The Dress Shop of Dreams Page 16

  I can’t put things as well as you. When you write about love, I feel as if I’m holding you in my arms and you’re whispering every word into my ear, your breath warming my skin. But when I try to explain myself, I feel clumsy, reaching for explanations, searching the English language for adequate sentences to reflect my feelings. And nothing will ever do. It’s all a shadow of what’s in my heart, it’s a muddled, muddy mess of striving and searching and failing. I’m sorry. I only hope you can feel how I feel, even though I’m doing a thoroughly appalling job of saying it.

  You wrote before of how your father never told you he loved you, never actually said the words. It seems silly of me to assure you that he did, since we’ve never met, though I can’t imagine how he couldn’t, so I’m convinced he did. Still, every person should be told, if they are in any doubt. Perhaps in the closest relationships people never say it, since they don’t need to, if it’s within every look, inside every gesture and underneath every word. I’m not sure if that is true of us yet, so let me step in and say: I love you, I love you, I love you …

  Milly strokes her fingertips along Walt’s hand. It should be enough, she thinks, that he writes the words, she shouldn’t need to hear them out loud, too. But it’s no use telling herself that, since she can’t help wanting it anyway, every minute of every day. Milly turns her head up to his face and he looks down at her.

  “Tell me you love me, please,” she says. “I want to hear you say it.”

  Walt feels something tighten inside him. He knew this day would come soon, he knew it wouldn’t be long, he’d only hoped to delay it a little longer, to give his heart a chance to catch up with his head. He didn’t want to lie to her, he wanted to wait until he could tell her he loved her and it would be pure and true. He wanted to wait until he could at least stop thinking of Cora twenty times a day. But now Milly is looking up at him with wide eyes full of hope and desire and, not wanting to hurt her, there is nothing else Walt can say.

  “I … I love you.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “It’s okay,” Etta says, “it’ll be okay.”

  “How will it be okay?” Cora says. “I turned down Angola. I haven’t got a job. I haven’t got a purpose. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’ll find another firm to fund your research, you’ll be able to complete it, you might just have to take a break, that’s all. But you’ll do it in the end, I’m sure.”

  “Are you?” Cora asks. “Do you know how hard it is to get scientific funding nowadays? Do you know how many other research groups we had to beat out to get that Royal Society grant? Six hundred twenty-six.”

  “Gosh,” Etta says. “Well, yes, I suppose it won’t be easy, but you’ll do it. You’re brilliant. You’re the most brilliant scientist I know.”

  At this, Cora can’t help but smile, even in her sorry state. “And how many scientists have you known in your life, Grandma?”

  Etta shrugs. “Including your parents and you? Probably three.”

  “Yes, I thought as much.”

  They’re sitting on the floor in A Stitch in Time, surrounded on all sides by dresses of every imaginable color. Cora realizes as she glances around, her gaze flitting quickly from one wall to the next, that Etta has arranged them like the seasons: sparkling whites, grays, blacks for winter; shimmering greens and blues for spring; pinks and purples for summer; reds, oranges and yellows for autumn. Together they are breathtaking, almost too bright if stared at for too long, like falling through a rainbow lit by the sun.

  “You can always swap this science stuff for sewing,” Etta suggests. “I think you might enjoy working here. I can’t say you’ll save the whole world here, admittedly, but I do believe I help it along a bit, one dress, one life, one heart at a time.”

  Cora glances down at her clothes—faded blue jeans and a green jumper—then looks pointedly at her grandmother’s red velvet dress, purple tights and violet bolero.

  “I don’t think the customers would trust my taste, do you?”

  Etta smiles. “Perhaps not now, but we could always spruce you up a bit.”

  “Of all the things I could ever imagine doing, of all the fields I could work in, I’m afraid couture isn’t one of them,” Cora says. “I think I’d probably make a better waitress than a seamstress.”

  “Maybe,” Etta says, “but then maybe you don’t know what you’re capable of until you try it and see.”

  Cora rolls her eyes, settling her gaze on the white dresses sparkling like fresh snow in sunlight. “What I can do isn’t really the point, it’s what I should do, which is do the thing my parents never got the chance to. They gave me the ability to do it, to do something that will actually save people’s lives.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No,” Cora says, “I don’t think you understand. If I don’t do it, then it’s like … it’s like I’m letting someone die when I have the power to let them live.”

  Etta sits up a little straighter, smoothing the red velvet beneath her palms. “Well then, there is only one thing for it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s time to get you into the changing room.”

  Miraculously for Milly, Walt still hasn’t asked the whereabouts of his mother’s notebook. It’s been a while since he lent it to her and she’d expected him to want it back after just a day or two. But perhaps he’s giving her a bit more time, hoping that another miracle might happen and she might decipher it. Sadly, there is next to no chance of that. In her rare free moments, those when Milly hasn’t been reading and rereading Walt’s letters and writing her own, she’s been trying vainly to make sense of the few pages she’d copied out of the notebook before losing it. It’s the strangest code, random jumbles of letters and numbers, one that makes absolutely no sense at all. Milly’s always been good at cryptic crossword puzzles and sometimes even dabbles in Sudoku during dull periods in the shop. But this code is impossible. As impossible, it turns out, as confessing to Walt that she’s lost it.

  Milly still listens to Walt every night without fail. When she wakes the next morning, his voice echoes in her head, the sentences of the stories he reads mixing with those of his letters. She wonders how many other women are listening, imagining him lying next to them in bed, making love … Lately Milly has been having rather wicked thoughts that won’t leave her alone. She tries to push them away, she tries to think of other, better and purer things, but she can’t, no matter how hard she tries she can’t.

  Milly has wanted a baby for as long as she can remember. Since she first hugged a doll to her chest and stroked her blond hair while whispering soft words in her china ear. When other little girls imagined their weddings, wearing pillowcases over their heads, Milly imagined what it would be like to feel a being growing inside her, tiny arms and legs kicking, until she gave birth and could finally hold the new life she’d created, wet and warm and screaming in her arms.

  Incredibly Hugh had wanted a child too, as soon as possible. They’d even discussed it on their first real date (dinner in a pizza restaurant followed by a walk along the river from Clare College to Trinity) and had agreed on three to start, with an option to add another after further consultation. They’d begun trying after they married four months later. Twelve barren months after that, Hugh died, and the only two dreams of Milly’s life (for a husband and children) died with him. Grief had buried hope and desire for ten years, until she met Walt.

  They haven’t talked about babies yet, not specifically at least, or written about them. Milly doesn’t quite dare put her most desperate and precious of dreams into words yet, because she isn’t sure he’ll echo her feelings, but perhaps soon. He’s said he wants to be a father. Walt is friendly with babies and children when encountering them in public places, tickling their chubby fingers and making them explode with giggles. This gives Milly hope.

  They haven’t made love yet, Walt has been curiously cautious physically, but Milly hopes it won’t be long now. She’s thirty-nine, after all,
she doesn’t have that much longer to wait. When they finally start having sex, would it be so very bad if they had an “accident”? After the initial shock, everything might work out beautifully. They love each other; they would love their child. But, of course, however hard she tries to convince herself, Milly knows it’d be a dreadful thing to do. She can’t betray his trust so completely. She can’t take a baby from a man without first asking him to give it. And yet … is her desire greater than her devotion? Perhaps. Once the thought seeded itself, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. In the beginning she’d thought only of him but now this imagined being has snatched much more than its fair quota of love from the heart Milly has handed to Walt.

  As the two emotions fight within her, Milly already knows which will win. She’s too old to wait. It took ten years before she fell enough in love with another man to want to have a child with him. And after a year with Hugh they still hadn’t gotten pregnant, though after being checked by doctors it was found that the difficulty lay with him rather than her. So Milly has the possibility and she knows she’ll take it. She’ll hate herself even as she does it, certainly. Guilt will cut into her desire, regret will taint her joy. But the shame won’t stop her, what’s in her head won’t be able to hold back her heart. Milly almost wishes it would, but she knows it won’t. And then Milly has an idea. She doesn’t have the courage to ask him to his face, so she’ll take advantage of their little secret and write to Walt and ask what he thinks about having a child …

  It took Etta three months to be certain she was pregnant. She put the first missed menstruation down to her body being overwhelmed with sadness and stress. The second, she started to suspect but was too scared to visit a doctor. The third, she no longer needed a doctor to tell her what she already knew.

  When they parted Etta told Sebastian that they wouldn’t see each other again, that it would be easier that way. He was already marked to take over from Father Isaac Harrison who, after hanging on to his parish for sixty-seven years, was ready at last to see heaven himself after rhapsodizing on it for so long. It would be too hard for him, she felt, to commit to the church if she was always lingering in the background. They couldn’t be friends, of this they were both certain, the temptation to touch each other would always be too much. So it would have to be out of sight and out of mind, if that was at all possible. Sebastian hadn’t wanted to promise but she’d persuaded him. That was when they agreed to divide the city in half. Etta would stay at the north end, within a mile circumference of her shop, and the Saint would stay at the south end, centering on the Catholic church at the crossroad of Regent Street and Lensfield Road. The line that divided them, Downing Street, would be no-man’s land. Of course, it was understood that certain eventualities might necessitate encroachment into each other’s territory, but at least the possibility of chance encounters was drastically reduced.

  Etta had told Joe she couldn’t marry him before she’d slept with the Saint. It was too much, she thought, after all she’d done, to betray him in this final way. She’d told him everything and he’d taken it remarkably well.

  “I always knew,” he said, still holding the hand she’d rested on his knee when it looked like he might cry.

  “You knew?” Etta felt shock, followed by shame. “How?”

  “No.” Joe shook his head slowly. “I don’t mean I knew about you and him. I just knew that it would end like this, I knew I couldn’t hold on to you forever. I knew you’d leave me in the end.”

  “Oh, Joe.” For some reason this confession made Etta feel sorrier than all the rest of it. That her fiancé held himself in such slight regard, that he’d been resigned to the inevitability of her betrayal even before it’d happened, that he seemed to hold his own inadequacies and inferiority responsible for everything, rather than her own inconstancy and immorality, made Etta regret it all more deeply than anything else. “I can’t believe you’d think that. I wanted to be with you, it wouldn’t have happened if—”

  “If you loved me,” he said softly. “But you don’t, you never did. That’s why you fell in love with him.”

  “Oh, Joe,” Etta said again. Tears sprang to her eyes. “It’s not like that.”

  He turned to face her then so her hand fell awkwardly from his knee. “Do you love me? Did you ever love me?”

  Etta looked into his wide, wet eyes and felt her heart rise up to hold him. “Of course,” she said, “of course I did. I still do.” It wasn’t a lie. She did love him, just not in the way she was supposed to.

  They bumped into each other again, a few days after Etta was certain she was carrying Sebastian’s child. They stood in the street chatting awhile, both surprised by how easy it was, how comfortable they felt together. When Joe suggested a cup of Earl Grey in the teashop on King’s Parade, Etta found that she wanted to go. Her body was sick with the baby growing inside, her spirit battered since her separation from Sebastian, and being with Joe felt like being wrapped in a rug and warming your toes on an open fire. She told him her news before she’d even taken a sip of tea.

  He’d given her a wry smile. “Well, I know it’s not mine.”

  “No,” Etta admitted, “that would’ve been something of a medical miracle.”

  “What will you do?”

  Etta shrugged. “I haven’t told my mother yet, though with the looks she gives me sometimes, I think she might just be waiting for me to confess. Dad will be upset, of course, but they won’t throw me out, or anything like that. I won’t be banished to a place for girls of easy virtue.”

  Joe laughed. It was such a fresh and welcome sound, like a light in the dark or water in the desert, that Etta laughed, too. She needed this. She needed someone not to react with deathly seriousness to her dreadful situation. She wanted to pretend, if only for a few minutes, that everything was fine and normal, not life-shatteringly awful.

  “Thank you,” she said, after they’d fallen into silence again. “That felt good.”

  Joe smiled and leaned forward across the table, his tie hanging over his teacup. “Marry me,” he said.

  “Do you love her yet?” Sebastian asks.

  “No,” Walt admits to the priest. “I think I’m closer every time I say it, as if my heart follows my words, or something like that. I really like her, I care about her, I do. But …”

  “But?”

  Walt sighs. “But whatever it is I feel it doesn’t even begin to touch how I feel about—–” He shrugs, unwilling to say her name.

  “So, why are you still trying?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you trying to love someone you don’t love and trying not to love someone you do? Why don’t you just go with the woman your heart chose, wouldn’t that be easier? Rather than trying to force it to take a hand it doesn’t know how to hold.”

  “It’ll learn. And I no longer want to be alone all my life,” Walt explains. “Now I have the chance to be with someone who loves me, who I can learn to love … I’ll let go of Cora one day, I’m sure I will—”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

  Walt turns toward Sebastian, looking at him through the wire mesh of the confessional. Walt doesn’t need its protection anymore, but they still sit and talk through it out of habit, which Sebastian thinks is a shame though he doesn’t say anything. Walt regards the priest curiously.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know more than you might imagine,” Sebastian says. “I know that a heart can hold on for a lifetime, hoping for the impossible, loving, wanting what it will never have.”

  The priest falls into silence for a long time and Walt waits.

  “I used to wonder why it would hold on,” Sebastian says at last, “why it would cause such suffering. Then one night I had a vision, or something like it …”

  “What?” Walt asks, impatient now. “What was it?”

  “I’m not so sure you’ll want to hear it,” Sebastian says, “since you’re set on doing the opposite.”


  “Tell me,” Walt insists.

  “It was just a feeling I had many, many years ago. But a feeling so sharp, so strong that it shook my spirit and I knew it was true.”

  “What?” Walt asks, so impatient now he could rattle the mesh and shake the priest by the shoulders.

  “My heart holds on because hers does, too,” Sebastian says softly. “That’s what I know to be true.”

  Walt frowns. “What does that mean? What do you mean?”

  “If two hearts truly love each other then they always will, even when they are apart. Unless they both let go. But if one holds on then it’s because the other one hasn’t yet let it go either.”

  “But that’s not true of us,” Walt says. “She’s never loved me, so—”

  “Really?” Sebastian asks. “Are you quite certain?”

  Walt sits up straight. “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know,” Sebastian says with a shrug. “It’s just a feeling I have.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Cora frowns at herself in the mirror. She’s wearing a dress of bright red silk with a black net petticoat and feels like a chorus girl. “Is it a trick to convince me I should be a seamstress?”

  Etta casts an appraising eye over the outfit. “It’s not quite right,” she admits, “the red is slightly too bright. You need something deeper, more of a maroon.” She turns and walks to the wall of dark winter gowns. “And you should know I never need to resort to tricks.”

  Cora waits in the changing room until Etta returns with two dresses. “Try this one first,” she says, handing Cora a simple column of dark red silk.

  “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Cora says, taking it.

  “I can’t believe it took you so long.”