The Dress (3 page)

‘She's as good as a sister that one,' Joe had often said. ‘Friends are as good as family and that's the truth.'

Both girls agreed it was important they get dressed up to the nines in his honour.

‘There will be no shirking in the wardrobe department,' Sally said. ‘We'll go to town for the old bugger.'

Lily knew that Joe would have wanted her to be looking her very best at his funeral. The old man could never stand to see anyone looking sad, especially not his only granddaughter.

‘Let me see that lovely smile, Lily,' he was always saying to her. ‘Let me see you're happy.' Then he would draw a bag of sweets out from behind his back and make her grin until her cheeks cushioned up into fat balls.

Lily pulled up a chair and sat in front of the mirror, then painted her lips in a perfect bow. Grief and exhaustion had taken its toll on her eyes but she nonetheless drew herself up and applied two slicks of Benefit eyeliner.

Then, checking that the seams on her stockings were straight, Lily slid her feet into the original snakeskin stilettos her grandmother had worn on her wedding day. It would make the old lady so happy to see them on her today.

‘I'm ready...' Lily shouted.

Sally appeared in the doorway. Her voluptuous curves were poured into a black tube dress with two chunky, full length zips straining down each side.

‘I thought we agreed you were wearing vintage?' Lily said.

‘This
is
vintage. Gucci, circa 1999.'

‘That is
not
vintage.'

‘It
so
is,' Sally replied, and grabbing a dictionary from Lily's desk she quoted, ‘
Vintage
; denotes something from the past of high quality.' She continued, ‘And let me tell you, any zip that can keep these curves in shape is
very
high quality indeed.'

‘You're a disgrace,' Lily said, jokingly.

Sally was trying to cheer her up but Lily was dreading the funeral. She had never been to one before and all she knew was that she wanted it to be over.

St Agnes Catholic Church on Cricklewood Lane was packed with people. The Fitzpatricks were at the heart of the Kilburn–Cricklewood Irish community. Joe had moved here from Ireland as a young man of fifteen, worked on the buildings then apprenticed as a mechanic and had lived and worked in the area ever since. He never missed Sunday mass, and he never missed his Friday pint in The Bridge Tavern. Lily's grandmother had been a dinner lady in the local primary school, as was Lily's own mother. The whole Catholic community, including the West Indians and Italians, knew the family, but everybody had a special fondness for easy-going, jovial Joe. At ninety he was still walking down to the high street to get his newspaper every day.

Sally sat in the front pew, next to Lily. When she saw Lily fumbling inside her tiny black clutch bag in panic, Sally reached seamlessly into her cavernous Vuitton and emerged with a fresh pack of lavender-scented tissues. Sally's bag was equipped with everything from sewing kits and hosiery to wet wipes. In that moment, Lily felt such a surge of love for her friend that she felt a lump come to her throat again.

When the mass ended, Sally stepped aside to let Lily join her parents, as they walked behind Joe's coffin. Gareth, who was standing at the back of the church, noticed Lily had been crying and wished that he had the right to go and comfort her. Never having been to a funeral before, he had shaved his beard off for the occasion, as a mark of respect. He now realized that was rather a silly thing to do. The suit he had on would have sufficed, lots of men had beards and he felt curiously naked without it. Lily glanced up from her handkerchief and gave him a slightly confused look as if she was trying to figure out who he was. Gareth was mortified. Dramatically altering his appearance before a funeral had clearly been a terrible idea. He left straight after the church so as not to confuse her again.

Lily found the burial extremely painful. Seeing the box being lowered into the dirty, grey clay hole in the ground and knowing that he was inside it was the worst part. Lily's good shoes sank into the soft grass, as she clutched her grandmother's arm and said goodbye.

Afterwards, there was a reception in St Agnes church hall.

‘My God, so many men, so much bad tailoring,' Sally said, looking around and grimacing at the crowd of parish mourners.

‘Don't be such a bloody snob,' said Lily.

‘Ah,' Sally said, grabbing a foil tray of sandwiches from a passing church lady, ‘you can put them down here in front of moi, thank you.'

‘Not so snobby when it comes to your food, are you?'

Sally glowered at Lily. ‘Ah, good, the bitch returns. I was beginning to wonder if she had been softened permanently under that pile of grief. You know, Old Joe propositioned me once?'

Lily gave a tearful giggle. ‘He didn't!'

Sally picked up a sandwich again and stuffed it into her mouth, with a cheeky nod, then said, ‘Actually, no, he didn't, but it made you laugh. I got to go, babe. I've got to pick up half a dozen woeful jumpers from a warehouse in Peckham for a night shoot in town. Will you be OK until tomorrow?'

‘Of course,' Lily said, even though she wasn't entirely sure that she would be.

The funeral crowd started to dissipate. Old Joe had been waked, prayed for and buried; tea and whisky had been drunk in his honour, sandwiches had been eaten, condolences given and now it was all over. He was gone, taking his past with him. Behind the tea urn were a dozen or so framed pictures from various stages of Joe's life, selected by Lily's mother. They included several of Lily as a child with her grandfather, but there were none of Joe himself as a boy; the earliest picture was one of his wedding day. Her grandmother had had to dig it out from the album; he had hated having old pictures lying about the place. Joe lived by the mantra, ‘never look back'. Now, as she looked at the photographs, Lily wondered about that and wished she had asked more questions about his past. Seeing her grandmother, Eileen, sitting on her own for the first time that day, Lily went and sat down next to her.

‘You OK, Nan?'

Despite her sadness, Eileen's eyes were warm.

‘He went the way he wanted, Lily, no fuss. I'm so sorry you were there when it happened, but I am glad about it too. You were his favourite girl.'

‘You'll miss him terribly; we all will.'

‘True, but I'm glad he went first. He wouldn't have managed on his own. Your grandfather hated being alone...' She paused as if she had something else to say, so Lily asked, ‘Why did he never go back to Mayo?'

The old woman let out a sigh. ‘He never wanted to. Too many bad memories. I don't know the half of it myself.'

‘What about his parents?'

‘They died when he was very small. He had a brother, though.'

‘Still alive?'

‘I doubt it, he was a good few years older. He went to America just after Joe got sent to the nuns.'

‘What was his name?'

‘Francis,' she said, ‘or Frank.'

‘And how old was Frank when he went to America?'

‘I don't know, darling, he never said.'

‘What year did Grandad go into the orphanage?'

Eileen got agitated and said sharply, ‘I don't know, Lily, now for goodness sake will you leave me alone – I'm just after burying my husband!'

Lily didn't like upsetting her grandmother but at the same time she felt there was something else, something the old lady was not telling her.

*

As Lily walked home she thought about how different the world would be now with no Joe in it. A distant roll of thunder brought rain and as she wandered through the familiar streets of her childhood her stomach jerked with memories. There was the plum tree that had been splattering its fruit on the London pavement since she was a child, there was the corner wall where she used to stop and kiss boyfriends after youth-club discos, there was the broken down garage where her father used to park his old van and where she and Sally had slept one night after forgetting their keys and being afraid to get her parents out of bed. These streets were Lily's comfort zone but they didn't bring her any comfort today. As she reached her flat, the top floor of an old Victorian terrace house owned by her parents, Lily stopped and tugged at the gate. The catch had been tricky to open for as long as she could remember. For a moment it was as if the past had entered the present, as if nothing had changed. Except a lot had changed.

It felt unnatural to know that someone who was so much a part of who she was, and where she had come from, simply wasn't there anymore. Along with that there was a new sensation nagging at her. Talking to her grandmother had only intensified the feeling that she did not know as much about her grandfather, about his life, as she might have done.

Lily had never been to Mayo where her own people were from. She didn't even know if she had ‘people' there. For all she knew she might have dozens of cousins all over Ireland. Joe Fitzpatrick had left Mayo as a young boy in the late-1930s and had never returned – not even for a holiday.

How could it be that her grandfather had died, that she had known him for thirty whole years, and yet was left knowing so little about him now? How was it possible that she had never asked? The answer, of course, was that she had never thought that he would die one day and take a part of her with him. Lily had always known she had loved the old man but now that he was gone she felt something more than that, as if a link had been broken.

When Lily got home, she was exhausted. She fell into bed but was too wired to sleep. She decided to go and catch up on some work, hoping it would wear her out. What with the funeral and everything, Lily had fallen way behind on her daily LilyLovesVintage.com posts, so she opened the blog up and resumed the last story she had been working on.

People are making a big deal out of Lucy Houston's new evening wear collection because of the full skirts, but it's been done before. When a certain Mr Christian Dior launched his couture house on 12 February 1947 he became an overnight sensation with a collection of designs featuring sloping shoulders, big busts and tiny wasp waists above full, voluminous skirts. A rival couturier at the time described Dior's ‘New Look' as ‘a total glorification of the female form' which given those times, could have been either an insult or a compliment...'

The text wasn't really flowing so Lily turned to her bookmarked page and pulled up the
Vogue
clipping she had saved earlier for some inspiration.

There was a beautiful picture of a woman in a divine, full-skirted evening gown. She had one of those archetypical haughty, high-cheek-boned faces so familiar from the old Avedon shots which Lily had scattered about the flat. The headline read:
Exquisite Irish Beauty
and the face looked a lot like the model Barbara Mullen who had been around at the time. However, when Lily scrolled down and checked the caption, she got a surprise as she read:
Mrs Joy Fitzpatrick wearing what has become known among the discerning couture clientele of New York as ‘The Dress'
.

Gripped by the coincidence of the name she scrolled down further and magnified another, smaller society picture. This caption read: Joy is the wife of dashing Irish-born steel magnate, Frank Fitzpatrick.

Lily sat looking at the screen for a moment, at Frank Fitzpatrick's name, then at his face. He bore a striking resemblance to Grandad Joe.

New York, 1950

It was New Year's Eve, ten years after he had first arrived in America. Frank Fitzpatrick's journey from the wilds of Bangor to the sophistication of New York society had been short, but hard won.

The beaten boy had left with the Conlons' money at first light as he had planned, taking a pair of his host's dress shoes from the front hall, tying them by the laces around his neck in order to spare them. Then young Francis walked and hitched his way across Ireland, all the way to Dublin. The six-day journey took him ten, because he worked for food along the way so he could save the cash he had stolen. He stacked turf for a widow in Pontoon, in exchange for a loaf of bread and a bottle of tea, that he made last two days. He whitewashed stones at the front of a rich-man's house in Strokestown and they gave him a hot meal of salty bacon and potatoes, which he ate with his hands from a china plate, in their shed. If the weather was dry, he slept in a ditch at the side of the road. When it looked like rain, he would go off route and seek out an old shed or a house that had been long since abandoned by famine or emigration.

When he arrived in the city, Frank went to the first menswear shop he passed and bought a shirt and tie. On O'Connell Bridge he asked a fellow street traveller where he could find the nearest public baths and the man, weathered, as if he had not bathed himself in some time, put his hand out for money, as he told him, ‘Tara Street.' Francis reached into his pocket and handed the man a penny. As he did, he felt a thrill, realizing that he had been in Dublin for less than a day and yet as such already felt he was in a position to give away his cash. Looking at the worn face of the street drunk at his feet, the young boy knew that he had finally escaped the brutality of his childhood and was about to begin his new life. No matter how hard the coming days would be, no matter if he was hungry, or had to work until his hands bled, the worst years of his life, all fifteen of them, were behind him now.

There were only half a dozen men, at most, in the public bath, and an official in a white coat looking down on them from the balcony above. One or two of his fellow bathers nodded a greeting, but he ignored them. He sank his head under the soapy, steaming water and stayed submerged, until his lungs hurt, then flung himself back up in an exploding breath, into his new, clean future.

His father's violence, his mother's death, leaving his baby brother behind, stealing from the Conlons, they were troubles too heavy for the young boy to bear. So Francis washed off his feelings and his conscience. He left his past, bobbing in a trail of soap scum on the tiles, at the side of the public baths in Tara Street, and he told himself he would not stop, he would do whatever it took, to get as far away from his past as he could.