I stood watching as the front door closed emphatically after them, my cheeks burning like a spurned lover’s.

I had a vague memory of us laughing in a noodle bar.

We are friends, yes?

And then I took a deep breath, called the little dog to me to fasten his lead, and headed out into the rain.

In the end, it was the girls at the Vintage Clothes Emporium who offered me paid employment. A container of stuff was arriving from Florida – several wardrobes’ worth – and they needed an extra pair of hands to go over each item before it hit the shelves, sew on missing buttons and make sure everything that went out on the rails was steam-pressed and clean in time for a vintage clothes fair at the end of April. (Articles that didn’t smell fresh were the most commonly returned.) The pay was minimum wage but the company was good, the coffee free, and they would give me a 20 per cent discount on anything I wanted to buy. My appetite for purchasing new clothes had diminished along with my lack of accommodation, but I said yes gladly and, once I was sure Mrs De Witt was stable enough to walk Dean Martin at least to the end of the block and back by herself, I would head to the store every Tuesday at ten a.m. and spend the day in their back room, cleaning, sewing and chatting to the girls during their cigarette breaks, which seemed to happen every fifteen minutes or so.

Margot – I was forbidden to call her Mrs De Witt any more: ‘You’re living in my home, for goodness’ sake’ – listened carefully when I told her of my new role, then asked what I was using to repair the clothes. I described the huge plastic box of old buttons and zips but added that the whole thing was such a chaotic mess that I often couldn’t find a match, and rarely more than three of the same type of button. She rose heavily from her chair and motioned to me to follow. I walked very close to her, these days – she didn’t seem completely steady on her feet, and frequently listed to one side, like a badly loaded ship in high seas. But she made it, her hand trailing the wall for extra stability.

‘Under that bed, dear. No, there. There are two chests. That’s it.’ I knelt and wrenched out two heavy wooden boxes with lids. Opening them, I found them filled to the brim with rows of buttons, zips, tapes and fringes. There were hooks and eyes, fastenings of every type, all neatly separated and labelled, brass naval buttons and tiny Chinese ones, covered with bright silk, bone and shell, sewn neatly onto little strips of card. In the cushioned lid sat sprays of pins, rows of different-sized needles, and an assortment of silk threads on tiny pegs. I ran my fingers across them reverently.

‘I was given those for my fourteenth birthday. My grandfather had them shipped from Hong Kong. If you get stuck you can check in there. I used to take the buttons and zippers from everything I didn’t wear any more, you know. That way if you lose a button from something nice, and can’t replace it, you always have a full set that you can sew on instead.’

‘But won’t you need them?’

She waved her good hand. ‘Oh, my fingers are far too clumsy for sewing now. Half the time I can’t even work the buttonholes. And so few people bother with fixing buttons and zippers these days – they just throw their clothes in the trash and buy something awful from one of those discount stores. You take them, dear. It would be nice to feel they were useful.’

So, by luck and perhaps a little by design, I now had two jobs that I loved. And with them I found a kind of contentment. Every Tuesday evening I would bring home a few items of clothing in a chequered laundry bag of plastic webbing, and while Margot napped, or watched television, I would carefully remove all the remaining buttons on each item and sew on a new set, holding them up afterwards for her approval.

‘You sew quite nicely,’ she remarked, peering at my stitches through her spectacles, as we sat in front of Wheel of Fortune. ‘I thought you’d be as dreadful at it as you are at everything else.’

‘At school needlework was pretty much the only thing I was any good at.’ I smoothed out the creases on my lap, and prepared to refold a jacket.

‘I was just the same,’ she said. ‘By thirteen, I was making all my own clothes. My mother showed me how to cut a pattern and that was it. I was away. I became obsessed with fashion.’

‘What was it you did, Margot?’ I put down my stitching.

‘I was fashion editor of the Ladies’ Look. It doesn’t exist now – never made it into the nineties. But we were around for thirty years or more, and I was fashion editor for most of that.’

‘Is that the magazine in the frames? The ones on the wall?’

‘Yes, those were my favourite covers. I was rather sentimental and kept a few.’ Her face softened briefly, and she tilted her head, casting me a confiding look. ‘It was quite the job back then, you know. The magazine company wasn’t terribly keen on having women in senior roles but there was the most dreadful man in charge of the fashion pages and my editor – a wonderful man, Mr Aldridge – argued that having an old fuddy-duddy, who still wore suspenders to hold up his socks, dictating what fashion meant simply wouldn’t work with the younger girls. He thought I had an eye for it, promoted me, and that was that.’

‘So that’s why you have so many beautiful clothes.’

‘Well, I certainly didn’t marry rich.’

‘Did you marry at all?’

She looked down and picked at something on her knee. ‘Goodness, you do ask a lot of questions. Yes, I did. A lovely man. Terrence. He worked in publishing. But he died in 1962, three years after we married, and that was it for me.’

‘You never wanted children?’

‘I had a son, dear, but not with my husband. Is that what you wanted to know?’

I flushed. ‘No. I mean, not like that. I – gosh – having children is – I mean I wouldn’t presume to –’

‘Stop flapping, Louisa. I fell in love with someone unsuitable when I was grieving my husband and I became pregnant. I had the baby but it caused a bit of a stir, and in the end it was considered better for everyone if my parents brought him up in Westchester.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Still in Westchester. As far as I know.’

I blinked. ‘You don’t see him?’

‘Oh, I did. I saw him every weekend and vacation for the whole of his childhood. But once he reached adolescence he grew rather angry with me for not being the kind of mother he thought I should be. I had to make a choice, you see. In those days it wasn’t common to work if you married or had children. And I chose work. I honestly felt I would die without it. And Frank – my boss – supported me.’ She sighed. ‘Unfortunately my son has never really forgiven me.’

There was a long silence.

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes. So am I. But what’s done is done and there’s no point dwelling.’ She began to cough so I poured her a glass of water and handed it to her. She motioned towards a bottle of pills that she kept on the sideboard and I waited while she swallowed one. She settled herself again, like a hen that had ruffled her feathers.

‘What is his name?’ I asked, when she had recovered.

‘More questions … Frank Junior.’

‘So his father was –’

‘– my editor at the magazine, yes. Frank Aldridge. He was significantly older than I was and married, and I’m afraid that was my son’s other great resentment. It was rather hard for him at school. People were different about these things, then.’