The carriage was still standing at the church gate with the white ribbons on it when Hannah Poole came round the corner into Vine Court. There was a man sitting on the wet stones with his back against the wall, and he was crying in the way that men do who have not done it since they were nine. She did not know who he was. She knelt down on the cobbles in her second-best dress and put her arms round him, and he held on to her sleeve like a child.
It was four minutes before either of them said anything at all. And Hannah Poole had known since March exactly why the bride had not come.
Vine Court was where the deliveries went, and that was why Hannah Poole was in it at eleven o'clock in the morning on the 4th of June. She had been at St. Bride's since eight o'clock with a box, because a bride's gown does not go to a church in the bride's carriage. It goes in a box at eight in the morning by the back way, with a girl who kneels on the vestry floor and does the last four hooks with the mother standing over her saying that the waist is wrong.
The waist had not been wrong. The waist had been exactly what Miss Caroline Vane had asked for in the March, and had confirmed in the April, and had asked to have taken in by half an inch in the last week of May. And Hannah had let it out again on the 2nd of June without being asked, because Hannah Poole had been fitting that gown for four months and had noticed what was happening to the girl inside it.
She had said so once to Mrs. Gill, who kept the workroom in Duke Street. "She has lost near two inches since March, ma'am." Brides do not like that. "She has lost it off her collarbones, and she cannot keep still, and she does not look at the glass." Hannah had had a mouthful of pins and had taken them out to say it properly. "Ma'am, on Tuesday I asked her to turn and she did not hear me, and I said it again, and she said, 'I am sorry, I was somewhere else.' And then she stood there and cried for about a minute and then said it was the heat."
Mrs. Gill had gone on with what she was doing. "Hannah," she had said, "how many gowns have you fitted in this house?"
"Perhaps two hundred."
"And how many of the brides cried?"
Hannah had thought about it. "About half."
"About half," Mrs. Gill agreed. "And every one of them was married inside the month, and most of them are perfectly comfortable now. Girl, I have been at this trade one-and-thirty years, and I will tell you the whole of what I have learned. We are not asked. We are never asked. We kneel on the floor and we see everything in that house, and nobody in it counts us as being in the room, and that is the entire reason they let us in. And the day you say one word out of turn is the day this house stops being sent for."
So Hannah Poole had said nothing to anybody, and had let the waist out half an inch on the 2nd of June, and had gone to St. Bride's at eight o'clock on the 4th with the box.
She got the gown on Miss Vane at nine in the vestry, and the girl's hands were like ice. There was a moment—Hannah went back over it for years—at about a quarter past nine when the mother had gone out to speak to somebody, and there were four seconds when the two of them were alone in that room. Caroline Vane had looked at Hannah Poole in the glass and had opened her mouth.
And Hannah had said, "The hem is uneven at the back, miss. I shall want you to stand quite still." Which was not true, and had knelt down. She never once in fifty years forgave herself for that.
The wedding was at half past ten, and Hannah did not go in, because a dressmaker's girl does not go in. She waited in the vestry passage with the box and her work bag in case anything went at the shoulder, which is what they were paid to wait for. And at about twenty to eleven, she heard the church go wrong.
It is a particular sound. It is not a shout. It is two hundred people beginning to talk at once in a building where nobody is supposed to be talking. And it went on for about four minutes, and then somebody began to cry very loudly at the front. And then Hannah heard a great many people standing up at the same time.
She got out through the vestry door into Vine Court with the box under her arm because she did not want to be in that passage when they came through it. And there was a man sitting on the stones with his back to the wall. He had got about forty feet from the church door. His hat was on the cobbles four feet away, and there were white flowers scattered along the wet stones where somebody had dropped a bunch of them. He was sitting with his knees up and one hand over his face, and he was crying so hard he could not breathe properly.
Hannah Poole put the box down. She was three-and-twenty, and she had never in her life touched a gentleman. She thought about it for perhaps two seconds, and then knelt down on the wet cobbles in her second-best dress and put both arms round him. He grabbed hold of her sleeve. That was all. He did not look up, and he did not say anything, and he got a fistful of the sleeve of her dress the way a child does. And Hannah Poole knelt on the stones in the rain of the day before and held on to a man she had never seen and did not say one single word for four minutes, because there was nothing to say, and she had known since March that this was coming.
He stopped eventually. He did not let go straight away, and she did not make him. When he did, he sat back against the wall and put both hands over his face and breathed for about half a minute. And then he said from behind his hands, "I am extremely sorry."
"There is nothing to be sorry for."
"There is a great deal to be sorry for, and I shall get to it." He took his hands away.
Hannah Poole looked at him properly for the first time. He was perhaps five-and-thirty, and his face was in ruins, and she still did not know who he was—and would not have known if he had told her his name, because she did not go into churches at half past ten, and she had never in four months been told the gentleman's name at all. She had been told the wedding was the 4th of June at St. Bride's, and that the waist was to be taken in.
"I have made a spectacle of myself in a public court," he said.
"There is nobody in this court but me."
"You are somebody."
"I am a dressmaker's girl," said Hannah, "and I have been kneeling in that vestry since eight o'clock, and I have got the box, and I am about as near to nobody as this morning has got in it. You may cry in front of me for another quarter of an hour if you want to."