Passion script and scissors on ribs

The rain has been at the windows since Tuesday and Mrs Pellow has taken to calling the back parlour the workroom, as though we are a proper establishment. Thirty-one guests this week, all wanting their hems let down before the Saturday dance. I have cut more gingham than the Sea View has served in teacups.

You will laugh, but the bell rang at six this morning and it was Mr Abernethy from number nine, asking for a suit to be taken in for his wedding. He had lost two stone since the spring, he said, and his intended had not yet noticed. I took his measure with Grandmother's shears, the ones with the curled handles, and he kept glancing at the blades as if they might bite. Half a crown and a promise I would not tell.

The thing I meant to write about is the card that came with the parcel from Mrs Ogilvie's shop in Hastings. She has retired to her sister's in Bexhill and left me her whole cutting table, with a note in that spidery hand: Keep them sharp, keep them honest, and never cut a thing you do not love. Underneath, she had written Passion, underlined twice, as if I might otherwise forget what I was for.

I laughed at her, then I didn't. Tonight I sat on the boarding house step with the shears open across my knees and the tide coming in grey over the groynes. I thought of all the hems I had been too timid to take up. Tomorrow I am cutting Mr Abernethy's suit properly, and I shall keep the scraps for a pattern of my own in the shop window. Your loving sister, Edie.