is Violet Speedwell. She’s just joined the Cathedral Broderers, haven’t you, Vi?”

Violet flinched. No one had called her Vi since Laurence died; her family had instinctively understood that his nickname for her was now off-limits. She tried to cover her discomfort by holding out her hand, but as Arthur shook it she suspected he was filing away in his mind: Don’t call her Vi.

He smiled at her. “Your name – that was very clever of your parents.”

“Clever how?” Gilda wanted to know.

“Speedwell is the common name for veronica, a kind of purple flower. And they named her Violet.”

“It was my father’s idea,” Violet explained. “My brothers have – had – have more traditional names.” She did not name them – she did not want to say George’s name aloud.

“Good thing they didn’t name you Veronica!” Gilda laughed. “Veronica Veronica.”

“I see you’ve chosen Thetcher to sit by.” Arthur nodded at the gravestone.

“I’d never seen it before,” Violet admitted.

“Ah, then you must not be from Winchester.”

“No. Southampton. I moved here seven months ago.”

“I thought not. I would have known you otherwise.” His tone was neutral but somehow the words were not. Violet’s cheeks grew warm again.

“Arthur and I went to the same church for a long time,” Gilda explained. “I played with his daughter at Sunday school. She’s in Australia now, and Arthur’s moved to the country. To Nether Wallop, the most beautiful village in England, and with the funniest name.”

Even as Arthur was correcting her – “Technically our cottage is in Middle Wallop” – Violet was remembering a visit to Nether Wallop with her father and brothers when she was a girl. “I have been there,” she said. “The Douce pyramid.”

Keith Bain and Gilda looked puzzled, but Arthur nodded. “Indeed.” He turned to the others. “In the churchyard at Nether Wallop there is a pyramid on the grave of Francis Douce. Apparently the family liked pyramids, as other relatives had them built as well, such as at Farley Mount.” He smiled again at Violet, and she silently thanked her father for plotting the route of their short walking holiday so that they passed through Nether Wallop. She would have been eleven, Tom seven, and George thirteen. Mrs Speedwell had not come with them, which made the holiday more relaxed and put them all in good moods as they’d taken the train to Salisbury and a cart up to Stonehenge, then began walking through woods and skirting newly planted fields of wheat. At Nether Wallop they stayed at the Five Bells, and went to look at the church, where George had got a leg-up from their father so he could grab the stone flame that topped the pyramid tombstone, and declared himself the King of Egypt. If any of them had been told that day that eleven years later he and hundreds of thousands of other British men would be dead, they would not have believed it.

To her mortification, sudden tears pricked Violet’s eyes, spilling over before she could hide them. She rarely cried over the loss of George and Laurence. Mrs Speedwell had always been the town crier of the family loss, leaving little room for Violet or Tom or their father to voice their own feelings. When Laurence died a year after George, Mrs Speedwell not once expressed sorrow or tried to comfort Violet, but managed to make it into a competition, reminding anyone who would listen that a mother’s loss of her son was the worst loss there was, the implication being that this trumped a girl losing her fiancé. Violet did not want to play that game, and stifled any tears.

Arthur was holding out a handkerchief with quiet understanding. Even almost fourteen years after the War’s end, no one was surprised by sudden tears.

“Thank you.” Violet wiped her eyes. “I’m terribly sorry.” Arthur and Keith nodded, and Gilda patted her arm just the right amount. Then they carried on, because that was what you did.

“I haven’t been to Farley Mount in years,” Gilda remarked. “We used to go all the time on a Sunday afternoon.”

“What’s Farley Mount, then?” Keith Bain spoke for the first time. To Violet’s surprise, he had a Scottish accent.

Gilda and Arthur chuckled. “Beware Chalk Pit!” Gilda cried.

“Unlikely as it sounds, Beware Chalk Pit is a horse’s name,” Arthur explained. “A relative of the Douces built a pyramid on top of a hill a few miles from Winchester, in honour of his horse who had won a race. Before the race the horse had fallen into a chalk pit, hence the name.”

“Maybe I’ll walk out to it,” Keith Bain said. “I’ve only been up St Catherine’s Hill. Want to see more of the countryside. Where is it?”

“About five miles west of here. If you fancy a longer walk, you can go straight across the fields to Salisbury. That’s twenty-six miles. I call it the Cathedral Walk. You can stay the night at mine in the Wallops en route if you like.”

“I may well do that.”

“We’d best get on to see the verger.” Arthur turned to Violet. “Very good to meet you, Miss Speedwell.”

“And you.” Violet watched him wheel his bicycle towards the side of the Cathedral. His brief attention had steadied her, like a hand reaching out to still a rocking chair that has been knocked.

Only after he’d gone did she realise she was still clutching his handkerchief. The initials AK had been embroidered in an uneven blue chain stitch in one corner. She could run after him, or give it to Gilda to give to him. Instead she waited until her new friend wasn’t looking, then tucked it in her handbag.

“Are they in a choir of some sort?” she asked when the handkerchief was out of sight.

“Not at all,” Gilda replied, folding the waxed paper from the sandwiches. “What made you think that?”

“He mentioned being a tenor.”

“No, no, they’re bellringers! For the Cathedral. Now, shall we have a coffee? Then I’m going to find a telephone and tell your office you’ve taken ill – fainted on the Outer Close!”

On their return, Violet found that her privileged position as Miss Pesel’s new pupil had been usurped. Several other broderers were crowded around her; indeed, two who saw Violet enter pushed closer, as if to defend their positions and their teacher.

“Which stitches was she going to teach you?” Gilda asked, frowning at the scrum.

Violet picked up the model. “This one … Rice, I think. And eyelets.”

“I can teach you those. Miss Pesel always likes us to teach others, says the best way to set in your mind what you’ve learned is to explain it to someone else.”

Both stitches were fiddly but not hard to learn. Then, before she went to consult Miss Pesel about her own work, Gilda suggested Violet make a sampler of the six stitches she had mastered, to show to the teacher at the end of the day.

It was calmer now, more settled. A dozen women – some from the morning, others new – worked around the big table, with Miss Pesel and Mrs Biggins fielding questions and making suggestions. Violet focused on her sampler, concentrating on getting each stitch uniform, the tension consistent. After a time she found she could work and also listen to the conversations around her. Mostly the embroiderers talked about their children and grandchildren, their neighbours, their gardens, the meals they made, the holidays they might take. All listened politely; none really cared. They were simply waiting their turn to speak. And, as was usual in these situations, the married women spoke more than the spinsters, assuming a natural authority and higher place in the hierarchy of women that no one questioned. Only Gilda spoke up from time to time, and was tolerated because she was entertaining, and knew everyone – though some glanced at each other behind her back. Most were of a certain class, and Violet guessed that they looked down on a family who ran a garage and serviced their motor cars. She herself had become less judgemental, however, for she had discovered that when you were a single woman living on your own on a small salary, background meant little. Gilda might be from a different class, but with her family backing her she could afford to eat much better sandwiches than Violet.

What would happen, she wondered, if I changed the subject and asked the room who they think will form the new German government now that the current Chancellor has resigned? Would anyone here have an opinion? She was not sure she herself had one, but the room was beginning to feel a little airless with its insularity. Perhaps she just needed to get to know the women better.

Mrs Biggins clapped twice. “All right, ladies, that’s enough for today. Leave your place as tidy as it was when you arrived. We don’t want bits of wool left behind. Mrs Way will sign out the materials to you.”

The others began lining up by Miss Pesel, who inspected their work before they left. Violet watched, suddenly shy about showing her sampler. She did not want to be told to unpick it again, or to be put on record-keeping alongside Mabel Way. Finally, however, she joined the queue behind Gilda and listened as she and Miss Pesel discussed the difference between upright and oblique Gobelin stitches. Then Louisa Pesel held out her hand for Violet’s piece. “You have come along nicely,” she declared, running a finger over the stitches. “Do be careful on the long-armed cross to pull the long stitch tight; otherwise it puffs out, as it does here. But not too disgraceful – no need to unpick since it’s a sampler, and the mistake will serve to remind you.” She handed it back. “For next Wednesday, teach someone else the stitches and come back to show me what they’ve done. You can pick up some canvas and wool and a needle on your way out.”

Violet gaped. “Who shall I—” But Miss Pesel had already turned to the next woman.

Gilda was grinning again. “Told you so!”

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