The jacket

The final instructions were written into the dress-maker’s notebook, written, in fact, in The Violinist’s own hand (a strangely petite hand-writing for a woman with the handshake of a snake wrangler):

Pinch waist further (to emphasise bosom);

Gold piping for collar

Her client was so eminent (a world-class musician) that the dress-maker couldn’t think of her as ‘Lucia’, even though the violinist had been in her little town-house almost every day for a fitting.  In the dress-maker’s mind, and in her notebook, Lucia was always, and only, ‘The Violinist’.

The dress-maker slid her glasses from the top of her straight black hair, down onto her nose and began her final task – that of inserting a strip of gold cloth so that it would stand up around the violinist’s throat (and ‘hide the wrinkles’). By then it was 10:00 pm and after a day of hard work with the difficult materials a relief to be finally approaching the end.

The jacket, designed in person by The Violinist, was in the close-fitting style of a cheongsam, but with long diaphanous sleeves (in black) and made in cloth steeped in the deep purples and reds of a Roma wedding dress. It was the most wonderful thing the dress-maker had ever made. And it was cut from materials that beautifully clasped The Violinist’s splendid bosom and the extrados of her hips. And when the violinist’s body began throwing itself into the drama of a Beethoven concerto or Villa-Lobos concert piece, the jacket would move effortlessly with her, like a muscle.

The dress-maker, who had always adored the violin, (the most intimate of instruments), felt doubly privileged to sew such a garment for such a woman – the beautiful, imperious and talented Lucia Garza. This jacket was her contribution to the great musician’s first Brisbane appearance, which would happen the following night. And she planned to be there with her young daughter, another musical prodigy already learning from the former teacher of Lucia herself.

The clock ticked, and the radio broadcast a concert from Elder Hall in Adelaide, a piano concerto. The dress-maker hadn’t caught the beginning. It sounded Russian: Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, someone like that. Just as the final movement reached its crescendo, and the dress-maker drew a thread threw the last stitch of the collar, and leaned to bite it above the knot (a superstition she had, like putting a horseshoe in the house for good luck) she heard the slam of a car door and then the rapid knock of high heels as they mounted the paving towards her town-house.

‘Hallo, hallo, are you awake?’

It was Lucia, apparently unable to wait until the morning and the time she had set down to collect her jacket.

‘I can’t wait to see it,’ she said, brushing past and into the front room where the sewing-machine reigned over the whole lower part of the house.

On a dress-maker’s bust, adjusted to The Violinist’s proportions, the jacket sat, splendidly illuminated under a downlight. Its extravagant colours gleamed, the gold collar glowing with a particular vigour.

‘What’s this?’ The Violinist said, flicking the collar at the base of the throat. ‘It’s gold!’

Her eyes, drawn in with black eyeshadow, and ‘Noir’ artliner, and a heavy coating of hypnose mascara, flashed mercurially. Her glossy lips trembled like dew on a ‘Garza’ rose (named after her of course). The Violinist seemed angry.

‘The gold piping you requested,’ the dress-maker said.

She went to pick up her notebook with its instructions.

‘That is not what I ordered,’ The Violinist stormed. ‘Don’t you know how to listen?’

The dress-maker opened her book to protest. There it was in The Violinist’s own writing – gold piping for collar.

‘But..’ the dress-maker said.

‘I don’t want excuses,’ The Violinist said. ‘It must be emerald. Emerald, do you understand?’

She turned to the dress-maker’s table where the remains of cloth lay. Beneath the gypsy reds and purples was a small swathe of emerald silk.

‘It’s this!’ The Violinist said, picking it up. ‘This is what I want.’

And she turned back to the front door, her Caro Poivre clouding the enclosed space. The dress-maker sneezed. She had an allergy to scent.

‘Tomorrow at nine,’ The Violinist said. ‘As we agreed.’

So the dress-maker sat up very late, unpicking and re-stitching the fine collar of The Violinist’s jacket. She cut into the emerald silk on the bias, creating a fine soft piping for the collar, and as she sewed, her heart was black. This perfect jacket didn’t belong to such a woman. It was a jacket which embodied the great skills of the dress-maker, skills she’d learned from her mother, not to mention understanding because of her own perfect eye for line.

‘Woman like that,’ the dress-maker muttered, ‘doesn’t deserve artistry like mine.’

On and on she stitched and the clock ticked and the radio was now playing Duke Ellington (‘Lady be good’).

She reached into a cobras’s basket and took out a number of scraps of material, feeling the thickness between finger and thumb and rustling each piece against her ear. The basket had been her mother’s gift to her.

‘This is where you keep your most precious materials,’ her mother said, before closing her eyes for the last time.

The dress-maker selected a particular scrap, cut it in two and tucked a piece each side of the collar, where a violin might rest.

‘Only a small piece,’ she thought, stitching the collar carefully back together, pricking her finger as she stitched so that a tiny droplet of blood soaked into the inserted cloth. And when she had tied off the last bit of thread she cut it clean with her scissors. After that she toggled the jacket onto its dress-maker’s dummy before finally going to bed.

The following night the dress-maker and her daughter had box seats courtesy of the shared violin teacher. Naturally they were both wore black silk, in dresses run up from remnants the dress-maker had found at Spotlight. She couldn’t afford not to buy remnants. The two sat above the Concert Hall stage in Box A, presiding like the vestal virgins at a Roman Scissore (a name which meant fighting with short swords – and a name the dress-maker enjoyed knowing).

The orchestra arrived and took their seats, filling the allocated places for the violins and violas and cellos and double basses; then the brass instruments lined up at the back, and behind them the tympani. Finally the conductor arrived, bowed to the audience in his ring-master’s pants and comical tails. And after a sufficient minute Lucia strode out, carrying her precious violin and bow in her right hand, using her left to test her heavy black chignon in a languorous gesture she knew enhanced the handsome curves of her breast.

‘The jacket,’ the dress-maker’s daughter whispered. ‘Doesn’t she look beautiful?’

‘Indeed,’ the dress-maker agreed. ‘Very striking.’

Everything about the jacket, its perfect cut, and the rich colours and the fine stitching, and the splendid way it encased the body of its wearer, made her proud. There wasn’t a thing to be said against her sewing when the right person wore her clothes.

The conductor tapped his baton, raised his two hands, and the music began. It was the Bruch Violin concerto (G minor, op 26), an old favourite loved by audiences everywhere and something of a signature piece for Lucia Garza. She swung her bow into the opening movement, and the jacket moved with her, tight as a glove. The powerful singing of the violin reached out to grab the audience. The dress-maker’s daughter was thrilled. She took her mother’s hand and squeezed it.

‘I want to be like her Mummy,’ she said. ‘Like Lucia.’

And her mother whispered back.

‘You will be better,’ she said.

The adagio movement arrived, and feeling safe in the hands of La Garza the audience relaxed into its reflective beauty. But the violinist herself seemed anything but relaxed. As soon as the gentle opening bars began her bowing lost its fluidity. Her arm was ungainly, and she seemed anxious, constantly shifting the violin slightly against her chin. A whispering sound followed her quiet bow, and only amplified in the perfect acoustics of the auditorium. For the audience, accustomed to the vagaries of great soloists, it seemed the violinist was talking to herself. But her lips were pursed, her brilliant red lipstick pouting and savage under the shiny stage light, and the audible whispers went on. Eventually the great violinist stopped mid-phrase.

‘What the fuck is that?’ she said, turning towards the conductor.

The orchestra having straggled on for a few bars, caught a contemptuous gaze from Lucia. In seconds every instrument was silent.

‘Someone in the orchestra is whispering,’ she said. ‘And just as I approach the most climactic moment.’

She turned on the tympani (notoriously bored in the back row with nothing to do in the slow movements). No-one looked at her. After a minute of total silence Lucia picked up her instrument, adjusted her chin-rest and began again, exactly where she had left off, and the conductor was forced to scramble the musicians into place to catch up. Then the whispering began again.

‘That’s it,’ Lucia said. She stopped and bowed towards the audience. ‘I am sorry but I cannot play on when there is this dreadful noise.’

And she stalked off leaving the orchestra to put together an ad hoc evening of Bartok folk dances, in case the audience might want its money back. As she left the building Lucia encountered a lone fan, a small frizzy haired woman of nondescript appearance, waiting patiently with her programme.  

‘Can you write ‘For Evelyn’’, she said, handing over the glossy brochure.

‘You are Evelyn?’ Lucia asked. She scribbled as she talked.

Yes,’ the woman said, ‘after my mother. She was a great fan of yours.’

‘She wouldn’t have thought so much of me here,’ Lucia said. ‘In this hick bloody town.’

‘Oh she would have,’ Evelyn said. ‘You were wonderful.’

She hadn’t bothered staying for the folk dances, they weren’t her ‘thing’.

Lucia took off her jacket.

‘An insect of a woman has done something,’ she said, shedding the jacket like a skin. ‘Call me a cab would you.’

And Evelyn leapt out into the traffic and whistled up a taxi (something she had never done in her life before).

 Lucia handed her the jacket.

‘Have it,’ she said. ‘It might suit you better.’

It was a cool night, and Evelyn tried the jacket on as soon as Lucia was out of sight. The jacket smelled of armpit sweat and Caro Poivre and it fitted Evelyn like a glove.

Evelyn was not really so fond of the violin, it was something she’d pretended to please her mother (now gone to a better place). Her real love was for the human voice, in particular the thrilling depths of a great mezzo-soprano. Sometimes her skin prickled with pleasure at the sorrows of these tragic women. Lucia Garza, while not a mezzo, had many of the qualities that attracted Evelyn to them – her dramatic marital history, the affair with a mob boss, and the neglect of her various children. Her life had all the makings of grand opera, a musical form beloved of Evelyn.

She herself enjoyed an uninteresting personality and a life sadly bereft of drama. She paid half her wage into a Defined Benefits Fund and lived underneath her own house in a garden flat. The main house was rented out to an accountant. When she came home at night from work (data entry for a government department) her cats accompanied her to the kitchen, demanding ever more expensive morsels of endangered fish. During the day they lay in the sunny spots of her front room and purred.

Apart from music, Evelyn loved auctions. Most weekends she went to at least one, and followed that with a late lunch in a favoured West End bistro. She collected early 78s, having an adoration for German lieder. Every Friday she bought the Courier Mail so she could decide where she would go the next day. That week the most promising was an auction in Paddington. It started at 11a.m. The list broadly declared ‘Opera singers – early 20^th’. That could mean Pelagie Andriessen, she thought, a mezzo of rare and beautiful depth.  Evelyn ‘collected’ her whenever she could. And it would be a chance to wear her new jacket.

The selling started right on time. Besides the 78s there were dolls, militaria, movie posters, china – all the usual things. Evelyn had looked around beforehand, but there wasn’t much there that interested her. The ‘Singers – early 20^th’ turned out to be yet more Nellie Melba. But she stayed anyway to enjoy the drama of the auction. Then a couple of violins were brought in. Evelyn hadn’t noticed there were instruments for sale, not that she was looking for any. But she did admire the line of a good violin.

The room was crowded and hot and the noise of hundreds of people filled the space like a balloon. Her neck nagged to be scratched. In the crush of people it was hard to move. The auctioneer stood at his podium, holding a violin and bow.

‘Violin.’ His voice was miked. ‘Circa 1900, Soliani type in appearance.’

Evelyn paid little attention, being far more interested in the people around her, than in the instrument on sale.

‘One hundred dollars,’ the auctioneer called. ‘Let’s get started. Hundred and five, hundred and five, who’ll give me a hundred and five?’

Heads swivelled from side to side. They were like spectators at a tennis match, following the movement of the bids from one part of the room to another. But the bidding was slow. It didn’t seem there was much call for old violins, in spite of the auctioneer’s description of it as coming with an especially handsome scroll, and tail piece. Evelyn jutted her chin forward, and stretched the collar of her jacket, trying to calm her ferocious itch.

‘Hundred and eighty dollars,’ the auctioneer said, pointing his hammer at her. ‘Hundred and eighty five, hundred and eighty five, who’ll give me a hundred and eighty five?’

And as no-one offered any further amount Evelyn found herself in possession of a violin of unknown make and quality and relieved of one hundred and eighty dollars.

She took the bus to West End, the violin case wedged between her knees. The bus was crowded. All around were voices and laughter, friends gossiping, lovers making plans for the evening. Usually people ignored Evelyn but not this time.

‘I love your jacket,’ the girl next to her said. ‘Did you make it?’

And Evelyn embarked on the strange story, of how an international musician had given it to her.

‘Now I’ve wound up with a violin as well,’ she said, pointing to the case.

Evelyn had noticed when she got onto the bus that people looked at her. It was because of the jacket. Now she realized people were listening as well.

‘Who knows?’ she said airily to her new friend. ‘Jessye Norman will be here next week. Perhaps she will give me one of her turbans.’

And they both laughed.

La Norman, as Evelyn thought of her, although always described as a soprano, had a voice Evelyn recognised as that rare thing a ‘Falcon’, that is a soprano voice with a sound closer to that of the tragic depths of the mezzo.

‘I don’t care if I starve for a month,’ she said loudly to her audience, ‘when Jessye Norman sings ‘When I am laid in earth’ I will be there with her.’

An appreciative titter came from the seat behind.

The Concert Hall auditorium was packed on the night, and when Evelyn got to her not very good seat (Row G, Seat 2, far left) there’d been a mix-up. Someone else was already there. Then she did something she had never done in her life before. In full view she stood her ground and created a scene, her brilliant jacket pulsing with righteous anger.

‘I am not leaving until I am given a seat,’ she said loudly to the usher. ‘You’ll have to call the police.’

‘Madame, Madame,’ the usher said. ‘No need for such a display.’

And she was taken upstairs to the entrance of Box A and seated next to a small black-haired woman, who instantly began to sneeze.

‘You must excuse me,’ she said. ‘But I have an allergy to perfume.’

And she held an embroidered muslin handkerchief to her nose.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Evelyn said.

She should have had the jacket cleaned of course, but the lingering scent of Lucia Garza was so seductive.

‘A beautiful jacket,’ the woman said putting out a hand to touch the sleeve.

‘Yes,’ Evelyn agreed, and she told the story of how she’d acquired it.

‘That was good luck wasn’t it?’ the woman said, turning back to the child beside her. They were so alike it was clear they were mother and daughter.

‘My daughter, Elise,’ she said, introducing the little girl.

Evelyn was fascinated by the two, with their heavy black hair, and deep black eyes and pale pale skin.

‘I’m Evelyn,’ she said to Elise and they shook hands.

She leaned forward.

‘I had to make a bit of a fuss downstairs,’ she whispered to the child. ‘They’d given my seat to someone else.’

The mother smiled.

‘It was your destiny,’ she said. ‘To come and sit with us.’

Then she explained that it was she who had made the exquisite jacket.

‘You sew for Lucia Garza?’ Evelyn was impressed.

‘Not any more,’ the woman said. ‘A barbarous creature.'

She refused to speak The Violinist’s name. Evelyn waited, but there was nothing further.

'Elise will be a great violinist one day,' her mother said. 'Better than anyone you’ve ever heard.'

Evelyn smiled at the little girl, with her ankle socks and the hairpin holding her black hair in place. Was that a jewel in her hair or the glorious iridescence of a lacquered Christmas beetle?

‘I bought a violin last week,' she said. ‘Purely by accident.'

And she explained about the auction, and the way the violin had become hers because of an itch..

'Do you know of anyone who could buy it?’ she said.

Right away the dress-maker said it would be perfect for Elise.

‘I think the man said a Soliani,’ Evelyn said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about violins.’

She remembered how her itch had stopped the minute she took possession of it.

‘You have it,’ Evelyn said to the child. ‘Your mother has made this beautiful jacket, apparently for me. So that would be fair exchange.’

Jessye Norman walked on stage at this point, in a drifting gown of irridescent blue silk, and with a high black turban on her head. Her voice rang out into the auditorium each note a perfect construction of pitch and timbre. The audience was soon in lost the wonder of the ‘Four Last Songs’ (Strauss).

‘Incredible,’ Evelyn whispered, her voice swamped by the storm of clapping. She was almost in tears, never having sat so close to the stage before, and being able to observe the majestic emotion of the singer’s face. All she could think was: I could die now, and I’d be happy.

Because of the intermittent rain that night the dress-maker offered to drive Evelyn home. It turned out they lived near to one another. The little white Suzuki with all its windows up, soon filled with Lucia Garza’s scent and the dress-maker began to sneeze.

‘Off to the dry-cleaners tomorrow,’ Evelyn said apologetically.

The dress-maker kept her eyes ahead on the road where oil swirled in puddles, making patterns of purple and gold, shot through with the flashing reds and greens of reflected traffic lights. Dry-cleaning would remove everything; there would be no trace of the blood and sweat that had gone into the jacket’s creation. She pulled up close to the garden gate for Evelyn, since the rain had started again.

‘You’ll bring the violin tomorrow?’ she said as Evelyn got out.

‘Yes,’ Evelyn said.

She put up her umbrella, to run inside, where her cats waited by the door.

‘Will my violin be as good as Miss Garza’s?’ the little girl said, once they’d got home and her mother was putting her to bed.

‘It will be better,’ her mother said.

Most likely it was a Liandro Bisiach, she thought to herself. That was the type The Violinist was known to play. They were often mistaken for Soliani replicas. In her opinion the Bisiach sound was much better. She opened her daughter’s favourite book of fairy-tales and began to read.

‘Once upon a time,’ she said. ‘There was a little girl in need of a violin.’