The Dress Shop of Dreams Page 2

  Cora frowns at her grandmother. She has never been able to make sense of her. Not since she was a girl. They are polar opposites. Where Etta loves flamboyance and frippery, color and chaos, Cora likes everything in life to be structured and simple, plain and predictable. She prefers even numbers over odd. She likes to know what’s going to happen next, or at least be able to estimate the probabilities. Etta had long ago tried to sprinkle some frivolity into her granddaughter’s life, telling her that little girls were meant to have fun. She bought Cora silly toys, organized treasure hunts and Alice in Wonderland–themed tea parties. She turned a corner of the shop into a playroom where they could dress up together and dance to the Charleston with feathers in their hair. But it was no use. Cora went along with it all, dutifully smiling whenever her grandmother asked if she was having a good time. But her heart was never in it. After her parents died her heart was never really in anything again.

  “I know this is the only time you ever eat properly.” Etta clears space on the table and produces two plates of roast-chicken salad. “I’m going to wait until you eat every bite. We’re having cherry pie for pudding. Walt’s bringing it over later. I would have baked a cake, but I know how much you love his cherry pie.” As she says this, Etta gives her granddaughter a sideways smile.

  Cora frowns. “What?”

  “Nothing,” Etta says. “Then we’re having cheese and biscuits after that; I’ve a rather delicious-looking Barkham Blue I’ve been saving for the occasion.”

  Cora resists the urge to raise her eyebrows. “It’s only a birthday,” she says. “It’s not a reason to celebrate.”

  Why not? Etta is about to say, but she holds back because, of course, they both know the answer to that. As they sit down the bell in the shop tinkles and Etta jumps up from the table.

  “That’ll be our pie.”

  Cora eyes her grandmother suspiciously as she hurries out of the sewing room and onto the shop floor. A moment later she is back, bustling through the doorway, one hand wrapped around the elbow of a tall, thin man dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt, whose messy black hair falls over his eyes but doesn’t conceal his large but handsome nose.

  “Hi, Walt,” Cora says.

  He nods in return and, with a sizeable nudge from Etta, stumbles forward into the room. He hands a plate of cherry pie to Cora and steps back.

  “Happy birthday,” he says, his eyes fixed on the plate. “I made it twice as sweet, and with ground almonds instead of flour.”

  “Thank you,” Cora says. “It smells delicious.”

  “I only took it out of the oven twenty minutes ago.” Walt lingers a moment then steps back toward the doorway. Etta grabs his arm as he passes her.

  “Stay for some,” she says. “It’d be wrong to eat it without you.”

  Walt glances at the food on the table. “No,” he says, “you’re still eating, I—”

  “Nonsense, it doesn’t matter, we’re nearly done.”

  Walt hesitates then shakes his head. “No, I’d better go. I, um … like to do a stock check on Thursdays and it’s getting late.”

  As Walt disappears, Etta throws a look of frustration in her granddaughter’s direction, but Cora just returns it blankly. Etta turns and hurries after him. She stops Walt as he reaches the door. The dresses displayed in the window rustle as if a breeze had just blown through them.

  “Wait,” Etta says and he turns, fixing his gaze just above her head. “You know, some people don’t see the things right under their noses. They mistake the everyday for what’s ordinary and unimportant.”

  Walt glances down at the tiny woman and meets her gaze, seeing the acknowledgment and affection in her watery blue eyes.

  “Especially those people searching for something,” Etta continues. “They don’t know exactly what they’re looking for, but they always imagine it’ll be far away and hard to find. They think it’ll come with whistles and bells. Those people need shaking up to see something as simple as”—Etta dropped her voice to a whisper—“true love with someone they’ve known forever.”

  Wide-eyed, Walt shakes his head. The thought of him shaking Cora up makes him slightly sick with nerves. “I don’t really know what you …” he begins. “Anyway, I’ve got to go. Enjoy the pie.”

  Walt turns the wooden doorknob but Etta is too quick. She grabs the back of his shirt and holds on.

  “You’ve got a loose thread, just let me fix it for you.”

  “Don’t worry.” He pulls away. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’ll only take a moment,” Etta says as she plucks her special needle from her pocket. “Wait.”

  Since he has little choice in the matter, Walt waits. Less than a minute later he leaves with a tiny red star stitched into the lining of his shirt.

  When her daughter and son-in-law died, Etta was the first and only family member on the scene. She rushed to the hospital, scooped her sobbing (but otherwise unscathed) granddaughter up in her arms and promised the little girl that she’d protect her forever, that she’d never suffer again. And so, when it became clear that—as some sort of subconscious coping mechanism—Cora had suppressed all memories of her parents, happy and sad, Etta let it be. She allowed her granddaughter’s heart to remain shut down even as she grew older. But now she realizes it must stop, or the cost will come at too high a price.

  Etta’s always been aware that the numbing of Cora’s heart has suppressed her urge for laughter and desire for love as well as protecting her from pain. Most of all it’s left Cora oblivious to him. Of course, it didn’t matter while Cora was younger. Etta knew Walt would wait then, but he won’t be able to wait forever. Eventually, he’ll give up. And Etta can’t let that happen. If Cora doesn’t have the chance to love the man who loves her more than anything else, it would be a tragedy, a loss on a par with Etta’s own: the man she thinks about late at night with a bottle of bourbon and a box of chocolates. Fifty years ago, when Etta lost him, she still hoped life might be full of other lovers. And it was—just none who held her heart the way he did. Now Etta knows that great love only comes once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky.

  Etta stands at the bathroom sink, looking into the mirror. Cora is downstairs, doing the washing up. Etta turned sixty-nine two months ago, but she doesn’t look a day over sixty-one. Which is some comfort, she supposes, but not much. Every day she sees a new wrinkle in the mirror, another line etched on her once beautiful face. She pulls the sagging skin back from her eyes, stretching it almost taut again, consoling herself that the one advantage of her fading sight is she can’t see her fading face so sharply. Her granddaughter insists that she’s still beautiful, but Etta knows she’s not. Cora only thinks that because she loves her; she’s blinded to the depressing truth by sentimental feelings. But Etta doesn’t suffer under such illusions.

  She hasn’t been with a man since her husband passed away twenty years ago, the same year her daughter died. If she hadn’t had Cora, Etta would have given up on life herself. While she was in her fifties, even in her early sixties, Etta still harbored hopes that she’d experience intimacy again, that one day she’d be held tight in a masculine embrace. But she knows it probably won’t happen again, not now.

  Cora and Etta sit on the sofa in the living room halfway through watching Gone With the Wind. Etta gazes at the screen while Cora fidgets.

  “You know we’ve watched this film 28 times before, don’t you?”

  “Hush,” Etta hisses, “we have not.”

  “We have. And it’s two hundred thirty-eight minutes long. That’s one hundred eleven hours. That’s four and a half days of our lives in the Deep South.”

  Etta smiles. “And every minute very well spent.”

  “You’re obsessed with Clark Gable.”

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. A girl could do a lot worse than Gable.”

  Cora smiles. “You know he’s dead, right?”

  “I’m old,” Etta says, “not senile. And, at my age, one has to take
what one can get. Unlike you, who could be with a real flesh-and-blood man instead of her grandmother on her birthday night.”

  “I’m perfectly happy as I am.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Very well.” Etta shrugs. “If you insist.”

  “I do.”

  “Then there’s not much I can do about that,” Etta says. It’s a lie, of course. Etta has rather powerful means at her disposal, methods she uses every day to transform the women who venture into her little shop, but she’s been putting off using them on her granddaughter, hoping that it might happen naturally instead. As the years pass, however, Etta’s hopes have dwindled, which is why, tonight, she’s pinning them on Walt instead.

  She hopes that her pep talk with Walt may have had some effect. Perhaps, for the first time, he’ll stop waiting in vain for Cora to notice him and do something to seize her attention instead. Etta doesn’t hold out much hope, since she must have given him a hundred similar nudges over the years and he’s never found the courage to act on them. Of course, this time is different, for this time he has a little red star stitched into the lining of his shirt to help him along. If that doesn’t work, nothing will, and then it’ll be time for Etta to take matters into her own hands.

  Chapter Three

  Walt has loved her forever, for nearly as long as he’s been alive. He was four years old the first time he saw her. It’s his earliest memory. A simple, ordinary day, made special and extraordinary by first love and first words.

  Walt’s father had been shopping with his son on a Sunday afternoon when he’d wandered into All Saints’ Passage and found the bookshop. A silent boy, Walt still hadn’t spoken, so there was no reason to think he’d be interested in reading yet. But when Walt snuck through the door, under his father’s arm, he let out a gasp of delight.

  He had stepped into a kingdom: an oak labyrinth of bookshelves, corridors and canyons of literature beckoning him, whispering enchanting words Walt had never heard before. The air was smoky with the scent of leather, ink and paper, caramel-rich and citrus-sharp. Walt stuck out his small tongue to taste this new flavor and grinned, sticky with excitement. And he knew, all of a sudden and deep in his soul, that this was a place he belonged more than any other.

  Hours later, staggering along the passage with armfuls of books, Walt had glanced up at another shop window to see two bright green eyes and a mop of blond curls peeking out under a beaded hem. The eyes blinked as he stared and the sad little mouth opened slightly. Walt stopped.

  “Come on, Wally,” his father had called, “we’re late for dinner.”

  He’d said this as though there was someone at home cooking it for them, a wife and mother who anxiously expected them. He always spoke this way, as though denying his wife’s death could bring her back, if only momentarily.

  “But Daddy,” Walt protested, “I want see the girl.”

  His father had dropped the books then, pages fluttering to his feet. Tears filled his eyes and fell down his cheeks. Four years of silence, of doctors, specialists and speech therapy. Four years of nothing and now a whole sentence, in an instant. It was a miracle.

  “What girl, son?” The question was a whisper on his lips.

  Walt turned back to the window, ready to point, but the girl had gone.

  There are people who like to connect, to make eye contact and smile. Walt is not one of them. At school he learned to make himself invisible, to watch people without being seen. And so he watched Cora growing up: staring out of the shop window while raindrops slid down the glass, wandering along counting paving stones, flower petals, leaves of ivy and anything else that inhabited All Saints’ Passage, sneaking into the bookshop to read biographies of Marie Curie and Caroline Herschel while entire afternoons slipped out of sight. He watched, biding his time before he finally found the courage to speak with her. And, even then, when they formed a tentative friendship in the years that followed, he was never able to look Cora in the eye and tell her how he felt.

  When Walt turned sixteen, with enormous relief, he abandoned school to fulfill his second greatest wish (his first being the wish for Cora) and work in the bookshop full time. When Walt turned twenty his father died, finally succumbing to the broken heart he’d been nursing for two decades. With the inheritance Walt bought his beloved bookshop along with the flat above it, and as soon as he moved in he stayed. He’s there for twelve hours a day, every day, even though the shop is only open for eight. But he loves the empty hours best of all, when he can walk along the aisles and bask in the warmth of the books, their glittering gold letters, their stories softly pulsing between pages just waiting to be opened and read and loved.

  Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are Walt’s favorite days, for these are the ones when Cora—at exactly 6:26 P.M.—opens the door and steps inside his kingdom. She stays for an hour while Walt gazes on, his eyes peeking out above Shakespeare or Milton or García Márquez. He watches her weave along the aisles until she reaches the science section, slides a book off the shelf and sneaks into a hidden corner to read it. When Cora slips into the book she forgets herself entirely, allowing Walt to watch without worry, to gaze unabashedly at the wispy curls that fall over her face, delicate fingers cradling the book, lips absently mouthing the words, breath that occasionally quickens with excitement and shivers through her body in the most alluring way.

  The very second the hour is up Cora, without looking at her watch, shuts the book then stands. On her way out she stops at the counter for a slice of cherry pie and a double espresso. She declines cream with the pie but takes four sugars with the coffee. Sometimes, if the book has been particularly brilliant and she’s forgotten to eat lunch again, she’ll have a second slice.

  Sometimes Cora chats absently about scientific subjects Walt can’t understand, though he listens avidly anyway, nodding along and making agreeable sounds in what he hopes are the right places. Sometimes Cora only nods hello and says nothing, just eating, lost in thought. Since Walt rates the odds of his lips ever touching hers as less than his chances of winning the lottery, instead he bakes cherry pies so he can watch her eat. And, despite the sadness of knowing that this is the closest he’ll ever get to Cora, it’s still the most sensual moment of his day.

  Apart from his love for Cora, Walt has another secret. A secret he’d love to share with her but knows he never will. He has always loved to read aloud, to hear words float about a room, to swim in stories and breathe in poetry. And he has a powerful voice, a beautiful voice, as deep, thick and rich as melted chocolate. Characters seem to come alive when he speaks, sliding off the page to stalk the bookshop aisles and relive their fictional lives in 3-D and Technicolor. At night, after Walt flips over the “closed” sign on the front door, he sits back behind the counter and opens doors to other worlds: bookshelves transmute into swamp trees, floors into muddy marshes, the ceiling into a purple sky cracked with lightning as he floats down the Mississippi with Huck Finn. When he meets Robinson Crusoe, the trees become heavy with coconuts, the floorboards a barren desert of sand dunes whipped by screeching winds. When he fights pirates off the coasts of Treasure Island, the floors dip and heave, the salty splash of ocean waves stings his eyes and clouds of gunpowder stain the air. As a rule Walt sticks with adventures and leaves romances untouched, preferring to escape his own aching heart rather than being reminded of it.

  Occasionally, picking up a book during a quiet afternoon, Walt forgets himself and reads aloud to an unsuspecting and delighted customer. And, two years ago, on one fortuitous Friday, that particular customer happened to be the producer of BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. Walt didn’t need to be told that his was a face made for radio (not that the producer even thought this, let alone said so) but he needed some persuading that his voice was, too. He’d be perfect for the Book at Bedtime slot, the producer urged. Every night at ten o’clock he could pour words into perfect silence and assist drowsy listeners to slip off to sleep. It was the thought of Cyrano
de Bergerac that convinced him. Cyrano had been Walt’s personal hero for the last fifteen years, and he’d always wished that they’d shared an eloquent tongue as well as an enormous nose and an unfortunate penchant for unrequited love. But now, since he didn’t have any great words of his own, Walt was being offered those of great writers—now he could have a voice without a face. He said yes.

  Tonight, Walt is sharing the wretched tale of Madame Bovary with his listeners. The story has sharpened its fingers on Walt’s fragile heart, snatching up little slices of flesh. This is exactly what he’s always striven to avoid, but for some reason his producer (a sorry sucker for romances) insisted on this particular book and now it’s wrapped the tragic twists of its plot around Walt’s chest, constricting his breath so the woeful words are barely audible anymore:

  “Her real beauty was in her eyes. Although brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her look came at you frankly, with a candid boldness …”

  The sentence scratches his throat. Walt thinks of Cora. He thinks of what Etta said: Some people don’t see the things under their noses. They mistake the everyday for what’s ordinary and unimportant. These people need shaking up. He isn’t a fool, he isn’t deluded by desire, he knows perfectly well what is possible and what is not. Cora is just a friend. She’s never shown the slightest physical interest in him so he knows absolutely that he’ll never experience anything with her, let alone passion and rapture. But he’s always accepted his hopeless situation fairly happily: the sight of her smile, the smell of her double espresso, the sound of her footsteps on the floorboards, this has been enough. Seeing Cora three times a week is enough. Almost.

  It isn’t as though Walt has no other options, at least in theory. He has fans: women who phone the radio station asking for his address, phone number and marital status. They call him the Night Reader. They send him lustful letters and, occasionally, their underwear. They declare their undying desire, their dreams of making love to him while he sprinkles them with words and kisses until they explode. Of course, he never replies. And not because he believes they’ll change their minds as soon as they see him, but because he simply isn’t interested in anyone but Cora. And it’s been that way since the first time they spoke.