Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Cliffside ·
My Hats Keep Their Heads
The hats returned to the millinery over the cliff steps hold the exact shape of their owners long after the owners stop coming for them.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Vera Loom, milliner"
I have kept the millinery over the cliff steps for thirty years — Vera Loom, in the silver lettering on the window — and the blocked-but-uncollected hats live on the top shelf behind the till. A milliner's first law is that a hat forgets its head. Felt relaxes inside the week: the brim lets down, the band goes round and slack, and the crown settles back to plain felt, the way water forgets a stone. That is the law I was apprenticed under, and I have no argument with felt as a material. It is my shelf that has stopped abiding by it.
My hats keep their owners' shapes. The grey trilby belonging to Mr. Cornelius Bray, the lighterman retired to the summerhouse on the cliff walk, was finished in April and he stopped calling that same month. The trilby has kept him ever since. The crown holds the lean of his part — straight, three inches, tipping east — and the band holds the long narrow oval of him the way a glove holds a hand. Mrs. Ada Pynn's toque keeps the dent of her bun at the height the bun sat, and no higher, through two turnings-out of the shelf and one re-steaming, which should have seen the crease off in a morning. The cap of the ticket inspector off the pier steamer keeps a ruled line across the brow where his station band goes.
Since June the callers have fallen off. Never announced, never refused; a hat done and pinned with its docket, and the docket stays in the spike. The shelf fills by ones. I dust it, flat the dockets, wind nothing in tissue any more because the windings dimpled two crowns that were not mine to dimple. The hats keep their shapes, patient as pasture, and the shop fills, shelf by shelf, with the forms of heads that have stopped coming up the steps.
It is disputed, and I will set the dispute down plainly rather than pretend it away. The Rate Office inspector came in October, turned the shelf, and signed a finding in the shared book: bands plain, crowns round, nothing held. I signed against it on my side of the same page, and Mrs. Sallow, who dusts the chapel along the top, added under me that she could see through the tissue the dent of Mrs. Pynn's bun, she having set that particular dent beside the woman's head a hundred mornings at the mirror in her own front room. The inspector's ink is an inspector's ink; the counter book is a shop's own; neither of us has shifted line since, and the matter is sent up marked disputed to whoever it is that keeps disputed things.
For myself I need no finding. I know twelve shapes on that shelf the way I know twelve lambs in a field, and the shelf was built for six. What the winter has not settled for me, and what I would put to the inspector across the same page if I thought he would initial it, is the question of why. A hat holds a shape for a head it expects back — that is trade sense, and I would stitch my name to it. But a hat that holds the shape of a head it is no longer on terms with is keeping something it has not been paid to keep, and I should like somebody to tell me what the felt thinks it is doing.