The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1)

by Nicholls, Sophie

  She was already there, putting her hand up to his face, pulling him down towards her so that she could kiss him.

  He smelled of soap and aftershave and, very faintly, of the surgery’s disinfectant. She breathed deeply.

  9.

  Bracelet in the shape of a snake. White-gold, with red crystal eyes.

  Vintage Chanel in original box, 1956.

  ‘How would you feel about us going out for the day, a little outing on Sunday? With David. He’s offered to take us to the seaside…’

  Mamma was biting her lip. Ella knew that every detail of her response was being scrutinised. She tried hard to make her face look interested –enthusiastic, even – but her cheeks felt as if they were made of rubber.

  Over the past few weeks, she’d become used to the sound of the shop bell jangling in her dreams. Night after night, she’d half-hear it and in the morning she could never be sure if she actually had.

  A few nights ago, she’d dreamed that she was drifting down the river on her back, her hair floating out all around her, watching stars falling across the sky and swooping like silver birds into the black water. She watched spires and stone turrets float by and felt the branches of the trees reach down to brush her face.

  And then a bell rang out across the water, shattering the still surface into thousands of moving fragments. It was the sound of one of the party boats getting closer, the bell swinging and clattering through the dark, the water rushing under and against her in noisy waves. She twisted her hands in a clump of reeds and tried to hold on as the boat sent shockwaves through the water, threatening to sweep her away.

  ‘Mamma’ she whispered. ‘Mamma…’

  She could see her then on the deck of the boat, leaning on the rail in her silver Marlene Dietrich number, the one that was backless all the way down to her hips. Dr Carter’s arm was draped around her shoulders. The glass in her hand sent reflections bobbing and splitting.

  Ella called again but Mamma couldn’t hear her. Instead, the tinkling sound of her laughter floated out over the water and she saw Dr Carter pull her in closer so that her face tilted up to his. A neon sign flashed on, flashed off, streaking their faces with blue, gold.

  The river washed through her and around her and she felt her teeth chatter inside her skull.

  When she woke up, Mamma was singing in the kitchen, bobbing and dipping to Radio Two. Ella stood in the doorway, watching.

  ‘When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore… When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine, that's amore…’

  She turned with a flourish of the wooden spoon and tried to catch Ella up in the lilt of the chorus.

  ‘When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet, you're in lu-uurve…When you walk down in a dream but you know you're not dreaming, signore…’

  Then beating the spoon against her hip, dancing around the kitchen table, she caught at Ella’s hand, tried to twirl her under her arm.

  ‘Scuzza me, but you see, back in old Napoli, that's A-MORE!’

  Ella tried to join in but her arms and legs felt stiff, awkward. Her dream still clung to her, the tendrils of weed, the cold water.

  She drew out a chair and poured herself some coffee from the pot.

  ‘So is Dr Carter your…’ she stumbled over the word, ‘your boyfriend, Mum?’ The word felt like a stone in her mouth but Mamma only smiled, the dimple in her left cheek deepening.

  ‘Yes, tesora, David is my friend. A very good friend. My boy-friend, I suppose, if you want to say it like that… But well…’

  Then suddenly her smile vanished. Her hips stopped moving, her arms fell to her sides and she stood perfectly still in the middle of the kitchen, looking at Ella with her big green eyes as if a thought had just occurred her.

  ‘You know, Ella, there is something you need to remember at all times,’ she said, her face very solemn now. ‘And that is that I will always, always love your father.’

  Ella watched her disappear then, watched her gaze travel far away, out into the air somewhere above her head, where she imagined that she could almost feel the shape of the past shimmering and pulsing for a moment.

  Then, just as suddenly, she pulled herself back. ‘But life goes on, carissima. We must go on, you and I… That’s what your father always used to say to me, you know: “Don’t look back, Fabbia. Never look back. We can’t keep things. We mustn’t try to hold onto things…” ’

  A flurry of red, a flicker of green wings. A voice taunting: Hold on, hold on, hold on.

  Ella stood up quickly, pushing her chair back.

  ‘How would I know what he’d say, Mum? I never even met him.’

  She saw the hurt look on Mamma’s face and immediately hated herself. She’d done it again, even though she’d tried so hard not to. Sometimes, these days, it felt as if she were playing a part in a film about someone else’s life. She didn’t even recognise herself any more.

  *

  Dr Carter drove a BMW convertible. Black with tan leather upholstery. Mamma wore huge sunglasses and, because the roof was down, an embarrassing yellow headscarf covered with a large blue saddle-and-stirrup motif. Ella didn’t care if it was vintage Hermés. She hoped no one from school would see them because, as if the yellow scarf wasn’t bad enough, Mamma was drawing even more attention to herself. At every traffic light, she’d twist round in her seat and shout, ‘OK, tesora?’ at the top of her voice to make herself heard above the noise of the traffic.

  At the junction with Scarcroft Road, David slowed for a red light and she saw Councillor Pike standing on the pavement, talking with Mr Braithwaite. The wind whipped his black overcoat around his ankles and flattened the thin fabric of his too-short trousers. Ella could see that Pike’s face was thrust a little too close for Mr Braithwaite’s comfort. He was jabbing the air angrily with one hand whilst the other tried to clutch at his coat as it flapped out around him.

  Both men turned at the sound of David’s revving engine.

  ‘Good morning, Councillor!’ Mamma shouted, clamping her scarf to her head, laughing into the wind. Pike raised an eyebrow and made a little mock bow in Mamma’s direction. Ella slumped down further into her seat. Mamma’s laughter caught in the wind, trailing behind her like a bright streamer. David put his hand out and touched her leg, chuckling.

  ‘Fabbia, go easy on the poor sod. You’ll give him a heart attack.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It might do him good…’ Mamma winked and they both dissolved into more laughter.

  Ella dug her nails deeper into her palms.

  They drove out of the city, on and on, through endless lanes and fields. Ella thought she’d never seen so many fields, so much sky in one place. Mamma made Dr Carter stop a couple of times because she thought Ella was going to be sick. She was watching her nervously, all the time, in the rearview mirror and she kept saying that Ella’s face had gone green and then David would patiently pull over, whilst Ella reassured them that, no, really, she was fine. Mamma was terrified that she might ruin David’s upholstery.

  She watched the brown winter fields go by and the clusters of seagulls blown on the wind, lifting and scattering and settling again like clouds of white confetti.

  They got out of the car at some small place – a village with an odd name – Eastern-wold? Easing-wold? – where they sat outside the pub in their coats and warmed their hands on white mugs of coffee.

  ‘Awful coffee, isn’t it?’ said Dr Carter in a stage whisper and Mamma said it really wasn’t that bad and then, after another sip, agreed with him that it was truly terrible and Ella watched them laugh and laugh as if sharing some amazingly funny private joke.

  She tried as hard as she could to smile. She knew that Mamma wanted her to be happy. She pushed her hands back in her pockets and clenched and unclenched them, trying to coax the warmth back into her stiffened fingers. That was when Dr Carter said that, really, Ella must call him David, that Dr Carter was much too formal.

  Lo
ts of the people passing by the pub seemed to know David. They stopped and said hello and how are you and David said, these are my friends, Fabbia and Ella, and Ella saw people trying to memorise their names, especially Mamma’s, their lips moving without making a sound until they just gave up and smiled. David said that he used to work here before he moved to the city and that they were nice people. Very friendly.

  At the promenade at Whitby, they ate what David called ‘a fish and chip supper.’ Even though it wasn’t suppertime.

  David brought out a blanket from the boot and spread it across their laps and Ella sat with the wind whipping her hair across her face, her eyes smarting with the cold, eating the hot chips right out of the paper. She noticed that Mamma didn’t tell her off then for licking the salt from her fingers.

  What a lovely day it’s been, Mamma said, over and over, on the way home, and Ella felt the empty space that had been growing inside her since that morning in the kitchen, widen a little more.

  *

  Jean Cushworth was irritated. The wind was up and messing with her hair, which always put her in a bad mood and one of her new shoes, the pair she’d bought online and now wondered if she should have sent back, was beginning to rub her heel painfully.

  As she stepped off Grape Lane into the courtyard, the wind blew in her face and she had to stop and blink her eyelids very rapidly to free the specks of grit that might already be trapped behind her contact lenses. She felt her throat tighten. She knew now that she could be seen from inside the shop and this was not the kind of first impression that she liked to make.

  When she could see properly again, she looked up at the gilt lettering – Fabbia Moreno. Well, Vincent had been right about that at least. It was certainly a very Italian-sounding name.

  She placed her hand on the door, noting the new sophisticated grey colour of the paint and the large brass knocker, which had been polished to a bright gleam.

  ‘Good morning.’

  A very attractive woman was coming around the counter to meet her. Early forties, probably, though you couldn’t always tell. Long dark hair, her natural colour, Jean thought. Petite, but a bit on the curvy side. Lovely red dress, if you liked that kind of thing. Very Mediterranean.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, pulling off her glove, extending her hand, ‘Jean Cushworth. Lovely to meet you.’

  Fabbia Moreno smiled. She had enormous green eyes lined with dark kohl and a perfect smile outlined expertly in bright red lipstick.

  ‘You’re so welcome here,’ she said as Jean’s eyes swept over the tables with their artful arrangements of coloured scarves and shoes, the shelves of handbags and the rails hung with silks and sprigged cottons and gowns with full skirts like exotic upturned blooms. ‘I’ll just let you have a little look and then if there’s anything you need…’

  Later, at lunch with her friends in Betty’s Café, Jean Cushworth would find herself flourishing a small white bag with black ribbon handles and the words ‘Fabbia Moreno’ scrolled across it in gold lettering. The bag contained a large black box which she would open so that Marge and Jen could admire the white-gold bracelet in the shape of a snake with chips of red crystal for eyes. She would try it on for them, turning her hand this way and that, so that they could see how it showed off her slender wrists, which as Fabbia Moreno had commented immediately, was one of Jean’s features.

  She would hear herself saying, ‘Yes, I’ve ordered something bespoke, 30s-style. A bit glamorous. Well, you know, it’s the new thing, vintage, isn’t it? It’s everywhere right now. It’s a simply amazing shop. Oh, and I’ve invited her to the party. Well, her daughter’s a little friend of Katrina’s, so she was coming anyway. But when I met the mother… she’s so interesting, so talented… You must go and have a look. Tell her I sent you…’

  *

  ‘That bell is going to wear out soon,‘ said Mamma, as the door closed behind another customer. ‘I can’t keep up. At this rate, I’m going to have to get some help in.’

  Mrs Cossington’s dress had been a great success at the annual mayoral ball and that had brought in a flurry of customers. In fact, when Fabbia had bumped into her in the street, just the other day, she’d taken her on one side.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough, my dear,’ she’d whispered. ‘You’ve given me a new lease of life.’

  She’d patted her hair which, Fabbia couldn’t help noticing, had been cut into a new style and coloured a rich chestnut, the green glass earrings sparkling above her coat collar.

  ‘I’ll be back for more, my dear,’ she’d said, winking, ‘and I just have to have more of that perfume.’ And then she’d squeezed Fabbia’s hand. ‘You’re like a breath of fresh air in this town,’ she’d said, looking her straight in the eye, and then she was on her way again, stepping over the cobblestones in what looked like a new pair of particularly elegant court shoes, leaving Fabbia smiling to herself.

  And now there was Jean Cushworth’s Royal Wedding Party. All her friends, ordering dresses. In only three short months, Mamma had become very much in demand. Each evening now, she sat squinting under the lamp in the upstairs sitting-room, altering a seam or a hem, or crouched over the sewing machine she’d set up on the kitchen table, its treadle producing a steady chant long into the night.

  ‘I can help,’ Ella said.

  Mamma smoothed a stray tendril of hair from her cheek. ‘Ah, tesora, thank you but I’m not having you cooped up here, ruining your eyesight. You’re young. You should be out doing things after school, enjoying yourself with Billy, making some nice new friends too, now we’ve settled a bit…’

  Ella looked away. She tried to hide her face from Mamma’s scrutiny. The truth was that when anyone new tried to talk to her, in the playground or in between lessons, she felt her face get hot and she didn’t know where to put her hands. She found herself imagining what they might be thinking about the new girl, the strange girl with the slightly funny way of talking, although she also knew that her words were losing their southern sound, becoming more clipped in some places, more elongated in others. It was as if her lips and tongue were learning how to fit into this new place before the rest of her was ready.

  ‘I like your hair. Lovely and dark, innit?’ said Lizzie Towcroft, one of the girls in her year, holding out a paper bag full of sherbet. ‘Go on. Just stick yer finger in then and give it a good ol’ lick. That’s right!’

  Ella felt herself being watched carefully as her finger, covered in vivid orange powder, found its way to her mouth. The unexpectedly sharp taste, popping on her tongue, made her gasp and her nose wrinkle.

  Lizzie giggled.

  ‘Funny stuff, innit?’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve never had it before.’

  ‘Don’t they have sherbet then, in the country where you come from?’

  ‘I come from England, like you do,’ Ella said. ‘From the south, from Eastbourne. By the sea. Well, that’s where I was born… and they might have sherbet there. But I don’t know. I never tasted it, anyway…’

  ‘Do they all talk like you, down there, then? It’s a bit posh, innit?’ Lizzie said, grinning.

  ‘I talk like this because my mum is… well… she lived in Paris before I was born. She speaks lots of languages. Her accent’s all mixed-up,’ Ella said.

  She could feel her insides beginning to slither around. That familiar feeling, half-defiance, half-panic.

  Lizzie’s eyes were wide and shining. ‘What about yer dad, then? Where does he come from?

  ‘My dad’s dead,’ Ella said. For a moment, it was almost satisfying to watch Lizzie’s face turn red.

  ‘Aw. Soz. No offence.’

  Then her eyes lit up again. ‘We’ll have to teach you how to speak proper, just like we do up ‘ere. Then you’ll fit in better, right?’

  She laughed a carefree laugh that seemed to force its way from her belly into her throat, her mouth opening to reveal her pink tongue and perfectly white teeth.

  Ella wondered what would happen if she wer
e to link arms with Lizzie, right there. She looked at Lizzie’s wide hips, the soft swell of her stomach under her sweater, the way she carried herself with a lazy kind of confidence. She watched with fascination the way that Lizzie’s mouth fell right open when she laughed, easily, unselfconsciously, so that you could see all the fillings in her teeth and the point of her tongue flicking across her lips. Being friends with Lizzie might be so simple, so straightforward. She sensed that if Lizzie decided that she liked you, then everyone would.

  But then Lizzie stopped laughing. She was looking at Ella differently now, from under those hooded lids.

  ‘What you gawping at?’ she said. Her hand went up and she began to twirl and twirl a strand of her hair around her finger. ‘Ohhhhhhhh,’ she said, and the sound came out like a long release of air. ‘Now I gerrit… You don’t want to talk like the rest of us, do yer? Yer think I’m common, don’t yer? Miss Fancy Pants. Miss Lah-di-dah, speaks all these languages, thinks she’s too good for the rest of us.’

  She leaned in closer. ‘Well, you know what you can do, Miss Fancy Pants?’ she hissed. ’You can stick it.’

  And before Ella could answer, before she could explain that this wasn’t what she’d been thinking at all, Lizzie turned sharply on her heel and walked off in that slow easy roll of hers down the corridor.

  For the rest of the day, throughout every lesson, Ella felt pairs of eyes boring into her and heard whispering and faint giggles whenever Mrs Cossington turned her back to write on the board.

  She knew what they were saying. Miss Fancy Pants. Miss Up-Herself. Thinks she’s so much better than the rest of us. She’d heard it all before.

  She wished that she could be like Mimi Parr or Lulu Barker, girls who seemed to make not fitting in into an attitude, a kind of talent. They wore clothes bought from charity shops – geeky cardigans buttoned up to the neck and A-line skirts and old lady chunky-heeled shoes – and they did it with a kind of flair, a carefully cultivated air of eccentricity.