The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) (3 page)

And now they were here in York, the final destination, Fabbia hoped, at the end of their long journey. Just three weeks ago, she’d watched her daughter, fifteen years old now, half-child, half-woman, with wild brown hair and that steady gaze, standing in the middle of the courtyard as the men lugged the boxes and shouted to one another and a little dog yapped.

She’d seen how Ella stood observing with her usual calm and serious expression, as if a part of her were somewhere else, somewhere far away and completely unreachable.

Fabbia Moreno felt, and not for the first time, a stab of fear for her daughter. She wished that she would giggle and shriek and fidget and get impatient, even stamp her feet and complain and make unreasonable demands, in the way that she saw other young girls doing.

There was always a part of Ella that seemed unreachable somehow, even to Fabbia. You never knew quite what she was thinking. And always with her nose in a book.

And then, of course, there was the other thing, all the signs that Fabbia knew to watch for in a daughter. The Signals. The gift that all the women of her family had been born with, in one way or another.

Seeing things, hearing things, feeling things. Knowing who was arriving at the door before they were even there. Feeling your way into another’s thoughts. Ella had this, she knew. But she wondered if Ella herself was aware of it yet.

Now she looked down at the top of Ella’s head, her hair a wiry halo that blazed in the sunlight.

‘You
are
holding on to this ladder, aren’t you,
carina
?’ she said, preparing to balance on one leg and reach her arms above her head to drive the last screw into the ceiling fixture.

Ella turned from gazing out of the window and grasped the stepladder with new determination.

‘I didn’t know you could do all this stuff, mum,’ she said.

‘Neither did I.’ Fabbia laughed as the chandelier in her hands bounced rainbows over the white walls. ‘But what is it they say here. That funny thing. Don’t tell me. Let me remember…
Sink… or swim
?’

Even now, almost sixteen years after arriving in England, she was still grappling with the language. She missed things out, forgot the correct sequence of the words. The vowels never seemed to feel quite right in her mouth somehow. And here in the North, she felt even clumsier. People here spoke in such a different way. Sometimes her head ached from concentrating so hard just to keep up with what they were saying.

It was so frustrating. She was an educated person, an intelligent person and yet she couldn’t always make herself understood.

‘We need a new dress shop, something a bit different.’ The pink-cheeked girl at Braithwaite’s Fruit & Veg had smiled. She reminded Fabbia of a ripe fruit herself, her bosom looking as if it might burst the stiff sheath of her overalls at any moment.

‘Vintage, you say? I like all that old stuff. It’s in all the magazines now, innit? I might have to pop in and ‘ave a look.’

She’d slipped an extra peach into the brown paper bag and winked at Ella.

Fabbia liked the hum and lilt of her talk, the ease of her body under the tight green cotton as she reached up to drop apples onto the scales suspended from the beam above her head, sending the silver dish bobbing and swaying.

‘I make some of the dresses too,’ said Fabbia, ‘and little alterations. Because, well, perhaps you know that vintage is very hard to size. And we have shoes, handbags, scarves, perfume…’

She stopped and felt herself blush at the sales pitch tripping out of her mouth so freely. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… Please. Come. Have a look…’

She tried to hide her embarrassment, burrowing to the bottom of her plastic shopper, fishing out a flyer from the pile and propping it against a pineapple. ‘We have little opening party. Glass of wine, yes? And… how do you say it here?
Canapés
…’

‘Oooo. Very nice,’ said the girl, her cheeks dimpling again. ‘Cana-what’s its. Those snacky things, innit? Want to give me a few of your leaflets, then, lovey? I’ll put ‘em on the counter.’

And as she left the shop, a trail of the coloured flyers fluttering behind her, Fabbia had felt a kind of fizz and crackle returning to her body after all the months and years of sadness. It was like throwing off a heavy blanket after a long illness and stretching her arms wide.

She’d done it. She was here. She’d made her new beginning. She could almost believe now that it was going to be alright.

She put back her head and laughed, opening her mouth and swallowing big lungfuls of the chilly air.

‘Mum! What are you doing?’ Ella was looking at her self-consciously.

‘Breathing it in,
carina
. Breathing it all in…’

Ella laughed, her eyes losing their worried expression, her cheeks flushing. For a moment, Fabbia thought she might join her, throw back her head too, take gulps of air.

Instead Ella seemed to check herself, glancing around her nervously, pushing her hands deeper into her jeans pockets. But she looked at Fabbia and smiled, in the indulgent way you might smile at a small child playing.

She feels it too, thought Fabbia. She’s relaxing a bit. She’s going to be happy here.

Because, above all, Fabbia wanted Ella to be happy.

All these first weeks, she’d busied herself, unpacking boxes for the shop and the flat, finding furniture, hanging curtains, cleaning and painting and tweaking.

She’d discovered that she could sand the old varnish from a table and paint it in smooth creamy strokes of duck-egg blue or grey. She could glue the broken spindles of a chair or improvise a headboard from a piece of wood and a length of flowered fabric.

But she wished she could do more, spin a circle around them both, keep the happiness in and any badness out.

She watched Ella carefully those first weeks, feeling relief on the days when she lost that far-off look, when she smiled or laughed or even put aside the book she’d buried herself in to help with painting a wall or emptying a box.

And when Billy appeared in the shop, tagging along in Ella’s wake, his face split in that wide smile, Fabbia felt her heart lift. Ella would make friends now. Nice young people like Billy. And this friendly woman in the grocers, was she old enough to have a daughter? Someone around Ella’s age?

She’d begun to believe that they were safe here. People were kind.

Stupid, Fabbia. So naïve. To trust. To relax in this way.

Because then, when her guard was down, that awful man had come sniffing around, with his black coat, all grubby at the hem, and his eyes, tiny eyes, too deep-set in his face - and never trust a man with too-small eyes, Madaar-Bozorg always said - looking into everything, picking up a handkerchief or a hat with the tips of his long white fingers, replacing each item with a look of distaste as if it were contaminated.

She’d felt her hand in her skirt pocket itching to leap out and grab his hands, to make those horrible probing fingers go still and quiet.

She’d had an almost overwhelming urge to pick up an embroidered cushion or a silk scarf and place it firmly over his thin, hard mouth so that she wouldn’t have to look at that expression on his face for one minute longer.

But instead she’d smiled and smiled and laid her hand gently on his arm – he’d certainly liked that, hadn’t he? – and she’d gestured towards the doorway gently, carefully, so that he wouldn’t feel pressured, so that he wouldn’t know, even for a second, that she was ushering him away, across the floor and out of the door.  Away. Please. Leave us now. Watching as the last flick of his black coat disappeared around the corner like a rat’s tail.

Fabbia Moreno knew how to make a shop. She knew how to make a high waist and a concealed seam, how to drape a neckline or cut on the bias, how to sew stretch jersey, remove the scuff marks from a 1920s evening slipper or restore the nap of a blush-pink leather glove.

But she didn’t know how to keep Ella safe, how to shield her from the prying fingers, the hard faces, the questions and looks, the words half-whispered behind the back of a hand or tossed over a shoulder, words made to cut you or hook you in.

And wherever they went, there was no getting away from those words, it seemed.

Foreigner. Dirty Arab. Osama Bin Laden. Terrorist cell. Excuse me, madam, may I see your papers? Passport? How long do you intend to stay here? Taking our jobs. Why don’t you just go home?

What had this man said as he stood, holding her flyer between his long wormy fingers? She tried to remember.

‘I take it you have a permit for this little opening party. If you’re going to serve alcohol, Mrs Moreno, well, you’ll need certain permissions from my office. But I’m sure that can all be arranged…’ 

Fabbia knew exactly what that meant.

‘Oh,’ she’d said, offering him her best smile, ‘I wouldn’t want to cause your office any extra trouble, Councillor. In that case, I will offer my guests some very nice homemade lemonade. Thank you so much for advising me.’

4.

A plume of emerald-green feathers with Swarovski crystal clip. Bespoke stage costume jewellery  from Paris. 1990s.

Jean Cushworth frowned at herself in the mirror.
Like this, with her hair sticking out in clumps all over her head, each clump wrapped in a piece of carefully folded tinfoil, she could see every wrinkle on her forehead. She moved in closer, trying not to look at the jowly bit under her chin, whilst inspecting her crows’ feet, which even ludicrously expensive pots of eye cream didn’t seem to be preventing from becoming so much more noticeable. She passed a hand over the skin at her collarbones, noticing the way that it no longer sprang back under her fingers.

She watched this woman in the mirror, this woman who was herself and also strangely not herself, a woman she no longer recognised, and let out a long sigh. The woman in the mirror sighed too so that she noticed now, along with the baggy skin under her eyes, a delicate web of lines at the corners of her mouth.

Jean Cushworth knew women with mouths like that. They were the main reason why, years ago, she’d finally managed to kick her thirty-Marlboro-Lights-a-day habit. Those women couldn’t wear lipstick any more without it creeping up from the edges of their lips, giving them a slightly mad expression.

Now she saw that she too would very soon be one of those women.

Maybe she’d go for the Botox option, after all. Perhaps even full-on surgery. God knows, Graham could afford it. And he owed her. That much was clear.

She thought of her mother and how she’d let herself go in the last decades of her life, the cardigans with the splotches of gravy down the front, her hair, the lustrous chestnut curls, her ‘crowning glory’ as she’d always liked to call it, left to fade to a wiry grey thatch and hacked at every couple of months by that awful woman who came to the nursing home.

‘Only seven pounds, she asks for,’ her mother had announced jubilantly. ‘Special OAP rate. And to think I’ve spent all that money in salons over the years. Yes, that’s one good thing about getting older. You don’t have to give a damn anymore.’

But Jean Cushworth did give a damn. She made a little grimace at the woman in the mirror and saw her mother – the raised eyebrows, the disapproving glare – grimace back at her.

No, she was not going to give in. She’d fight it just as long as she possibly could. She wasn’t and was never going to be her mother.

Vincent, the colourist, was faffing over her, adjusting the towel around her shoulders and then carefully unwrapping one of the foils.

He caught her eye in the mirror. ‘Just seeing if you’re cooked, Mrs C.’

She grimaced again and flicked through the pages of a magazine, lingering over the soft spray-tanned curves of some young celebrity presenting her new baby to the camera. No laughter lines on
her
face, Jean noticed, despite the fact that this girl was smiling in that way they’d always told her you really never should, back in her own modelling days. It was a smile that bared all of the girl’s perfectly straight white teeth.

Probably touched up, Jean thought. Lots of air-brushing. We never had any of
that
back then. We even did our own make-up.

Now Vincent was removing the foils, one by one, playing each strand of damp hair through his fingers, spreading it over the towel.

‘Have you seen that there’s someone new moved into that old boarded-up place on Grape Lane?’ he was saying, ‘A vintage shop. Vintage with ‘vintage-inspired bespoke.’ Apparently.’

He raised a provocative eyebrow.

‘Oh, I haven’t been down there in months,‘ Jean said. ‘Not much reason to, really…’

Vincent brightened, relishing the opportunity to impart some new gossip.

‘It’s someone come up here from Down South. She’s Italian, I think. She came in the other day with some flyers. Very lovely, she was. Terribly glamorous. A breath of fresh air, really. She’s kitting the place out beautifully too. I had a little walk past there, bit of a nosy. Very stylish. Worth taking a look.’

Jean smiled at him sweetly. ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s lovely, if you like that sort of thing. Personally, I’ve never liked the idea of wearing,’ she dropped her voice conspiratorially, ‘
someone else’s cast-offs
… I mean, it might be alright for students and people with not much money to spend but…’

Vincent laughed. ‘I know what you mean. Those dusty old places. Smell of mothballs and damp and old ladies’ wee, most of ‘em, don’t they? Still, I think this place isn’t going to be like that. No, it looks much classier. And vintage-style bespoke. That’s the next big thing, really. I’m getting people asking for 40s up-dos and 60s asymmetric bobs. I love all that stuff. Good luck to her. Anything new in this place gets my vote, that’s for sure.’

‘I suppose,’ said Jean, ‘but then, are people in York actually ready for something new? I think most of us rather like this place the way things are.’

*

‘Mamma, are you a witch?’

Ella spun the screw-top jar of threads-ends on the kitchen table. She watched the bits of silk, blue-red-brown-yellow-white, blurring together.