A letter from a reader

At 64, a woman at an art gallery asked me which of the paintings was mine

The only thing with my name on it that has ever been pinned to a wall is the tearoom roster at the surgery, and somebody used to cross it out. I am not a writer, and I have never once thought it my place to tell another woman what she ought to wear.

But a woman at an art show in Tasmania asked me a question not long ago that nobody has asked me in sixty-four years, and I have been asked about my jacket so often since that I am writing it down once, properly, and then I can stop explaining it.

Graham has a sister called Lyn. Lyn taught art at a girls' school for thirty-five years. She wears linen that has never met an iron and very large earrings, and she has been saying the same thing about me since the day Graham brought me home. She said it at our engagement party. She said it in her speech at our wedding. She said it last Christmas, while I was carving.

You have always been the practical one, Di.

She means it kindly. That is the worst of it. What it means is that Lyn talks about the light in the room, and I find the good scissors and do the sandwiches. For forty years I have been the woman in the kitchen at Lyn's things, in a jacket that goes with everything, being a great help.

Nobody sets out to be practical. It is just that somebody has to know where the scissors are, and after a while you start dressing like the person who does.

How it happens

I do not think it is only me. I think most families have a Lyn and a Dianne, and most women our age worked out a long time ago which one they were. There are women who look as though they know about things, and there are the rest of us, holding the tray.

Then you go and buy a jacket, because you do need a jacket, and the girl in the shop tells you what a good choice it is. Navy, or black, or that shade of beige they have started calling oat. It goes with everything. It will not show the marks. You will get years out of it.

All true. I have had years out of every one of them. But nobody in the history of the world has ever walked across a room to ask a woman where she got something because it would not show the marks.

Then Jenny put the bins out

What changed it was Jenny from over the road, who has never been to a gallery in her life and thinks Monet is a type of biscuit. I looked out one Tuesday evening and there she was at the kerb with the recycling, in her old jeans, wearing a green jacket with gold running through it like something out of a museum.

I crossed the road in my slippers. I said, Jenny, what on earth. She said it had been a cold change and it was the first thing on the hook. Then she told me it came from a small Australian boutique called Thompson Sydney, and that they had a whole collection of these printed jackets, each one different. I looked it up that night with Lyn's invitation sitting on the fridge beside me. Two of her watercolours, a group show, a little sandstone gallery near her place at Evandale, and a note at the bottom asking whether I would mind giving her a hand with the platters.

The one I chose is called the Philippine, and I will describe it, because you may want to sit down. It is a soft cream, and it has faces on it. Large ones. Great big faces drawn in black in one long wandering line, the way you might draw if you never took the pen off the paper, with an eye up by the shoulder and a nose coming down the front and a pair of lips near the hem. Here and there among the lines sit little gold coins with a spiral in each.

Graham looked at it on the hanger, then walked around the back of it, where there is another one looking straight at you. He said, there is a woman on this jacket who wants a word with me. I very nearly sent it back on the strength of that alone.

Then I put it on, and it is the tailoring that makes it work. The lapels are completely plain, so there is a calm bit around your face. It does up with one gold button and shapes in at the waist without pulling. It is light, but it has some structure to it, and it holds its line. It looks right done up or hanging open, and I had stopped thinking about it by the time I found my keys.

What happened at Evandale

If you have not been, Evandale is a sandstone village just outside Launceston that looks as though somebody forgot to tell it about the last hundred and fifty years. It was a lovely bright spring day, and Lyn rang to warn us that it would be cold by six regardless. It was. I did the platters in Lyn's kitchen in an apron, and at the last minute I took the apron off, put on my white top and cream trousers, and did up my one button.

The gallery was one long room with stone walls and about forty people in it, all of whom seemed to know what to do with their hands. I had put my sandwiches on the table and was standing by myself with a glass of white wine, looking at something large and orange and wondering which way up it went, when a woman in enormous round glasses stopped in front of me. She looked at the jacket. She looked at me. She looked at the jacket again. Then she leaned in, the way you do when you are talking to somebody important.

Which one is yours?

I said, which what? She said, which of the paintings? I want to know which one is yours. I have spent thirty years on the front desk of a doctors' surgery, and I have never been so lost for an answer. Graham had come up beside me with a sandwich of my own making, and he did not even look up from it.

Tell her the one by the fire extinguisher.

I told her the truth, that I was only there to do the platters. She laughed for quite some time, and then she asked me where I got the jacket. So did the young man who ran the gallery, who wanted to know who the designer was and wrote it on his hand. So did a woman with silver hair who said she had come all the way from Hobart for the watercolours and had looked at nothing but my back since she came in.

And then Lyn came over. Forty years, and I have never once seen her lost for a word about colour or line. She looked at me from the neck down, slowly, the way she must have looked at a lot of year nine still lifes. She said, Di, that is not like you at all. Who made that? I told her. She asked me to spell it. Then she asked what it had been like to wear, and I am sorry to say I had been waiting forty years for that one.

I said, oh, it is very practical, Lyn. It goes with everything.

Three things I have learned since

One. Nobody checks your qualifications. I know nothing about art. I still do not. But people decide what you are from across the room, and for forty years what they decided was that I would know where the scissors were.

Two. A loud print wants a plain cut. I thought a jacket with faces on it would have to be fussy to go with them. It is the opposite. Plain lapels, one button, and everything else is left alone. I wear nothing round my neck with it at all, because there is quite enough going on.

Three. It is not only for galleries. I worried it would hang in the wardrobe waiting for another invitation. I have had it on over a white T-shirt and jeans to walk Banjo on a cool evening, and I have it ready for summer in Sydney, when every restaurant and club has the air conditioning set for a man in a suit and you sit through Christmas lunch with goosebumps.

About the price

I sat on the other side of a lot of invoices in thirty years, so I will tell you straight, the price made me suspicious.

The Philippine is $90.95. It was $182.00.

My first thought was that a jacket with this much going on at that price would turn up looking like a tea towel from a gift shop. I have paid more than that for a navy jacket nobody has ever once asked me about, and I have kept it for eleven years, on the grounds that it would not show the marks.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is nobody in the middle taking a cut, and they run a spring sale to move the season's stock. I read the reviews before I ordered, the way I imagine you are doing now. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if anything made me trust it more. One woman from Longford had written, “My husband asked if it was a bit much. Then two women at the club asked where I got it and he has not mentioned it since.” That was the one that decided it for me.

Lyn has since rung to ask what size I take, for no reason she was prepared to give.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were out on the back verandah with a cuppa and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have a wardrobe full of jackets that go with everything, and a Christmas lunch or a function coming up where you already know which one you will reach for, it is worth ten minutes of an evening to go and have a look. There are a dozen designs in the collection, each one different, and some of them are a good deal quieter than mine.

Not because a jacket will change your life. It will not. I still did the platters, and I will do them again next year. But I have been the practical one for forty years, and I had not realised you were allowed to do it with faces on.

Two practical things, since that is what I am for. The spring sale is on now and the middle sizes go first. And with the Christmas lunches coming, I would not leave it too long.

I am still the one who knows where the scissors are. I just look as though I might have painted something.

Dianne