The Dress Shop of Dreams Page 3

  He was five and she was eight. He was sitting on the steps outside the bookshop, half-reading The Three Musketeers and half-watching her standing in front of a willow tree that grew over the alleyway wall, counting the leaves that dripped down to the pavement. Walt knew that was what she was doing, not only because he knew her quite well by now, but because she mouthed the numbers staring into the branches. Why he was suddenly seized by the courage to finally address her, he never knew. Perhaps the devious Milady de Winter, who’d just swept onto the pages of the tale, dared him to do it.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  She’d turned to him with a deep frown, instantly terrifying him. About to turn to escape back into the bookshop, Walt was stopped by her shrug.

  “Cora.”

  “That’s a funny name.”

  “It isn’t, actually.” Cora’s frown deepened. She pulled herself up to her full height of four foot three inches. “Officially my name is Cori, but Grandma calls me Cora. I’m named in honor of Gerty Cori, the first woman winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  “No,” Walt admitted, embarrassed. “I didn’t.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Walt,” he offered quietly, expecting her to retort that his was an even sillier name, but she didn’t.

  “After the scientist?”

  Walt frowned, thrown. “What scientist?”

  Cora shrugged. “Maybe Luis Walter Alvarez or Walter Reed, but … actually Walter Sutton is the most famous. He invented a theory about chromosomes and the Mendelian laws of inheritance.” Cora let slip a little smile of satisfaction at the blank look on the boy’s face. “Or maybe Walter Lewis—”

  “No,” Walt interrupted, “I’ve never heard of any of them.”

  “Oh.” Cora folded her arms and tilted her nose upward. “Then who are you named after?” she asked, as if this was a given.

  “Walt Whitman,” he retorted. “The poet.”

  Cora considered this for a moment then shrugged again, a careful gesture this time, as if she were unburdening a heavy coat from her shoulders. “That’s okay, I guess. But poems, stories and that stuff are a waste of time anyway. They don’t answer any questions. They don’t help anyone.”

  Walt swallowed the protest that rose up inside him and slid his book out of sight. “Don’t you like reading at all?”

  “What a silly question,” she said, and then seemed to regret it and was kinder. “I have to read, to find things out. I’m studying to be a scientist,” she added. “When I grow up I’m going to save the world.”

  If he’d been curious, enchanted and infatuated with her before, that was the moment he actually fell in love.

  “How?” Walt asked, though the answer didn’t even matter. Just the fact that she wanted to do such an incredible, enormous, ambitious thing was enough for him.

  Cora shrugged for a third time. “Maybe I’ll discover a cure for cancer, or invent a special food that can grow anywhere and feed everyone, or a way to kill every mosquito or … something special like that, anyway.”

  Walt just stared at her. Most of his time was spent lost in stories or playacting out their plotlines—pretending he was twenty thousand leagues under the sea or journeying to the center of the earth—and most of his thoughts were wasted on similarly pointless subjects. He’d never considered even attempting to do something so noble and amazing. That this girl had not only considered it but was, he was certain, actually going to do it, left him without words.

  Cora narrowed her eyes at Walt, seeming to suspect him of mocking her with his stare, then her face relaxed. “What are you going to do when you grow up?”

  “Work here, in this bookshop.”

  Walt replied without thinking, then instantly regretted it. Someone who was going to save the world would never be interested in someone who was going to work in a bookshop. But it was the truth, this was his one and only ambition in life, and Walt was quite incapable of lying.

  “Oh,” Cora considered. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Now it was Walt’s turn to shrug. The die was cast, there was no point in trying to snatch it back now. “Because … because I belong here.”

  “Oh,” Cora said and Walt knew, with a sinking heart, that he’d given the wrong answer. “I’ve got to go home for tea,” she said. “Bye.” And with that she turned away, leaving him to gaze after her.

  It’s a memory Walt has recalled so often that every second of it sparkles, like a ruby polished a hundred thousand times. It’s a great shock to Walt then, what happens next as he’s sitting in the studio, speaking softly into the microphone, following Emma’s tragic fate. The air in the studio booth is so still that the words bounce off the walls and echo through the room:

  “… her gown still hanging at the foot of the alcove; then, leaning against the writing table, he remained there until evening, wrapped in a sorrowful reverie. She had loved him, after all!”

  It is this last sentence that does it. Those six little words tip the delicate balance of his fragile life, smashing it like crystal onto stone. And suddenly it’s clear to Walt what he must do. He has to act. He has to do something different. Something special. He has to shake Cora up.

  Chapter Four

  When his shift at the radio station is over, when he’s finally slammed Madame Bovary shut, Walt runs all the way back to the bookshop. Fumbling with the lock, he yanks at the door, scurries through the maze of bookshelves to the counter, then opens a drawer under the till and plucks out a book. He hurtles upstairs, through the hallway of his tiny flat, and falls onto the sofa in the living room. Sweating and panting, he sits up and waits to catch his breath. The book he holds is bound in rough red leather, worn at the edges and along the spine. Inside the words are handwritten, dotted with diagrams, faded with age and in a language Walt can’t understand. It had been his mother’s book, tucked, along with a pack of tarot cards, another book and a gold pen, into the side of his cot on the night she died.

  Eva O’Connor had lived just long enough to see her son into the world and hold him once. Walt’s father hadn’t known about the rare condition that killed her and at first simply thought his wife was sleeping, a well-earned rest after twenty-six hours of labor. Walt was born at home and it wasn’t until nearly a week later that David O’Connor found his wife’s notebook alongside Leaves of Grass, which was how Walt got his name. The bereaved husband and new father saved both books and gave them to his son on his tenth birthday. Walt has been trying to make sense of his mother’s legacy ever since.

  Walt’s parents had met in an unorthodox way, a story that Walt had heard a thousand times and always cherished. Eva had been a fortune-teller before she married; David, a slightly drunken visitor to the fair on Midsummer Common who went into her tent on a dare. In the ten minutes that followed she read his cards, then kissed him, and their lives changed forever. When the fair left Cambridge three days later, Eva didn’t go with it. Two years later Walt was born. As a boy he’d begged his father to tell him what his mother had read in the cards, but David had always claimed he couldn’t remember, saying that the delightful shock of the kiss had knocked the memory right out of him.

  Walt must have gazed at the pages of his mother’s book a million times, desperately trying to make sense of the confusing and complex mess of curling letters, dots and lines. In an attempt to decode it he’s studied more than a thousand languages—past and present—but Eva’s words don’t match any of them. Sometimes he thinks it might be her own secret code indecipherable to anyone else but her. But why, then, would she have left it for him?

  The year before David died, while they were carving out a pumpkin to celebrate Walt’s birthday on Halloween, he jokingly suggested it might be a spell book, which is why Walt consults it now. He’d laughed off the idea at the time but, since an air of mystery and magic always surrounded the memory of his mother, Walt secretly enjoyed entertaining the notion.

  As he opens th
e book, tentatively holding the pages like the wings of live butterflies between his fingertips, Walt hopes that this time it will all suddenly make sense. He needs a spell or, failing that, a miracle to shake Cora up.

  Walt closes his eyes and mumbles a prayer, a request for help. In the silence that follows he waits. Nothing happens. He opens his eyes. Still nothing. And then, just as he’s about to shut the book and stand, Walt hears the voice in his head. It isn’t his voice; it’s female for a start, and it doesn’t rise up from his consciousness. Instead each sentence seems to drop, fully formed, from the sky. Mum is the first thing Walt thinks, though of course he can’t remember the sound of her voice. Then he stops thinking and listens.

  Seize your courage and show her your heart.

  Walt sits up straight and still, holding his breath. The words fire through his blood, igniting every artery and vein in his body so his head pounds until he can’t think straight. But Walt doesn’t care about momentary intellectual impairment; he doesn’t care about thoughts, rationality and judgment. It’s all unimportant. His mind doesn’t matter because he has his heart. And something else of which Walt isn’t even aware: a little red star sewn secretly into the lining of his shirt.

  Walt needs to act now. Right now. This second. Even if it is past midnight, it doesn’t matter. What he is actually going to do, along with the appropriateness of this undecided action, is irrelevant and immaterial. Walt has been waiting a lifetime for anything approaching a chance with Cora and he won’t wait another minute for his sudden courage to disappear.

  Unsure of exactly what he’s going to do or say, Walt snatches up his mother’s notebook then dashes out of the flat and through the shop before he can change his mind or doubt himself. When he’s standing on the pavement he stops. Then takes a breath. What on earth is he doing? It doesn’t matter, it only matters that he’s doing it. He’s taking action. He’s doing something. He’s not a coward, he’s not scared anymore.

  Walt wonders if Cora will still be at her grandmother’s. He suspects so. Etta will probably have persuaded her granddaughter to stay and watch old films. He hopes so, since he doesn’t know where Cora lives, and is rather embarrassed to ask Etta but he will if it comes to that. For now though, he’ll try his luck. As he walks Walt wonders how Etta will take to a late-night visitor. Not too badly, he hopes, since it was Etta who put him up to it in the first place. Or at least put the idea of doing something crazy and courageous into his head.

  When he reaches the front door of the shop he hesitates. Pulling himself up to his full height of six foot three inches, he knocks. He listens to the silence. All Saints’ Passage is dark, lit only by moonlight, without the assistance of streetlamps. As the owners of the only two businesses on the street, Walt and Etta joined together to petition the city council for lighting but have so far been fobbed off with postponed promises. Walt taps his forefinger on the spine of his mother’s notebook and ponders his next move.

  Cora is in the bathroom, splashing water on her face so she’ll stay awake until the four-hour film finally ends, when she hears tiny taps rattling the glass of her grandmother’s windowpane. She twists off the tap and walks into the next room. Another tap hits the glass. Cora hurries across the carpet, past the quilted bed. She fiddles with the catch and pulls the window open.

  “Walt?”

  He smiles sheepishly. “Happy birthday, again.”

  Cora frowns. “What are you doing here?”

  “I, um, I wanted to show you something.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “It’s pretty special,” he says.

  “But it’s late,” she says. “Why don’t you show me when I come to the bookshop tomorrow? That might be easier. Oh, and thanks for the pie. It was even more delicious than usual.”

  Walt watches as she reaches up to pull the window closed again. The little red star stitched into his shirt tightens its threads.

  “No, wait!”

  Cora frowns, her arms paused for a moment, her fingers tight on the wood of the window frame.

  “It’s a book,” Walt blurts out, “my mother’s notebook. It’s in a special code and I thought … I thought you might help me decipher it.”

  “Oh?” Cora releases her fingers. She still can’t understand why on earth Walt is coming to her with encoded diaries at—she glances at her watch—12:06 A.M., but now her interest is piqued. She reaches out her hands above his head. “Why don’t you throw it up and I’ll take a look.”

  “No.” Walt shakes his head, holding the book tight to his chest. This isn’t going at all the way he might have hoped. It’s no use. He’ll have to stop hiding behind other things and come right out and say it. And quickly, before she disappears again.

  “Okay, it’s not exactly that, not right now anyway,” Walt stumbles, unable to believe he’s on the brink of finally confessing, declaring, announcing, trumpeting his love. “I’ve come to tell you …”

  “Tell me what?” Cora folds her arms.

  Walt takes a breath so long and deep he starts to feel dizzy. “How I feel.”

  “How you feel about what?” Cora’s frown deepens.

  “About you.”

  “Me?” Cora gazes down at the man standing on the pavement underneath her window and wonders what she’s missing.

  In the silence blood pounds through Walt’s head and he starts to hyperventilate. The little red star tightens its threads again.

  “Yes.” Walt’s voice is soft but strong now, unwavering. “I want to tell you, I have to tell you, that I love you.”

  The anxious discomfort that has been rising up inside Cora bursts forth in an entirely unexpected bout of laughter. The laughter cracks through the air, a whip that snaps across Walt’s chest and flays his fragile skin. The laughter surrounds Cora in a brittle, oblivious fog. Walt begins to feel his legs give way under him, caught between collapsing on the pavement and making a mad dash in any direction. He has to save himself, he must claw his way out of this hideous situation or he’ll never be able to face Cora again. He’ll have to sell his beloved shop and move to Mongolia.

  Suddenly it occurs to Walt what to do. He starts to laugh, sounding shrill and forced at first but, driven by sheer desperation, he manages to smooth out the sound and inject a little levity. Then, in a stroke of divine inspiration for which he’s infinitely grateful, Walt starts to hiccup.

  Cora stops laughing. “Are you drunk?”

  Walt nods, adding a delirious giggle for effect. “Too much tequila,” he slurs, “sorry. I suddenly had an unstoppable urge to perform an impromptu Romeo and Juliet. I thought you might fancy a birthday show.”

  Cora frowns. “I thought you were doing a stock check.”

  Walt looks momentarily horrified. “Well, yes, um, I finished early, so I decided to get a drink—to celebrate.”

  Cora’s frown deepens. “It’s not my birthday anymore, anyway, and you’re crazy.”

  Walt took a bow. “Guilty as charged.”

  Cora stares at him, brows furrowed, and for one long torturous moment Walt isn’t sure whether she’s going to believe him. Then she gives a slight smile and shrugs.

  “Go to bed, you crazy fool, and we’ll forget about it.”

  Thank heaven for that, Walt thinks. Thank heaven for that.

  “Free cherry pie next time you come in,” he calls up to her, “all you can eat.”

  “And espressos,” she says as she starts to pull down the window. “For the rest of the month.”

  “Done.”

  When the window closes, a dull thud of wood against wood, Walt stands awhile longer looking up at the dark glass. When a gust of wind ruffles the pages of Eva’s diary and blows down his neck, Walt slowly turns and walks away.

  Etta stands in the corridor, her hand against the wall, her heart sunk to the floor. Having heard the commotion she’d sneaked upstairs and, having arrived just in time to catch Walt’s declaration, quickly followed by its rebuttal, Etta is more sorry than she ca
n say. She doubts very much that, given the twenty years’ worth of love and longing that had been channeled into this one act, Walt will ever attempt it again. Which means that she’ll have to take Cora’s closed heart into her own hands and get ready for the inevitable mess of confusion and pain to come.

  Cora nearly runs into her grandmother in the corridor.

  “What are you doing?”

  Etta sidesteps the question. “Why don’t you stay tonight?”

  “I … I don’t have anything with me, my pajamas …” she says feebly.

  “Oh, come on. It’s late and you don’t have a date,” Etta prods her granddaughter.

  “I suppose it’ll already be morning by the time we finish this epic melodrama,” Cora concedes. Every now and then her grandmother invites her to stay the night and she can never say no. Although she prefers the solitude of her own flat, and a night uninterrupted by snuffles and snorts, in a bed uncluttered by a sexagenarian who kicks in her sleep, Cora will never leave her grandmother alone when she doesn’t want to be. When her parents died it was Etta’s bosom she buried her head in, it was in Etta’s arms she cried. It is Etta who gave Cora everything she needed to survive.

  “Okay then,” Etta says as they walk back toward the living room together. She stops at the airing cupboard and makes a show of rooting around for a nightgown while, as Cora waits, Etta quickly stitches a little red star into the corner of the first one she finds. After a moment she hands it to Cora. “This’ll fit you fine.”

  “I’m not sharing your bed again,” Cora says as she takes it. “You snore dreadfully.”

  “What rot,” Etta huffs. “I most certainly do not.”

  While they watch the last hour of Gone With the Wind for the twenty-ninth time, Cora thinks about Walt and what just happened. Had he really been drunk? Or had he actually meant something by what he said? If so, Cora doesn’t understand it. He can’t care for her, certainly can’t love her; that much is impossible. She isn’t a lovable person. She’s cold and calculating and doesn’t really want anything in life except to make a great scientific breakthrough. Excepting Walt himself, she has no real friends to speak of. The only person who really cares for her is Etta and, Cora suspects, this is only because blood and biology compel it.