She tore off the paper and gave me it. “Mary says Frances has never mentioned Jennifer. That’s her number. She’s still Frances Delaney, married a boy with the same name.”
On the way out she opened the door to the front room to show me her wares. She’d put a large work table in the centre of the room and it was scattered with clumps of fabric, jam jars full of paint, trays with beads and coloured glass nuggets, small mirrors and assorted picture frames. Tools and brushes were stuck into a collection of vases in the centre. There was a smell of glue and varnish.
“Looks like chaos doesn’t it,” she joked, “you can see the finished results over there.”
The far wall was smothered with an array of fancy picture frames and mirrors, everything from tiny, stylish mosaic-edged mirrors to padded, frilled and be-ribboned portrait frames. There were plaques too, painted with house names and numbers and, at waist height, a long shelf held vases and jars decorated with vibrant glass mosaics.
“They’re great,” I pointed to the vases, “I love the mosaics.”
“They’re selling like hot cakes at the moment,” she admitted. She edged her way past the table and picked up a small urn-shaped vase. “Here,” she held it out, “do you like this one?”
“Oh, no,” I protested, “I can’t.”
“It’s good PR,” she insisted, “when your friends admire it you can tell them where you got it. Word gets round, it all helps the business.”
“Thank you, it’s lovely. You manage to make a living out of it?”
I thought of my friend Diane, a textile artist and printer whose income went up and down like a yoyo.
“Now, I do. I’ll just wrap this.” She pushed back her long, grey hair and rummaged in a carrier bag for some bubble wrap. “The first few years were very hard. I made a loss for the first three. But I’ve a couple of big contracts with gift shops – that gives me a fairly regular return and the craft fairs and commissions top it up.” She tore some sellotape from a dispenser and stuck it round the bubble wrap. “There.”
“Thank you, it’s lovely.”
“And I’ll give you one of these,” she took a business card from a box on the table. “I do orders to design, too.”
“Swap you,” I fished one of my cards from my pocket.
She helped me to manoeuvre my bike out of the door and down the steps to the path. She wished me luck with my search for Jennifer. “I do hope you find her,” she said, “I’d love to know how she’s turned out, I always thought she’d make something of herself, you know.”
