It took them some time to stride out far enough to be able to swim, but once they had, Skye caught up to him and stroked ahead. She swam on and on, out into the Solent, not even knowing if he was following, swimming away from the sight of Nicholas Crawford in his swimming trunks, legs strong and bare, chest bare too, a line of hair trailing down to his waistband. She stroked harder, swimming away from the treacherous warmth in her body that had nothing whatsoever to do with the sun.
At last her breath came too fast and she slowed and turned over, lying on her back, certain she’d got hold of herself, that the physical sensations in her body were the result of exercise, nothing more.
She should return to the shore. But Nicholas was beside her now, floating in the water, a thing they’d done together a million times before.
‘This was just what I needed,’ he said quietly.
‘Me too.’ She closed her eyes and saw a dream behind her eyelids. ‘Imagine,’ she said, turning the vision into words, ‘if there was no war and we flew planes every day for fun, to France and Cairo and Cape Town. And every weekend there was the cove in Cornwall …’
Her voice died abruptly as she realised she’d inscribed him into her dream. But his dreams were joined together with Margaux’s.
‘And we’d swim and cook limpets for dinner and fall asleep on the sand.’ Nicholas’s voice, which had picked up her unfinished sentence so eagerly, perished as suddenly as hers had.
Skye couldn’t speak. Her words, and his unexpected continuation of them, had left her throat as scalded as if she’d just drunk an ocean of salt water. She stared upwards at the blinding blue of the sky, which, right now, seemed a safer place than the sea. Because she mightn’t be in Cornwall, falling asleep on the sand next to Nicholas, but she was lying beside him in the water, recalling the way his eyes had traced over her body on the doorstep of the cottage. And she needed to stop.
‘What happened to your knees?’ she asked, trying to find safe ground.
‘Broken elevator controls.’
‘Ouch.’
For a long stretch of minutes there was only the gentle plash of waves, the occasional shriek of a gull – until the current moved her sideways and her fingertips brushed against Nicholas’s. It was a whisper, nothing more, over almost before it happened, but she felt the crackle of it everywhere.
The splash that followed told her plainly that she was the only one who’d felt anything. Nicholas had simply been waiting for the perfect moment to copy one of Skye’s favourite childhood moves, which was to catch him off guard and drag him down into the water. He pulled her under by the arm, but because he’d learned the move from her she knew how to twist away and dive below him. He caught her ankle, not stopping her from getting away as she’d always done to him, but tickling her foot.
She kicked feebly while at the same time convulsing with laughter, accidentally opening her mouth and swallowing water. She rose to the surface coughing and gasping.
He grinned. ‘I’ve been waiting to do that since I was thirteen.’
She laughed again, having finally caught her breath, but lost it once more as she and Nicholas trod water just inches away from each other. Water droplets caressed his shoulders, and it was impossible to look at anything other than him. Their eyes tangled together, his flaring the fieriest of blues, his mouth opening. Then his smile vanished and he turned his head away in so sudden a movement that it felt as if he had torn her skin.
‘I’m going back in,’ he said.
He swam back to the group: Rose splashing Richie in the shallows; Margaux leaning glamorous and elegant on her elbows on the sand, surrounded by a cloud of smoke; and O’Farrell, his trousers rolled up, his shirt unbuttoned, alternating between kicking the water and looking out towards Skye. And Nicholas, stepping out of the water and dropping down beside Margaux. She offered him a cigarette but he shook his head.
A group of friends by the seaside. So normal. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. Except that the mist had lifted and Skye could see it now, the large and shining thing: she was wholly and overwhelmingly and undeniably in love with Nicholas Crawford.
Which was just about the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
Skye made her way back to shore slowly. When she stepped out, it was to hear Nicholas say, ‘We should go back if we’re going to get any sleep before tonight.’
‘You’re on ops again tonight?’ Skye asked O’Farrell as they started back to the cottage.
He nodded. ‘While you were being a mermaid, I made a plan. Our flight has leave in June and two days of it coincides with your leave. Rose worked it out. We’ll all go to London. Dance at the Embassy Club. Stay at the Dorchester.’
She knew what he was asking her. She saw Nicholas glance over at her and O’Farrell, and then turn quickly back to Margaux.
O’Farrell was holding her hand, Skye realised. She hadn’t noticed the moment he took it in his, hadn’t felt the frisson of skin touching skin, a frisson she felt when Nicholas merely looked at her. But what good was that? What was the best way to forget someone you couldn’t have?
‘That sounds like fun,’ she said, and O’Farrell looked as pleased if he’d invented the aeroplane all by himself.
‘We’ll take care of the arrangements,’ he said, indicating himself, Nicholas and Richie. ‘You ladies need only turn up at the appointed time and a weekend of fun will await.’
But Skye was no longer listening. On the steps of the cottage, a woman waited, black Sobranie in hand, smoke forming a halo over her dark hair. Skye stopped still and stared.
‘Liberty,’ Nicholas said to Skye.
Skye’s mouth began to smile but then her body braced as if it recalled that it was best to assume a defensive position when near Liberty. One of Skye’s feet stepped forward but the other wouldn’t move so she remained fixed to the spot.
‘I didn’t think …’ Nicholas said.
In his voice, Skye heard both surprise and wariness and she knew he’d believed what he’d told her at Tangmere – that Liberty didn’t want to see Skye. But now here she was and Nicholas was clearly worried about why she’d come.
The last thing Skye wanted was for everyone to witness a reunion between herself and her sister. Luckily, Nicholas understood. He roused, gave Liberty a brief wave, then shepherded O’Farrell and Margaux into the car, and steered Rose towards it too so she could say goodbye to Richie.
Skye was left to walk alone towards her sister.
Her sister. Liberty was here at last. All of a sudden, Skye’s heart hurried her feet along and she opened her arms, ready to embrace her sister for the first time since 1937.
Liberty raised her arm, bringing her cigarette to her mouth, deflecting Skye.
‘Was that your friend Nicholas?’ she said, her words inflected like Skye’s with a rhythmic and husky Parisian accent of soft ‘t’ sounds and an absence of the letter ‘h’. ‘My, hasn’t he turned out handsome? Although he’s leaving rather than staying. And with a woman.’
For Christ’s sake. Liberty might not be hitting out with her fists and feet any more but her blows were still brutal. And she hadn’t finished.
‘I’m surprised you’ve let him back into your life,’ she went on. ‘It took you ages to get over him leaving the first time.’
The effort to keep her voice level, her face calm, was immense but Skye managed it. ‘Some people are always in your life,’ she said simply. She offered her sister a smile, hoping she would understand.
‘What if he leaves again?’
Skye knew then that the worry she’d confessed to Nicholas the night they’d danced had been right. What she had seen as reclaiming her own life when she’d left France for Cornwall, Liberty had seen as abandonment. And after their mother’s death, such departures smouldered deep in Liberty’s psyche. Skye wished so much that she had known better when she was eighteen, wished she’d known everything that war and loss had taught her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’
t know how much I’d hurt you.’
‘You take a lot of credit for my feelings,’ Liberty said coolly.
It was the kind of kick that had used to precede an emotional storm. Skye accepted it and waited, ready, but the storm didn’t come.
Instead, Liberty said, ‘I have a new job with the Inter-Services Research Bureau. The man I have to type papers for spends some time at RAF Tangmere. So I will too.’
She smiled, and all at once looked so much like Skye’s annoying little sister that Skye’s heart contracted with both love and remorse, and the exquisite pain that only Liberty could inflict. She understood that – despite what Liberty had told Nicholas – Liberty had come to warn Skye, rather than letting their first meeting in six years play out on a runway with dozens of people around.
‘Why don’t you come in,’ Skye said. ‘We have a few years to catch up on.’
‘Yes, all those years since you left me in France.’
That kick made Skye flinch. ‘I’m not sure we have anything to say to one another about the past, except things that hurt,’ she said. ‘And as war brings with it enough hurt, it might be better to call a truce and stay in the present.’
This time, Liberty’s smile was the same as the one she’d worn back in Paris when Skye had pointed out the damage to her bicycle tyres – a smile that made Skye want to leave all over again, even though they were standing outside her cottage.
‘You wear your emotions too obviously, sister dear,’ Liberty said. ‘That’s why war hurts you.’
Pain won out over effort at last. ‘I don’t suppose you’re ever afflicted with anything like hurt,’ Skye shot back.
The words hung in the air like the aftermath of an incendiary. Skye closed her mouth and pressed her lips together so nothing else so cruel could escape.
Liberty turned her back on her sister, which was what Skye deserved. But it meant that she didn’t hear Liberty’s next words properly. ‘I can’t afford such afflictions,’ was what Skye thought her sister might have said.
But then Liberty shrugged and said loudly, ‘Someone’s waiting for me.’ She pointed to a car parked further down the road. A man in an RAF uniform sat in the driver’s seat.
‘But you’ve only been here for ten minutes,’ Skye said, and even she could hear the hurt in her voice. She did wear her emotions too obviously.
Perhaps it was the wind, or Skye’s imagination, but Liberty’s eyes appeared to shine with tears, and Skye couldn’t help reaching out her hand, trying once more to mend the threadbare seams of their sibling bond before it finally unravelled.
At the same moment, Liberty pushed herself away from the door and clattered down the steps. ‘See you soon!’ she called gaily.
And Skye knew she’d been mistaken; Liberty hadn’t felt any emotion other than glee at the shock she’d caused. Skye was the only one with tears in her eyes.
And now Skye had two reasons to dread any flight that took her to Tangmere: the fact that Liberty might be there. And that Nicholas was, sometimes, too.
PART SIX
Kat
Eighteen
LONDON, JULY 2012
For her meeting with Celeste, the director of conservation from Dior’s archives, Kat wore another of her grandmother’s dresses: a Marc Bohan design for Dior from 1961 – the Green Park dress in scarlet wool.
‘That dress was made for you,’ Celeste said, indicating the iconically sixties above-the-knee skirt and its delectable subtle flare. ‘But what I really want to talk about is your mystery dress – the blue. C’est magnifique. I’m convinced from your photographs that it is a Dior from 1947 or 1948. The covered weights in the back to make the dress hang correctly, the architecture of the internal corsetry, that minute row of hook-and-eye closures along the inside of the skirt tell me it is a Dior. But I know nothing of it.’ She finished with a dramatically raised eyebrow that perfectly complemented her striking mustard-toned strapless bodice and black-and-white hounds tooth pencil skirt.
‘You can’t find a record of it then?’ Kat asked.
‘I have looked through all the archival drawings from that time, the extant photographs, Monsieur Dior’s own notes and I can find nothing. Your dress was a secret. But why?’
‘That’s a very good question.’ Kat felt the buzz of finally talking to someone about the astonishing dress animate her. ‘And why a secret sent to Australia? I know Dior eventually had an excellent relationship with the country and Australians loved his clothes, but in 1947 he was just a rumour of brilliance, a discovery yet to be made.’
‘I want to start with the handwriting on the label that you mentioned,’ Celeste said. ‘Could it be a customer’s name?’
‘But why sew a blank label into a dress? And who writes their name on a couture gown? It’s unlikely that whoever wore the dress was planning to keep it in a public changing room. You’d need a maid to help you undo all the fastenings for a start.’
Celeste laughed. ‘Perhaps the words were written on the label at the atelier? I don’t know why that would be …’ She paused, thinking.
‘The lady who donated it to the museum said that a friend gave it to her,’ Kat went on. ‘She didn’t buy it from Dior. So I don’t know who the original client was.’
‘I’ll look through the records of Australian customers from that time and see if we can turn the fragments of letters from sixty-five years ago into words.’
Then Kat confessed. ‘Actually, there are two dresses exactly the same.’
‘Two?’ Celeste’s eyebrows almost arched off her face.
Kat nodded. ‘The other one is here in England in a relative’s collection. I’m going to look at it again on the weekend to see if it has a label with writing on it too.’
‘When you say they’re exactly the same …’
‘I mean they’re identical.’ Kat took out her phone and showed Celeste the hasty pictures she’d snapped of the dress at the Cornwall cottage.
‘Wow.’ Celeste couldn’t take her eyes away from the phone and she looked as if she wasn’t sure whether to faint from shock or laugh with delight.
‘You wanted to see the fabric,’ Kat continued, trying to be the calm and rational one so that Celeste would shrug off her stupefaction and begin to flick through the exhaustive catalogue in her mind of everything to do with Dior and thus help Kat with her quest.
She withdrew from carefully folded tissue paper a tiny sample of blue fabric snipped from one of the dress’s seams – common practice for conservators when a deeper investigation was required. ‘I’ll analyse this under the spectroscope. But I doubt it will tell me anything other than what I already know: it’s silk.’
Celeste reached out her hand for the sample. ‘I knew, when I saw your pictures, that I had seen this blue, this shocking and extraordinary blue somewhere before,’ she said slowly. ‘But I couldn’t recall where. Seeing it now, in a tiny scrap, I have the same feeling … but this time I think I do know where.’
‘Where?’ Anticipation filled Kat to the point where she thought she might burst the expertly stitched seams of her dress.
‘Another secret. For now.’ Celeste smiled at Kat. ‘I could be wrong. I’ll go back to Paris this weekend and see if I’m right. Then if I am, on Monday …’
‘We might solve our mystery,’ Kat finished.
And she might have the answer to one of her grandmother’s secrets.
Kat placed the small square of fabric under the spectroscope, shone light onto it and watched molecules vibrate with energy. An idea pulsed with similar intensity in her mind. She texted Elliott.
Are you able to check if there’s any connection between your Margaux Jourdan and the House of Dior? I know it’s a weird question but, depending on the answer, it might help rule my grandmother out or in pretty definitively.
He replied almost immediately. No question is weird when you’re researching, I’ll check it out. Looking forward to seeing you tonight.
And Kat realised she was looking forwa
rd to seeing him too.
Kat took off the dress, and put it on again. Three times. The evening was formal, Elliott had said, and the dress was formal. In fact it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She’d coveted it since it had sashayed along the runway at Raf Simons’ first show as creative director at the House of Dior. But now that she had it, did she have the guts to wear it?
It was another of the dresses from her grandmother’s house, this time in a flame-coloured scarlet: not a colour to hide in. The skirt swept the floor and had been expertly designed so that it only began to flare out when it reached her hips rather than flaring from the waist – a trick that made it look sensuous rather than princessy. The bodice was strapless, or more than strapless; it was almost like a corset. The gown skimmed up and over her waist to a line just below her breasts, which were covered by shaped cups that certainly hid everything and were much less revealing than the plunging necklines favoured by footballers’ wives but it was so much sexier than anything Kat had worn in a long time, or perhaps ever.
Her phone buzzed. Elliott had arrived. There wasn’t time to change.
She sent a text to her daughters – even though she’d already spoken to them that day – so they would have a message from her when they woke up. Then she checked to make sure her lipstick hadn’t smeared over her teeth, smoothed her dark brown hair, which she’d decided to wear long and straight so as not to overdo things, and caught the lift down to the lobby. She tried very hard not to fidget when she felt the other people in the lift staring at her bold red dress.
She saw Elliott in the lobby straightaway, even though his back was to her. There was something about the way he stood – confidently, but not over-confident, as if he was happy in himself – that she admired and even envied. He definitely hadn’t taken his tuxedo on and off three times before coming here tonight.
The sound of her heels on the tiled floor made him turn around. A smile crossed his face the moment he saw her. While he might have looked handsome in the moody lighting of the bar the other night, out here in the well-lit lobby he looked even more gorgeous. His tuxedo, which she realised as she drew closer wasn’t black but rather the darkest shade of midnight blue, deepened the colour of his eyes still more – magnetically so. He leaned over to kiss her cheek and her breath caught.
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