The Dress Shop of Dreams Page 4

  When the credits finally roll on Gone With the Wind Cora eases herself off the sofa and tucks a patchwork quilt (88 hexagons in every hue of blue) around a snoring Etta, then walks across the living room and into her grandmother’s bedroom. She hasn’t got the energy to brush her teeth, she just wants to fall into bed. Now that Etta won’t be sharing it with her, Cora actually stands the chance of a good night’s sleep.

  Cora slips off her underwear and reaches for the nightgown her grandmother has given her, made of cotton and lace, all in cream with blue ribbon trim. There’s something about it she almost recognizes; the memory of something tugs at her fingers but does not rise up. When she pulls it over her shoulders it slides over her skin like silk, falling to her toes where the fabric floats just above the floor.

  “It’s like being hugged by a cloud,” Cora whispers, rather surprising herself.

  And when she slips between the sheets she’s asleep before she closes her eyes. In the living room Etta opens hers.

  Tonight, for the first time since the tragedy, Cora won’t dream of a party, she won’t wake to whispers of laughter and jazz. She won’t feel a blush of wistfulness that can be washed off in a moment or two. In a few hours she’ll know true sorrow for the first time in twenty-five years, every feeling that she’s suppressed all her life will surge up and engulf Cora again. In a few hours she’ll wake up weeping, her heart cracked wide open. This, Etta knows, is the cost of love. It’s a great shame, she thinks, that the heart cannot feel joy without also feeling pain, that it cannot know love without also knowing loss.

  Chapter Five

  An hour after she’s fallen asleep, Cora wakes screaming. She sits bolt upright in bed, her own terrified voice mixing with the screams in her dreams and the smell of smoke now so powerful it almost chokes her.

  Etta is already waiting at her bedside. And when her granddaughter stares at her with horrified eyes, Etta strokes her fingers through Cora’s curls and places a glass of brandy in her open hands. Despite the fact that Cora never drinks anything stronger than coffee or tea, she swallows it in a single gulp, then coughs and splutters until tears are running down her cheeks.

  “It’s okay, dear girl,” Etta says softly. “It’s over now. It’s all over.”

  Cora stares at her grandmother as if she’s speaking a foreign language. She shakes her head and opens her mouth but no words come out.

  “Do you want another drink?”

  Cora shakes her head again. She reaches for Etta’s hand and clutches it until Etta can’t feel her fingers anymore.

  “It’s all right,” Etta whispers. “It will be all right, I promise.”

  At last Cora finds her voice. “What happened? I can’t, I don’t …”

  “You had a nightmare,” Etta says. “You had a—”

  “No, it wasn’t a dream. The dream I’ve been having every night of my life, that was a dream. That never happened, I know, it’s only what I wished—but this was real, a memory, I just don’t understand how it could be.”

  “What did you see?”

  Cora still can’t quite believe what she did see. “My parents. Our house was on fire. I was trapped, screaming, and … I don’t know, it all went black, but I think they saved me.”

  Cora stares at Etta’s bedspread, adorned with 168 embroidered butterflies. She stares at them, then begins to multiply and divide them, trying to slow the frantic pump of her pulse. Etta shuffles out of the room and returns with another brandy. “Drink up, dear girl, it’ll help.”

  “It was real?” Cora splutters. “But how … Why am I finally remembering this? All my life I couldn’t remember what happened. Why now? And how?”

  Etta glances at the ceiling. Cora eyes her suspiciously.

  “You did something, didn’t you?”

  “It was time,” Etta says, not yet offering her granddaughter the whole truth, knowing that now is not the right time to talk about Walt. Cora must mourn her parents first. “I couldn’t let you spend the rest of your life in a cocoon. It was time to unlock your heart.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I have my ways,” Etta admits. “I know you’ve wondered about my dresses, you just won’t let yourself believe in magic and the power of clothes to give a person confidence, hope, courage … Mine just happen to be a bit more—”

  “What did you do?” Cora interrupts.

  “I sewed something special into your nightgown,” Etta admits, “a little red star …”

  Cora has, on some level, always been aware that there is something different about Etta’s dress shop, though her scientific reasoning has never allowed her to ask or investigate into exactly what. Of course she doesn’t believe in anything not firmly underpinned by a fixed foundation of provable facts. But she’s unable to deny that something slightly strange, something perhaps beyond the realms of her understanding, is happening now. Still, Cora doesn’t want to know what, so instead of asking how she asks why.

  “But why are you doing this? You know I don’t want to remember the past. I don’t want that reality. I prefer dreams. There’s no point, nothing good comes from pain like that.”

  Etta collects herself. She knew this wasn’t going to be easy. “You may be a brilliant scientist,” she says, “you may have one of the biggest brains in the world. But, my dear girl, you know absolutely nothing about the heart.”

  “The heart?” Cora frowns.

  “When you shut down your heart you protect it from pain but you prevent it from feeling anything at all,” Etta explains. “Which is why you’ve never fallen in love.”

  “Love?” Cora’s frown deepens, wondering what her grandmother is going on about. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You might not miss it now,” Etta says. “But trust me, you will one day. And I can’t let that happen. I can’t let you lose the love of your life. I can’t let you wind up alone when you’re my age, wishing …”

  “Wishing what?” Cora asks. She’s never seen such a look of sorrow on Etta’s face before and, for a second, she forgets about her parents.

  “Nothing,” Etta says, the look suddenly gone. “It’s simply a shame that one’s own particular magic never seems to work on oneself, that’s all. Anyway, the point and purpose here is that it is time to open your heart. I’m afraid that means unearthing all that pain you buried so long ago and …”

  Cora wonders what her grandmother isn’t saying. It seems as if sweet, innocent Etta might be keeping quite a lot of secrets. Cora narrows her eyes and frowns, formulating a carefully phrased question. But, before she can speak, the sound of her parents’ screams ring in Cora’s ears.

  “You never told me I was there,” she says, tears clouding her eyes, “and you always said it was an accident.”

  “I know, sweetheart, I’m sorry.” Etta takes her granddaughter’s hand, wishing there was a softer way to say what she’s about to say, wishing she didn’t have to say it at all but she knows that now that Cora is starting to remember, she deserves to know the truth. “But you were there. And I don’t believe it was an accident. At least, it wasn’t their accident—something, someone else was involved. I don’t know what happened. But I do believe there’s more to it than the cold, hard facts. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “What do you mean?” Cora still grips her grandmother’s hand, looking up at her through red eyes. Time folds in on itself and all at once Etta sees Cora as a girl, sobbing after scalding herself on a Bunsen burner, failing to get 100 percent on a chemistry test, being rejected by Oxford University. That she’d got 98 percent, that she’d been accepted by Cambridge, didn’t matter. Cora’s standards were uncompromising and untouched by reason or rationality. All the same, Etta feels her heart contract when she sees her granddaughter in pain.

  “So what are you saying? You think they were murdered?”

  “I don’t know,” Etta admits. “I don’t know anything for certain. The police ruled your parents’ deaths as accidental. They didn’t have enou
gh evidence to the contrary and I didn’t have the energy to push them. I brought you home. Keeping you safe seemed to be the only thing that mattered after Maggie died. So I let it go.”

  “But you might be wrong. It might just have been an accident. You don’t have any evidence either, do you? You don’t have any proof.”

  Etta shakes her head. “Yes, I might. And no, I don’t. But, dear girl”—she reaches out and cups Cora’s cheek in her hand—“not all of life’s answers are found in your head, some you have to sense with your heart.”

  Cora frowns, used to her grandmother’s sentimentality and suspicious of it. “Okay, well, just tell me everything you do know, everything you remember. And stick to the facts.”

  So Etta does, until patches of gray morning light slip slowly into the room and neither of them has words or breath left. Cora’s parents’ scientific papers all burned in the fire, Etta believes, and no further details are known. But the day before they died, Maggie had called her saying she wanted to talk about something very important, something for which she’d have to be sitting down. At the time Etta had been distracted by a rush of customers and, after quickly checking it wasn’t the imminent arrival of another grandchild and thinking she’d have endless hours to discuss details later, promised to call her daughter back tomorrow. Of course, then it was too late. This is everything, the whole truth as she knows it, Etta promises. There are no more secrets, at least none that she is keeping.

  Something happens to Cora while her grandmother speaks: an unfolding, an unspooling of her outer layers to reveal her core. At first she simply wants all the facts laid out before her so she can organize and assimilate them, reshuffling stories and memories, nightmares and dreams, into a revisionist history of her past. But, as Etta talks about her parents, about truths Cora never knew or had forgotten, Cora begins to do something she’s never done before. Slowly, in effortless exhaustion, her mind switches off, shuts down, and emotions flood through her body.

  Etta watches her granddaughter cry, head bent to her chest, shoulders shuddering slightly, fingers wrapped together, twisting around and around each other as if whittling down the bones. It is nearly noon before Cora slides under the covers, allowing her grandmother to tuck the duvet into a tight cocoon, and closes her eyes. Etta creeps out of the room with soft, slow steps.

  She turns at the door to glance back at her beloved granddaughter now asleep in her bed. Cora’s eyes are swollen and red, her skin burnt and blotchy with sorrow, but something else is happening, the very thing Etta intended; a lightness is beginning to wash over her, a shadow of joy. It’s only a whisper of possibility now, a potential, but Etta can see flickers of it at the edges of Cora’s body. A space is opening up in her tight chest, a gap that could let love slip in. The tears she’s shed have started to erode the ice. Her heart is beginning to thaw.

  Walt slides Much Ado About Nothing off the shelf and slips it alongside The Merchant of Venice. Five minutes later he returns it to its rightful place. The attempt to suppress his sorrow beneath unnecessary stock reorganization isn’t working. That morning he’d rearranged the entire romance section into alphabetical order. In the afternoon he’d returned all the books to their original places.

  Last night, like Cora, he hadn’t slept. He’d run home, limbs pumping, adrenaline pushing away tears, and fallen into bed. He’d lain there all night, fully dressed, and stared up at the ceiling, replaying every hideous second of the awful event over and over and over again. As the morning light slowly crept across the room, Walt managed to drag himself out of bed and tug off his clothes. Finding a funny little red stitch in his shirt, he’d pulled out the thread with his teeth and dropped it onto the floor. Then Walt had taken a shower and, as the hot water spat onto his skin, he’d known that this was it. His life as it had always been was over. He could no longer pretend. He could no longer keep hoping and deluding himself. He had to let go, just as he should have years ago. That much was clear now.

  “Oh, bloody hell.”

  Walt abandons Shakespeare and slouches back over to the counter to find solace in a slice of cherry pie. He glances at the clock and frowns. It’s 6:48 P.M. She didn’t come. It’s Friday evening and Cora isn’t sitting in the science section reading The Life of Mary Somerville or something similar. She is a creature of unwavering habits, of precise and exact routines. But now she’s deserted him. The world has been knocked off its axis and is spinning in a different direction.

  His half-finished copy of Madame Bovary sits next to the till, taunting him. Walt glares at it, then snatches it up, fingernails digging into the paper. After last night he suspects Cora will probably shun his bookshop for a while, perhaps forever. He wouldn’t blame her. She probably thinks he’s some sort of mad stalker and will avoid ever having to see him again. This, Walt considers, should be a good thing. At least it will save him from the abject humiliation of having to look Cora in the eye again.

  What will he do now? Perhaps he’ll be able to employ great reserves of willpower and, eventually, one day, he’ll forget her. Or at least be able to go a whole hour without thinking of her. He will find other things to fill the gap, fun and wonderful things, until the gaps have gone and he’s left with a life, a life he will love. This plan should leave Walt feeling free, released from chains and ready for anything. But it doesn’t. He only feels disorientated, untethered, a forgotten sheet left to flap in the wind.

  The second time Walt spoke to Cora he’d been six, she’d been nine and crying. The sight of her, fragile shoulders hunched over and trembling, so moved him that he forgot to be shy. He’d just wanted to hug her, cuddle her like his father did when he couldn’t sleep and called out for his mother. Cora sat on the pavement in All Saints’ Passage, almost hidden by the branches of the willow tree hanging over the wall and brushing the paving stones. Walt sidled up, scuffed shoes on tiptoes until he stood just inside the curtain of branches.

  “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

  An 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 ar
e 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.