The Dress Shop of Dreams (6 page)

“Are you okay?” he’d asked, immediately regretting it because of course she wasn’t.

When Cora looked up, eyes swollen and bloodshot, he expected her to tell him to push off, to leave her alone. But she didn’t. Sorrow had temporarily rubbed off the rough edges, leaving her tender, exposed. She swallowed several times before speaking.

“My science teacher, Mr. Heatly,” she said, wiping her eyes and sniffing. “He says no one can save the world. He says we’re all insignificant and ultimately useless, that no matter what we
do it’ll never stop millions of people from suffering. He says I should give up and surrender to the inevitable.”

“He sounds like an idiot,” Walt said, thinking that if he ever met Mr. Heatly he’d kick him in the shins. “You shouldn’t listen to him.”

The look that Cora had given him then—a glorious mixture of gratitude, hope and expectation—had nearly stopped his heart. If someone had told Walt, in that moment, that he could give ten years of his life in exchange for Cora’s happiness, he would have.

“Thanks,” Cora said. “That’s naïve but nice of you.”

Walt smiled then and his near-stopped heart had soared.

Now Walt paces up and down behind the counter, hoping his frustration will evaporate as he moves. He rubs the end of his nose (something he used to do for endless hours as a child, in the hope that he could rub some of it away), lost in thought. His old way of life has collapsed. He needs to find a new way of being: new thoughts to fill the cavern left in his brain that now must be emptied of Cora, new actions to pass hours no longer marked by anticipation, a new life to replace the old.

Then Walt stops pacing. He has an idea. An idea so different, so startling and wild, it makes him sneeze with shock.

Chapter Six

A
n hour later Walt walks into his producer’s office and stands in front of his desk.

“Hey, Dylan. I’ve come for the letters.”

Dylan sits up in his chair, leaning forward. “But you said—”

“I know. I’ve changed my mind.”

There are many things Dylan wants to say in response, but thirty-six years in the world have taught him such impulses are usually best suppressed, so he holds his tongue and shrugs. “I’ve been throwing most of them out, because you told me to …” He ducks under the desk and gropes around, pulling out a shoebox with letters spilling over the sides. “Here is the last two weeks’ worth.”

Walt leans over the desk and takes the box. “Thanks.”

After his shift, during which he reluctantly shares another
three chapters of
Madame Bovary
with his late-night listeners, Walt takes the box of letters home and spreads them across his bed. The envelopes are multicolored: pastel pink, lavender purple, fire-hydrant red among the creams and whites.
In for a penny, in for a pound
, Walt thinks, and reaches for the red one.

Less than a minute later he drops it to the floor. “Bloody hell.” He’s not a prude, well, perhaps he is. In any case, he’s too embarrassed to finish the letter. It emits waves of desire from where it lies on the floor. Walt quickly picks up another, safer letter, sealed in virginal white.

Dashwood Cottage, Cambridge

01223 290478

Monday, March 4

The Night Reader
,

I’m sorry, I don’t know your real name. And I’m sorry to write to you like this. I’m not a crazy person, a deluded fan who thinks she knows you just because she listens to you every night. I’m not in love with you, though you’ve got the loveliest voice I’ve ever heard, and my mother always said you can tell everything about a man from his voice. But she’s on her fourth marriage, so perhaps I shouldn’t listen to her. Anyway, that’s not the point. I’m just writing to say that your voice is magical. I’ve already said that, haven’t I? Okay, let me say it properly. Your voice is like birdsong. It woke me up
.

Ten years ago my husband died. I stopped going outside
.
I stopped speaking to people. Six months ago I turned on the radio. You were reading
The Great Gatsby.
After that you read
The Awakening,
then
A Passage to India.
Now, as I write this, you’re reading a book about a woman hitchhiking across America
.

I’m turning 40 in December and I’ve only now started to see the world again, to see color and light. And everything is sharper, brighter, more alive than I ever remember it being before. You’ve opened my eyes and my heart. You’ve saved my life
.

With love and thanks
,

Milly Bradley

After Walt has read the letter three times he does something he’s never done before in his life. He picks up his phone and, not thinking of the late hour or what on earth he’s going to say if she answers, he dials the stranger’s number.

On Wednesday Cora calls in sick and cancels all her tutorials. In the four years she’s been working with Dr. Baxter it’s the first time she’s taken a single day off (for ill health or holiday) and, though he’s surprised, he tells her not to worry, that she’s welcome to a week off if she needs it. Cora is assisting the eminent Dr. Baxter in his research for the Emergency Nutrition Network to develop alternative food sources to combat acute malnutrition. Last year he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize in Biochemistry, for the world-changing creation he’d made decades before: genetically modified wheat that grew without water. So the work they do together is extremely important, and Cora is a little loath to miss a single day of it. She assures him she’ll be back as soon as she feels better. Strictly speaking she isn’t actually sick, though she has a strange ache in her chest she’s never felt before, but Cora needs time to investigate another potentially life-changing subject.

At lunchtime Etta brings Cora a tray with a bowl of homemade garlic and truffle pasta and a plate of lamb, new potatoes and braised broccoli. After setting it down on the bedside table, Etta pulls open the curtains and the room lights up with a flood of midday sunshine.

“I didn’t make dessert,” Etta says. “I thought you could go to Blue Water Books and get some of that cherry pie you love so much. I made these for you.” She sets a pair of new trousers on the wooden chair next to Cora’s bedside. Etta pats down the duvet then, one by one, plumps up the cushions on each of the chairs in her bedroom.

Cora eyes the trousers suspiciously: dark blue cotton, 28.4 inches at the waist, 36.7 inches long: a perfect fit. “What’ll happen if I put those on?”

Etta swallows a smile. “Nothing. I haven’t touched them. If you don’t want to go to the bookshop, I’m going to Fitzbillies for a coffee and Chelsea bun, maybe two. You’re welcome to join me.”

Cora sits up in bed. “You know, those things will kill you, the rate you eat them.”

“That may be true.” Etta smiles. “But I can’t imagine a better way to go.”

Cora raises her eyebrows and pulls the tray of food into her lap. It’s too rich for her taste but, in the absence of a good old sandwich, she’ll eat it anyway.

“I’m going to Oxford,” Cora says, twirling her fork around in the pasta. “I’ve decided to see if there’s any truth to your suspicions.” She eyes her grandmother. “So you should tell me now if there’s anything else you’re keeping from me. Okay?”

“No,” Etta says, glancing out of the window. “No, of course not.”

“Hum.” Cora gives a suspicious sniff. Then she swallows a mouthful of pasta. “Delicious.”

Etta smiles. “Thank you.”

As she watches her granddaughter gobble up the pasta as if she hasn’t eaten in a month, Etta is already almost regretting what she’s done. She might have known that Cora would want to investigate the facts for herself, though she didn’t think she’d do it so quickly. Etta doesn’t want Cora diving into the past, walking a painful path paved with sorrow, blood and broken glass, getting lost in the pain of events she can’t change. She wants Cora to wake up to the opportunities of hope and love in the present. Unfortunately, having awoken Cora’s heart, and given how strong-willed her granddaughter is, Etta has no hope of controlling events now, so she may as well not bother.

An hour later, having exacted a promise from Cora that she’d give herself a day to think about it before doing anything rash, Etta is ensconced in her usual corner in Fitzbillies, famous purveyor of what are supposed to be the stickiest, sweetest Chelsea buns in the world. She remembers going to the café as a girl, it having been a fixture on Trumpington Street since 1922, though she was never allowed an entire Chelsea bun to herself in those days. Now, although she can eat as many as she likes, Etta can never manage more than one. She teases her granddaughter by suggesting otherwise, but the stodgy, sticky concoction of raisin-studded dough drenched in syrup is a challenge to consume. However, delicious though they are, the Chelsea buns are not the reason Etta has been coming to this café three times a week for nearly fifty years.

The real reason Etta comes to this particular café is because of a man and a promise she made. Before that, when she was
barely eighteen, Etta once had a brief affair with a hypnotist, who’d told her he could look into an audience and spot—at a hundred feet—those who would fall under his spell and those who wouldn’t. He used this gift to pick his volunteers. There was a tightness in the ones who would successfully resist him: stiff shoulders, firm jaw, unyielding stare. The people he picked were eager, fluid, restless, those who wanted to step into the alternative reality he was offering them. But, very occasionally, he’d be wrong. There were some, he had explained, who seemed suggestible on the surface: bright eyes, easy smile, sitting forward in their seats, when really their minds were as inaccessible as their bank accounts. Etta, he’d said, was one of them. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that she’s always been immune to her own magic.

When Etta’s heart had been broken, by the only man who ever held it, she’d tried everything in her box of tricks to help it heal. But nothing had worked. She’d closed the shop for a week, had tried on virtually all the dresses, made little nips and tucks with her needle, stitched stars into them with her special red thread, yet the following Sunday her heart still hung heavy in her chest: a broken pendulum of bruised flesh swinging slowly back and forth.

Now she sits at the window gazing out onto the street. Her coffee is cold now and her Chelsea bun half finished, though she can’t actually remember eating it. As she picks a raisin out of the dough and squeezes it between her thumb and forefinger Etta is seized by a sudden longing so strong and sharp it makes her gasp. A moment later, when she can breathe again, Etta closes her eyes to think of the man she lost to God almost fifty years ago.

Milly is not a woman of moderation. She was once. She used to take baby steps through life, always tentative, always second-guessing herself. When her husband died—snatched from her suddenly by a drunk driver—she got even worse, going from baby steps to stopping walking altogether. Because she knew the terrifying truth: no matter how careful you were, how prudent and well-protected, you were never really safe. You could be hit by a car crossing the street, you could walk under a falling chimney, you could get cancer even if you never left your house. No matter what you did, death would get you sooner or later. Which made everything else meaningless. So Milly surrendered, waved her white flag and gave in. Until she heard Walt.

It was just before midnight. Milly was in bed, staring up at the ceiling, knowing she’d be conscious for hours yet. Halfheartedly she reached for her radio alarm clock and tuned it in. When she heard his voice she froze the dial and sat up. That was the moment she started to come alive again, piece by piece, word by word.

Walt’s words fell around her like warm rain that settled on her skin, slowly and gently soaking in. Milly closed her eyes and listened. She felt her husband’s hand in her hair, his kiss on her mouth. Her cheeks flushed with a heat that spread through her body, lapping in waves across her chest, flooding to her fingers and toes until she was lit from within by life again. At first she was an oil lamp—her light flickering and pale. But as weeks passed and
The Great Gatsby
progressed Milly’s light grew stronger until, by the time Walt finished
A Passage to India
, it shone like a sunrise. That was when she wrote him a letter.

And now Milly is about to meet him. The Night Reader. In person. It’s all she can do to stand up straight. Her heart thunders, her head throbs. Now she is no longer a woman of moderation.
She is illuminated. She is fire and ice. She is passion, excitement and joy. After being in the desert for so long her appetite for life is unquenchable. Now, when Milly unwraps a box of chocolates she eats every one, when she uncorks a bottle of wine she drinks until the last glass and when she falls in love she gives her whole heart. When she opens the door to the bookshop Milly holds her breath. When she steps inside all she hears is blood rushing in her ears. And, when she sees him behind the counter, her mouth drops open.

Cora wanders along All Saints’ Passage, absently counting the cracks in the paving stones beneath her feet: twenty-seven by the time she reaches the end of the street. She glances left and right, at the pretty boutiques, at the students and tourists wandering past. She’s not in the mood to mix with people or even be near them. She needs to decide what to do next.
Books
, Cora thinks. That’s what she needs now, the company of books and their characters: the company of famous female scientists who’ll sweep away her thoughts with their brilliant, beautiful lives. She turns back into All Saints’ Passage and steps into the bookshop. She hurries, head down, past Walt and a woman, about forty and rather frumpy, standing next to the coffee machine. Out of the corner of her eye Cora sees the woman tentatively tasting a slice of cherry pie while Walt watches. She hurries past, pushed forward by the memory of the last time she saw Walt and still embarrassed, though surprisingly not as much as she thought she would be.