The Dress Shop of Dreams (34 page)

“Something you know more than most, I imagine.” Eliot’s eyes glittered.

For a moment Amandine felt the fire rise up in her throat, but just before she retorted with words that would singe Eliot’s eyebrows, she realized he was flirting. She suppressed a smile and feigned a nonchalant shrug.

“I’m as wrong about life as anyone, but I’m rarely wrong about art,” she said. “Are you a student here? You’re not art history. I haven’t seen you around Scroope.”

“Law. Finalist. Trinity.” He gave a little bow with a flourish of his hand. “Eliot Ellis Walker-Jones, at your service.”

“Ah, so you’re one of them.” Amandine raised a teasing eyebrow, her glance resting for a moment on his thick dark hair. “I should have known.”

“One of whom?”

“A lawyer. A snob.”

“The first charge I already confessed to,” Eliot said, “but how can you claim the second?”

“Your accent, your name, your knowledge of art even though it’s not your subject.” Amandine smiled, feeling a sparkle on her skin as it began to tingle. “You probably play the piano disgustingly well and row for Trinity, too. I’d bet a hundred quid you went to Eton—”

“Winchester.”

“Same difference.”

“Well, not unless twenty thousand pounds a year means nothing to you.”

Amandine rolled her eyes, finding it harder and harder not to stare into his: vivid green with flecks of yellow, bright against his pale skin and dark hair.

“So, you’re an art historian then?” Eliot asked, shifting the tone.

Amandine gave a little curtsy, still wanting to keep it light, slightly scared at the rapidly growing intensity of her feelings for him.

“Amandine Francoise Héloïse Bisset.”

“Pretty name.”

“Merci.”

Eliot met her eyes. “You don’t have an accent.”

A rush of warmth rose in her throat. “My parents are French, but I grew up here. I had a brother, but he … he died when he was a little boy.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

And he was. Amandine felt gentle waves of sadness wash over her as Eliot spoke. She could feel what he felt just as she could feel what van Gogh had felt when he painted
The Starry Night
in 1889. Every artist—painter, writer, musician—put their spirit and soul into their work, along with their emotions, and Amandine had always been able to feel exactly what the artist had been feeling when she looked at a painting or read a book. Music was trickier because the emotions of the musician always mixed with those of the composer, and she felt confused and cloudy when confronted with conflicting or unclear emotions.

Amazingly, though he clearly wasn’t a witch, Eliot was right about van Gogh, though Amandine would rather die than admit it. Besides, she couldn’t say so without also telling him her deepest secret. And she had absolutely no intention of doing that. Even her father hadn’t known about her mother. Héloïse Bisset had kept her true nature from her husband, and although she’d never explicitly told her daughter to do the same, Amandine had always assumed that it wasn’t safe to share such things with people who were purely human. It was likely, if nothing else, to shock them so much that they’d never see you in the same way again.

“I don’t suppose …?” Eliot began, tentative for the first time.

“What?” Amandine asked, though she already knew the answer.

“I don’t suppose you fancy taking a cup of tea with a snobby lawyer? My treat.”

“Well,” Amandine pretended to consider, “since you’re not a lawyer yet, I suppose I could make an exception. And if you like van Gogh, you can’t be so terrible.”

“Ah, high praise indeed. I should ask you to write my references,” Eliot said. “And when I am a lawyer, what will you do about fraternizing with me then?”

They began to walk, past the paintings and toward the door.

“We’ll still know each other then, will we?” Amandine swallowed a smile.

Eliot paused for a moment in front of
The Kiss
.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “In ten years or so I’ll be a London lawyer and we’ll be married with two kids. Boys.”

Amandine raised both eyebrows. “Oh, really?”

They began walking again.

“But I don’t want children,” Amandine said, “so I’m afraid that might put a little crimp in your plans.”

“You might not now,” Eliot said, “but you will.”

“Now you’re taking arrogance to a whole new level.” Amandine laughed. “But I’m afraid you are wrong this time. I admit I might change my mind in many ways in the next ten or twenty years but not about that.”

“Ah, but I told you,” Eliot said, still smiling,. “I’m never wrong.”

And then, with one bold move following another, he reached out and took her hand in his. Amandine almost flinched, thinking perhaps she ought to be shocked, affronted at his arrogance again. But the thing was, she wasn’t. So she let her hand soften in his, and as they walked together, Amandine wished that her mother had given her psychic powers, along with extraordinary empathy, so she could know whether or not this man she suddenly loved might be right.

Now Amandine lies in bed next to her husband who has changed so much, and so suddenly, from being the light at the center of her life to someone currently trying to hide at the edges. Lately there’s something else Amandine has begun feeling from Eliot, emotions coming off him in swells so strong she could swear she can almost smell them. Wafts of guilt and fear float about the house in great ribbons, trailing through corridors and lingering in the air so Amandine could track his every movement if she so chose. Her first assumption, of course, was that he was having an affair. It wouldn’t be difficult. He commutes to London every day and often works late and on weekends, no doubt spending time with a wide variety of ambitious young lawyers
who might set their sights on a successful and handsome barrister.

However, if Eliot’s having an affair then he’s as careful and cunning as an MI5 agent. No emails, no texts, no phantom phone calls. Amandine’s few routine investigations have failed to unearth anything remotely suspicious, and she’s sure he’s neither discreet nor deceptive enough to pull off such an obvious secret right under her nose. Eliot Walker is clever, certainly, and as a lawyer he has probably pulled off a few tricks in his time, but as a husband and father he’s always been transparent and true. At least as far as Amandine knows. It’s just a shame that her gift for feeling what other people feel isn’t accompanied by the ability to know their thoughts. Empathy balanced with telepathy would make sense. It would provide the whole picture. Without it Amandine is left knowing how people feel but not knowing why.

Noa Sparrow has never been much liked by people, and she doesn’t much care. That isn’t strictly true, of course. She tries not to care, she pretends not to care, but she doesn’t do a very good job. The problem is that most people don’t like to be told the truth. They prefer to hide things from themselves, to act as if everything is okay, that stuff doesn’t bother them when it does. They think, rather foolishly, that what they ignore will simply disappear.

Noa can’t help it that she’s always been able to see the truth. What’s worse though, is that she’s unable to keep silent about what she sees. The words escape her lips, no matter how hard she tries to clamp them tight shut. How often she longs for the ability to feign and fake, to be two-faced, to be a bold and brilliant
little liar. Most people seem to manage it easily enough, but sadly it’s never been one of Noa’s gifts.

She was twelve years old when her need to tell the truth ruined her life. It was two weeks before Christmas and Noa was sitting at the dinner table with her parents, wondering about what she’d get in her stocking that year, while they talked about fixing the dripping tap in the sink, when she saw something—a dark truth snaking underneath benign sentences about faucets and the price of plumbers—that she couldn’t keep secret. Every day since, Noa has cursed her awful truth-telling Tourette’s syndrome, wishing she’d been able to keep quiet on that dreadful December night. But, since she can’t undo the past, she’s spent every day instead hating herself for doing what she did.

Diana Sparrow didn’t speak to her daughter for three months after Noa, reaching for more potatoes, suddenly burst out with the fact of her mother’s affair with her tango teacher. The shocking secret had just slipped out. Noa clamped her hand over her mouth as the words tumbled into the air, but it was too late. Both her parents had turned to look at her in shock, and the stunned guilt on her mother’s face was unmistakable.

In the months of ear-splitting, heart-shattering pain that followed, Noa prayed every night that she’d be struck down and her “gift” for seeing and telling the truth would be stripped from her. She cut off her long blond hair in penance and denied herself any treats. She took a vow of silence, not opening her mouth to say anything at all, so no hideous, undesirable truths could sneak out. Noa watched, helpless, while her mother relocated to the sofa, then moved out altogether. She listened to her father sob behind his bedroom door in the early hours of the morning. And all the while she said nothing. Not a single word.

Noa had hoped she would somehow be able to go through
the rest of her life like that, silent and unseen, never upsetting anyone again. But when she returned to school at the end of the summer, Noa found that her teachers weren’t willing to let her tiptoe through her education undetected, especially when they noticed the quality of her written work. Seeing they had someone rather special in their school, they encouraged her to participate in class, to join in with everyone else. So, in spite of her desperate efforts to remain anonymous, Noa was frequently forced into class discussions, team projects and group assignments. And, although she tried very hard to monitor words very carefully in her mind—planning them once and checking them twice—before she let them out of her mouth, every now and then someone’s secret would break free. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Noa’s childhood passed without the comfort of friends.

By the time she reached university, to study the history of art at Magdalene College, Cambridge, Noa had almost convinced herself that she didn’t need anybody else, she was perfectly fine going through life alone. She could quite happily spend entire days in the Fitzwilliam Museum on Trumpington Street, passing the morning with Renoir, Matisse and Monet, sharing her lunchtime sandwiches with van Gogh and Vermeer, having a quick supper snack in the presence of Picasso and Kandinsky. But at night, as she lies alone in her bed, all the unspoken thoughts of the day pinballing around her head, Noa’s loneliness is bitter and sharp.

Noa sleeps with the curtains open, allowing as much moonlight as possible to flood her bedroom, allowing her to see each and every picture on the walls, if only a rather pale glimmer. It took Noa weeks to perfect the art display. Reproductions of Monet’s gardens at Giverny blanket one wall: thousands of violets—smudges of purples and mauves—and azaleas, poppies
and peonies, tulips and roses, water lilies in pastel pinks floating on serene lakes reflecting weeping willows and shimmers of sunshine. Turner’s sunsets adorn another: bright eyes of gold at the center of skies and seas of searing magenta or soft blue. The third wall is splashed with Jackson Pollocks: a hundred different colors streaked and splattered above Noa’s bed. The fourth wall is decorated by Rothko: blocks of blue and red and yellow blending and bleeding together. The ceiling is papered with the abstract shapes of Kandinsky: triangles, circles and lines tumbling over one another in energetic acrobatics.

Noa adores abstract art. It quiets her mind; it throws up, for her, fewer questions than figurative art. She doesn’t wonder—though perhaps she ought—what intention lay behind the placing of a square or the choice of yellow or blue. Noa can simply gaze at the colors and shapes and enjoy the emptiness inside her, the rare absence of thought, together with a feeling of connection—the shadow of something she misses and longs for.

With the exception of a few cursory words exchanged with librarians and museum curators, virtually (with the exception of her beloved aunt, Heather) the only people Noa speaks with are her professors. So far, to her great fortune, her only two teachers have been so boring and lifeless that they harbour no hidden truths for Noa to blurt out and offend them with. Today, though, she’s meeting a new professor, Amandine Bisset, and Noa can already sense that she won’t be so lucky this time. This new teacher’s name alone suggests sensuality and secrets, veiled lives and lovers, concealed longings and desires. Noa imagines her: tall and willowy with long black curls, enormous brown eyes and lips that have kissed a hundred men and brought them to their knees with whispered French words coated in black coffee and chocolate. Noa is absolutely certain that this woman
will be her undoing. After years of carefully clipped silence, she will be unable to contain herself anymore.

It’s a surprise then, when Noa opens the door to Professor Bisset’s office and steps inside. The room is large and the walls are bare—a strange quirk for a professor of art—except for a big, bright poster of Gustav Klimt’s
The Kiss
hanging opposite a large oak desk, behind which sits Amandine Bisset, head down, scribbling into a notebook.

“Give me a sec,” she says, without a French accent and without looking up.

Noa stands at the edge of the room, not sitting down in her allotted chair, antique and upholstered in dark red leather, wanting to give her new teacher at least the semblance of privacy. While Amandine writes, Noa watches her. She’s been right about the beauty and the black hair but it’s very short, her eyes aren’t brown but green, and Amandine isn’t tall and willowy but average height and verging on voluptuous. More important, however, Noa instantly sees that she’s absolutely accurate about one thing, the worst thing of all: Amandine Bisset is full of secrets.

“It’s strange that your walls are empty,” Noa says, before she can help it. “Why do you have only one painting? Don’t you get bored?”

Professor Bisset looks up from her writing, eyes green (not brown as Noa predicted), almond shaped and pinched in a frown.