A letter from a reader

At 66, I left another cardigan on the back of a chair at a restaurant. My husband worked out it was the fourth one.

You should picture me writing this at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold beside me, because that is exactly how slowly it has come. I am not a writer, and what another woman takes out with her has never been any of my business.

But three different women have asked me about this top since the long weekend, two of them at the same lunch, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it all down properly.

It started with Don, in the car park, after a lunch in Fremantle. We had got all the way to the car when I did the thing I always do, which is stop dead and say the word cardigan. He went back in and got it. And on the drive home, in the most reasonable voice you have ever heard, he counted them out. The one at the bowls club. The one at his brother’s. The one at the markets that somebody kindly posted back. And now this one.

That is four cardigans, Maggie. You do not even wear them. You carry them.

I laughed, and then I looked out the window all the way down the freeway, and he was right. I had not worn one of those cardigans properly in years. I had taken them. There is a difference, and I had never once stopped to notice it. Out of the house with it over my arm, too warm to put on, too exposed to leave behind.

I did not decide to spend thirty years carrying a cardigan I was never going to wear. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides that. It happens quietly, one outing at a time, until your husband is counting them out at eighty on the freeway.

How it happens

When I actually thought about why the cardigan came everywhere, I understood what it had been doing.

It was never for the cold. It came in January. It came to the beach. The cardigan was not a jumper, it was a cover, and it existed entirely because whatever I had on underneath did not go far enough down the arm.

The shops give you two choices. The sleeveless one or the barely-sleeved one, which needs the cardigan. Or the long-sleeved one, which you cannot wear here half the year. So you buy the first and you carry the second, and nobody ever says out loud that you have been sold half a garment.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You pick the cardigan up off the hook. You carry it all day. And you assume that is simply what going out is.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I suspect I am not alone.

I thought my problem was that I kept losing cardigans. I bought more of them. I bought cheaper ones so it would matter less. One year I bought one specifically because it folded up small.

It turns out the problem was never the cardigan.

It is whether the thing underneath needs one. A top with a sleeve that already goes far enough, in a relaxed shape that skims rather than clings, does the whole job on its own, and there is nothing to pick up, nothing to carry, nothing to leave on the back of a chair. The second layer stops existing.

It took me until 66, and a tally in the car, to work that out.

The top is called the Marigold

It is from Perth Boutique, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. My friend Bev found them, which she reminds me of regularly.

The top is called the Marigold, and they call it a comfort coverage tee, which is a plain name for the thing that ended thirty years of this. It is a round-neck tee in a relaxed shape with half sleeves that are longer than usual, and it is light. Mine is the blue. There are seven colours and I am working through them.

The sleeve is the part that matters. It comes down far enough that there is nothing I want a cardigan for, which means there is no cardigan, which means there is nothing over my arm in the car park. The shape through the body is relaxed, so it is not asking anything of me either. The hem is longer than a tee usually is and curves down at the sides, so it covers the top of whatever I have on underneath and I am not tugging at it. And it is light, which is the bit I did not expect, because I assumed more sleeve would mean more heat and it simply does not.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is one layer doing the work of two.

What happened at the next lunch

The first proper outing was the following Sunday, at the same sort of place, with the same people.

Three women asked me about it before the plates came. Don’s sister-in-law started it, because she had a cardigan over the back of her own chair at the time and she said so.

The third was Lorraine, who I have known for twenty years and who has never once commented on anything I wear. She looked at me and asked whether I was not cold. I was not cold. I have never once been cold. I have decided to take it as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the questions, though, was leaving. I stood up, picked up my bag and walked out. No patting the chair. No looking back at the table. No standing in a doorway doing a mental inventory, which I had not realised I had been doing at the end of every single outing for thirty years until I stopped.

The next morning I put it straight back on to walk down for the paper, with nothing over my arm at all. Completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. I was never wearing them. I was carrying them. Thirty years of a second garment that went everywhere and did nothing, except get left behind. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Two. One layer is cooler than two, obviously. I had somehow decided that more sleeve meant more heat, when what I was actually doing was taking a whole extra knitted thing out in January.

Three. There is nothing to leave behind. Four cardigans in four places. The fifth one is still on its hook, and it has stopped being my problem.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Marigold is $45.95. It was $90.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because that is less than I have paid for a cardigan I left at the bowls club.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no middleman taking a cut, and they have their end of season sale on at the moment, with free shipping Australia wide.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and had a proper look before I ordered. Seven colours — grey, white, blue, royal blue, pink, black and a yellow-green — and the sizes run from an AU 8/10 right up to an AU 18/20, all at the same price, which I notice, because for most of my life it has not been.

Then I ordered the white and the grey, and Don asked, quite reasonably, whether we were going to have the same conversation about t-shirts in ten years.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in the kitchen with the teapot between us and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have a cardigan over your arm in a photograph from every summer of the last twenty years, and you could not tell me the last time you actually put one on, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a t-shirt will change your life. It will not. But there is something in walking out of a restaurant without checking the back of the chair that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the free shipping goes with it. And it is the blue and the white that go first, which I found out because Bev had to wait a week for hers.

I have not left a cardigan anywhere since.

Maggie