Before and After by Laura Lockington Page B

stacked neatly enough against the bare walls. Boxes of knick knacks were piled in the hallway. The piano was standing alone and unloved in the middle of the room, leaving Marmaduke bewildered as to where his bed had gone. He eventually settled outside Flora Tate’s room, turning three times on his imaginary long grass, to make a bed.
     
    Meanwhile, over at Limehouse, I was introducing Hal to Mr Isaacs. I felt very sure of myself. I knew how Mr Isaacs looked to Hal, indeed, how he looked to all of us. His voluptuous face was classically proportioned into one of those visages that belonged to the sixteenth century perhaps. He would have been quite at home being a Vatican spy, or perhaps the power behind a doge’s throne in the murkier times of Venice, where loyalty was severely tested and found wanting most of the time. Needless to say, Mr Isaacs and I saw eye to eye over nearly everything.
    With very little talk he ushered us into his Spartan office, and then unlocked the back door, to reveal a damp and chilly courtyard. Hal and I followed him in single file, my heels clicking on the broken paving stones. A few clammy ferns clung to the high sooty brick walls, but otherwise the courtyard was bare. The humming of a large refrigeration unit could be heard, and the twitterings of some brave London sparrows, but that was all, even the traffic noises were muted. Mr Isaacs unpadlocked a sturdy looking wooden door at the end of the courtyard, and stepped back to allow me to enter first. We were in yet another office, but oh how different this one was. A small mahogany desk and an abacus were the only real sign that any commerce went on here. Otherwise it was all red. Plum coloured walls, layer upon layer of Persian rugs, a damson coloured velvet chaise longue , and a vast, intimidatingly vast, mirror that only I knew to be a two-way affair. It was like stepping into a nomad chieftain tent on the steppes. An incongruous looking steel door was set in the middle wall of this riot of colour, from which the hum of the motorised unit grew louder.
    Mr Isaacs (we had never been on first name terms, and in this life never would be) motioned for Hal and I sit on the chaise. Of course, sitting on a chaise has never, in all the history of that particular piece of elegant and opulent furniture been an option. One lolls or reclines like a well fed pasha and Hal and I were no exception. I saw that Hal was very silent looking almost frightened. He was, for all his outward polish that comes from good schooling and a polite family, nevertheless a very nervous young man.
    “I say Miss T- Flora, what are we doing here? I mean –“
    “Oh, I am so sorry Hal, haven’t I explained who Mr Isaacs is? He’s my furrier.” I smiled reassuringly at Hal laying a soothing hand on his young warm arm.
    He looked blankly at me.
    “He’s your what?”
    Do they teach them nothing at all at school these days? Honestly.
    “I buy, well, borrow perhaps might be a better way of describing it, all my winter furs from here.”
    They were very special sorts of furs too. A long time ago there had been an uprising of British sentimentality about the wearing of furs, culminating in a mass bonfire in Trafalgar Square. Mr Isaacs had been there too. Some think he may have engineered the whole thing. Whatever the truth, and we can be sure that we will never find anything out from clever Mr Isaacs, he was now the owner of the rarest, most luxurious, furriest furs in the whole of the British Isles. Mink, Ocelot, Sables, Tiger, Leopard, Bear, Wolf, Ermine, Beaver, Seal, Astrakhan, even the humble sheared sheepskin hung in perfect order in the vast humming cold store behind the steel door. Every hue of pelt from the most midnight of black to the palest of grey, from the living warmth of gold and the boldness of white were waiting in the frosty manufactured air. Hung like immaculate corpses in an abattoir they awaited the soft flesh of a human to inhabit them again. And, before