The Dress (8 page)

‘I suppose it cost a fortune?'

‘I paid for it myself.'

Frank smarted. ‘I wish you wouldn't keep buying expensive things without consulting me first.'

Joy's independent wealth bothered Frank. Without a woman's dependence a man could not gain the full respect of his wife or, indeed, exert any authority over her. Joy had her mother's fortune still tucked away somewhere in a bank vault to draw on. She didn't need Frank's money – ergo, she did not need Frank. It wasn't normal.

‘Sorry, darling, it was an impulse thing. Don't worry, it's not very big so we can pop it in a corner. Hilla Rebay talked me into it. Honestly, I don't know
how
she keeps selling me her friends' work. She is such a charmless bore, I don't know how Guggenheim puts up with her.'

‘It's that sort of talk I don't want inflicted on poor Minnie Yewdell this afternoon.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about Frank. You know I am always perfectly charming to your business associates. I shall be the perfect wife.'

Six hours later Minnie Yewdell was perched nervously on the edge of one of their Eileen Gray Bibendum armchairs. She was a small redhead, wearing far too much make-up and way out of her depth. She seemed terrified that the modernist chair with its soft black leather edges might close in and swallow her up.

Frank found himself looking across at the poor woman and realizing his wife's promise to be charming to her might have been optimistic. Joy hated it when her guests looked uncomfortable. She said it interfered with the line of the furniture. Frank knew she was only half-joking.

As Joy got up to fetch more drinks Frank saw the eyes of the three other female guests follow her across the room. Joy was wearing a simple Chanel shift dress with day pearls and low, black stilettos. As she raised her tall, slender frame from the chair he noted each woman self-consciously checking their own outfits, flicking the hem of a skirt or fingering the collar of a blouse, painfully aware they were, inevitably, wearing the wrong thing. They had all made a huge effort to impress his wife and were frothed up in full skirts, wide belts and voluminous blouses, the latest craze. ‘Dior,' he had heard one of them say, too loudly. Joy didn't go in for fashion fads; she liked to carve out her own style. Even walking across her own drawing room, Joy Fitzpatrick was magnificent. His wealth and her beauty, plus her innate sense of style, put her beyond the jealousy of Manhattan's elite wives. She was their queen. If you didn't know Joy Fitzpatrick you were out of the circle and if you were out of the circle in New York society, well then, life just wasn't worth living.

‘You're a lucky man,' T. J. said to him. ‘She's one beautiful lady.'

Frank smiled and nodded but as he watched his graceful wife wander over to their elegant, mirrored cocktail bar the thought crept up on him, not for the first time, that actually, he didn't give a rat's arse about any of this social-climbing, polite chit-chat nonsense.

However, he liked Ted and was determined to help him and his wife fit in to the exclusive social club in which he had found himself living.

Joy stood over her nervous new guest with the Martini shaker.

‘No, really,' Minnie objected, lifting the glass a little higher, ‘it's way too early for me.'

‘Nonsense,' Joy said smiling.

‘Ooh, don't get me tipsy,' Minnie said. ‘In South Carolina we ladies don't drink so much as you do here in New York.'

Joy's smile vanished. Frank felt sick. It was going to be one of those afternoons. Despite Joy's composure he knew his wife was always on edge when she had guests. Joy said she needed the Martinis to loosen her up – to loosen them all up. His wife spent her life creating expectation from her peers and exceeding it but Frank knew this was not so much because she wanted to impress them as because she felt she needed to. Ever since she was a child, she had felt the world's eyes judging her. Judging what she was wearing, how she behaved, the way she wore her hair. In the early years it had touched him, and he had comforted her and loved her insecurities away.

Joy tapped the cocktail shaker slightly on the side of her new guest's glass and said, a little sharply, ‘If you're feeling unwell, Minnie, I can ask Jones to bring the car around?'

Joy gave Frank a look across the room that clearly said, ‘Why am I entertaining this gauche overdressed southerner in my home?' Between the strong cocktails and the tense moment, Frank could see that Ted's wife Minnie was almost in tears.

‘Oh no, Joy, I didn't mean to...' As the Martinis kicked in, Frank knew Joy would become even less sympathetic about Minnie's pitiful attempts to ingratiate herself socially.

He looked across at Jones and gave him the secret nod that said they needed to start winding things down.

Within a few minutes Jones announced that cars were outside waiting to take them down to Sardi's. Things were easier when they were out. The atmosphere was less intense and it didn't seem as obvious somehow if Joy got drunk in a crowded restaurant as it did in their own apartment in the company of a handful of people.

‘I thought we were eating at home tonight?' Joy said.

There she was, his magnificent Joy, in her perfect dress, in their perfect apartment, holding aloft the shiny cocktail shaker, and in that moment Frank suddenly felt something strange happen. The beautiful bare-faced Joy he had breakfasted with a few hours earlier, the real Joy, was gone. He had lost her. Frank gathered himself together. He was being foolish.

‘Oh, sorry darling, did I not say?'

Jones handed Frank Joy's fur cape. He walked across the room, draped it around her shoulder and kissed her tenderly on the cheek.

She closed her eyes and leant against him in sheer, loving bliss. Seeing the other women watching, Frank felt separated from himself, as if he was on a stage, acting in a play he had written, except he had forgotten his lines.

Over dinner at Sardi's Joy was snobbishly verbose, just as she had promised Frank she would not be, talking about artists that nobody had heard of and the poor quality of American couture. She managed to get away with it by ordering copious numbers of cocktails and making everyone drink alongside her. Frank held back, cautious of how things might end if they both got drunk together, something that was happening less and less often. By the time dessert came, poor Minnie was drooling on her husband's shoulder. Finally, Ted Yewdell carried his legless wife out of the restaurant, full of apologies for her sorry state.

‘
That
was embarrassing,' Joy said, making a face after them while her friends laughed. Frank felt furious.

After dinner, when all their friends had gone home, Sardi's filled up with a party being held by a theatre impresario Joy knew. She insisted they stay on and socialize with the arty set and while Frank wanted to go home, he was too afraid to leave her there alone. As they worked the room separately, Joy fingered her diamond earrings and looked coyly across at her handsome husband, making sure all the women saw her. Frank kept up his buddy-Irishman thing and was all smiles and handshakes and ‘no business talk tonight in front of the ladies' back slapping. They drank champagne and danced and appeared to everyone like the perfect, happy couple. Frank almost believed they were just that, until after midnight when it was time to go and they hit the fresh air. Without an audience Joy's transformation from perfectly groomed lady to belligerent drunk was complete. She stumbled against Frank and started shouting that she wanted to return to the party until he managed to cajole her into their car without anyone seeing. She leant against him murmuring, ‘I love you, I love you so much,' until eventually she fell asleep.

Frank carried her across the lobby, into the elevator, in through the door of their apartment and laid her down on their bed.

With her limbs flopping in a dead sleep, Frank easily peeled off Joy's coat and dress and unwound the string of pearls up over her head. Then, he took off his jacket, loosened his tie and sat on the bed next to her looking, just looking, at his lovely wife. Her perfect pouted lips, her large eyes closed, their half mooned lids framed in that trademark black line she painted on so meticulously each morning. He placed his hand on her forehead and pushed the hair back from her face, marvelling at the smooth cream of her skin against the coarse lines of his large, rough hand.

She looked so innocent asleep like this, like his Joy, and he was relieved to have her back. When she was asleep like this, he was able to fall in love with her again.

Frank lay down next to her and realized he was exhausted. He checked his watch. It was not yet 1 a.m., not so late for a Saturday night, yet he felt as if he had been run over by a truck.

He was glad the day was over. Tomorrow was Sunday; Joy could sleep her hangover off, then on Monday he would be back at work and able to resume some semblance of the ordinary life he craved.

New York, 1958

Honor looked out of the window: New York was glistening under the streetlights. From the shabby brownstones of Harlem to the verdant green lawns of Central Park everything was covered in a blanket of thick snow. It was nearly 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve 1958 and Honor Conlon was the last person left at work.

‘It's so beautiful,' Rosa, the newest seamstress had said that morning. ‘In Mexico we don't have snow. You have snow in Ireland?'

‘Yes,' Honor said.

She was tired of all the chatter and gossip in the workshop. Endless exchanges between the dozen women on how their husbands annoyed them, what they cooked for Thanksgiving dinner, and now, ‘Look how pretty the snow is!'

Honor was the best seamstress there. She could machine-sew an evening skirt to couture finish in less than two days or embroider the collar and cuff of a blouse so that a socialite would pay a small fortune for it. Even Colette, Monsieur Breton's right hand woman, acknowledged that the young Irish girl had an instinctive way of interpreting the designer's drawings, which baffled the elegant older seamstress, who had been working for the renowned couturier since their early days together in Paris.

‘She is the best I have ever seen,' Colette told Breton, after he had admired a piece of crochet work Honor had done overnight.

‘The Irish learn to crochet from their mother's breast,' he said. ‘They do it to keep their hands warm.'

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Honor had learned to sew and crochet in the workshop of the great Irish designer Sybil Connolly in Dublin, but her teacher parents had made her finish school before she was allowed to take up an apprenticeship. The Conlons were puzzled by their daughter's determination to become a ‘humble dressmaker'. Honor's own mother Clare could barely darn a sock.

‘Will he ever let me work with him in the design studio?' Honor asked the old French woman.

‘Perhaps...' Colette said, elusively, always stopping short of praising Honor to her face.

Barbara, who had been there six years, to Honor's three, said, ‘They'll never let you out of here. You're too good.'

Honor's dream of designing clothes, instead of merely making them, was fading with each passing day. Now, here she was, on Christmas Eve, working into the early hours on a finicky white-on-white embroidered panel for some spoilt rich woman's New Year's Eve party dress. It was her own fault she was still here.

‘Something pretty, something feminine,' Breton had said, rubbing his long slim fingers with his thumbs, in a soft, fluid motion, like her mother binding fat and flour for pastry.

Honor could have started something simple. She could have done daisies, or snowflakes, in a few hours. Instead, she thought of the fine grey frost on the window of her small cottage bedroom in Ireland and tried to replicate it with the thinnest embroidery thread she could find. Before she knew it, she was making panels of lace that would have taken five Kenmare nuns a full week. She knew it was madness but she could not help herself: once she had an idea she was driven to create it.

The light was fading and her eyes were smarting from the intensity of pulling the thin thread through the taut silk-skin but looking out of the window didn't help. Honor hated the snow. Not the cold, but the way it turned the whole world into white velvet.

‘There's no variety.' She once tried explaining her dislike of it to her mother. They were sitting by the fire, back in Ireland, during her last Christmas at home, three years ago, just before she had left for New York.

‘I need colour,' she said. ‘Look at this...' And she held up a piece of knitting that seemed, even to her mother's untrained eye, to capture perfectly the coppery winter grass and the deep purple heathers on the boglands that surrounded the town of Bangor, County Mayo, where they lived.

‘White snow is boring – it makes the earth look like a shroud.'

Her mother smiled and looked across at her eccentric, artistic daughter.

‘I want you to make me a dress the colour of a duck's head,' Honor had said when she was seven.

‘And what colour would that be?' her bemused mother asked.

‘Dark, dark green,' the child answered. ‘Although sometimes it changes to a blue – like the night sky.'

Seven-year-old Honor could not hide her disappointment at the green cotton dress her mother had had made for her by the local tailor, but years later, when Honor came home on a Christmas holiday, from her apprenticeship with Sybil Connolly in Dublin, she brought with her a Panné Velvet gown, in those exact colours. It skimmed Clare's slim figure perfectly, although she would never have anywhere to wear it.

‘I'll send for you, Mam, one day, when I'm a big designer in New York. I'll take you to a party where you can show it off.'

When Honor's father complained to his wife about their only child's obsession with making clothes, she pointed out it was his fault. It had all started with Honor making costumes for the amateur dramatic shows which her father ran in his school hall. It was through John's love of Shakespeare that his daughter had got a taste for velvet capes, puffed medieval sleeves, elaborate beading and gold braiding. Honor spent all her free time embroidering handkerchiefs and making costumes. She would tear up her father's good shirts and remodel them into blouses for herself, then pick apart clothes she had grown out of and patch-work them into skirts and aprons for her mother.