Work Text:
I: Linen
“You do realise,” Cyril had said, the week before they left for the country, “that Johanna is getting married next month.”
The newspaper crackled over to Reynolds across the breakfast table. From the window behind him, the sun came through from several streets away, at a slant that kept the walls around them all as cool and dismal as a plashed bluebell.
High across her cheeks and down the collar of her blouse, Alma felt the rough red heat of her skin like it had been scrubbed down by steel wool. “Johanna?” she asked.
“Johanna has the October dress,” said Reynolds, very softly, and from such a distance that it made no difference who he meant to answer. With his sketchbook still in hand, the paper was left to wilt next to the lapsang.
“That’s all very well,” Cyril said, “for an April wedding.”
But she was looking at Alma when she said it. One of those crisp midnight looks, preserved through the humid tea-steam of the morning. Alma skimmed over her toast with a knife made plush by jam, and did not look away.
II: Leather
They met at a teahouse. While Alma’s neck prickled wistfully at the disturbance of china, Johanna trembled out fine columns of ash between her fingers. Caught between panels of ripe polished wood, damp at the nape from a wash of rain, Johanna was soft and brown as any bird in the hedgerows outside.
“He’s a racing car driver, you see. If you spend long enough in that house, you need to feel as if you’re going somewhere at last,” she said, and her eyes fell. “Or at least, I did. It’s rather sweet of you to ask to see me, you know. It’s always nice, to be seen.”
“I saw your picture in the paper,” said Alma. What was it the English said, about keeping their pretty girls all in a row? In the photograph, Johanna stood between two other women, those wide lashes caught in flight. She had lovely face for silver, even though Alma had ached to see the flush of her dress lost to the darkroom, only a muddy grey bruise left behind in the print. “What will you wear,” she asked, “to the wedding?”
“I have my gratuity,” said Johanna, in her pretty, grave treble, “if that’s what you mean. You understand, don’t you, why I can’t admit to owning anything less, not yet?”
“Yes,” said Alma, with Reynolds’ serge cut tight around her knees. “I understand.”
She stood a while at the street corner after Johanna left in her taxi, until her feet ached in the slanted leather of her shoes. Later, she took down a box from the store room, brown cardboard with a satiny bloom of lilac inside, and watched from the fitting-room window as a car took it up the street and out of sight, to the address Cyril still had in her workbook. Now the birds were tumbling through a pale twilight, over the thin rails of the park. She watched herself in the glass as the lights of the house came on behind her, the set of her mouth, the full length of her hung between creasy taffeta. She wondered if this was what Cyril meant for her to see, after all: the world as it moved around her own persistence.
III: Muslin
Morning in the country, and the trees were folded in a pitchy green around the house when Alma came back from her walk. In about an hour from now, London would open itself to a distant pearled sun in careful slices, shutters thrown back and cars in the roads cracked open for their drivers like the waxed shells of so many beetles. She could see it now as clearly as she saw everything else. It was Johanna’s wedding day: she would be waking, soon, in a high white flat swept through with flowers, and so Alma would bring Reynolds his tea and say, I think it is only right that you are the one who sleeps today.
She stood in the kitchen, at the stove, her thimble and her basket on the table behind her while she took a knife to the mushrooms, clammy in their cool night skin. Above her, she heard Cyril at her morning work, letting in the day by increments. Alma turned her head, as she sometimes did, to listen to the reverberations as they shook down to her, to let that heel-beat find expression in her own strong arms. With the tilt of her neck, she followed Cyril from one room to another. In the skewed light of the windowpanes, the lines of Cyril’s face would be soft with rose powder, the curtains as dense as soot in her hands as she drew them apart. In the long, damp hill-climb from the new year to spring, Alma had felt Cyril through the walls a little more each day, as if her ribs were no different to the walls of the house: of course, Cyril would be there between them.
The shocks in the woodwork were a tremor between Alma’s shoulders, by the time Cyril came down to the kitchen with an armful of pale glass and flowers. “Good morning,” she said, and disappeared behind the corner.
Alma left her work. At Cyril’s elbow, her vase cooled with tap-water as she cut through the stems in the sink, and Alma remembered her first night in the restaurant, their faces dim in the lavatory mirrors. “You’re fraying at the edges,” Cyril had said, her mouth stretched to an oval around her lipstick, and she had nodded to Alma's reflection, the hazy red contour of her lips. Cyril handed her tube to Alma, and they had both watched the borrowed slide of the lipstick in the mirror. Satin turned Alma's hands clumsy around the low gleam of the bullet; she’d sealed the wax with a wary press of her lips. What kind of family, she had not asked then, do you want me for?
“I don’t think I ever told you how I wondered about you,” Alma said now, a crack in the whitewashed silence of the kitchen, “before I ever met you.” She had passed, this morning, the photograph of a mother who she knew only as a billow in the sepia, held in that colour which seemed to anticipate love. Through the milky drift of the camera, she would never be able to make out Cyril’s stitches, but she thought about them all the same. “I sometimes wonder,” she said, “whether your mother expected you.”
“Expected me?”
“Your name,” she said, slowly. “I’ve never met another woman who was a Cyril, and you are, I think – a very singular person.”
“Oh,” said Cyril, a sound that withered at its edges like a fallen petal. “That kind of expectation had nothing to do with it, I assure you. Pre-emptory daughters are as common as foundlings, in families like ours.” When she turned around, she looked down at the thimble on the table, her eyes clear and water-blank. “Is something in need of mending?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Alma, “but I will fix it in my own way.”
IV: Cotton
In the attic, a light like rose gold, finger-worn. While rolls of satin slept high in the rafters, Alma was on her knees in front of the mannequin, plunged up to her wrists in folds of green moiré. Her hands could have been underwater, as she picked through the hem of the dress and into the lining. What fell out from the seam had been stitched in yellow cotton, thick as pollen: venom, cursive.
Cyril came up the stairs with a chalky noise, a scuff from the floorboards. “Is that the dress you’re taking to the photographers?” she asked, unwinding her scarf.
“Yes,” said Alma. It was held wide with organza down to the calf, closed with buttons at the wrists, all in the same heady evening distortion of green, the world from the other side of a chemist’s bottle.
“Have you worn it for him yet?”
“No,” said Alma. “It was finished yesterday.” Leave something hidden for me, she had said. “And now, since –”
“Since my brother is indisposed, perhaps you could wear it for me instead.”
For a moment, Alma wondered whether she had left a thread of rosewater behind her, a pale bloom of pink in the timbre of the house. She shivered deep in the creases of her shoulders, warm, lightheaded. She did not reach for the screen where Reynolds had left it to yellow in the corner: she looked back as much as she was looked at, as she unbuttoned her dress.
“You watch me often,” she said. “In his dresses.”
“You wear them well,” said Cyril, through the motes of the attic. “Reynolds isn’t the only one who appreciates that.”
After she smoothed the dress over her hips and down her chest, Cyril came in closer.
“May I?” she said, and took Alma’s hand to close the buttons on her wrist. Her nails were painted red, and pinched the moiré together with a vivid tenderness that Alma felt like a prickle of champagne in her throat. “I do enjoy this colour on you,” she said, her eyes raised over the turn of Alma’s neck. “They’ll want you to wear lipstick with it, of course.”
The scent of iris was cupped close behind her ear, a lush discretion like the sheen of velvet. Pressed to Alma’s, her lips were dry as oakmoss.
It was a subtle kiss, almost a blot. When she drew back, Alma rubbed her lips together. They felt dusty, as though waiting for breath to clear them. Her lipstick had been warmed through by the hours it had been worn.
“Just so,” said Cyril.
In the mirror, Alma’s mouth was the colour of a berry stain, a bitten thing: it felt almost a joke to her, that Cyril hadn’t needed to use her teeth at all.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” she said, to their reflections, “that we haven’t been this close since we first met.”
“Do you now,” said Cyril, and the beams of the attic seemed to close around them like the raw underside of silk, as if they were another kind of secret stitched into the edge of something. She turned Alma back to her, slid a hand up the clouding underskirt.
Alma did not apologise for the heat of her thighs, or the hungry clamp of them, when Cyril went to draw out the deepest drift of organza between them. Cyril’s knuckles were cool, and their skirts pressed together in a whisper of fabric, a quietude of force and motion. Alma felt a snag of filigree, and the hard, proud imprint of pearl into her thigh. She bent to kiss Cyril again, and the quiet sound that Cyril held between her teeth was almost lost in the seethe of the moiré.
How wonderful, then, that the catch of a nail over silk was the most distinct thing in the world, scored out against her cunt, a sound of continual devastation where her groan turned to powder in the air. She pulled Cyril’s other hand over her breast to hear it closer, red nails almost screaming out down the strange drowned green of her dress. The world came to her in flashes of pleasure, sharp possibilities like she felt when she stood awake at midnight.
“So, this is what it is,” she said, dazed, every word pressed to Cyril’s cheek, “to be strong in this house.”
The silk between her legs was plastered to every fold of her, thin sweat deepened to wetness, turning the catch of fingertips to a fine, relentless thrill across the rise of her clitoris. The grip of her thighs left Cyril nowhere to work but up, and up, high into the shell of her cunt, and for a long time, there was no give in either of them.
Alma fell forward when she came, reedy and wind-blown, her cheek unbearably hot in Cyril’s shoulder. She almost laughed as she sank down into the folds of her dress, clinging to Cyril like a railing. Behind her eyes, the future opened itself out to her a little more, a bolt of satin thrown down the lapping stairs of the London house.
V: Nylon
There was a fire burning when she came to bed, a warmth that was dense with the ash beneath it. Alma watched as it licked a feverish relief across Reynolds’ wide blank eyelids, his breath a slow undercurrent that drew her down to kiss him. Cyril sat in the chair by the fireplace, her shoes set aside in the wavering light, and Alma smiled as she went to her.
She leaned in over the back of the chair, her cheek as close as a tango dancer, and kissed one of the dark spots by Cyril’s temple. “Hello,” she said, and slid down on her knees.
It was too dim for Alma to make out the toes of her stockings, but the lines of Cyril’s face held the firelight like the shivering cracks of an oil painting. “If you’re going to do this,” said Cyril, “then you should take down your hair. Your poise is commendable, of course, but I rather think we’re beyond doing these things by halves.”
Alma sat back on her calves. “I will do it,” she smiled, “for one pin.”
“I wondered what you’d ask for,” Cyril said under the fire, its sound like outraged taffeta. She plucked into the dark behind her ear, left a single pin on the arm of the chair. A twist of hair fell to her shoulder, covering over the knotted pearls of her earring, the way they looked almost flushed from the heat. As warm as the skin that closed around them. “Well, here you are.”
Alma took her hair down in wisps. Her skin was hectic under the tartan she wore tonight, her nipples drawn hard enough for her to wish for the rasp of it through her slip. “Now will you let me start?” she asked.
Cyril’s dress closed, this evening, with a belt and two buttons over her hips. Alma watched as she undid them each, pressed her lips together when she thought, unrepentant, of catching her hand and kissing over the points of her knuckles, the flashes of her rings. Cyril wore faultless nylon, underneath, and the tea-brown bands of her stockings each sloped at the top of her thighs the way other women wore the sling of their furs; they slid in a kind of sheer familiarity under the palm. Alma liked the silk above them better, thin and black and creased with wear, a slip that seemed to haze at the edges in the indeterminate light.
“Yes?” she said, and touched at the hem of the slip, her voice low like warm water.
“Yes,” said Cyril.
Alma held the slip as gently as a breath, even though she knew Cyril would allow no frailty this close to her skin. Cyril’s cunt was neat and dark, and Alma bent into the sharp heat of it, first with her nose over the drift of hair, and then with her tongue into the split beneath, a blind intimacy.
Cyril was as soft and bittersweet as any veined thing, and Alma licked in short, tidy strokes, her hair fanned out in damp threads. Cyril twitched and trembled at the catch of them over her thighs. She closed her hand over the string of pearls around her neck, and Alma heard the low, round tap of them over her head, faint through Cyril’s palm.
“If you need to touch yourself,” she murmured, as Alma wore her jaw to nothing but resolve, “go ahead.”
Alma let her nails catch at Cyril’s thighs and pressed out two white scalloping lines over the top of her stockings. Cyril cried out so softly that her throat could have been lined in iris, her cunt wringing itself out to a peak just under the plumped tip of Alma’s tongue.
“But I never let go,” Alma said, slick at her chin, and let the sound and light of the fire go dim around her as she slid back into Cyril’s lap. “Not any part of me.”