The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) (2 page)

When Mamma was angry, it was the old words, dark with jagged edges, that would force themselves between her lips. These words, in particular, fascinated Ella. They sounded a bit like spitting.

Billy liked to listen to Mamma too. ‘Tell us one of your stories, Mrs Moreno,’ he’d say.

Tales of woods and deep rivers. The story of twelve princesses who, while they were sleeping, would take the shape of wild geese and fly from their bedroom window on silent white wings. The story of the old woman with many faces who travels from town to town, arriving with the autumn wind, leaving again with the spring. The story of the man who steals the precious pelt of the selkie, the seal woman, and Ella’s favourite, the story of the red shoes.

‘Aren’t you two getting too old for stories?’ Mamma would laugh.

But Billy would coax them out of her anyway, prancing around the shop, making them laugh, acting out the different parts. He’d be the princess simpering under a pink hat with a beaded veil at one moment, the merchant striding haughtily in a jewelled Venetian mask at another.

‘The witch, Billy. Go on. Do the witch,’ Ella would say and he’d lean on a silver-tipped cane with an opera shawl draped over his head and shoulders, rolling his eyes, cackling spells, his face contorted in a way that made her cry with laughter.

Surprising that Mamma let him do this with the things in the shop. She didn’t seem to mind at all.

‘He’s a good boy, Billy. A clever boy,’ she’d say. ‘He sees everything, understands everything. We are safe with him,
carissima
.’

Safe. Ella didn’t know exactly what that meant. What exactly was there for them to be afraid of? Some days, she could feel this unnamed fear shimmering between them like the synthetic veil on one of the mannequin’s hats.

2
.

A pair of leopard-print shoes, platform heels. Late 1950s. Size 37.

Mamma said that city life would fit them better. Less
chiacchiere,
Ella
,
less interfering.

‘In a bigger place, no one is interested in other people’s business,’ she said. ‘You’ll see. A new start. So much better for us.’

There was a contact, someone father had worked with, someone who knew someone else. There was a shop that had come empty, with a flat over.

Mamma took the big Atlas of Great Britain from the drawer and flipped through the pages, her fingernail with its scarlet polish tracing the journey they would take, up from the bottom of the page, along the yellow spine of the country to a large splotch of blue-green, right here.

‘York,’ she said, stabbing at a small red spot. ‘Very nice, so people tell me. Three rooms upstairs: sitting room, kitchen, bedroom. We’ll have to share. And then the shop on the ground floor, of course. It’s
good
place for us, Ella-
issima
. Clean place with no trouble. The kind of place where we can start again, sell beautiful dresses to nice people. Everything much better.’

They arrived at the beginning of a new year. A cold blast of wind caught at the hem of Ella’s coat and blew her from the train steps and across the platform.

She hurried, her bag banging against her bare legs, following the splash of crimson that was Mamma as she expertly steered the trolley, piled high with their cases and boxes, through the crowd.

The wind blew through the station portico, whipping up scraps of paper and petals from the flower stall, sending them skittering over the stones.

A man with a briefcase tipped his hat at them and smiled.

‘Welcome to Yorkshire,’ he said and the sound of his voice was surprising, flat and wide, with a kind of hum to it, like what happens when you pinch your nose and try to sing at the same time.

Ella watched him following Mamma with his eyes. Mamma was wearing the red suit, 40’s style, with the fitted skirt and nipped-in waist, a wide belt of patent leather, a red hat with a little black half-veil, and her very high leopard-print shoes.

Ella wished, not for the first time, that Mamma could be more like other mums, her hair less done, her lipstick less red, that she’d dress in normal clothes, jeans and sweatshirts, draw less attention to herself. Who, Ella thought, glancing around her, wore red with leopard-print? Who wore a hat and gloves any more?

But Mamma had already reached the front of the station where another man waited for them, leaning against the wall, a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. His hands gripped a piece of cardboard scrawled with Mamma’s name, bracing it like a shield against the cold wind.

He looked Mamma up and down, the corner of his mouth twisting. He’s laughing at her, Ella thought. The black mis-spelled letters, ‘
Mrs F. Murreno,
’ flapped and shuddered in his hands.

 ‘Good afternoon,’ Mamma said to the man, with careful precision. ‘I’m Mrs Moreno.’ She pronounced the name crisply, rolling the ‘r’ more then usual.  ‘Thank you so much for meeting us.’ She extended a gloved hand.

The man took a final drag of his cigarette and then ground it under his heel. He fished a mobile phone from his pocket and shouted into it.

‘Yeah, mate. That pick-up for Jack. I’m gonna need the van.’

Mamma’s hand hovered in the air, then came to rest on the strap of her handbag, which she pushed higher up her arm. Ella saw that she was nervous. A single bead of sweat was trembling on her top lip and she was surreptitiously checking that the clasp of her bag was firmly closed.

Half an hour later, a rusty van pulled up outside the main entrance, the doors tied shut with bits of rope and the bumpers hanging half-off.

Mamma’s lips tightened as the man and the van driver began to toss their boxes into the back of the van, one on top of the other. She saw the men smirk at one another as Mamma negotiated the van step in her tightly-fitted skirt and high heels, flicking her glove over the grimy back seat before gesturing for Ella to climb up beside her.

The van jolted and wheezed over a wide bridge, the river flowing fast and brown below. Through the spattered window, Ella caught glimpses of high stone walls, brooding clouds, a throng of afternoon shoppers shouldering their way towards the station, their heads angled against the wind. She pulled her thin coat closer around her.

The van bumped down a cobbled side street and sputtered to a stop. Mamma sat up straighter in her seat, craning her neck impatiently over the backs of the men’s heads.

What she saw made her gasp out loud, her hand flying up to her mouth to stifle the sound.

‘But it’s perfect,’ she said, her eyes welling with tears of relief.

And although, Ella thought with new irritation, this response was just a touch on the dramatic side, she saw that it was also true.

Their new home stood in its own secluded courtyard. To enter the yard, you had to walk under a low archway of old wooden beams and that was when the noise of the street faded away and you could feel the buildings draw close around you, as if cradling you in their arms.

There were no other shops facing into the courtyard, only a café with a few chairs and tables outside and three or four customers staring into their cups.

They looked back at Ella with glazed expressions. One of them fed flakes of croissant from his fingers to a little dog that he’d tethered to the back of his chair by its lead. No one seemed the least bit interested in the van or their arrival. 

Ella let her mind soften into a small, still point, then imagined herself floating upwards and outwards, flying across the courtyard and into Mamma’s head. From here, she could see the shop as Fabbia Moreno was seeing it right now, windows polished to a bright gleam, a smart sign in gilt lettering, a mannequin in the window in a red crepe dress and scrolls of silk and velvet spilling over the counter.

‘Where do you want these, then, love?’ one of the men shouted, throwing a box in the air and catching it with a fake flourish. Ella snapped back into herself.

She watched as the men stacked their boxes in a clumsy pyramid on the shop floor.

‘Please, no need… No,
really
,’ Mamma entreated them, her lips tightening again.

But the men were fast, deft, efficient. The van moved off in a cloud of exhaust fumes and Ella watched as Mamma removed her hat, twisting it in both hands.

She picked her way between the puddles, poking at the splintering shutters, testing the footboards with the toe of her shoe, then stepped inside the shop, peeling off her glove and running her hand over the surfaces.

‘So much dust. It must have been empty a long time.’

Ella saw only how the white plaster seemed to glow in the half-light, the graceful arches of the window panes and the ironwork above the shop door where the  face of a woman smiled down at her. The woman’s ironwork hair, unravelling over the lintel, was so realistic that Ella could almost imagine her winking.

Licking the tip of her finger, she wrote on the dirty window ‘Fabbia Moreno,’ and beneath that ‘Ella Moreno,’ making the ‘b’s as loopy and extravagant as she could. And beneath that, she drew the shape of a heart.

3.
Baby’s blanket. White merino wool. Hand-knitted.

Ella had always been different from other children. Fabbia knew this from the moment she took the newborn bundle in her arms, gathering the soft bird bones of her, feeling the tiny heart beating fast and strong against her own.

The baby was strangely quiet and calm and looked at her with wide eyes that were not-quite-green and not-quite-blue but perfectly focused in a way that made Fabbia wonder what she was already saying to herself inside her mind.

She was born just before midnight on All Hallows’ Eve, the time when, so Madaar-Bozorg would have said, the worlds of the living and the dead overlap for a while. A lozenge of moonlight fell through the window of the third-floor hospital room and spread itself across the sheets. The baby seemed to reach for it, her little rosebud fists opening and closing as if trying to hold the light in her hands.

Her name came easily. Fabbia saw the shape of it very clearly in her mind – or was it that she heard it, blown in on the autumn wind, like an eddy of leaves or the smoke from the first fires? Isabella, for Isis, Brilliant One, Great Lady of the Moon and Magic, protector of the dead, queen of beginnings in all the old stories.

But she would always call her Ella, in honour of that first night, hers and Enzo’s. The smell of jasmine and honeysuckle, the chink of glasses, the sounds drifting on the heavy air to the balcony where Enzo had stood waiting for her.

‘Do you like, jazz,
bellissima
? Billie Holliday? Nina Simone? Listen, this is my favourite. Ella Fitzgerald.
Magnifica
. What a goddess…’

You go to my head and you linger like a hearty refrain and I find you spinning round in my brain like the bubbles in a glass of champagne…

He’d put his hand on the small of her back, his hips swinging gently to the rhythms snaking around them and between them.

‘Don’t you love how you feel it all through you, like… like…’ He’d lifted his hand as if to pluck the right word out of the air. ‘Like
e-lec-tricity
?’

 
You go to my head with a smile that makes my temperature rise, like a summer with a thousand Julys, you intoxicate my soul with your eyes...

The high notes tangled with his words, breaking against her in shivers of green, red, gold.

That night, the night of Ella’s birth, she let herself remember all of that, testing herself, fondling the memory as if she were fingering an old wound.

The nurse wrestled with the window latch, slamming it shut against the wind. But the baby, Ella, lay perfectly quiet, seeming to take in everything with her calm, clear gaze.

‘This one’s been here before,’ said the nurse, stroking Ella’s cheek, letting her tiny fist close fast over her finger. ‘She’s not going to let go...’

And yes, Fabbia thought, turning the words over in her mind, this was true. She’d been thinking about nothing else but this moment for months now, wondering what it would feel like, to go through it all alone. She’d expected to feel so small, not up to the task, so afraid. Because Enzo wasn’t here with her, to stroke her hair or play her his compilations of favourite jazz tracks or distract her by laughing at his own terrible jokes.

But when the moment had arrived, she hadn’t felt any of those things.

She flexed her feet under the white sheets, wiggled her toes. Exhausted, yes. Every muscle in her body ached and throbbed. But as she looked down at this baby in her arms,
her
baby, hers and Enzo’s, something inside her seemed to soften. She didn’t really know how to put it into words. Except that it had a colour, this feeling, the softest blue, spreading through her stomach, reaching up towards her heart, turning purplish at the edges and opening into a velvety pink, like the petals of the orchids that grew in Madaar-Bozorg’s garden.

Now the baby kicked her feet and made a small mewing sound. Her eyes searched Fabbia’s face. I wonder what I look like to her, right now, Fabbia thought. An enormous moon-face, blurry, all out-of-focus.

‘You’re safe,’ she whispered.
‘
We don’t need to worry about anything any more.’

But she knew that she was only trying to convince herself.

In fact, Ella had never been a moment’s trouble. Whenever Fabbia thought about those first difficult years, which she tried hard not to do, she saw herself as a small figure in a flimsy coat and worn shoes with Ella tucked under her arm, traipsing from one town to another, one life to another; and she saw how Ella had simply looked out at everything around her from those clear blue-green eyes, as if perfectly resigned to whatever might happen next.

Fabbia had placed her carefully in her Moses basket in the middle of all those other women’s kitchen floors while she scrubbed and polished, tidied away, scraped stale food from stacks of dishes, loaded and unloaded dishwashers, ironed and folded clothes. And all the time, Ella had lain quietly, clasping and unclasping her little pink fists, opening and closing her eyes and murmuring to herself from time to time.