The Dress Shop of Dreams Page 10

  “Like what?” Etta asks again, even though she knows the answer.

  “As if I’m five years old,” Cheryl says, “and the whole world is all mine and I can do absolutely anything I want to do.”

  Etta smiles. “And what is it you want to do, my dear?”

  Cheryl grins. She smooths her hand slowly along one of the multiple folds of the magnificent turquoise gown.

  “I want to be a poet,” Cheryl says, “and a painter.”

  Etta nods. “Then that, my dear, is what you must do.”

  Later that night Etta is again sitting at her sewing table. She has a plan. She won’t tell Cora, just in case it doesn’t work. Etta has always been superstitious, suspecting that spells are more effective when kept secret from the intended recipient. This is why she never tells her customers about the dresses, together with the fact that they probably wouldn’t believe her even if she did.

  Since speaking with her granddaughter six nights ago, Etta has thought of nothing else but how to help Cora solve the mystery of her parents’ deaths. And she’s now convinced that the key lies in knowing what Maggie was going to tell her the day before she died. Unfortunately, of course, that seems impossible, especially given that Etta’s never had much luck with ghosts. After her daughter died she’d spent endless hours with candles and icons and incantations, desperate to summon her daughter’s spirit, to bring her little girl back. But eventually, when nothing happened after months of trying—not the flicker of a light switch or a wisp of breath on her neck—she gave up.

  Etta knows better than to try that again now. It’s too exhausting for one thing, it’ll take too long for another and, most important, it’ll probably still not work. Instead she’s going to stick to what she knows best: clothes.

  Although most of Maggie’s possessions were burnt in the fire, Etta still has a few things from when her daughter was young: her favorite patchwork teddy bear, her first drawing (of a tree with purple apples) and a box of baby clothes. A few hours ago Etta went up to the attic and brought down three little lace dresses of white, black and blue. Now she sits at her sewing machine unstitching their seams and carefully laying out the pieces. Hours pass, jazz hums through the shop, but the door is locked. When she’s done, the table is a blanket of lace.

  Cora never wears dresses, so it’s no use making her one. But sometimes she deigns to try a T-shirt or two. So this is what Etta will make for her now. It’s already long past midnight, but she won’t sleep or stop until it’s done, because the air is always thicker with magic, faith and possibility at night. And Etta needs as much of all that as she can get.

  At sunrise three very special T-shirts lie on Etta’s sewing table: one white, one black, one blue. Each has a tiny red star hidden in a seam. They are made of cotton but edged with strips of silk and lace, and all that remains of her daughter’s dresses is a scattering of sleeves and hems on the floor.

  Cora had planned to go home at some point. She hadn’t meant to stay in her office all day and all night. But when she looks up at the clock again it’s nearly ten o’clock. About to stand up, she suddenly thinks of Walt and his books. It’s true, Cora has never really been interested in fiction, especially not romantic fiction, but she’s curious and has a digital radio, occasionally utilized for listening to scientific topics on Radio 4, so why not? Having no idea what frequency to tune in to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, Cora reaches for the radio and starts fiddling with the dial. Snatches of music blast out as she turns. It’s more than a minute before she finally hears his voice and stops.

  “… My affection for Marianne, my thorough conviction of her attachment to me—it was all insufficient to outweigh that dread of poverty, or get the better of those false …”

  Cora has absolutely no idea what or whom Walt is talking about but she absolutely doesn’t care. Because, my goodness, his voice. His voice is something she could listen to forever. It wraps around her body, soft sounds encircling her limbs, and holds her tight. Cora closes her eyes and breathes deeply, sighs of deep contentment and bliss. Gradually, a memory rises up inside her: a three-year-old Cora is squeezed snugly between her parents in bed as her father tells a story about a Victorian girl called Mary who hunts for fossils and finds a very special fish-lizard. The discovery changes the current opinion on evolution. The fossil was called … The memory evaporates. Cora waits, calmly sinking into the softness of Walt’s voice. After a while, another memory bubbles up. Now she’s four years old and sitting in her mother’s lap, listening to Maggie tell her about another woman named Mary who loved mathematics so much, and was so good at it that she had a Cambridge college named after her.

  When Cora opens her eyes, she’s crying again. When is she ever going to stop crying? Tears slide slowly down her cheeks and collect under her chin. She is so full with the feeling that she can’t hear what Walt is saying anymore, her body is simply space, breath, relief—emptied of everything else. She isn’t sad. For a few glorious, giddy minutes she had her parents back. She held them, smelled them, loved them. As Cora blinks, her sight a blur, a smile on her face, she isn’t thinking about death and police investigations, she’s thinking about life and Walt. A lightness folds over her, a shadow of joy. It’s still only a whisper of possibility, a potential, a flickering at the edges of Cora’s mouth. A space is opening up in her chest, a tiny crack that could let love slip in.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Milly has never had any grand ambitions. She doesn’t aspire to be rich or famous. In fact, she’d really rather not be either. She doesn’t want to work that hard and she’d hate having people watch and comment on her every move. Milly wants a simple little life: a husband, a baby, a house. That is all she needs to be happy. And, she thinks, it isn’t asking too much. Surely God could give her these things and then just leave her alone. Which is why it hurt so much when her husband died so suddenly, only a year after they married, when they’d just started trying for a baby and saving up to buy a home.

  Hugh had stepped into the shop where Milly worked one day and the moment she saw him she knew. It wasn’t the way he looked—rather short and chubby with messy hair and slightly smudged features—but the air he carried about him. He was dependable, thoughtful, sweet-natured: a good man. He was a man who’d immediately say “yes” when you asked him to fix the kitchen light, take out the rubbish or do the washing up. He’d buy your birthday presents in advance and wrap them himself. What he wrote in the card would make you cry. He’d really listen and remember what you liked or disliked, what scared you and what made you smile. He was a man worth loving with your whole heart. Milly wasn’t sure how she knew all this from just one look, but she was more certain of it than she’d ever been of anything.

  Hugh had wandered around aimlessly at first, glancing at the trinkets on display but holding back from picking them up, as if they were too precious and might break at his touch. Now and then he hovered over something—a pink leather bag, a silk umbrella scattered with roses, a box lined with lace, an engraved bookend—and studied it. And all the while Milly watched him.

  The Craft & Curiosity Shop on Trinity Street only sold things that were pretty and delightful. If they happened to be useful, too, that was a matter of pure coincidence. Ninety percent of the customers were female, women who visited regularly, simply to spend time among the beautiful things, to soak in the sensuality of pink silk and red roses and feel their souls sigh with joy. When a man ventured into this feast of femininity, he was shopping for one of two people: his lover or his mother. And as she watched Hugh slowly circling the shop, Milly had prayed it was the latter.

  Eventually, having seen everything at least once and still not able to decide, Hugh had cautiously approached the counter.

  “Um, hello,” he said, his eyes flitting from Milly’s face to the till to the array of pretty little things laid out in front of her.

  “Hi.” Milly smiled. “Would you like help picking a present?”

  Hugh nodded, his face relaxing with
relief. “It’s for my mother.”

  “Okay,” Milly said, unable to suppress the giggle of delight that burst out of her mouth. They’d wandered slowly through the shop together. It was early morning and still quiet. A few other customers wandered in, then out again without buying anything (for which Milly was extremely grateful), and as they walked and talked Milly discovered that everything she’d believed about Hugh was true. He listened, he remembered, he spoke kindly, he smiled when she made silly jokes. Their time together passed so quickly that the lunchtime rush, dozens of women ducking out of their offices to seek refuge in an oasis of beauty, surprised them.

  “Sorry,” Milly said, as chatter and perfume suddenly swirled around them, “I’d better go.” She turned back to the till where a woman was already waiting with a paisley bag clutched protectively to her chest. Milly began wrapping it for her.

  “Do you know what you’ll get for your mother?” she asked him.

  “I can’t decide,” he said. “I’d better come back tomorrow for another look.”

  When Milly arrived the next morning, Hugh was already waiting on the pavement outside the shop. He handed her a warm paper bag as she reached him.

  “Pain au chocolat,” he said. “In case you haven’t had breakfast.”

  Milly smiled. She hadn’t.

  “How thoughtful, thank you.” She jiggled the key in the lock and pushed open the door. “I want to show you something.”

  Hugh followed Milly as she crossed the shop. She stepped behind the counter and picked up a box from the floor.

  “We had a new delivery yesterday, from an artist in Brooklyn. I don’t know why I love them quite so much but I do.” Milly handed Hugh a small frame containing a black-and-white photograph of a cottage, a dried crimson rose and a poem. “This one is my favorite.”

  He took it in his hands as though he was holding a baby bird and then read the words aloud, his voice soft and still:

  I long for

  a little life,

  an everyday life,

  a splash of sunlight

  through a window

  a smile from a stranger—

  a heart to hold in mine

  “Me too,” Hugh said. And Milly had leaned over the counter and kissed him. That poem had summed up so perfectly what she most wished for in life that Milly had memorized it, whispering the words to herself when she did the dishes or swept the floor or at night if she couldn’t sleep. Hugh recited the poem on their wedding day, whispering it in her ear after the priest pronounced them husband and wife. It was, far and away, the very best moment of her life.

  The day Hugh died was the last day she spoke those words aloud. But for years afterward they still floated into her head, stinging so sharply they brought tears to her eyes, her heart aching with longing for the little dream that had been so cruelly snatched from them.

  The first time Milly heard Walt read, she closed her eyes and remembered her wedding day, the memory so vivid that she could reach out and touch her new husband’s lips and feel his kiss on her cheek. It was that night that the desire to live again had started to smolder within her. Now, as she walks down All Saints’ Passage on her way to Blue Water Books, Milly begins to hum a tune and, for the very first time since Hugh died, she repeats those magic words again:

  I long for …

  Detective Dixon sits at his desk staring at the telephone. He can call her if he wants to, he doesn’t need to know the number, he is a police officer after all. But he shouldn’t. It isn’t right. It isn’t as if she’d asked him. But it is not in Henry’s nature just to sit around and do nothing. He hasn’t been able to stop thinking about Cora, her dead parents and the fact that he just knows, in the same way that he always knows—with a sense bordering on psychic—when a suspect or witness is lying, that there is something off with that case. He doesn’t know exactly what it is, and can’t say why, but he suspects some sort of cover-up.

  Twenty years ago, when Henry Dixon joined the force fresh out of school, it wasn’t because he had always dreamed of being a police officer, but because he didn’t know what else to do, and because most people had been telling him all his life he was like a cop. The boys at school called him Bobby or Copper, or sometimes Pig, on account of the fact that he always knew which one of his classmates had covered a desk in graffiti, stolen someone’s lunch money or hidden the textbooks from the teacher. Henry knew a guilty person even if their face never betrayed a flicker, even if they’d never done a wrong thing before in their lives. He knew the innocent from the guilty as easily as he could count to ten. And whenever questioned by the grownups, he always told the truth. Which is why he was loved (by the victims) and hated (by the bullies) in equal measure.

  So when he finished school with a fistful of passable grades, Henry headed straight for the local police station to inquire about employment. After passing all the necessary tests he’d started patrolling the streets, preventing petty crimes: littering, lewd behavior, shoplifting … As the months passed his superiors began noticing his preternatural ability to detect liars and Henry quickly moved up the ranks to detective, where he stopped. He could easily have kept climbing, right up to chief superintendent, but by this time he was married and his wife already objected to the long unsociable hours. If they got any worse, he feared she’d leave him. Unfortunately, even though he compromised his career in a bid to hold on to her, she left him anyway. More unfortunately still, he didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.

  He had fallen heart-over-head in love with Francesca Rossetti at first sight. He wanted her body and soul. She was unlike any other woman he’d ever seen: tall, dark, voluptuous and Italian. She’d been living in Oxford only a few years when they met and still had a heavy accent, one that left her sentences dripping with honey and sugar, and had Henry hanging on her every word. Francesca had reported a robbery—a student had stolen some test papers from her office at Magdalene College—and Sergeant Henry Dixon was first at the scene. He’d never believed that someone so beautiful and accomplished, a professor of Italian Literature no less, would give him a second glance. So he’d never even presumed to ask her for a date. When she had asked him, giggling in a glorious way that suggested they already shared a secret, it had taken Henry a full minute to catch his breath before saying yes.

  After the most glittering, glamorous year of Henry’s life, a year of book launch parties and birthday parties, feasts and fiestas, a dizzying year of cocktails and champagne, they married. Mateo was born the following year. Three years after that, by which time his wife attended the parties alone, drinking wine and sherry with her fellow academics and leaving Henry to share beers with his coarser friends, Francesca filed for divorce. The thing that most surprised him wasn’t the request (he’d been expecting the end, anticipating being dumped from the day she first asked him out) but that when she told him her voice was still dripping with honey and sugar, her words still made him shiver with desire even though they were saying she didn’t want him anymore.

  She never explained why, and eventually he stopped asking. It wasn’t another man; Henry had misused police resources to be sure of that. But he knew then and knows now, two years later still, that Francesca hadn’t simply stopped loving him, no matter how often she insisted she had. Henry has always been able to sense a lie; it’s a gift that makes him so good at his job, and whenever Francesca says she doesn’t love him anymore Henry can tell it isn’t true. So it must be something else, there must be another reason why she left him. So far, though, despite endless hours of investigation, it is a secret he hasn’t been able to uncover.

  Henry glances from his computer screen to the picture of Mateo, now five years old, in a gold frame on his desk. Since his divorce, his son is the only person Henry allows himself to love. Women are too unpredictable, too dangerous. If he gave his heart to a woman again she might drop it, she might throw it to the ground and watch it smash into a thousand pieces, a shrug in her shoulders, a smile on her lip
s. Oops. But his son is steadfast. His son holds Henry’s heart tight to his chest, gripping it with grubby hands as fiercely as he holds his favorite teddy bear. Mateo illuminates with grins when his father picks him up from school three times a week. He jumps into Henry’s open arms, giggling as he buries his blond head in his daddy’s armpit, snuggling up close as if he never wants to let go. Unlike Francesca, Mateo is a safe person to love.

  Luckily, the reason he wants to call Cora has nothing to do with attraction or the fear of falling in love again. He isn’t drawn to her, even though she looks perfectly lovely and seems rather nice. He simply can’t stop thinking about her case. Henry knew the investigating officer, Detective Nick Fielding, before he retired. Not well, but well enough not to trust him, well enough to know he might stoop to anything, well enough to know he was a liar. Which is why, after days of staring at the computer, Detective Henry Dixon decides to reopen the case himself. In private, to be investigated on his own time, with perhaps the occasional misuse of police resources.

  Cora pushes open the door to Blue Water Books. She wants to read something scientific and eat a slice of cherry pie. At least, that’s what she is telling herself. But it’s silly. The university library has a much vaster selection of books and there are thirty-seven cafés in Cambridge offering a plethora of pies and cakes. So it’s not, and perhaps has never been, about the books and pie or even the lovely little bookshop, but the one who owns it. And as she walks through the first corridor of books, quickening her step, she’s even more than usually excited to see him. And has been, ever since hearing him read. Why on earth Walt didn’t want her to listen Cora can’t possibly imagine. True, it wasn’t her favorite sort of book, at least not before he read it to her. Well, not to her exactly, but it had certainly felt that way. Now, if Cora was intrigued by Walt before, her interest borders on desire. She wants to see him, speak with him, listen while he talks, feel his eyes on her skin …