Parachute Silk, by Margaret Ibbotson

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Mavis had sewn every one of the forty-two buttons on the back of the dress, and during the vows she found she was counting them. Twenty-nine, thirty. Joan stood before the chapel table with her shoulders back, and the parachute silk, which had cost them six months of bargaining at Kirkgate Market, fell from her waist as cleanly as water. It was the best work Mavis had ever done. Nobody would ever know that, and she told herself it did not matter.

The minister’s voice went on, kindly and slow. Mavis looked at the groom, Frank Ellis, with his ears pink from the barber and his demob suit pressed to a knife edge, and tried to feel what a sister ought to feel. What she felt instead was a small, mean ache under her ribs, like a stitch from running. She was thirty-two. She had been engaged once, in 1940, to a boy called Alwyn who wrote her eleven letters from North Africa and then stopped writing. Joan had been at school then, with her hair in plaits.

At the wedding breakfast in the Sunday school room there was ham, and a cake with a cardboard cover made to look like icing, and Aunt Ivy said loudly, ‘Your turn next, Mavis love,’ with a little laugh to show they did not expect it. Mavis smiled until her face felt glazed.

Later, Joan found her in the cloakroom among the coats.

‘Undo me a bit, Mave,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t breathe. I’ve eaten too much ham.’

Mavis unfastened the top three buttons. Under her fingers her sister’s back was warm and thin, the same back she had scrubbed in the tin bath on Friday nights when Joan was six and screamed about the soap. Something rose in her that was so much larger than the ache that the ache was simply swallowed up, and she put her forehead against her sister’s shoulder for a moment and closed her eyes.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Joan said. ‘Everyone keeps saying. I tell them, my sister made it.’

Mavis did up the buttons again, one, two, three, and her hands were perfectly steady.

How does the writer show Mavis’s thoughts and feelings at her sister’s wedding?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Mavis
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.