Philip Mercer arrived carrying a photograph in a stiff brown envelope.
He was smaller than Iris expected, neat in a gray coat, with a narrow face and fine white hair flattened by the rain. He stood just inside the doors as if he had forgotten what happened next in a shop.
She went to meet him.
“Mr. Mercer? I’m Iris.”
“Philip, please.”
He shook her hand with both of his. His fingers were cold.
“Thank you for keeping it.”
“Of course.”
She had arranged the small fitting area upstairs so they could sit down. Winnie waited there with a kettle, cups and the unquestionable authority of someone who knew how to make an awkward room usable.
“Tea first,” she said.
Philip looked relieved to be given something he knew how to accept.
They sat. The suit hung on the rail behind Iris, covered. Nobody reached for it yet.
“Arthur loved this place,” Philip said. “He used to come in to look at the televisions, even after we bought one.”
“Lots of people did,” Winnie said.
“He’d tell the salesman ours was perfectly good, then stand there for twenty minutes explaining why the new one wouldn’t fit.”
“Mr. Price,” Iris said. “He retired two years ago.”
“Arthur was terribly sorry about that. He said nobody understood the cabinet dimensions.”
Winnie laughed softly. Philip smiled, and his face became easier to imagine beside somebody else’s.
He took the photograph out of the envelope.
Two men stood in a garden, one in a striped shirt, the other wearing a straw hat held on with a cord beneath his chin. Arthur was the taller man, his smile broad and slightly crooked. Iris remembered the smile at once.
“That was September,” Philip said. “Before things became difficult.”
“It’s a lovely picture.”
“He didn’t like it. Said the hat made him look like a retired colonel who’d lost his regiment.”
Iris laughed. So did Philip, though he looked at the photograph instead of them.
“We were together twenty-three years,” he said. “He wanted to get married for ages. I kept saying we had plenty of time. It seemed like paperwork, at first. Then a fuss.”
He touched the edge of the picture with one finger.
“We managed it. At the end. I don’t want you to think we didn’t.”
“I don’t,” Iris said.
“The nurse brought flowers from the front desk. Someone lent us a vase. Arthur said the tie was too tight, so I took it off him.”
Winnie set her cup down very carefully.
“It was a good day,” Philip said. “I keep having to remember it was a good day too.”
For a little while the only sound was the muffled store noise beyond the curtain. A trolley wheel. The elevator. Somebody asking which floor had the towels.
Then Philip looked at the suit.
“May I?”
Iris stood and unzipped the cover.
The navy wool held its shape. The lining, which Arthur had chosen with such pleasure, was a quiet silver-blue. Winnie turned the jacket slightly so he could see it.
Philip put his hand against the sleeve.
“He’d have looked lovely in that.”
“Yes,” Iris said.
“I know it isn’t him. People keep explaining that about things. As if I think he’ll answer if I open the wardrobe.”
Iris felt her throat tighten.
“You’re allowed to want his suit,” she said.
He looked at her then, directly, and nodded.
Winnie brought the cover around it again. Philip folded his photograph into the envelope and tucked it inside his coat.
“Would you like us to take it to the car?” Iris asked.
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
Downstairs, Daniel stood beside the counter checking fixture labels. He saw the three of them and put his pen away without approaching. Iris was glad he gave Philip space.
She carried the suit out to a blue hatchback parked in the loading space. Philip opened the back door and laid the hanger on the hook with immense care.
“I should have come sooner,” he said.
“We had it safe.”
Except for the trousers. She did not offer him her guilt to manage. They had found them. They had done what she’d promised.
“Will you still be doing alterations somewhere?” he asked.
“I hope so.”
“My own jacket needs letting out. For my grandson’s graduation. Not much, I don’t think.”
She smiled. “That’s what everybody says.”
He patted his middle, looking rueful. “Arthur used to warn me about the biscuits.”
“There’s time. When is the graduation?”
“June.”
“Give me your number and I’ll contact you when I know what I’m doing.”
He wrote it on the back of an old parking receipt. A simple request for work, in his careful hand. She put it in her pocket as if it were more fragile than paper.
At the counter, Daniel looked up.
“All right?”
“Yes.”
She expected him to ask about Philip. Instead he handed her a cup of tea. Her own cup, from the office. No explanation.
She took it and stood beside him for a moment.
“Do you think we know when we’re having the good days?” she asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Not always.”
“No.”
She looked out through the window at Philip’s car pulling carefully into traffic. The coat cover lay across the back seat, a dark shape against pale upholstery.
“We ought to,” she said.
Daniel’s hand touched the back of hers, briefly, below the edge of the counter where nobody else could see.
That afternoon, Priya found Iris studying the old photograph from the farewell window.
“We should do something with the clothes,” she said.
“We are. We’re selling them.”
“I mean properly. An evening. People showing what they bought here.”
“A fashion show?”
“Not fashion exactly. People.”
Iris looked at her.
Priya became more animated. Mrs. Hallet in the red coat. Hugh in the suit he’d bought when his daughter married. Winnie with the yellow dress she claimed had once caused an argument at a dance. Customers could bring photographs if the clothes no longer fitted. It would be a way to sell remaining pieces without pretending the store had never been part of anybody’s life.
“We’d need a budget,” Iris said.
“We’d need chairs. We have chairs.”
“And permission. And a reason people would come.”
“Us.”
The answer was so immediate that Iris smiled before she could start calculating the work.
“That’s a very good reason.”
Priya grinned. “So can we?”
“We can propose it.”
Daniel, returning from upstairs, listened while they explained. He asked about staffing and insurance arrangements, exactly as Iris would have expected. Then he suggested using the main aisle on the first floor because no one should have to manage the stairs to participate.
Priya looked at him with frank approval.
“You can do the music.”
“No,” Iris said at once.
Daniel turned toward her. “That seems prejudiced.”
“It is informed by experience.”
He smiled, and Priya looked between them with the pleased expression of someone who had confirmed a theory.
For the first time, Iris did not mind.
They put together a one-page proposal. A Friday evening in two weeks, after normal closing, using staff who wished to take paid event shifts. Light refreshments. A limited number of seated tickets, free but booked in advance. Remaining sale goods available to buy, no obligation. On a separate page in her notebook, Iris drew the two mirror-backed display islands at the end of the aisle, with the enlarged photograph between them. They would make an entrance without hiring anything grand. Joan could open it, if she wanted. They would include a collection for the town’s clothing bank only if the charity agreed and the estate approved the arrangements.
By five, the proposal was sent. Priya began a list of people who would look wonderful walking slowly past a row of chairs.
Iris added Mrs. Hallet’s name.
Then, below it, her own.
The green dress deserved another evening. So did she.