The Dress (18 page)

There had been something between them, she was certain, but she was busy; she had her work and there was no urgent need for romance in her life. Nevertheless, she was sure that their paths would cross again. It was when she had mentioned Mayo that he had bolted. It seemed as if he had seen a ghost. Perhaps he had been in the Irish civil war as a boy, or was an Irish deserter from the Second World War. Perhaps he had been widowed from an early marriage and was afraid to love again. As glamorous possibilities surrounding her mystery man circled in her mind, Honor's pencil doodled the fairy tale fantasies of her childhood: a beautiful forest inhabited by unicorns, knights on white chargers, the spinning wheel in
Sleeping Beauty
, Rapunzel's tower, and the poison apple the wicked queen gave to Snow White.

The faster she drew, the more excited Honor got. As she laid her sketches out, for Joy to discuss the following day, Honor realized, with a kick of amusement and excitement that, despite herself, she was dreaming about a Prince Charming: in the shape of a rather ordinary building superintendent, who may or may not have been from County Mayo, in Ireland.

London, 2014

For the past two weeks Lily had got up early to get her online work out of the way so she could get to the dress toile by mid-morning. She worked slowly and meticulously and found that not working to her own design gave her more freedom, not less as Sally had suggested. Interpreting Honor's work gave her the joy of designing and sewing she had experienced as a student, yet none of the pressure of fearing failure. The only pressure Lily felt was in serving Joy's past and not, as it had been before, in creating her own future.

Lily had started costing it up and had nearly frightened herself out of the whole thing. She had stopped counting at £30,000 and that had not included the Carrickmacross lace.

There was hope on the horizon. Sally had got her that work gig in Miami and Gareth had sold all of her couture stuff in Birmingham. He had a cheque for almost £10,000 – four of it had come from the Chanel dress alone. Gareth didn't want to take any commission but Lily had insisted he take 15 per cent. She thought that would motivate him to sell the rest of her cheaper stuff through the shop.

When she called in to collect her money, Gareth asked how the project was going and Lily showed him the small notebook she was keeping, detailing all that needed to be done to bring The Dress back to life. It included her drawings and, at the back, the dreaded, half-finished shopping list.

Gareth found his hands going weak as he turned each page. Lily's drawings were so detailed, so meticulous; she was talented as well as totally gorgeous in absolutely every single way. Even further out of his league than he thought.

‘If you come across anything you think would help, that would be great,' Lily said, as he handed it back.

‘I picked up some brochures, actually,' he said, trying to keep his voice light and casual, ‘for specialist fabrics. Also, I met a guy who deals in vintage corsets. He said he would keep an eye out for you. Plus, I picked you up a few remnants. Nothing fancy. Just because they were there.'

‘Wow, that sounds great,' Lily said. ‘Thank you! Can I see them?'

‘Actually, I left them at home. Perhaps we could meet up later?'

‘Oh, Gareth, I would love to but I'm leaving for Miami tomorrow, on a shoot. Maybe when I get back?'

‘Great!'

I'm just getting better and better Gareth thought dismally to himself. Let me lure you back to my flat where we can rifle through some remnants and look at pictures of antique undergarments. How could a girl resist that offer? Well done, man.

As she left, Lily felt curiously vulnerable at having shown Gareth her work. She hadn't shown Sally the notebook or told her about Gareth's fundraising because she would have told her to forget it and Lily knew she could not do that.

Besides, Sally was all caught up with the Miami shoot on which they were now both going to be working.

‘You have almost a million blog followers,' she told Lily. ‘It didn't take much to persuade Jack we should have a vintage element to the shoot and pay you top dollar to come along and cover it.'

Sally had been pushing her idea for a ‘Cool Curves' campaign to Scott's for months and had got them to agree to book the Size 12 Superstar, Sharon, to front the new brochure. In the planning meeting though, she had been slightly irritated at how eagerly Jack had fallen on the vintage idea.

‘Vintage is huge right now,' he said. ‘Lily would be perfect.'

‘It's important we don't lose the Cool Curves angle,' Sally reminded him. ‘We've planned this collection out very carefully.'

‘Vintage Curves. I love it!' said Jack, already halfway out the door. ‘Let's make it happen.'

Sometimes Sally wondered why she bothered. She doubted that her boss even knew she was there sometimes.

Nonetheless, Sally put together her crack team: Sharon as model and Justine on make-up. Lily's job was to record the whole trip ‘pirate-style' for her own and Scott's blog – cross promoting both sites. Scott's had furnished her with a new high definition camera-phone so she could continuously tweet and vlog YouTube messages in virtual real time.

Lily felt like an ingénue next to Sally and Justine, with their special lightweight airplane pyjamas and bottled water and skin hydration routines.

‘Thank you so much for this,' Lily said. She was enjoying every moment of this adventure, but there was still the niggling knowledge that, no matter how much money Scott's paid her for this gig, it wouldn't come close to covering the cost of the dress.

Sharon flew in from New York and met them at luggage reclaim in the arrivals hall. They were picked up in a black SUV driven by a cute Cuban and as they sped down the maze of broad highways Lily looked out at a crisp blue sky and palm trees so green and lush they looked too perfect to be real. As they approached Miami city, Lily stuck her camera out of the window and recorded cars and shops and people going about their ordinary everyday lives, with the excitement of a tourist seeing something for the first time. Maybe it was jetlag or just pure excitement but Lily felt alive in an exaggerated way; she felt utterly free.

Lily had only been to America once before, to New York for a long weekend with Sally. and she had loved it – from the vintage boutiques and the fashion buzz to the whole thing of just being in America – but never,
never
in her wildest dreams had she imagined a place could be as weird and as wonderful as South Beach, Miami.

The strip of art-deco candy-coloured hotels was pure vintage, with its doormen in old livery and classic cars parked casually around the place. Even the shop fronts were perfectly preserved. Lily felt as if she had stepped into an old Elvis Presley or Doris Day movie. In her red gingham blouse and retro-granny sunglasses, she felt as if she finally matched her surroundings.

As they stepped out of the car onto the shallow sandstone steps of the legendary old-school art-deco Raleigh Hotel Sally said, ‘Welcome to the mad, bad capital of catalogue fashion.'

‘Best location pool in Miami,' said Justine, the make-up artist. ‘Impossible to get a bad shot. We'll have the week's work done by lunchtime.'

‘Best burger and fries in the world,' said Sally.

‘Thinnest population in America...' said Sharon.

‘And oldest,' Sally added, saying to the barman with seasoned flair, ‘Four mojitos please. Have them sent out to the pool.'

They followed Sally out to the pool and sat on soft upholstery seats under a fashionably art-deco awning, feeling conspicuous in their ordinary London travel clothes. The pool was a sheet of ice-blue glass shaped by smooth black and white tiles. Above them the sun beat down from an azure sky, making the green palm trees gleam. Everything seemed too big, too perfect. Lily felt high with the excitement of a brand new, born-again feeling, the feeling of stepping outside her own life. Sally began to explain Miami to her.

‘While the body-type in Miami itself is clinically obese, here on South Beach everyone is either impossibly beautiful, because they work in fashion or film, or incredibly old and rich because they have retired here from the East Coast. So the first thing you need to be aware of as an ordinary mortal—'

‘No surgery, under six foot, more than fifty pounds in weight...' Justine helpfully added.

‘...is that after a few days, when your eyes adjust to the glittering, unfeasibly buff bikini bodies you will start feel like an ugly outsider. Do
not
give into this feeling or you will start being bothered by octogenarian men.'

‘Ew!' Lily said. ‘How does that work?'

‘The really old guys like more standard-shaped women,' Sharon explained. ‘Chicks with a bit of meat on their bones...'

‘...like us,' Sally added even though Lily was as slim as most models.

‘I guess they remind them of women in the 1950s, so they tend to leave the models alone and follow the regular girls around.'

‘Old men? In their eighties? You're having me on.'

‘Oh no,' Justine said. ‘I am telling you straight, there is no cut-off point over here for those rich old boys, Lily. Money, Viagra and a tan – sure, what more could a girl want?'

‘Don't think I haven't thought about it,' said Sharon.

‘She's the most popular,' added Sally. ‘They follow her around like a pack of small, yapping dogs.'

‘They love my curves,' Sharon said, standing up and shaking her booty. ‘Get one old enough then get him excited enough and you're set up for life.'

‘You are
so
awful,' laughed Lily.

‘OMG. They will
love
Lily in her vintage,' Sharon said. ‘We'll need security!'

Across the water were a couple of women in bikinis lying on loungers, with their Jimmy Choo sandals and Gucci purses thrown idly at their feet.

‘They look like models,' Lily said and nodded towards them.

‘Tourists,' Sally said disparagingly. ‘
Nobody
comes to Miami to lie by a hotel pool.'

‘The cool set are working, like us,' Justine said, standing up and draining her cocktail. ‘Now, let's
go
.'

Their suite had an ocean view and was luxuriously furnished in perfect art-deco beach style; Lily had never been anywhere this plush before in her life.

‘All thanks to you,' Sally assured her. ‘Usually we'd stay in some flea-pit motel and just use this place as a location, but Jack Scott did this for you...'

Lily felt a little thrill and said, ‘I'm sure that's not true.'

Sally looked at her suspiciously. ‘...so that when you were taking shots for the blog the backgrounds would be glam-retro and not seedy.'

The rest of the day passed in a whirlwind of fun and fabulousness.

Justine did Sharon's hair and make-up and the driver arrived with the photographer, an experienced professional in his fifties who Sally had worked with before. He had got them a permit to take pictures in an outdoor games park across town in an area called Little Cuba. As they drove up the wide, dusty streets it was if they had been absolutely transported to Latin America. Within moments of arriving at the park, the local men were performing for the camera and flirting wildly, not just with Sharon but with Sally and Lily too, although, true to form, Sally's curves attracted the attention of the local ‘boss' and he took some persuading to let them go. Lily caught it all on film and when they got back into the SUV she was so hyper to get the blog started that she began writing it on her phone, sending tweets and instagramming images at the same the time.

Back at the hotel Lily checked her social media accounts for feedback and found it was coming so fast she barely had time to ‘like' the comments before it was time for them to all get back out to the Raleigh pool and start shooting again.

At seven Sally called it a day. Chad was a top photographer out here and didn't ‘do' unpaid overtime like Sally's English photographers, who could always be relied upon to squeeze in an extra shot at the end of the day.

They went up to the suite and Sally ordered food. They wolfed down ‘designer' burgers and fries but Lily couldn't eat, she was too excited. Seasoned travellers, the other three took a power nap to help defer the jetlag until the following morning but Lily was wired. She sat on the balcony and looked down at the darkening hotel pool, where night lights were dropping like lit blooms from the lush foliage. She watched as the sky changed from burnished orange to warm purple and the clouds from white through grey to the dusty blue of a night sky. She never looked at the sky in London. Nature was something in the background of her life, like electricity – you knew it was there, serving an important purpose, but there was no need to pay it any attention, unless there was a power cut. Here, in this beautiful hotel, in this amazing place, Lily felt as though the changing colours of the sky were as much entertainment as she would ever need in a lifetime. Just sitting, alone, looking at the sky in this moment, the whole world looked shiny and new and perfect.

When the girls woke from their nap they got themselves spruced up and went down to the bar for a nightcap.

The art-deco Martini bar in the Raleigh had rounded furnishings and walls glimmering with glasses. It seemed like the private home of an old Hollywood film star.

Lily drained her glass. ‘That was delicious. What was it?'

‘Fifteen dollars' worth of rum, maple syrup and lime,' Sally said, smiling.

‘It's called a Crown Colony,' said Sharon, ‘which is maybe why you Brits love them so much.'

‘Am I paying for it?' Lily asked.

‘Started a room tab so it's on the job,' Sally said. ‘I'll pretend I didn't know I wasn't supposed to until Jack arrives tomorrow.'