The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

Author:Angela Carter
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Published: 2017-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

6

Aunt Margaret had one single piece of jewellery, besides her fat gold wedding ring. This was a curious necklace which she wore on Sunday afternoons after lunch, when she changed from her drab, black, weekday clothes into her best dress. The week’s work was done and she waited for another hard week to start in this ugly, holiday dress. The dress itself was old-fashioned and made of cheap, unyielding woollen material in a deadly, flat shade of grey, a shade which was a negation of colour, an annihilation of any possibility of prettiness, an ultimately dejected and miserable grey. It had a high neck and narrow sleeves too short for her, from which her chapped, bony wrists and her hands on which every knotted sinew and vein was visible protruded limply, as if they were stitched separately to the cuffs and not part of her arms at all. It was her best dress because it was her only dress; otherwise her wardrobe consisted only of three or four shabby black skirts and four or five shapeless black sweaters all with snagged stitches slowly unravelling themselves, and the elbows worn thin and pale.

The dress fell straight from her shoulders to a hem midway down her shins in a long, vertical line. It fitted her badly, barely skimming her body and catching on her bony hips. It was difficult to imagine she had bought the dress on purpose, had one fine day long past gone into a shop and tried on dress after dress and, finally, taking this grey and unbecoming tube of cloth from a rack laden with many-coloured garments, slipped it over her head, examined herself fore and aft in the changing cubicle mirror, smiled with pleasure, clapped her hands in approval and said to herself: ‘This is lovely, this is the very thing,’ while a curled, perfumed salesgirl hovered, saying: ‘But it’s perfectly you, madam.' Rather, she must have inherited it or bought it at a jumble sale for the sake of something to cover herself as a rest from her everlasting black or perhaps (most likely) found it in a drawer of her newly married bedroom, chosen for her by Uncle Philip as suitable for his wife to wear on Sundays.

It was a very dowdy dress, and old, and it smelled of mothballs and, faintly, of years of perspiration soaked into the fabric, but it had been well and carefully preserved. Also, it was nevertheless her Sunday best and, as such, had a certain innate dignity in spite of its nastiness. Somehow, too, because it did not quite fit her and hung gauchely in parallels and was kept with such care, spots of dirt sponged out and the dress frequently brushed and pressed, it made her seem, touchingly, much younger.

It was a dress the good girl in Sunday school might wear. She looked naive and youthful in it. With it, she put on stockings with the holes and ladders neatly darned, saved for Sundays, and a pair of round-toed, low-heeled, strapped shoes, very old but nicely polished and also kept only for Sundays.

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