Miss Mary's Book of Dreams

by Sophie Nicholls

  She thought again about her other self, the version of herself that she saw in her dreams. Because she hadn’t stopped dreaming. And there was an entire world that she returned to now, even though she told herself she wouldn’t, each time she closed her eyes.

  ‘It’s just a dream,’ she told herself. ‘Just a dream. It’s not real . . .’

  Over and over again, she would wake up feeling heavy and exhausted, her heart pounding, her mouth parched. She had to lie for a long time, forcing herself to remember things – her own name, the names of Billy and Grace, the name of the shop where she’d bought the bedroom curtains and the way the lace edging of the pillow felt when she rubbed it between her fingers – just to anchor herself in the present again.

  Sometimes she imagined that she saw Mary Cookson, felt her mud-fringed skirts brush against the walls of the narrow hallway, heard her voice in her head. She thought she saw, as she passed the bedroom mirror, the arch of a neck, a wisp of red hair, a shoulder wrapped in a woollen shawl out of the corner of her eye.

  Sometimes she thought she was going mad. Is this how easily it happened? She’d reach for Billy’s hand then, squeezing it with such ferocity that he’d put his head on one side and looked at her.

  ‘El, are you OK?’

  Was she? She really didn’t know anymore. What did it mean, to be OK?

  ‘Fair to middling,’ Billy’s mum would have said. ‘As well as can be expected, love,’ as she rolled out the pastry for her apple pie or folded her newly ironed bed sheets. ‘The secret to a happy life,’ she’d said to Ella on the day that she and Billy had married, ‘is never to expect too much. That way, when something isn’t going well, you’re not too disappointed, and when something lovely happens, it’s a nice surprise.’

  She lay and listened to the sound of Billy’s breathing and the pigeons splashing in the guttering after last night’s downpour. This was the life she’d made for herself. And it was a good life, in so many ways. Here was the man she loved. And here, in these few small rooms, was the world that they’d made together, their daughter dreaming just across the hallway, their books on the shelves, their plates and cups in the kitchen cupboards, their coats hanging on the hooks under the stairs. She and Billy had made for Grace what Ella herself had never been able to have, despite all of Mamma’s hard work – a family of three. So why did she now find herself longing for something she couldn’t even shape into words?

  She put out a finger and stroked the bristle on Billy’s cheek, watching him stir slightly in his sleep. When he was sleeping, he looked most like that boy who’d once hung by his feet from a rope swing above the middle of a muddy brown river. The smile that always hovered at the corners of his mouth relaxed in sleep to a kind of gentle openness, which was the way he’d looked when he’d first kissed her that night on the bridge seven years ago, the night that she’d pushed him away.

  And maybe, Ella thought, we all have so many different selves inside us, like Grace’s set of Russian dolls, made of painted wood. You opened one to find another, and another inside that and another, until you discovered the tiniest doll, not much bigger than a seed or a grain of rice, so that you couldn’t make out the eyes and nose and lips, except perhaps with a magnifying glass. Who was the Ella in the centre of it all – the Ella that she was when every other self had been opened up and set aside? That, she thought, was what she was searching for.

  19

  To dream of your true love: Take one cup of flour, one of salt and a handful of ashes from a spent fire. Add a hair from your own head, a handful of apple blossoms and enough water to make a mixture. Put them in a pan and cook slowly over a low fire. When the cake is done, place it under your pillow and wait for your love to appear to you.

  – Miss Mary’s Book of Dreams

  ‘What do you think?’

  Fabia steadied herself at the top of the ladder and adjusted the signs on the new bookcases. She watched Ella stand back, head on one side, assessing her handiwork.

  ‘Just left a bit, Mum. More towards the centre. Yes, that’s right.’

  Florence whistled. ‘Love it,’ she said. ‘Very, very cool, you two.’

  The signs were written out in Mamma’s beautiful copperplate handwriting, which Ella had asked the printer to super-size on crisp, white card. ‘RED,’ said one and then, next to it, ‘SNOW.’

  ‘I can’t claim any credit.’ Fabia directed a meaningful look at the top of her daughter’s head.

  ‘Except for the exquisite handwriting, of course.’ Ella winced. ‘Mine would have been a disaster.’

  The bottom stair creaked and Maadar-Bozorg stood nodding.

  ‘Yes, these two are a formidable team. But for goodness’ sake, Farah, child, get down from there before you break your neck. Or at least kick those shoes off.’

  Fabia laughed, negotiating her way expertly down the ladder in her leopard-print court shoes. ‘Years of practice,’ she said.

  ‘The idea,’ Ella said, oblivious, ‘is that we curate things for people, make it easier for them to browse, to stumble across something new. LOVE is something we’ll introduce for Valentine’s Day next year.’ She held up another enormous sign with flamingo pink lettering. ‘TRANSFORMATIONS is Mamma’s thing. We’ll bring it in for the New Year. But SNOW and RED, we’re going to do right now. So that you see them as soon as you walk in. What do you think?’

  She watched Florence slip behind the stepladder and run her finger along the first shelf of ‘RED’, which included a collector’s edition of a pop-up Red Riding Hood, Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, a biography of the Red Queen, a field guide to poppies, a book of gluten-free cake recipes entitled Red Velvet, Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, and, of course, a copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales with the red shoes featured on the cover.

  ‘It’s brilliant.’ Florence nodded. ‘You need to get this featured in the press. Really. I should call up a couple of people for you.’ She was already browsing SNOW.

  Fabia thought how much she liked this young woman, Florence. How supportive she was of her daughter. And maybe it wasn’t coincidence that, like Ella, Florence had never really known her father either. Her mother, a very chic French woman who’d been quite a regular in Fabia’s York shop, had mostly raised her alone. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that these two had gravitated towards one another.

  ‘There’s loads more we could do,’ Ella said. ‘Maybe we could ask customers to suggest things, too? But we’ll just start with a few shelves like this, see how it goes.’

  ‘It needs just a little something extra, I think.’ Fabia crossed to the old fitting room at the back of the shop, which she’d recently cleared of the dusty boxes of books and resurrected as a dressing-up corner. It was already proving a popular extension of the Children’s Section. The shop’s younger visitors were enjoying trying on all the new costumes she’d created, turning to admire themselves in the gilt-framed mirror.

  Fabia opened the new dressing-up box – one of her old trunks that she’d dragged out from storage upstairs – and selected the Red Riding Hood cloak, shaking out its silk folds.

  ‘Do you think Grace will object?’ she said, draping it over the end of the bookcase.

  Florence and Ella exchanged glances.

  ‘Um. Honest answer?’ Florence laughed.

  The shop door jangled, making them all jump.

  Bryony stood in the doorway.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ she said, her face dimpling. ‘I love it. What a wonderful idea.’

  Fabia smiled. ‘I’m just being persuaded that my granddaughter might object to our using her Red Hiding Hood cloak . . . But it needs a little something extra, don’t you think?’

  Bryony frowned. ‘What about the red shoes? The ones in the dressing-up box that the children are always fighting over?’

  ‘Of course. Bryony, you’re a genius!’ Ella was already fishing them out from the bottom of the trunk.

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Fabia stroked the worn satin of her old
red ballet shoes. She looked up and met Maadar-Bozorg’s eye. ‘I’m not sure how they got in there, anyway. I can’t believe these are still going.’ She took the Brothers Grimm book from the shelf and displayed it front-wise, nestling the shoes one inside the other on top. ‘There. Thank you, Bryony. Perfect.’

  *

  Fabia watched the silent shapes flicker across the TV screen. She’d turned the sound right down so that she could hear the fireworks. Giant blossoms of white and gold burst across the chink of sky that she could just glimpse above the rooftops from Ella and Billy’s living room window.

  She’d insisted they go out for the night whilst she looked after Grace, who was still too small to relish the Bonfire Night celebrations. They’d left holding hands, like two teenagers on a first date, Ella bundled into a bulky nylon parka – Fabia really couldn’t understand why all the young women she saw in the street actually chose to wear that kind of thing – her cheeks glowing as brightly as her knitted red woollen hat.

  The chat show host stood up to introduce his next guest and Fabia felt her eyes getting heavy. She yawned, letting her sewing slip from her fingers into her lap.

  Maadar-Bozorg was already sleeping, bundled in a nest of quilts and blankets in the old bedroom above the shop. ‘So cold,’ she’d said. ‘So damp, here. It gets into your bones. I don’t know how you stand it.’

  Fabia had already looked in on her, her silver hair spread over the pillow, her lips moving as she muttered to herself in her dreams. Later, Fabia too would cross the courtyard again, lock up the shop and climb the stairs, just as she had years ago, but this time she would sleep on a sofa bed squeezed between a desk and stacks of boxes in the old living room that was now Ella’s office.

  Fabia had the distinct feeling that the past – after all these years of running – was finally about to catch up with her. Her stomach churned, colours flickered behind her eyes and the scent of dust and pomegranate blossoms followed her everywhere.

  Now she put her head back on the sofa cushions, closed her eyes and felt the sun-warmed stones of the terrace at Maadar-Bozorg’s village house beneath her bare feet. She felt the hem of an embroidered cotton nightdress tickling her ankles.

  She lay down in the thick grass, in the shade of the pomegranate trees, her head resting in the cleft between two gnarled old roots. She breathed in the fragrance of the dry red earth. She watched the ripening fruit bobbing like round red lamps between her flickering eyelashes.

  ‘What are you doing, child? You can’t sleep out here.’

  The touch of cool hands through the thin cotton of her nightdress, scooping her up, carrying her inside. The floor tiles with the pattern of opening blossoms – blue and red and brown – the glint of the big chrome taps and the thrill of a cold cloth pressed to her sticky forehead.

  ‘There, child. You can sleep now . . .’

  Her soft bed with its crisp, white sheet. The feel of the threadwork under her chin.

  ‘Maadar-Bozorg . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Tell me a story . . .’

  The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses

  Long ago, in a land where the sun is never too hot and the grass grows green and high, there was a king who had twelve beautiful daughters.

  The twelve princesses were inseparable. They had no mother – she had died when the youngest princess was still a baby – and so they were free to do whatever they pleased. By day they wandered through the palace grounds, climbing trees and playing tricks on the palace gardeners. At night they slept together in one long and narrow room, in twelve beds arranged in a row. Each bed had a white coverlet and a soft white pillow. Each pillow was filled with the down of the royal swans on the palace lake, which the King’s maidservants gathered every morning in their aprons in great white drifts.

  Each evening, when the princesses had undressed and put on their white nightdresses and slipped under their coverlets, the King ordered that their maidservants must lock and bolt the door to their room. He was determined that, unlike their mother, his precious daughters would never come to any harm. He insisted that the heavy silver key to their door was brought to him personally each night and, each night, he slept with the key under his own pillow.

  But despite these careful precautions, in the mornings, when the maidservants came to unlock the princesses’ room and bring them breakfast, they always found the same thing. The princesses would be sleeping peacefully, their hair tumbling over their pillows and their shoes paired neatly at the foot of each bed. But when they gathered up the shoes to take for polishing, the maidservants saw that the soles were all worn through, as if each princess had been dancing all night.

  Each morning, the King would summon one of his daughters and demand to know where they had been. But each girl would only smile at him or cover her mouth and laugh behind her hand.

  And so, eventually, the King made it known throughout the entire land that if any man could discover the princesses’ secret and find out where it was that they went at night and what they did there, he could choose the princess he liked best as his wife.

  The princesses were renowned as twelve great beauties and so very soon there was a long line of suitors waiting outside the gates of the palace for a chance to try their hand. The princesses were not afraid in the slightest about this. They knew that there was no man in the world who could ever discover their secret. In fact, they took to hanging out of their bedroom window and giggling at each man as he knocked at the great oak doors.

  ‘Look at this one. He’s so fat!’

  ‘And look at this one with the big nose. He looks so proud.’

  Only the youngest of the princesses, a girl with blue-grey eyes and wild brown hair, refused to join in. She begged her sisters to be quiet. ‘Come away from the window,’ she said.

  The first man to try to uncover the princesses’ secret was a gentleman with greying hair and a large round belly. He made a great show of walking up and down their bedroom and looking carefully under each of their beds, whilst scratching his beard and mumbling to himself.

  Finally, he settled himself down by the doorway to begin his night watch. The eldest princess brought him a goblet of wine, which he took greedily and drained to the very last drop. When the sound of his snores began to reverberate through the room, the princesses stifled their laughter. It was late the next morning that their suitor stirred and he never came close to discovering the princesses’ secret.

  The same thing happened to the second and third and fourth suitors, and the King began to despair that he would ever discover how his daughters managed to wear out every new pair of dancing shoes.

  He tossed and turned in his own bed until the fifth night, when he dreamed that his daughters had turned into white geese and flown away through their open bedroom window. In the morning when he woke up, he burst into their room, fearing that all he would find were a few white feathers scattered on their pillows, but instead he saw each of the princesses sleeping peacefully with a smile on their face and the latest suitor rubbing his eyes and muttering to himself.

  Now it happened that one day a young man, the son of a local blacksmith, was walking through the woods at the edge of his village, gathering sticks for his father’s fire. An old woman with cheeks as wrinkled as crab apples stopped him and asked him for a few coins. The man pulled a handful of coppers from his pocket.

  ‘Old woman, this is all I have to give you,’ he said, ‘but if you come with me, you can warm yourself by our fire and my mother will give you some bread.’

  The old woman’s eyes twinkled and a large black crow flew down out of the trees and settled on her shoulder. It put its head on one side and looked at the man. ‘Cark, cark,’ it said.

  ‘Young man, I’m going to tell you something,’ said the old woman and she waved her finger, which was as gnarled as an old tree root, beckoning him to come closer. Then she whispered some instructions into his ear.

  The man looked at her, astonished. ‘
The twelve dancing princesses?’ he cried. ‘But the King himself and some of the richest men in the land have tried to uncover their secret. What makes you think I can do any better?’

  The old woman laughed and her laughter was like the sound of the wind sighing through the trees. She reached into the pack on her back and pulled out a piece of folded material. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is a cloak. Put it on and whatever you do will be invisible.’ She shook out its heavy folds and the young man shuddered as bits of old leaves and dead insects and spiders’ webs dropped onto his shoes.

  But in order to be polite, as his mother had always taught him, he thanked the mad old woman for her gift and rolled it under his arm and carried it back with him to his cottage.

  That night and for all the nights after that, his dreams were filled with the rustle of silken skirts in red and yellow and silver and the sound of twelve pairs of feet dancing.

  And when he was so exhausted from lack of sleep that he dropped his tongs in the fire and ruined a good set of horseshoes, he decided to set off and try his hand at the palace.

  By now, the line of men outside the palace gates had dwindled away. Word had spread that no one could outwit the twelve clever princesses and some said that they were bewitched by the ghost of their dead mother and that each night they slipped from the Land of the Living to the Land of the Other Ones, the dead ones who lived in a castle far out beyond the edge of the darkest woods. These stories had frightened away even the most faithful of the King’s many servants, including the palace gardeners, who had abandoned their work so that thick branches of ivy had begun to twine themselves around the window of the princesses’ bedchamber.