Free Gracious Living by Andrea Goldsmith

a ‘come-on-and-bear-up-darling’ squeeze, but this is insufficient for a young woman trying to stay alive. As the strangerpatted and stroked, Elizabeth felt the tears start and turned away, but the shop assistant had finished: she had just the thing, she said.
    Moments later, Elizabeth was alone in the dressing room with three pairs of jeans and three of the Indian print shirts. She stood beneath a frosted lamp, the strange clothes clasped against her gaberdine skirt, stood there wondering how she could leave without giving offence, without making a purchase. At Liliana’s, at Roma, at La Femme you came in order to buy – try and buy, never try and leave. And although you might leave with a garment for which you had little use, the procedure was clear: you never left disappointed, which is to say, empty-handed. Now her hands were full, but things had gone awry. She dropped the clothes to the floor and glared at the bundle. The shop was quiet, incense burned and Elizabeth dawdled for want of knowing what to do. And soon Ginnie would wake and want to be fed and Mrs Cox had made it quite clear what her duties were.
    She bent down and disentangled one of the pairs of jeans and with her index finger traced the embroidered leaves and flowers that blazed a flagrant trail from thigh to ankle. With the filigree still etched on her fingers, she pulled the jeans on under her skirt and stood facing the mirror, gaberdine crimped about her breasts, legs of pagan totems below.
    ‘Let me see,’ the shop assistant said sweeping the curtain to one side. ‘Ah yes,’ she nodded, ‘but not with the skirt. Not with the skirt.’ She helped Elizabeth into a flimsy lavender top. ‘Now then, look at yourself. Beautiful,’ the woman said, ‘beautiful.’
    One by one each garment was tried. The shop woman was deft and admiring, Elizabeth was quiet and curious, content to watch the sequence of strangers passing across the mirror. She failed to recognise herself in the parade, failed to see the married woman with a handicapped child, and for the first time in months she felt calm.
    Elizabeth chose a pair of jeans tight and clinging around the hips and thighs and flaring from the knee in a manner that her mother would consider cheap and Adrian would see as provocative. She bought two of the shirts, a lavender floral and asmudged blue-black swirl. The shop woman was very kind but already Elizabeth knew she could never return, and she knew why when in the familiarity of her car she tipped her purchases on to the passenger seat and inspected them. She was really quite shocked, wondered what could have possessed her. And what people would think! Denim and radical shirt to drink tea with several strangers with whom the only thing she had in common was an unwanted, unlovable child. The clothes were wrong, she would give them to the Salvation Army – someone in need was bound to appreciate them.
    Now, as she stood at Penelope Roscoe’s front door in her flimsy blouse and denim jeans, she wondered what had made her change her mind: the clothes were ridiculous. It was as if she had dressed up as someone else for these strangers and yet it was Elizabeth Dadswell, well-mannered and well-married Elizabeth Dadswell with the problem, and that problem was Ginnie. No disguise would ever change that.
    ‘You must be Elizabeth.’ A woman stood on the other side of the doorway. ‘I’m Penelope Roscoe.’
    Penelope Roscoe was truly a Penelope. She began solid and large at her smiling face and dropped herself down with a thud. Pen-el-o-pe. A Penny she was not. Not with her five feet ten inches of height, her one hundred and eighty pounds of weight, her mammoth bosom, her thick braid of hair. She had slender legs, Elizabeth was to notice later, but these were overshadowed by all the rest.
    ‘Everyone calls me Penny,’ she said. ‘Now come in and meet the others. What do you like to be called?’
    ‘Elizabeth. Just Elizabeth.’
    ‘Love your shirt,’