The Dress (9 page)

Despite this eccentric hobby, Honor kept up with her schoolwork and when she got top marks in her Leaving Certificate exams at the age of eighteen, her father assumed she would go on to teacher training college. John had a private hope that Honor would then return to Bangor and join him in the school. Classroom numbers were growing and John was confident that he could get funding for another teacher. When Honor announced that she intended to go to Dublin to work as a seamstress, he was furious.

‘Have you any idea how few get called for teacher training?' he argued. ‘You cannot possibly consider wasting your good brain sewing for a living?'

‘But I love sewing,' she said, ‘and I don't want to teach – I just want to make things.'

‘Well, I love acting,' John said, ‘but I'm not about to rush off and try to get a job at the Abbey!'

‘Well, maybe you should,' Honor snapped. She was red-faced now. Not just angry, but afraid that her parents were going to stand in the way of her dream.

‘I wouldn't be that selfish,' John said. ‘I would not abandon my town, my community, my family, to follow a foolish notion.'

‘It's not a foolish notion, it's a good job.' But even as she said it, Honor knew that running off to Dublin to become a seamstress would hurt her parents and she could not bear to do that. Her parents were good people. She was a good person. She would have to do what her father wanted, but she was damned if she wouldn't put up a fight first.

In the end they let her go.

Honor had been hoarding fashion magazines under her bed, scouring her father's newspapers every day for news of shows in Paris and London. She had filled a broad, brown scrapbook with cuttings and her own designs. Clare knew where her daughter's heart lay and she showed the stash to John. Knowing it was the right thing to do, he rang the only person he knew connected with clothes. This theatrical fabric supplier in Dublin was a kind man who managed to secure the headmaster's daughter an apprenticeship.

Honor would never forget the moment her parents called her into the kitchen to tell her. Her mother was beaming, as her father handed her the letter, on thick official paper, offering her a place in Sybil Connolly's Dublin studio.

‘I don't even know who she is,' John said.

‘She is the best designer in the world!' Honor screamed. ‘Thank you, Daddy. Oh, thank you.'

‘I still think you're making a terrible mistake,' he said, but it didn't matter now.

‘You'll lose her,' was what Clare had said, when he had stubbornly declared he would force her into teacher training against her will. ‘You can have her body, or her heart, John, but if you push this, you could end up losing both.'

Clare and John continued to dream that their daughter would return to Bangor one day, perhaps marry and be content sewing for the local women and making costumes for her father's productions. In her weekly letters, Clare often jokily asked if her daughter had met any nice men in New York and if she did, to be sure they were from the north-west coast of Mayo.

Yet three years later, here Honor was, still stitching sequins onto hems and no closer to the dream that had brought her so far from home. She had expected to be designing by now. She had done her time. All the other women were happy in the workshop, clocking in the hours, until they could get out, to either find a man or return home to one. Honor was twenty-three and unmarried – a spinster. She didn't care about that. She just cared about creating beautiful clothes, her
own
beautiful clothes, with
her
name on them.

The lace was not going well. Despite using the finest thread, she could see her freehand stitching looked less like delicate frost and more like fat fingers of coral. This had been a mistake – it looked awful – but Honor had done too much of it to start again.

Exhausted and despairing, Honor went to get some coffee. As she walked down the corridor to the staff kitchen she noticed that the light was on in Monsieur Breton's studio. Instinctively she moved towards the door then hesitated when she noticed the maestro was sitting at his desk. He looked up briefly, barely acknowledging her, and then went back to his drawing. The two of them were often the only ones left in the building, but Honor had not expected to see him on Christmas Eve. Why wasn't he at home? Though she knew he had no wife. ‘Me? I love only my work,' he often said to the women who left his employ to get married.

Honor's hands were cold and her fingers stiff from the work, as she held them near the stove while the kettle boiled.

As she carried her strong black coffee back to the sewing workshop Honor was careful not to look in at her employer and incur his displeasure. At her worktable she peered down at her lace tentacles with a fresher eye. Perhaps they were not so bad, after all. The shapes were unusual but they were interesting and they reminded her of something. Absorbed in her thoughts, Honor reached for her coffee without looking, and spilled it all over her lace.

She screamed, partly in pain, as the hot liquid splashed her hand, but mostly for her ruined work. She reached out to rescue it when, suddenly, the maestro appeared from behind her, grabbed her arm and dragged her away from the table. At first she thought he was in a fury and was about to throw her from the building, but he simply guided her firmly and quickly into the bathroom, turned on the cold tap and carefully placed her scalded hand under it.

‘Hold it there,' he said, ‘for at least ten minutes.'

‘It's fine, really,' Honor said, taking her hand away, anxious to get back and rescue the lace.

Breton glowered at her and pushed her hand back under the water. ‘You are of no use to anyone with a scalded hand, girl. Keep it here for
dix minutes
– I will come back.' Then he went back into the workshop.

Honor started to cry, partly with frustration, but also with fear of what would happen when her boss saw the ruined lace. He would sack her for sure. Then what would she do? Start again, sewing anonymously for another designer? There was no other designer in New York worth working for and in any case, who would have her without a reference from Monsieur? She might as well be back in Ireland, fixing hems for a local tailor, or making simple blue burial gowns for the undertaker.

As each minute passed, Honor became more and more anxious until finally her boss came back, turned off the tap and checked her burnt hand.

‘It will be fine,' he said. ‘No swelling.'

He was right, her hand was red from the freezing water, but there was no sign of the original burn.

‘Leave it tonight,' he said. ‘Go home.'

‘I can't, Monsieur,' Honor said. ‘I have to finish my lace.'

‘Pfft,' he replied, flicking his hand up. ‘It is done.'

‘No,' she said, ‘you don't understand, it's just that...' Her voice dropped to a terrified whisper. ‘...I haven't finished it, and the coffee...'

‘Mon dieu,' he said, ‘follow, follow.'

She followed him over to her desk and there, hanging above it, on the line she used for his drawings, was her un- finished lace. The frost lines were no longer white but a faint shade of ochre gold.

‘Bog grass,' she said.

‘Non,' he said. ‘I dyed it with the coffee.'

But Honor was lost in rapture at the beautiful copper colours of the field of heathery threads in front of her.

‘Bog grass is what we have in Ireland, before the snow comes.'

They stood together in silence for a moment, looking at the lace.

‘So now it makes sense,' he said. ‘It is finished. You have time to sew it onto the collar after Christmas. Now you can go home.'

Honor did not want to go home. She wanted to stay looking; she wanted to sew it into the white silk gown straight away.

‘The heather under the snow.'

‘How did you know?' she asked. She had to know. It was amazing, what he had done. ‘How did you think of it?'

‘You think you are the first person to spill coffee in a sewing studio?' He could see she was disappointed, so he shrugged and added, ‘I am a genius.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘you are.' Honor felt as if he had looked inside her imagination and unearthed something she had not even known was there herself.

‘Also, my mother used to dye things,' he said. ‘She sewed. I like to sew sometimes, too, and dye. You think the maestro cannot sew?'

‘Well, I...' She had never thought about it.

‘I can sew! My mother taught me. I stitched my own clothes from the age of eight! I can sew better than any woman in this room. Now? I am too important to sew. Now, I am a genius.'

Then the maestro did something which, in her four years of working for him, she had never seen him do before. He laughed. Then, looking at the lace, he said, ‘It looks better, yes?'

‘Oh,' Honor said, ‘much better.'

The he stood back and said, ‘Yes, like heather under snow, I like this. You and me, we think alike.'

Honor felt a kick of excitement in her stomach.

He paused, then added, ‘You are good, Irish girl, very, very good...' Then he turned to go and added, ‘...but you are not a genius yet, Honor, not quite yet.'

He knew her name.

‘When?' she asked. He turned at the door, shocked at her cheek, but she had to ask. She had to know.

He paused again, then said, ‘When you know there is heather under the snow, then you will be ready to design.'

Honor packed up her things, turned off the lights and walked out into the crisp, snowy night. The sidewalks had turned treacherous from thousands of busy footsteps crunching snow into icy concrete, but Honor smiled, as she realized that on New Year's Eve, there would be a beautiful woman walking these same New York streets, wearing her Irish heather.

New York, 1958

Joy wasn't sure about the collar on her dress. She ran her finger along the rim of the soft chiffon, so fine it was barely there, then scraped the edge of a scarlet nail inside the almost invisible fabric, until it sat, just so against her throat.

Her dark, straight hair had already been styled earlier in the day and was pulled back from her face, ready for her to make up her face. In front of her, on the broad glass-dressing table, was the palette of powders and paints she used to turn herself into the person people recognized and admired, the person she needed to be. She tucked tissue paper in under the collar of her new dress and briefly checked her naked face before smoothing on her foundation.

Joy spent a lot of time tending to her face and what a face it still was. She had high cheekbones, a straight slim nose and her lips formed a perfectly-proportioned bow. Her eyes were broad, slightly slanted almonds, dark brown in colour, speckled with hazel. The
Vanity Fair
columnist who had sat next to her at the Waldorf Astoria Halloween Ball the previous year, had described them as mesmerizing.

She checked the time on the clock above the bed. It was a Gilbert Poillerat Sunburst she'd had shipped across from France. It was 5.50 p.m. Not quite cocktail hour yet.

She checked the collar again, studying the feathery stain against her skin and still wasn't quite sure whether she liked it or not. Joy had specifically asked for the garment to be pure white, but then the designer, Breton, could be a law unto himself. He rarely followed instructions, even though Joy was always quite clear what she wanted. Nevertheless, he was still the best; the only designer in New York worth going to. She preferred to buy in Paris, of course, but recently Joy had found herself less inclined towards travelling to Europe to shop. She hated leaving Frank, who seemed to be busier and busier at work these days. New York was limited in what it had to offer by way of couture. Breton was virtually unique. Joy had been annoyed when she pushed back the tissue paper on his box and found not only that the collar and cuffs had a strange design which she had not been expecting, but were a different colour from the rest of it. Attention to detail was very important. Without detail a woman was nothing. Without everything in its exact right place, a delicate woman could fall apart.

Joy had certainly considered taking it back and complaining. However, she decided to try it on first and was glad that she had, because in this instance, the designer was right. The golden heathery hue worked against her skin. White would have been too harsh, too unforgiving. She held the matching cuff up to the collar and decided that she liked it after all. It would have been a shame not to have worn this dress tonight, after all the money she had spent on it.

Tonight was the eighth anniversary of the night she and Frank had met. Joy never celebrated their wedding anniversary. It was New Year's Eve that meant everything to her, the night Joy hoped Frank would fall in love with her again.

She snapped the lid of her compact shut and checked the clock again: 6.15 p.m. It was a quarter into cocktail hour now. Joy wasn't finished getting ready and made a point of never drinking until after she was fully dressed. That was one of Joy's rules, along with no drink in the bedroom, no drink without mixers, no drink on a Wednesday (Thursday was drinks party day), no drink in front of Frank's business partners, and no drink at lunchtime, unless you had your own driver with you. Joy had so many rules, she reasoned, that it was a wonder she ever managed to have a drink at all. Anyway, it was now after six o'clock, which was the time when
all
civilized people had their first cocktail and those silly rules of hers were made to be broken. She walked barefoot out to the drawing room and over to the bar. The small Frigidaire was already stocked with ice and a large cocktail glass, which saved five minutes of messing about. It also prevented the glass from filling with melted ice and diluting the alcohol because, let's face it, Joy thought, there is nothing viler than a watery cocktail.

Joy scooped the ice into the tall mixing glass, measured out three jiggers of gin and two of dry vermouth, gave the mixture a brief stir, poured it to the rim of the frozen triangle and threw it back. Her head was barely upright as she poured the second one, paused briefly to draw breath and drank it back too. She could relax now. She carefully measured out two and a half measures of gin and one of vermouth back into the mixing glass on top of some ice. Then she took out some olives, sticks and peeled off a lemon rind, pushing it around the edge of a fresh glass and arranged all the accessories on a mirrored tray. She took a quick mouthful out of the mixing glass, just to taste, and spilled it down her chin but, as Joy reached for a napkin, she found there were none in the napkin tray.