The Forgotten Seamstress by Liz Trenow Page B

catchy. Some seemed to glitter like jewels, the patterns pulsing almost as though they were alive, the threads shimmering as they caught the light.
    She showed me how the quilt had been designed as a series of squares, each one larger than the last, like a painting within a painting within yet another painting, each one framing the one inside, and each one so different from the next, in the complexity of its patterns and colours, and the types of fabrics used. We wondered, together, how many tiny scraps of material had been used to make the quilt and I tried counting them, but gave up at twenty, the limit of my numbers. Then she suggested that we play a game of ‘match the scraps’, discovering that a section of triangles near the head of the bed was repeated at the other end, and the row of printed cottons sewn into squares were in the same order in the opposite corner.
    The design of the outer panels was just shapes and colours, as far as I could see, sometimes in patterns like sticks or steps, with what looked like rising suns along the sides and ends. I liked to run my fingers along the curly pattern of embroidered stitches in the central panel, imagining myself to be in a maze of tall hedges.
    But it was the panel of appliqué figures that most intrigued me. In a row along the top was a duck, an apple, a violin, a green leaf and a dragon with fiery flames coming out of its mouth and, at the bottom, another row with a mouse, an acorn, a rabbit, a lily-like flower, and an anchor.
    ‘Why is the duck trying to eat the apple?’ I asked.
    Granny chuckled in that easy way that always made me feel safe. ‘Have you ever watched a duck trying to eat an apple? They can’t pierce the skin with their round beaks, so the apple keeps running away.’ She mimicked the action with her hands, the fingers of one bent over the thumb like a bird’s bill, the other a round fist in the shape of an apple. ‘They have to wait until another bird with a sharp beak has cut into the apple, then they can eat it.’
    I pointed to the dragon at the end of the row. ‘Why’s he got flames coming out of his mouth?’
    ‘Perhaps he’s trying to scare away the duck so he can eat the apple.’
    I’d chattered on brightly, desperate to prolong the conversation and postpone the inevitable lights out: ‘Mummy says I can have a real-life rabbit, like this one, when I am a bit older.’
    ‘That’s for her to decide, my little Caroline,’ she said. ‘Now it is time for sleep. Tomorrow’s a big day. Someone special is coming to meet you.’
    In the middle of the night I sat up in bed and tried to write down as much of that memory as I could. Some details were still clear as a spring day, but there was something else I couldn’t quite grasp, a foggy incompleteness, as if my mind associated something important with that moment, but which was long since too deeply buried to bring back to the surface.

Chapter Five
    Cassette 2, side 1
    Is that thingy working again?
    The clink of a cup being placed into its saucer.
    That was a nice cuppa, thank you dearie. Much needed. So where was I?
    ‘You were going to alter the prince’s breeches …’
    That smoky chuckle again, rattling in her chest and catching her throat till it becomes a full-blown coughing fit. She struggles to regain her breath.
    It do sound a bit unlikely, don’t it, when you say it out loud like that? It’s no wonder they thought I was making it up. Most of ’em didn’t believe me, you see. And why would they, when they was surrounded by crazy women with all kinds of weird imaginings? There was Ada, for example, who believed she was the pregnant Virgin Mary and used to stick a pillow up her dress whenever she got the chance. They’d tell her off too, just like they did with me. ‘Stop putting on airs,’ they’d say. The psychiatrist was the worst, sitting there like a pudding with that question-mark face on him. ‘This is in your imagination, dear,’ he’d say to me. ‘None