The Dress Shop of Dreams (23 page)

“What is it?” Walt has his arms around Milly. They lie in bed, kissing. It seems as though tonight might be the night, until Milly sits up.

“I have to tell you something.” She wants to ask why he hasn’t yet replied to her question about having a baby, why he hasn’t written back. But she doesn’t quite dare. Just in case he says something she doesn’t want to hear. So instead she’ll make her other more pertinent confession.

Walt sits up, too, pulling the duvet over his knees and looking at her, nervous now. “What?”

There is only one way to do it, fluid and fast, ripping the plaster off the raw skin. “I lost your mother’s notebook,” she says softly, but loud enough for him to hear. “I’m so sorry. I searched everywhere. I couldn’t find it. I must have walked around town
twenty times, staring at the pavement. I went back into every shop twice, I—”

“When?” Walt tries to keep his voice calm and steady, though panic and fury fire through his body and sizzle at his fingertips. “When did you lose it?”

“Two weeks ago.” Milly mumbles the words into her lap.

“Two weeks?” Walt repeats, only just managing not to shout. “So why the hell didn’t you tell me two weeks ago?”

“I’m sorry,” Milly says softly. “I’m so sorry, I was scared, I was hoping I’d find it, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you.”

“Bloody hell, Milly, you just wanted to cover your tracks, you weren’t thinking about me. All this time I could’ve been looking for it, too. We might have had a chance. Now there’s no chance.” Walt stands and starts pulling his clothes off the chair, falling over his feet and yanking his jumper on inside-out. “The only piece of my mother I had. And you lost it. I can’t believe you!”

“Please.” Milly reaches toward him. “I’m so sorry. I’ll do anything to get it back, I’ll do anything to make it better, I’ll—”

“I think you’ve done enough already,” Walt snaps, stuffing his feet into his shoes. “I think I’ll sort it out myself now.”

“Are you going home?”

“No, I can’t sleep,” Walt says. “Tell me where you were when you lost it, tell me everywhere you went.”

“I’ve been over and over every place,” Milly says, “I couldn’t find it. It’s two o’clock in the morning, it’s pitch-black, you’ll never find it—”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” Walt says, “just tell me where you went, that’s all I want from you.”

“Don’t go, don’t go now, please,” Milly begs, reaching out to him. She can’t bear the look on his face, the distance between
them. She can feel the desolate hole that swallowed her when Hugh died beginning to tear open under her feet. “Please …”

When Milly starts to cry Walt feels his chest tighten as if all the air is being squeezed out of him. The sound that comes from her isn’t soft sobbing or even heavy, throaty cries but a wail so high it’s almost inhuman and so deep it’s almost from another world. The sound rips through the room, scratching his skin and shredding him. For a moment he’s frozen to the spot but then he steps toward Milly and has her in his arms before two seconds have passed.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says, pressing his lips against her ears, the words a lullaby and a love song. He speaks in his reading voice, in his most soothing and seductive tones. “I’m here, I won’t leave you, I promise, I won’t leave you. I’m here, I’m here …”

Milly rocks back and forth, arms wrapped around her legs, face pressed into her knees, while Walt holds her tight. As he whispers his promise to her, over and over again, her wail begins to wane, peeling away from the ceiling, dropping its pitch and strength until it sags to the floor and falls flat. When the air is still and silent again they sit holding each other until they fall asleep.

Cora finds the notebook while helping Etta in the shop, just before leaving for her trip to Oxford. It’s tucked between the wall and the purple velvet chair in the changing room (146 matching purple roses are stenciled on the walls) and Cora’s surprised she didn’t notice it before. Then, of course, the last time she was inside she’d been too busy gazing openmouthed into the mirror to notice stray notebooks on the floor. When she
picks it up, Cora’s surprised to see Walt’s name on it, embossed in gold. It’s
the
notebook. His mother’s notebook. But why would he be in the changing room of Etta’s shop trying on dresses? Cora smiles at the thought. And then she remembers the woman, the one who was eating the cherry pie. They must have been here together, finding something beautiful for a special occasion.

Cora feels a twist in her chest. The more she dreams of Walt the more she realizes how deeply she cares for him, though that doesn’t mean she’s
in
love with him. Does it? She can’t be. She’s never been in love with anyone. Of course, the scientist part of her points out, that means she wouldn’t know what being in love feels like, since she’s never felt it before. No experiments to evaluate, no variables to adjust, no results to contrast and compare.

Cora opens the notebook. If it’s a diary, she won’t read it, even though the scientist side, remorseless in its desire to investigate, urges her on. But it isn’t a diary, or a book of any kind. Instead of words across the page a glorious carnival of numbers and letters dances before her eyes. Cora smiles. It’s a code, a puzzle, a mystery, which is far, far better than a simple diary. A moment ago she had thought to hand it back to Walt, to drop in at the bookshop before catching the Oxford bus. But now she can’t possibly do that. Cora knows it’s wrong to do what she’s about to do yet she can’t help it. Refraining from reading a man’s private thoughts is one thing, as a woman she can do that. But desisting from deciphering a mathematical enigma, as a scientist she can’t possibly do that.

“When will you be back?” Etta calls from the sewing room.

Cora glances up from the notebook. “In a few days I think, I
won’t be long.” She hears her grandmother’s footsteps on the carpet and quickly tucks Walt’s notebook inside her jacket.

Etta seems to give Cora a slightly suspicious look as she pokes her head around the purple velvet curtain draped across the entrance to the cramped changing room. “What will you be doing there?”

“I’m not sure,” Cora admits. “Henry’s investigating their case on the side, sort of, and since I’m currently unemployed, I’m going to see if I can help at all.”

“Oh, I see.” Etta smiles. “And who is Henry?”

Cora frowns. “Detective Dixon, I told you.”

“I know. I just didn’t know you were on first name terms now.”

“Stop being so seedy,” Cora says. “It’s not like that.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Etta says, “since he’s not the one for you.”

Cora frowns again. “What?”

Etta turns, lifts the velvet curtain and ducks out of the changing room. “You heard me,” she calls out, the words floating behind her as she walks away.

Cora absently multiplies and divides the numerals on car number plates as they pass, waiting until the bus is bumping gently along the M25 before she opens the notebook. It has been sitting in her bag, safely squashed between two T-shirts, waiting to have its code cracked, until Cambridge and Walt were far enough away from the scene of the crime. Cora’s fingertips tingle as she opens the notebook, blood pumps fast in her veins and her heart races. She reaches back into her bag for a piece of paper and a pen, then shuts out all sound around her to focus on the delicious task.

Three hours and thirty-seven minutes later, just as the bus joins the standstill traffic on the Woodstock Road into Oxford, Cora has deciphered the first line. And it is quite the most shocking, surprising, life-changing line of anything she has ever read. The bus comes to a stop in the station, all the other passengers file out, and Cora is all alone save for an impatient driver before the implication of the words has sunk in.

“Oh,” Cora whispers. “Oh my God.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

C
ora taps her finger against the coffee cup, beating out her nervous thoughts in Morse code. She’s agreed to meet Henry in a café on Walton Street, one far from the police station and heavily populated by chattering Oxford University students, so they won’t be noticed. Not that it should really matter one way or the other, since no one is watching them, but, being professionally paranoid, Detective Dixon thought it best to be cautious anyway.

He’s already five minutes late and Cora, always so precise with timing, is starting to worry that he won’t show at all. Why should he, after all? Why should he investigate a case on his own time and possibly jeopardize his position in the process? She certainly wouldn’t blame him if he changed his mind. Cora takes another gulp of coffee. It’s too sweet. In her nervous haste
she’d added six sugars to the cup, so distracted she couldn’t even count.

If she didn’t have the more imminent matter of her parents’ deaths to address, Cora would be obsessing instead about the startling revelation she read in Walt’s notebook. Though to claim she simply
read
it is perhaps slightly misleading, suggesting a casual innocence absent from the dedicated attention applied to cracking a cryptic code. She can hardly hand it back to him and claim that the first page fell open and she just happened to glance down …

The café door opens and Cora glances up. But, instead of Henry, a gaggle of giggling students tumbles through. They aren’t wearing their matriculation robes or carrying textbooks, but Cora knows they are students nevertheless, the odds are 98:6: 1:4. She’d bet her life on it, or at least her laptop. Oxford students carry that same air that Cambridge students do, the affected casualness thinly veiling the self-conscious sense of superiority at being among the top 2 percent of the country. At least in terms of intelligence, if not modesty and grace. Of course, the odd exception wasn’t unknown but unfortunately Cora didn’t meet the exceptions while she studied at Trinity, only those that proved the rule.

Shaking off the sorrow always accompanying memories, Cora focuses her thoughts on Walt and her mood lifts. Before Etta released Cora’s heart she’d been feeling a sort of numb sadness all her life, almost as if it was part of her genetic makeup: the double helix of her DNA being composed of the usual nucleic acids, atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, carbon and nitrogen with additional molecules of sorrow woven into the cells. It’s surprising to Cora to realize that she’s never noticed this before. Probably because it had been her permanent state;
she’d had nothing to contrast it to, no comparative experiments with alternative variables to analyze and identify. She’d simply been sad. The feeling imbued her body, lay in her lungs so she breathed it in and out all day long. And it’s only now another element has entered her life, something a little like happiness, that Cora can see she’d been breathing in smoke and only now she was getting a taste of crisp, fresh air.

Cora considers her past now, with objective eyes. The sadness was a dark, dense fog clouding crucial things she might have seen. This new happiness is a light, a torch that is beginning to shine through the fog and illuminate those things, especially throwing her thoughts of Walt and memories of their childhood into sharp relief.

Moments she’d forgotten float up through the fog, popping to the surface of her subconscious and emerging into the air. Cora thinks of the times Walt read snippets of stories while she sat under the willow tree in the summer, counting its leaves. He’d pretend he was just reading aloud to himself and she’d pretend she wasn’t listening. She remembers when she’d sit with him on the doorstep of the bookshop and attempt to explain complex chemical equations. She’d be effervescent with excitement, exploding with neurons, electrons and atoms. He would nod along with an enormous grin, pretending he loved and understood numbers as much as she. But whenever Cora asked Walt questions at the end, it was always clear he hadn’t really understood a thing. Once, when she was ten and he was eight, Walt had asked what it was she loved so much about numbers. No one had ever asked Cora this before, not even her grandmother, and she was surprised by both the question and the earnestness with which it was asked.

“I don’t know,” she’d replied automatically, then realized that
in fact she did. “I love them because numbers are black and white, pure and clear. You can’t mess and muddle them about, you can’t fake them. They fit together or they don’t. When I balance an equation I’ve done something right and good, like balancing the world a bit,” Cora said. “That sounds silly, I didn’t mean …”

“No,” Walt said. “It isn’t silly at all, it’s beautiful.”

Cora smiles at the memory. And, all of sudden, the imbalance between her heart and head finally aligns.
She loves him
. She does. She absolutely does. She has always loved him. It’s clear and simple, black and white. How this fact, so pure and true, could have gone undetected by her brilliant mind for the last twenty years, Cora is at an embarrassing loss to explain.

As Walt steps into Etta’s shop a piano starts to play and the air hums with “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” He smiles, used to this particular quirk of the place, having stepped through the door more times than he can remember. As children he and Cora played hide-and-seek among the puffed skirts of the ball gowns and the beaded hems of the flapper dresses. It had taken Walt a while to win her over, to extract more than a few words from Cora’s lips, but eventually she had deigned to pass the odd hour in play when she wasn’t working on solving string theory or dissecting dead frogs. On rainy afternoons when the shop was empty of customers they sometimes sat together in silence watching Etta sew or making endless inquiries about the great mysteries of life: Why is the sky blue? How was the Earth made? When did the dinosaurs die? It was usually Walt who asked these questions and Cora who provided answers to them with Etta merely the onlooker, soon discarded as a potential source
of knowledge once it became clear that she didn’t really know the answers to anything.

“Hello, Walt.” Etta smiles as she sees him. “It’s been a while.”

“Yes.” He nods, walking to where she stands next to a rack of blue dresses in every color and hue: cornflower, cerulean, cobalt, navy … “I’d forgotten how beautiful it is in here.”