Sylvia laughed again but Fabbia saw her eyes well with sudden tears.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to…’
‘Oh, goodness, you didn’t. She had such a good innings. She was ready to go. She told me only last month that she didn’t want to linger.’
Sylvia sniffed and fished a tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan and began to take the stairs, two at a time.
‘It’s just that I already miss her so much. It can’t ever be the same!’
They reached the stop of the stairs and she took a key from the back pocket of her jeans and inserted it into a door, pushing it open.
‘Come in, come in. That’s right. Here’s what I wanted you to see.’
Fabbia allowed herself to be ushered into a large bright room. It was painted a soft shade of green and one wall consisted almost entirely of window, a huge window through which the light poured, settling in a kind of haze over the polished floorboards and the furniture.
There was a large bed with a simple white coverlet and above it was a mural painted in delicate strokes, almost Japanese in style - hummingbirds and butterflies hovering between pointed green leaves.
‘Eustacia’s room,’ said Sylvia, ‘and she painted this wall herself. I wish I could keep it somehow. It breaks my heart to think of it fading or someone papering over it when the house gets sold.’
‘So lovely,’ Fabbia breathed, moving in closer, noticing the orange beaks of the hummingbirds and the care with which each wingtip had been picked out in gold. She thought for a moment of Madaar-Bozorg, standing in the kitchen in her housecoat embroidered with red and green wings.
Sylvia had already crossed the room and was wrestling with the lock on another door.
‘This is her dressing room,’ she said. ‘I think you’ll like it.’
Fabbia stepped through into a sudden spill of colour. From floor to ceiling, the room was lined with cupboards, which Sylvia was now throwing open with a series of theatrical flourishes, revealing rails of garments and shelves of belts and scarves and shoes.
‘My goodness,’ Fabbia gasped. Instinctively, she moved closer, running her hands over one of the rails, lifting out a dress of creamy lace.
‘One of her favourites,’ said Sylvia, approvingly.
Fabbia checked herself, sliding the dress back into its place.
‘I’m sorry. How rude of me.’
‘Oh, she’d love you to look,’ said Sylvia. ‘Do. Please do. Everything is here. From the ‘30s onwards. She kept everything.’
She slid open a drawer in a little rosewood cabinet in the centre of the room and took out a large leather-bound notebook.
‘You see,’ she said, leafing through the pages, ‘She catalogued it all. Every detail. What she bought, where it was made and then each time she wore it. She was like that. A great collector of things. Plants, paintings, clothes.’
‘Is this her?’ Fabbia peered at a black and white photograph in a silver frame – a young woman, with a face and demeanour not very different at all from the one that she’d imagined, posed in a conservatory next to a large potted palm. She was small and slim and her dark hair was bobbed in the fashionable style of the era, finishing at her jawline and carefully waved. She looked directly at the camera with a steady open gaze and her chin was ever so slightly raised in what Fabbia imagined as carefully-concealed defiance. She wore a pair of beautifully cut trousers and a crisp white shirt, a tie and a silver tie-pin. She leaned on a silver-topped cane.
‘Yes,’ said Sylvia. ‘That’s Eustacia on her twentieth birthday. Isn’t she something?’
‘She certainly is,’ Fabbia breathed. ‘I think she and my grandmother would definitely have got on.’
Sylvia was holding the notebook open at the last completed page.
‘Her last entry was just a few weeks ago. Look…’
Fabbia leaned forward to decipher the small, precise handwriting.
‘Silk scarf. Vintage Chanel. Cream with black motif.’
Fabbia’s heart skipped a beat. She traced her finger across the careful columns and read: ‘From Fabbia Moreno, York. 14/3/11. Just like the one I once lost in Delhi.’
Fabbia looked at Sylvia, puzzled.
‘You mean that Eustacia came to my shop?’ she said, making a mental scan of every one of her recent customers over the age of 60. ‘I don’t remember…’
‘No,’ said Sylvia. ‘It was my sister. Cammy. Sorry, Camilla... Cammy’s just what we call her in the family, you know. And the scarf. Well, in fact, we buried Eustacia in it. She loved it. It reminded her of a time when she was very happy.’
At the edge of Fabbia’s memory something stirred. Of course. Now she remembered. The scarf with its outsized Chanel motif, the bold interlocking ‘C’s. She remembered folding it carefully in pink tissue for that lovely young woman, the one with the baby in the pram. She’d admired the woman’s knitted pea coat – sky-blue with gilt buttons - and her fat, contented baby in her stripy knitted cap who’d gurgled and babbled.
‘It’s a birthday present,‘ the woman had said. ‘For my elderly cousin. I wish I could bring her here. She’d love your shop. But she’s just too frail these days…’
‘Of course.’ said Fabbia. ‘I do remember Camilla. I do… Well, imagine!’
Sylvia was watching her with her bright eyes, her head tilted to one side.
‘I’ve made a decision,’ she said. ‘I want you to go through and choose.’
She gestured to the walls of clothes.
‘It’s what Eustacia would have wanted,’ she said. ‘Someone who’ll truly appreciate them. She’d have loved to visit your shop. When we gave her the scarf and told her about you, she made Cammy describe the shop and everything in it in great detail. And when we were thinking about what to do with all this stuff, Cammy did suggest you as a possible solution, but I just didn’t know what I thought about it. You see, I’d never met you. But now that I have…’
‘Oh,’ said Fabbia, swallowing. ‘It’s so kind. But I couldn’t. Really. You don’t know what you’re saying. I just couldn’t…’
‘Couldn’t you?’ laughed Sylvia. ‘And I do know what I’m saying, I can assure you. We’ve debated it, Cammy and I. It’s a mammoth task, going through it all. There are some things, obviously, that we’d like to keep for ourselves but the rest…’
She lowered her voice conspiratorially.
‘No one really knows about all these things, either,’ she said. ‘We kept this room locked. The thought of that horrible man from Christie’s going though her lovely things.’
She shuddered.
‘No, better that they go to someone like you.’
‘But I couldn’t possibly buy them from you,’ said Fabbia, embarrassed. ‘ I just couldn’t pay you what they’re worth.’
‘Oh, no! I’m so sorry. How perfectly awful of me.’
Sylvia clapped her small suntanned hand to her mouth. The tiny bells on her bracelets jingled.
‘I should have been clearer. It’s a gift, you see. A gift from Eustacia to you. You can keep some and sell some. Because wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone else were able to really enjoy them? Eustacia would have loved that. In fact, I know she’d have loved to meet you. Cammy and I, we don’t really have much use for this kind of thing. Most of them wouldn’t fit us, anyway. Eustacia was so petite. Just like you. And as you can see, I’m a bit of an old hippie, to be honest.’
She gestured towards her beaded flip-flops, the frayed edges of her skinny jeans.
‘But you, Fabbia, you’ll be able to find the perfect owners for these things. You’ll just know, won’t you?’
11.
Day or cocktail dress. Unusual design with detachable sleeves in mustard mohair mix. 1949.
It had taken several weeks for Fabbia to go through Eustacia’s clothes, selecting the items that she felt she could sell, packing them carefully in layers of tissue, copying the relevant entries – dates, names, details – from Eustacia’s
notebook and labelling each garment carefully.
In the evenings, when the shop was closed, David had patiently driven her back and forth between York and Doddington Hall, the back seat of his car stacked with boxes.
Now she stood in the shop, the dresses and shoes and coats spread out all around her, draped on the backs of chairs and over the counter.
She still couldn’t quite believe it.
‘How will I ever part with any of them?’ she’d said to Sylvia. ‘They’re all so precious.’
‘Well, you must keep whatever you want for yourself, of course,’ Sylvia had laughed. ‘They’re yours now.’
So Fabbia began the process of trying on everything she could. There was the cream lace tea gown, of course, the one that had first seemed to leap from the rail in Eustacia’s dressing room and into her hands.
It was made in two pieces: the silk underslip, cut on the bias, and then the exquisite lace – ‘handmade by nuns in the South of France,’ Eustacia had recorded carefully – draped from the shoulder and gathered into a diamond-shaped panel at the waist, the back cut into a deep ‘V.’ As she stepped into it, she felt the silk whisper around her shoulders. It smelled very faintly of something vaguely familiar – roses, perhaps or was it jasmine? the sweet powdery scent of a summer’s evening – and, as the silk fell over her head and upstretched arms and settled into place, there was a deep sighing sound. It fitted her perfectly.
Them there was the taffeta evening gown in bold chevron stripes of black and beige; and a stylish trouser suit in lightweight black wool, the high-waisted trousers finished sailor-style with double rows of large black buttons.
As she stepped into them, she felt little ripples in the air, the Signals shimmering at the nape of her neck and the insides of her elbows.
These are yours, they whispered, yours, yours…
Fabbia had never really been a trousers person before, but she was surprised to find that these elegant 1950s styles, which Eustacia had clearly favoured, elongated her hips and swished around her ankles when she tried them with wedges or platform heels. They made her walk differently somehow, hold herself straighter, taller.
Then there were the pieces she instantly coveted but that didn’t suit her at all. The Balenciaga double-breasted day coat, for instance, its textured white cotton cut in a wide A-line and lined with navy wool. Fabbia put her hands into the large patch pockets and turned in front of the mirror to admire the back. The sleeves were much too long, even when she turned back the cuffs, and the cut just made her look dumpy. Eustacia, Fabbia began to realise, had been a touch on the flat-chested side. These made-to-measure couture pieces could have been worn by a prima ballerina, whilst Fabbia had softly rounded curves.
She sighed and laid the coat carefully to one side.
And here was the mustard mohair day dress, described in Eustacia’s entry for 1949: ‘Bought in Selfridges, London, for lunch with R.‘
Fabbia imagined Eustacia poised elegantly in a high-backed chair among gigantic potted ferns, peering over a silver cake stand arranged with tiny sandwiches and petits fours, perhaps in the salon of The Ritz or The Savoy.
Because it was that kind of dress. A dress designed for sipping tea from bone china cups. It had a high-necked bodice designed to skim the figure, a broad belt in contrasting black wool and a surprisingly full skirt for the time. No austerity measures here, thought Fabbia. The sleeves could be detached from the bodice to create a cocktail silhouette through an ingenious arrangement of concealed buttons. But mustard was definitely not Fabbia’s colour. She stood in front of the mirror, grimacing.
There was an Ossie Clark `Lamborghini’ trouser suit in black embroidered satin that looked a little like a Japanese lacquer print. ‘Celia Birtwell fabric,’ Eustacia had noted in her journal and alongside it she’d pasted a magazine cutting of Twiggy wearing the exact same suit, labelling it: ‘Vogue, 1968.’
Fabbia ran the fabric through her fingers. It reminded her a little of the mural that Eustacia had painted above her bed at Doddington – hummingbirds and delicate bamboo trellises intertwined with crysanthemum blossoms and butterflies.
Fabbia knew that the suit wouldn’t fit her. The slender cut of the jacket, the slim-hipped trousers. She didn’t even try them on. She wondered, though, where she could source similar fabrics to reproduce this piece for her vintage-inspired line. She could think of several customers already who would love this look in their size.
She imagined Eustacia standing in her dressing room, a tumble of scares and shoes spilling around her, slipping her arms into the silk sleeves of this jacket, fastening up her hair.
The shop doorbell jangled, startling her out of her reverie.
‘Hello. Are you open?’
A young woman – she might be in her early twenties – stood uncertainly in the doorway, looking at the opened boxes on the floor and the layers of dresses and trousers draped over the counter.
‘Of course.’ Fabbia smiled. ‘Come in. Please do excuse the mess. We don’t usually look like this. I’m just finding homes for all these lovely new things.’
The woman stepped forwards, her fingers instinctively reaching for the satin trousers in Fabbia’s hands.
‘Oh, these are beautiful,’ she breathed. ‘Perfect. Just perfect. Just exactly what I was looking for…’
‘Well,’ Fabbia smiled, appraising the young woman’s petite figure. ‘Why don’t you try them both on?’
The woman nodded eagerly.
‘I’ll just hang them here in the fitting room for you while you look around...’
The woman’s eyes were already roving over the shop, sizing up one garment and then another with appreciative gasps. Her hands wandered over the rails, fingering the skirts in bright cottons with full net underskirts, inspecting the soles of a pair of green leather platform sandals, opening and closing the gilt clasp of a velvet evening bag.
Fabbia watched her discreetly from the corner of her eye as she continued to work her way through Eustacia’s treasures, shaking out a crease, smoothing a sleeve, tweaking a collar, slipping each garment onto its padded hanger.
She noticed immediately that her new customer had an eye for the clothes. She bent carefully, almost reverently, to inspect the detail of a pocket or a hem. She was dressed in a mixture of high-street and vintage - the black pencil skirt and leather biker’s jacket were definitely high-street but she’d tied a vintage scarf jauntily at her neck and her red shoes had pointed toes and an unmistakable 1950s heel.
Her long dark hair was swept up in a fabulous beehive effect, which showed off a single dyed streak of shimmering blue.
‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ Fabbia asked. ‘I have all this new stock too that I’m only just unpacking…’
Her customer turned and smiled.
‘Oh, goodness,’ she laughed and Fabbia noticed the high, breathy lilt to her voice. ‘Don’t make it any harder for me. I can’t choose as it is.’
And then she added, blushing slightly, ‘I absolutely love your dress, though.’
Fabbia glanced down and realised that she was still wearing the mustard wool day dress.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘and it just doesn’t suit me at all. I wish it did. I was just trying it on. But you, however…‘ She put her head to one side, running her eyes up and down the young woman again. ‘Definitely. You must try it.’
A few moments later, Fabbia was helping her customer fasten the dress and pinning a large gilt-plumed brooch at her left shoulder.
‘There.’
She stood back admiringly. ‘It could do with a few little alterations. It’s slightly too large on the hips. But that’s no problem. I could do that for you. And something like this brooch would be just the right finishing touch, don’t you think? It looks wonderful with your shoes.’
The young woman nodded, transfixed by her image in the mirror. She ran her hands over her hips, testing the nap of the fabric.
‘I’ll take it,’ she said. ‘Ye
s. Please.’
Fabbia began carefully inserting her marker pins at strategic points along the bodice.
‘So do you live in York? I haven’t seen you in the shop before…’ she said, to make conversation.
‘Yes,’ said the young woman. ‘I live here. And I’ve been past lots of times since you opened. I’m a guide, you see. I do those awful ghost tours. Spooky Stories. You might have seen the sign. Most of the time, I’m dressed up like the Bride of Frankenstein in some hideous wig and outfit. This is my day off. I couldn’t wait to come in and have a look around.’
Fabbia nodded.
‘Yes, I think I might have seen you,’ she said. ’What an interesting job…’
‘Well, it is if you don’t mind trying to squeeze a tip out of a load of bored tourists who just want to know where Guy Fawkes lived,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘I’ve been doing it ever since I left uni. It was supposed to be a stop-gap but… you know… ‘
Her voice trailed off and she shrugged.
That explained it, Fabbia thought to herself. There was a kind of sadness hanging around this young woman’s shoulders. Despite the brilliant streak in her hair and her bright red shoes, her Signals were pale, washed-out greys and browns.
‘And so what do you really want to do?’ she said, smiling at her in the mirror.
The young woman looked startled.
‘It’s such a long time since anyone asked me that,’ she said, fidgeting with a loose strand of her hair. ‘I don’t know. And that’s the problem. Something… well, this is going to sound so… so adolescent… but I’ve always wanted to do something creative… to make things.’
‘Of course,’ said Fabbia. ‘And to me, if you don’t mind my saying so, you look like a very creative person. When you walked in, I thought that about you immediatemente. Your lovely hair, your shoes, your scarf. All so beautiful. You make me very… very curious about you…’
The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) Page 10