Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

“That’s it? That’s all you can say?” He feigned disappointment to humor her. “And after all the time I spent!” He laughed quietly. She said nothing. He looked at her. In the half-light, he could see the growing concern on her face. He reached out and lifted up her chin a little.

“Katherine, are you all right?”

She did not answer him.

“Don’t worry, Katherine — all the material and the beads and the — they were from an old stockpile of my father’s stuff I discovered in the storeroom. It cost me nothing. Don’t look so worried.” He stroked her hair, attempting to reassure her. “And I know you don’t exactly look ‘make do and mend’ but what the — I wanted to make it for you.”

She felt her body as a leaden weight. She could not deny to herself how her heart had opened like a glorious flower at seeing him. But now there was a darker edge to everything. Now as she looked at Tom, she felt the overwhelming weight of her intentions. In admitting to herself what she would lose, she wasn’t so sure that she wanted to lose it anymore. Or, perhaps in truth, she wasn’t so sure that she could deal with the consequences. She could feel her courage slipping, as though the floor itself had tilted and she had nothing to hang on to. The courage she had fought so hard to find. The courage she knew she needed in order to tell George. She couldn’t hold on to it.

Tom took Katherine’s hand and pressed something small into her palm.

“Take Mr. Agnew’s keys to the tailors’ rooms. Meet me there after the performance tonight.”

The tender pains of reasoning shook her; the pulses of shame and desire shuddered through her. And then, while her mind and heart were arrested by and flooded with this sweet confusion, he kissed her. But this time, she pulled away.

“I can’t, Tom. I won’t,” she heard herself saying.

A loud, tense voice came from the stage; it was Cissie McGee calling out to the cast. “Five minutes to ‘curtain up,’ everyone!”

For the first time, she saw Tom’s expression take on a gravity that almost frightened her, so deep was its measure. “You will,” he said, looking directly into her eyes.

She could not contain her distress.

“Tom — I can’t. This was all an awful mistake. All of it. All an awful mistake. I can’t.” She felt her stomach lurch. “It’s just not possible!”

“An awful mistake? What are you talking about?” he asked, putting his hands on her waist as though to hold her steady. “And why is it not possible?” He took her face in his hands.

“Katherine, we were meant to be together.”

Suddenly, the music started. Miss McGrath, a dark-haired, heavily built girl of about seventeen, hit the cymbal so loudly that three elderly ladies in the front row jumped in unison out of their seats, covering their chests with their hands as they did so, as though to hold their hearts in.

Katherine took a deep breath. She was shaking. She found herself taking the keys from Tom and slipping them into the pocket of her costume.

Tom smiled at her as he left.

She turned her head to catch Rosemary Wylie strutting confidently toward the downstage entrance, her high heels giving her the extra height she did not need. Charlie stood beside Cissie McGee, fidgeting with his cravat. He kept talking to her. It was all too ambitious, he was saying, all too ambitious. They had never tackled more than a medley of popular opera arias before and now here they were staging Carmen and there was just too much to remember. Charlie pushed his glasses back into position on the bridge of his nose.

The Cigarette Factory Girls bustled onto the stage and shook their felt hats to the tambourine.

And then it was her turn to step out of the shadows and enter as Carmen. As soon as she stepped into the light and onto the stage, there arose, all at once, a unanimous swell of “Oooohhh” from the auditorium as the audience saw her costume.

It was how the bubbling stage conversations amid the cast members had all slowly wound down to a halt and how the orchestra, section by section, seemed to fall to sleep — first the strings, then the wind, then the lonely percussionist, all droning to a final stop. Rosemary Wylie had been the last to turn her head, and a low groan emitted from her throat like wind from a corpse.

It was only now they all saw Katherine’s costume clearly for the first time. While every other character in the production had had costumes adapted from hand-me-downs and any possible pieces of material — curtain, upholstery, industrial fabric — any pieces that could be reshaped and refitted to suit their parts — uniforms for the soldiers, shawls for the street hawkers, Don José’s pantaloons, Escamillo’s waistcoat, Micaela’s gold leaves — anything “make do and mend”—Katherine’s costume had been so beautifully tailored, so exquisitely and meticulously assembled, so expertly decorated that it drew from the cast not the reaction of appreciation but the embarrassment of inappropriateness.

Her costume was everything that Tom had said it would be the evening they had lain together in the tailors’ rooms. Ottoman silk and soft bouclé wool, the colors of salmon, mandarin, coral, and cherry. The bodice fully boned and lined with lemon sateen. Tiny silk buttons. Beaded embroidery and silk-thread tassles along the edges of the bolero. An intricate arrangement of pleats and gores along the skirt. A silk vermilion braid trimming the hem in a long, scandalous line.

Charlie Copeland was the only one who broke the silence. “How lovely you look,” he whispered loudly to her, his head poking out from the downstage entrance.

She could not begin singing until the excited murmurings from the crowd had settled.

A woman in the front row, wearing a flat turquoise hat, began frantically scanning the program page she was holding in her hand to find out who had designed such a magnificent piece of couture, and then she turned to her companion.

“A dream tailor, don’t you think?” the woman said, her eyes wide with admiration.

I T IS THE EARLY HOURS OF THE MORNING and George returns home exhausted and unsettled. Katherine is in bed but still awake and she hears him slip off his boots in the hall and hang up his jacket on the hook just under the stairs. She hears him give that singular, unproductive cough he gives whenever he feels anxious or worried or defeated, and even from up in the bedroom she can already smell the burned air and smoke that has followed him home. George moves up the stairs, stepping cautiously so as not to wake Katherine, yet he is relieved when she lifts her head from the pillow to look at him.

George lies beside Katherine on the bed, not getting into it, but lying on top of the blankets, stretching out on his side, his legs straight, his toes curled slightly. The night’s events still surround him with all their confusion and uncertainty. He looks at Katherine, then casts his eyes down like a dog waiting for instruction. He squeezes his eyes tight, as though he is blocking something out or as though there is some griping pain gnawing at him. When Katherine lifts her hand to touch his cheek, his world immediately loosens. He begins shaking his head and talking in rapid, whispering bursts like a man possessed.

“It was totally unprofessional of me — I should have stayed out where the other men could find me — but — I just acted on impulse — I didn’t check myself — I don’t know why—”

“George, what is it? Slow down. What happened?”

“It was — we didn’t have the manpower — there was so much trouble everywhere last night, we were overstretched — we were called to a house fire — Willowfield — had nothing to do with the mess that was going on in the city — the petrol-bomb attacks — nothing. And it was only because I knew the layout of the house—”