The atelier at Maison Veneri is on the fourth floor of a building off Great Titchfield Street. It has eleven windows and no view of anything. In summer it is unbearable and in winter the radiators bang at about half past nine and everybody has learned to keep talking through it.
There are twelve tables in that room and Noor Rahimi had been at the third one from the window for four years.
She kept a notebook, which nobody knew about.
It was not a diary. It was a list, in her own hand, of every finished garment that had gone out of that room with her stitches in it, and by the March of her fourth year it ran to one thousand and eleven entries.
412. Ivory silk, bias, client fitting x3, sleeve rebuilt twice (their fault).
611. The black dress. Re-cut 11 times over 9 days. Milan.
844. Coat, bouclé, for the awards. She cried in it. It held.
She had started it in the second month because a woman on the fifth floor had asked her what she did all day and she had not been able to answer, and had gone home on the bus and sat in her coat and realised that she could not remember a single thing she had made.
The black dress is in the archive now with a card on it. Noor has seen the card.
Maison Veneri, Autumn/Winter, atelier.
Which is not a name. It is a room.
"Hold that."
Séverine Aubry did not look up when she spoke. She had been in that atelier for thirty-four years and had a way of issuing instructions to the middle distance that everybody in it had learned to answer.
Noor came over and held the shoulder of a jacket while Séverine put four pins in it.
"Your hand is better than it was in the January."
"Thank you."
"That was not a compliment," said Séverine, "it was a measurement." She took the pins out of her mouth. "Sit down."
"You are the best hand in this building," she said.
"Séverine — "
"I am not being kind. I am sixty-one and I do not say it to people, and I have not said it to anybody in this room since 2011." She snipped a thread. "You are better than I was at twenty-six. You are better than I am now on a bad day, which I would deny in a court of law."
Noor stood at the end of the table with her hands full of somebody else's jacket.
"And it is written down nowhere," said Séverine Aubry. "It never will be. There is no version of this job in which it is, and I have thought about how to say that to you since the November and I have decided that a Tuesday is better than the alternative."
"Which is?"
"Which is finding it out at forty," said Séverine, "on your own, in a lift."