ATDTDA (18) 500-504: Who ever heard of a Snazzbury?

[John Bailey]

Yashmeen mysteriously receives one of Snazzbury’s Silent Frocks, which cancels out the sound of its wearer’s movements.
 
“Snazzbury” to me recalls the Snozzberries of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Willy Wonka shows the kids flavoured wallpaper, one section of which is decorated with snozzberries. “The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!” Which doesn’t clear things up for the kids, since what a snozzberry does, or should taste like, is a mystery – having no referent, his statement is a kind of closed system or loop. Kind of appropriate to a dress that cancels itself out using the same kind of recursion.
 
It’s quickly established that the use of the dress has possibilities for espionage, though – good for when a woman “must also appear plausibly feminine in public…whilst engaged, in private, upon some clandestine assignment.” Femininity here subtly distanced from the clandestine, the secret, which I think ties in neatly to this chapter’s focus on femininity as surface and light (among the TWITs and university folk, at least). That there may be another kind of femininity which works in silence and darkness now becomes a growing possibility. The traffic in frocks has picked up; one shady fellow buys a hundred of the things, and an army of “women on the move, all silent?” raises concerns. 
 
These aren’t suffragettes, we’re told. The order is for frocks in black crepon and Italian lining. Any idea what that might suggest?
 
 
Yash, Lor, No and Faun are summoned (?) to a London tailors’ studio with wince-inducing punny name of L’Arimeaux at Queurlis (Larry, Moe and Curly’s). Watching a procession of mannequins descending a helical staircase to model the Silent Frocks, the girls respond differently to the “cruel smiles” of the wearers, Lorelei a bit turned on and Faun sniffing in disdain.
 
We then have a typically erotic fitting session in which the girls are measured and (wo)manhandled by the same mannequins, registering vocal alarm which shifts to submission – “though it might be difficult for an accidental observer – or say a clandestine one – to judge the level of innocence in the room.” That word “clandestine” sure gets a lot of play in these few pages.
 
Of course while the others are engaged in the fleshy pleasures of the fitting session Yashmeen’s mind as usual wanders away from the body into an intellectual consideration of the mechanics of the frocks’ silence. Her reverie is like a dream, and she’s surprised to find herself coming to at the top of the Earl’s Court ferris wheel where she and the others a taking a spin. The wheel has stopped so that those on board can have a nice view of surrounding London. A “person of distinctly suburban aspect” (love that description of a day-tripper) launches into a rambling a seemingly pointless story about family members who once got stuck on the wheel for four hours and then got married. Woo hoo.
 
Yashmeen soon absents herself back to the world of the mind again, pondering the world’s newfound craze for “vertical rotation on the grand scale” – literally ferris wheels, but this phrasing suggests something more fundamental – and this contemplation sets in motion thoughts which will later lead her to develop a cool roulette system that we’re forewarned will make her a pretty penny.
 
And then Yashmeen is off to the Continent, a small farewell party waving her off at Liverpool. It’s a lovely end to the chapter. Yashmeen’s projected imminent voyage across the continent is described while simultaneously the present tense of those she’s leaving is outlined – the girls stave off their “insupportable” melancholy at her departure (see, they’re not that bad) by making fun of Cyprian, while Cyps himself awaits the “terrible onset” of tears and misery which he feels sure will hit when he arrives at the “intestinal certainty that he would never see her again.” A familiar use of the bowels as an effective affective gauge again, and it’s interesting that Cyprian waits for a bodily certainty to tell him what’s happening, rather than letting reason guide him – either way, when the tears never arrive in the course of the next few days he realises that it’s au revoir, not goodbye, and that “none of ‘this’ – whatever it was supposed to be – was quite done with yet.”
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