thread and smoothed out the scarlet fabric, relishing the vicarious sense of luxury. Her fingers, roughened with cold and work, caught slightly on the crêpe.
Rubbing her thumb against the chapped skin of her fingertips, the sensation transported Claire back to the years spent growing up in Port Meilhon. After her mother had died of pneumonia, brought on by the damp and chill and exhaustion, leaving her only daughter a silver thimble and a pincushion stuffed with coffee grounds, Claire had been responsible for darning socks and mending the clothes of her father and four older brothers. The pins and needles would quickly grow rusty in the sea air and she had to pause frequently to rub them down with emery paper to stop them becoming blunt and staining the fabric of her father’s and brothers’ shirts with little brown marks like dried-on droplets of blood. As she’d sat at her sewing beside the range in the kitchen of the cottage that had been her home, her chapped fingers cracking open in places with painful fissures, a quiet determination had grown within her: her mother’s legacy of needles and pins would become her passport out of there. It was all she had. She would use it to change her path, refusing to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Instead of her grief at losing her mother lessening over time, the thought of the grave in the churchyard up on the hill had become more than Claire could bear. She preferred to think instead about the possibility of a life elsewhere filled with elegance and sophistication. And so she had concentrated on making her stitches smaller and neater, sewing quickly but fastidiously.
Her longing for pretty things was a form of escapism from Claire’s rough and ready upbringing in a cottage full of men who spent their days wrestling creels from the grip of the cold Atlantic waters. When her father and brothers were off in the boats, she offered to take in mending for her village neighbours, charging them a few sous a time, saving the coins in an old sock stuffed into the bottom of her mending basket. Slowly, the sock became heavier, the toe weighted down as the coins accumulated. And then one day she counted her money and discovered that she had enough for the train fare to Paris.
Her father had scarcely reacted when she told him she was leaving. She suspected it would be more of a relief to him than anything else – one less mouth to feed. And Claire sensed, too, that increasingly she reminded him of his dead wife, her mother, a reminder which probably stabbed his heart with guilt each time he looked at her. He must know that this was no place for her to live so, she said to herself, he couldn’t blame her for wanting to leave. He’d driven her to the station at Quimper and given her a gruff pat on the shoulder as the train pulled in, picking up her bag and handing it up to her once she’d climbed the steps into the carriage, which was about as much of a blessing as she could have expected.
Setting aside the bodice of the red evening gown, she sighed. Well, she’d made it to Paris, only to have the war interfere with her plans for a better life. She was still spending her days hunched over her meticulous stitching, she was still freezing cold most of the time, and she was hungrier than she had ever been at home.
She was overcome by a momentary surge of self-pity and homesickness at the thought of the family she’d left behind in Port Meilhon. She pictured her brothers’ cheerful grins as they came home to the cottage on the quayside: Théo ruffling her hair and Jean-Paul lifting the lid on the pot of cotriade she’d prepared for their supper to sneak a taste of the delicious fish stew, while Luc and Marc pulled off their boots at the front door. Did their shirts go un-mended now that she wasn’t there, and their socks un-darned? She missed the sound of their laughter and their gentle teasing, as well as the quiet reassurance of her father’s presence as he sat in his armchair splicing a rope or untangling a length of twine. It was funny, she thought, how instead of feeling too crowded when they were all in the tiny cottage together, the room had always felt too big and empty when they were away.
She shrugged