Around the time that Sally
found the wonderful chemist treasure trove in Soho, she also found a 1920s
fringed kimono in a charity shop. When wearing Caron’s Narcisse Noir and trying on the garment, she got such a spooky feeling,
she wrote the following, chilling, short story...
 |
| William Merritt Chase (1849 - 1916) - 'The Blue Kimono' |
The
Fringed Kimono
By
Sally Blake
It
was far too expensive, especially for a charity shop, but then prices had been
getting way out of reach for some time. Ever since they’d got the design gurus
in, and started to hang clothes on broomsticks suspended from the ceiling by
fine twine.
The
pleasurable days of rooting through jumble long gone, but £40! Surely
that was expensive for cast-offs even in Marylebone. All right, it was silk,
and had a fine fringe – so long in fact that it touched the floor when worn,
but no-one possessed of any taste would ever have worn it. It was the sort of
copy of a traditional Japanese kimono that a chorus girl would have worn long
ago. Probably in the late ‘20’s or early ‘30’s.
You
could almost smell the grease-paint and the hastily stubbed out cigarettes.
There would have been a tin of “cremine” on the dressing table to remove the
pancake make-up, and sticks of grease-paint covered with a cloth at night after
the show was over in an attempt to deter the mice who found the brightly
coloured crayons delicious.
So
how had such a garment ended up in a north London charity shop? Perhaps the
original owner had died, and whoever had been given the task of sorting through
her things had decided to donate it. No-one in their right minds would have
wanted to own such a piece of exotica, leave alone pay £40 for the privilege, but
Sarah was a romantic. She took one look at it and had to have it. She knew she
would never wear it. She was too short for a start, the fringe trailed on the
shop floor as she tried it on. Whoever it had belonged to had been at least
5’7” and slender. Sarah knew it would never be of any constructive use
whatsoever, but still she felt drawn to it somehow. She felt deep in her purse,
paid the price, and took it home.
Sarah
spent much of her life in charity shops, picking up beads and books and
handbags and gloves. Up to a good third, or more, of her income was spent in
this way. Her birth sign was that of the crab, and like a crab decorating its
underwater cave, she hooked pretty things into her lair.
Every
week, she pushed her daughter’s pushchair into the charity shops, and every week
she returned with more artefacts.
Shoes,
oh dear Lord, the shoes! There was some woman out there who took the
same small size and didn’t apparently wait five minutes before getting rid of
them. Beautiful shoes; shoes by Gucci, and Ravel, and Pinet, and Russell and
Bromley and Ferragamo, still containing a fine powdering of biscuit crumbs in
the seams.
“It’s
my daughter,” sighed the shop manageress, “but what can I do?”
For
some time after she got the kimono home, Sarah watched it from the kitchen
table. She had latched it onto the hook on the back of the door, and the kimono
bulged out over the top of the mass of carrier bags kept there for recycling.
Sarah lit a cigarette and contemplated the life of the original owner of the
garment. On closer inspection, she now felt it could even be older than she had
at first suspected. Perhaps it had graced the back of a dressing room door as
early as 1912. It could even have been around when the Titanic went down.
The
thought excited Sarah. “Hands across time” she liked to call the link between
objects and the people into whose care, or not, such things had passed over the
years.
She
began to speculate as to what sort of perfume the original owner might have
worn. Leaving her cigarette in the ashtray, she got up from the table and
although she knew it was ridiculous, buried her nose in the neck of the
garment. She did not know what she had expected, but the smell of dust came as no
surprise. Dust, and the distinct smell of the charity shop, a smell that had
been the same in every second-hand clothing shop since time immemorial.
She
sat back down and picked up her cigarette again. Nodding to herself, she
decided that the dead showgirl had probably just worn something cheap. An
oriental of some kind. Heady and seductive. Something in a showy bottle,
undoubtedly left at the stage door by an admirer.
Then
she thought again. Stage Door Johnnies were often high born gentlemen, swept away
by long legs and false eyelashes and stage-lighting. Many was the stately home
whose châtelaine had started off in the chorus at the Music Hall, she
remembered with a smile. Perhaps this kimono’s owner had been given something
more upmarket than a Phŭl Nana or Californian Poppy to win and keep her
favour from others crowding around the back of the theatre after the show.
After all, she had ended up with an address in Marylebone.
Then
she remembered the scent her own grandmother had said she had worn to the races
“before the war”. She had meant the Great War of 1914 of course. She was sure
she had some of it somewhere.
Foolish,
she knew, but she felt somehow the kimono would like to smell like it used to.
Or at least something approximating it. Tamping out her cigarette, she scraped
back her chair. She knew where it was. She had a box of old perfumes she had
bought as a job-lot when the chemist in the High Street had given way to
another coffee shop. She remembered how delighted she had been to see her
grandmother’s scent had been among them.
Picking
the kimono off the back of the door, and flinging it on with a flourish, she
hurried to her bedroom and burrowed under her bed for the wicker suitcase in
which she kept her best and prettiest things. There it was. In among the
gloves, and scarves, and feathered fans. Still in its box. The cellophane
wrapper merely opened at the top, but not removed to preserve the perfume as
much as possible. The tiny bottle inside glinted as she raised it to the light.
Its black glass stopper wedged in firmly, she had to tap it gently with a
bottle of nail polish to get it to give; “glass on glass” – a neat trick.
Sarah
smiled with satisfaction as she dabbed a little of the precious elixir
carefully on her neck where it came into contact with the scuffed silk of the
old gown and twirled in front of the full-length mirror at the foot of her bed
to release the scent.
********
Iris
couldn’t remember how long she had been asleep. It had been some night that was
certain. She couldn’t quite see where she was as it seemed to be dusk already.
She must have slept all day. She certainly didn’t seem to be at home.
Strangely, she did not seem to be at Bertie’s either, although the last she
remembered was a cab ride with him. She sighed and stretched her long limbs and
breathed in the scent that was wafting towards her from somewhere.
Narcisse Noir. She savoured the words in her mouth,
pulling out the “waaah” sound at the end of the “noir”. She giggled. Strangely, she felt like she hadn’t smelled
it in years. How it reminded her of the night Bertie had given a bottle of it
to her. He had said he could still smell it on his pillow days later, which had
been shocking but rather lovely.
She
supposed she ought to get up, but it was so cold. She rolled her neck around a
couple of times as her eyes focussed on the unfamiliar room. There seemed to be
a long mirror, a dressing table, and a strange basket of assorted pretty items
sitting on top of the bed. Iris shivered as lights danced from what must be her
bottle of Narcisse Noir on the
unfamiliar bedside table. Turning, she saw with delight, her old kimono
seemingly suspended in front of the mirror.
Too
woozy and cold to wonder how such a thing was possible, she reached out through
the dim air... and put it on.
Sally Blake
c.1982
