Killing Violets, Tanith Lee [the two towers ebook .TXT] 📗

her down to the street, and waited, his hat tilted, turned from the street lamps, for the tram to rush roaring up.

In the scuffle as other passengers got on, he pressed his cool mouth to her fingers.

“I will never forget you, darling.”

As she sat on the tram, she saw raindrops had stained her skirt. There was no rain. Like the noise of the trams that afternoon, she had not heard the quiet sound of her own crying, until that moment.

As she walked Preguna, Anna saw an advertisement in the window of a fashionable shop. In Paris, or Athens, such a shop would be laughed at. Here it was quite important.

Anna went home, and manicured her nails, she put on her best summer dress, the sleeves of which she had had altered, like little gossamer wings. She combed her hair starkly and put on a hat of straw and net, and her reddest lipstick.

At the shop she was interviewed by another sharp woman, this one in a sharp dress of dark blue muslin.

Anna spoke succinctly, checking herself, watching every word. She dropped mentions of other cities. She had been working with a professor, a friend of her father’s, on a historical work. But that was done now, and she was bored. It was either find something of interest to occupy her, or move on quickly to another place.

Probably the woman did not believe very many of these lies. She looked at Anna shrewdly.

“The assistant’s post is filled. But we give a couple of little shows most weeks, for some of our clients, to display the nicer, more costly gowns. You have the right figure. You’d be surprised, the number of fifty-year-old women who think they’ll look just the same, once they’ve seen a dress on a slim young girl.”

So Anna was engaged as a model.

The work involved her only two or three afternoons a week, but she was paid much more than the professor had ever offered.

The shows were held in the large back premises of the shop, a big chamber of velvet chairs and a raised walk.

Here, with red lips and nails, powdered arms and face, Anna stalked in fine high-heeled shoes that had marcasite buckles or gilded bows, the tea gowns and evening dresses clinging to her slender new-moon curves. Not even knickers could be worn under such clothes, let alone a brassiere or garter-belt. The trick was to damp the body first with the wet sponge, next sliding the silk and satin home, so that it dried to the body like a second skin.

She discovered soon why she had been hired. The blue woman liked herself to look at slim young girls dressing or undressing, or simply sprawled, smoking, and bare but for their cosmetics. However Peepy, as the other three models called her behind her back, seldom touched and never propositioned.

“Oh, she’s quite safe,” said the brunette, “she lives with some old woman lover who’s madly jealous. Peepy loves her, but likes to tickle her own fancy a bit with us.” The redhead was coarsest. She would flaunt and tempt Peepy, approaching her to ask if Peepy would help with this dress or that, asking if she had a pimple on her bottom – yes, just there, it felt sore, or letting slip a strap to display one breast. Afterwards it was she who would call the woman other rather bestial names.

Anna did not mind Peepy. Even if Peepy had asked for more substantial favours, Anna would probably have granted them. She had usually granted them to men.

Perhaps it would have been a relief. Her mind was full of Árpád, her body was full of him. It fluttered and twanged, and sometimes, when she had not thought of him for half an hour, something would recall him to her, the hot sunlight falling on the backstairs of the shop, the tilt of a man’s hat in the street, and her stomach would turn itself over, not quickly, but like a heavy, sinking wave. Alone, she would look at herself in a mirror, and she would think, If only you could see me, just like this.

Remembering things he had said, she heard his voice. He had a beautiful voice.

The idea of him passed over and over her, like the reflections of clouds. He was always with her.

She had never felt this way for any man. It was not desire, or not only desire. Sometimes she thought of him moving alone about Preguna, and her eyes stabbed with tears. Sometimes she felt a wild rage that echoed away through her brain, shouting his name, and she wanted to tie him to a post and beat him – but this image was a sexual one, and would soon resolve itself in arousal, and so to compassion and tenderness.

She tried to see how it must be for him. But she was only afraid he did not want her. So she looked into a mirror, turning her face to catch the light, widening her eyes until she was perfect, and then thinking, If only he could see me as I am now.

Now and then the other girls ‘borrowed’ dresses, for personal use outside the shop. They boasted of this to Anna. Presently she realised, from certain snide remarks, that they distrusted her, since she now knew their habit and had not succumbed as they had. This might lead to trouble. In another country, a petty pilferer had got Anna the sack because she had not wanted, or thought, of also companionably pilfering.

So Anna told the other girls she would like to wear the white silk gown one night, but she would wait until her friend took her somewhere suitable.

“Once she got a spot of red wine,” said the brunette of the other blonde, “on one of the jackets. It was moile velvet. Guess what she did? She had the sewing girl sew a flower in gold beads over the stain. It cost a lot of money, but better than