Leave Your Sleep

by R. B. Russell

  On a chair by the door was a pile of papers, and with a tremendous effort I made myself get back off the bed and walk over to them. When I picked up the documents, mainly letters, I was sure that I hadn’t seen them before; they all related to a patient at Lancaster Hospital called Sylvia Smith and her address was Hilltop Cottage. I sat down in the chair to look through them properly.

  Among the items, towards the bottom, were a passport and a driving licence. These both had photographs on them and to my relief they showed the woman I had seen in the mirror. All of the papers related to each other, referred to me, and seemed to make some kind of sense. It all explained who I was and where I lived, but it was all at one remove. Looking at the photographs again I decided that I must have lost a lot of weight since they had been taken.

  And then the tiredness made me feel sick again. Some of the panic had subsided, though, and I felt able to sit back and close my eyes.

  I slept. And when I awoke I knew that there had been a significant change. I was still in the same room, but this time I remembered it, albeit only from when I had last been awake. The papers had dropped on to the floor, but I did not bother to retrieve them. I stood up, with some resolve, and walked over to the door. It opened softly and beyond it stretched a long, bright, white-painted passage with stairs at the far end. I walked with one arm out at my side, the tips of my fingers against the wall to help me balance. I could hear a distant voice, and as I got to the stairs I discerned movement from the hall below. Someone was approaching; I could see it was a man and I tried to decide whether I knew him or not. He looked up, surprised, and he quietly said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello,’ I replied.

  ‘Do you not know me?’ he asked, in a very reasonable voice. ‘I’m your husband.’

  We had inherited the house from my Aunt Cecilia and had moved into it in April with great excitement. After our terraced house in Manchester it seemed idyllic; so vast and beautiful that we did not feel worthy of it. And we inherited all of her furniture, which was a godsend because we did not have enough ourselves to furnish the place. Those first few days in the house were like an adventure and I recollected them fondly. But then something had gone wrong. I had started to worry about so many things; small problems grew to vast proportions, and by May I was seriously ill. For almost a month I had been in hospital; not that I recalled anything about that time.

  ‘You’ve been home for a week,’ my husband told me as he sat on the edge of my bed. ‘Every day you’ve woken up and asked where you are. You’ve wandered around for a while and then gone back to bed. But every time you’ve woken back up we’ve had to start the process all over again. This time you seem better.’

  I told him that I had managed to get out of bed earlier, only to doze off in the chair. When I had woken up again, though, I was aware of what had happened before.

  ‘That’s progress,’ he said with a smile that was kind and reassuring, and which I was so glad that I recognised. It was only now, looking back on my temporary memory loss, that I found it really frightening.

  ‘Why have I been sleeping in here, rather than our bedroom?’ I asked him.

  ‘We’ve been sleeping apart since you were first ill. You were very troubled in your sleep, and then you stopped sleeping at all…And I thought you’d be reassured waking up in this room you said you’d loved as a child?’

  ‘When I used to stay in this house, with my Aunt Cecilia, I thought it magical to have such a large room to myself. And a window-seat, and windows on three sides…The light in here is marvellous in the mornings.’

  ‘When we first moved into this place you didn’t want any of your Aunt’s things changed.’

  ‘I remember. I think I was a little unreasonable. I think that was a part of my illness?’

  ‘Well, I might have been unreasonable too; when you were away in hospital I moved a lot of her furniture out to the garage and brought ours inside.’ He then added hastily: ‘But I’ve not thrown anything away.’

  ‘It’s hard for me to be quite sure of what happened, once I was becoming ill, but I do remember us arguing about what to keep and what to get rid of.’

  He nodded: ‘It wasn’t easy to work out what was going on, for either of us. But we can take our time and start again. When you’re up to it you tell me which things of hers you might want to keep, and what we can get rid of.’

  ‘You left her photo on the chest of drawers.’

  ‘When you were ill you accused me of trying to eradicate all traces of her, but that was never my intention.’

  I held him tight. Some of that time was coming back to me and it was frightening; I found it hard to believe that they were my memories. I had been very afraid of something, but I couldn’t recall what it had been.

  Two days later my husband decided that I was well enough for him to be able to go back into work for a few hours and to leave me alone in the house. To be honest, I found this rather daunting, but I didn’t say anything. The doctor had visited a couple of times and pronounced me well on the way to recovery. Already my strength was returning, but the doctor seemed to me to be too positive and cheerful. I wasn’t convinced that we knew exactly why I had become ill in the first place, and I was therefore worried that it might happen again. I was simply told to take my medication and to rest. The patronising old man had even told me ‘not to worry my pretty little head over such things’ and I came close to telling him to get out of my house.

  But at least I now knew that it was my house. I had always loved it and always found it reassuring. The white-painted woodwork indoors and the stone surrounds to the windows suggested a timelessness that comforted me. The outside world did not need to ever intrude on the fantasy we created within.

  Now that I was recovering I tried not to think about what had happened to me. I did try to rest, but felt better when I had tasks to distract me, and so I set about completing the process of moving in. We had made a start together, and then my husband had made the decisions alone; some pieces of my Aunt’s old furniture had been kept, and some of our own had been introduced. On the whole I agreed with what he had done, although there were one or two of her garish prints from the nineteen-fifties that I decided I could not live with. These I took down and hid at the back of the garage.

  I had emptied out my Aunt’s chest of drawers when we first moved in, but I had not started on the cupboards. The room where I was still sleeping on my own had been used by her as a dressing room.

  ‘I did think about turning out all of the rest of her clothes,’ said my husband. ‘But you told me some of the dresses were very expensive, and I wouldn’t know what to keep and what to get rid of.’

  ‘She used to let me dress up in some of them when I was little, but others were too precious for me to be allowed to try on.’

  ‘I’m not sure if antique clothes have any real value?’

  ‘If some of them have come back into fashion they might,’ I said, but I was not optimistic from what I had seen. I wasn’t sure that any of them had anything other than a kitsch value to offer.

  On that first morning alone I decided to go through them, assuming that most of them could be assigned to charity shops. I took up a number of bin bags for those that I was going to throw away. I was wondering if there were really going to be any hard decisions to be made, but as I walked down that corridor to Aunt Cecilia’s dressing room a memory came back to me; there had always been boxes of her most precious dresses carefully put away on the floor of the far wardrobe, at the back. I had been allowed to look at them, supervised, but I had never been allowed to wear them.

  Where I had expected them to be, I found a half-dozen colourful cardboard boxes carefully stored, and I thought that I might have made a discovery. One had printing on it suggesting that it was by André Courrèges and another was by Yves Saint-Laurent. Inside the boxes the dresses were wrapped in tissue paper and when I took them out they were obviously of the finest quality. The labels were authentic as far as I knew. There wa
s no reason for them not to have been.

  I laid them out on the bed and realised that I would need a specialist to come and tell me if they still had any value. The box that excited me the most, though, contained a dress that I was sure had to be by Paco Rabanne. If so then I knew it had to be worth several hundred pounds, if not thousands. There was no printing on the box, and it did not have a label, but it was characteristic of his space-age dresses; it was made of small petal-shaped metal tiles held together by delicate chains. I searched through the box to see if there was a receipt or anything else to give it provenance, but there was nothing.

  I picked up the dress and it was surprisingly light. It could have been an imitation of his work, of course, but it was once again the quality that convinced me of its authenticity. Guiltily, I asked myself if I might try it on?

  My Aunt Cecilia had been a petite woman, and I had only been able to get into her clothes when I was a child and a teenager. They should not have fit me now, but I had lost so much weight during my illness that I thought I might just be the right size after all. I resolved that at the first sign of this dress being too tight I would take it off because I did not want to damage it.

  I was not expecting anybody to come to the house that morning. I took off all of my clothes, including my underwear and stood before the mirror. This was not necessarily the best thing to have done because I have never felt very good about my body. I have always thought that my hips were too wide, my thighs too fat, and my breasts too small. As I stood there with the dress lifted up, ready to be dropped down over my head, I asked myself what on earth I thought I was doing? Why would I possibly think that an expensive, classic, designer dress like this one would look good on me?

  I looked up, though, to make sure that I knew where my arms were going through the dress and I dropped it down over my head. I had a momentary fear that it would get stuck and I would be standing there stupidly with my arms trapped in the air, but it slid down my body and the cold metal from which it was made sent a thrill through me. I looked in the mirror and was astounded by what I saw.

  The dress fitted me perfectly. Suddenly I looked amazing and yet my shape had not changed. I had never worn anything before that was so flattering. And physically it felt astounding. I ran my hands over myself, gently so as not to snag my fingers on the many little plates, and it felt almost as though each piece of metal sent a little electric current into my skin. I had never experienced such a delight in the way that my own body both looked and felt.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, unashamedly taking pleasure in wearing the dress, but from downstairs I heard a knocking at the front door. I walked to the bay window and looked nervously around the side of the curtain, not wanting to be seen by my visitor.

  The first thing that I noticed was the car; very old but immaculately presented. And then I saw the man as he stood there with his back to me, looking out over the garden.

  I then looked down at myself and felt like a child who was in danger of being caught doing something very naughty indeed. I wasn’t sure that I trusted myself to take off the dress in haste without damaging it, so I simply stood there, watching, hoping that he would go away.

  The man knocked again, and after waiting for another minute, during which time I hardly dared breathe, he tried the handle and opened the front door.

  My heart raced. I was too scared to try and take the dress off, up over my head, so I pulled my trousers on over the dress which was tight around my hips. I then put on my shirt, trying to do up the buttons too quickly and fumbling with each one.

  ‘Hello?’ came a tentative voice from downstairs in the hall as I put the last button in place. I went out onto the landing with a boldness that surprised me. I walked to the head of the stairs.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  The man walked into sight and looked up.

  ‘Cecilia?’ he asked, uncertain, confused.

  ‘No, I’m Sylvia. Her niece,’ I said, standing my ground.

  He continued to frown, baffled.

  ‘I’m afraid that my Aunt died recently,’ I explained.

  His confusion appeared to deepen.

  ‘So you’re not Cecilia?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No…now that I look at you…you are very different. But you say she’s dead?’

  I nodded. And then he visibly sagged. He reminded me of a cartoon character who only falls into a chasm once they have finally noticed that there is no solid ground beneath their feet.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said quietly, ‘My condolences.’

  The words were said automatically and without real meaning; his thoughts were obviously elsewhere. He appeared deeply affected by the news.

  ‘It was a shock,’ I admitted. ‘A heart attack, but she died in her sleep; it was peaceful.’

  ‘But I only saw her, I don’t know, a few months ago?’ he said, almost to himself. Then he looked up. ‘I’ve been away.’

  ‘Did you know her well?’

  ‘Yes, I did, for several years.’

  His grief moved me, and I walked carefully down the stairs to where he stood. He watched me descend without really registering my presence.

  It was as I was two steps from the bottom that I thought, if he had known my Aunt so well, and for so many years, how had he ever confused the two of us?

  I walked past him and showed him through to the front room, and he followed, distracted. As he did not really appear to notice me I took the opportunity to look at him, wondering how old he was? It was very hard to tell, but I decided that, like me, he had to be in his late thirties. He sat down without being asked and I was about to take the seat opposite him when I thought that I might not actually be able to sit while wearing the dress!

  And so I stood, and he stared up at me.

  ‘My name is Weaver,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ I replied, wondering why he answered so formally. ‘I’m Sylvia, Sylvia Smith.’

  He looked about him: ‘You’ve changed things.’

  ‘We’ve been here a few months.’

  ‘Just driving up to the house I could tell that it was different. But you…’ He looked at me and shook his head as though he found me to be a poor substitute for the woman he had been seeking.

  He was acting very oddly, but I did not distrust him. I think that I was at ease with him because I felt as though I might have seen him before. It was an experience similar to those when I had woken from my illness a few days before; when I had looked at my hands, or that copy of Pride and Prejudice. Did I know him? Was an explanation about to present itself? One that would make me laugh at the idea that he was a complete stranger?

  ‘Have we met before?’ I asked bluntly. ‘I’ve been ill. My memory isn’t what it was.’

  ‘I don’t think we can have done?’

  I was disappointed at this. Disconcertingly, I considered that if he had been presented to me two days before as my husband I might well have accepted him in the role.

  ‘What do you do for a living?’ I asked, dismissing the thought.

  ‘Me? Well…’ and he frowned again. ‘Oh, I don’t know how to best describe myself. I’m something in the City.’

  He had looked around the room nervously, as if for clues.

  ‘I, I…’ he started to say, but lost confidence, and then offered the information: ‘Your Aunt and I were lovers.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘When her husband was alive we had an affair. And when he died we carried on as though there was still someone to hide from…’ and he trailed off.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, standing up. ‘I’m imposing. I’m taking up your time.’

  ‘No, sit down, do. Can I get you a drink or something?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks. It’s just, sitting there, with you standing…’

  I laughed. ‘Actually, I’m not sure that I can sit down at the moment.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ he asked. He then apologised again; ‘I�
�m sorry, that might be personal. You don’t have to answer. I’m not doing very well am I? I just walked in. I should go.’

  ‘You’re fine,’ I assured him. I was not certain that I trusted his dissembling; perhaps he could tell what I was wearing under my trousers and shirt? The dress felt so strange against my skin, which had become hyper-sensitive. I found myself pressing my hands to my hips to feel the dress against me, not certain whether the sensation was pleasurable or not.

  ‘It’s just that I’ve done something very silly.’

  I didn’t know why I was going to tell him what I had done, but for some reason I wanted him to know what had happened.

  ‘I’ve put on one of my Aunt’s dresses,’ I explained. ‘It’s wonderful, and I look great in it, but I’m afraid that I might damage it. It’s under this,’ I pointed to my shirt and trousers. ‘If I sit down I think it might rip, or tear…’

  ‘Which dress?’

  ‘A rather nice one, and possibly a rather expensive one.’

  ‘She did have some magnificent clothes, and looked marvellous in them.’ He nodded and smiled in confirmation of the memory. Then he looked at me and remembered himself: ‘As I expect you do, too.’

  ‘That’s very sweet of you to say so,’ I dismissed his afterthought.

  ‘But, which of them is it?’

  ‘Which dress? I’d rather not say.’

  He appeared to relax for perhaps the first time.

  ‘It’s the Guy de Welch dress, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It didn’t have a label.’

  ‘It looks like a Paco Rabanne? It’s not a copy. It was made as a private commission for Cecilia by a man who worked with Rabanne.’

  I looked down at myself, embarrassed, but not entirely uncomfortable. I have to admit that I felt quite excited. I knew what was going to happen. I knew that I was going to show him the dress.

  He lowered his gaze and with a movement of his hands dismissed the idea: ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Really, I’m sorry. It’s just that I remember Cecilia wearing it. It’s unique.’