The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) (6 page)

Fabbia had looked up at Madaar-Bozorg, seeing her strong profile against the sun, her sunglasses pushed up onto the top of her head, the slightly hooked nose, the high cheekbones and the way that she stood with her hands on her hips, as if daring the city below them and she decided then that she’d never need any other kind of mother. She loved Madaar-Bozorg for her loud, low laugh and the way that she wore a man’s trousers to work in the garden and for her hands, which were brown and lined and smelled of oregano and wild garlic.

She loved that the Madaar-Bozorg in the village was quite different from the one that most people saw in the city, elegantly dressed, twisting a string of pearls around her fingers. In the village house, she sang as she cooked or sat all day, sometimes on the terrace or in the cool shade of the patio, reading her books, writing her lecture notes, shielding her eyes with her hand and squinting into the quivering blue horizon.

And of course, it was Madaar-Bozorg who had first shown Fabbia the magic in words. Fabbia could see Madaar-Bozorg’s sunbrowned finger running along the lines of poems or favourite chapters, sounding out the letters. She could still taste those words on her tongue, words like
mag-ni-ficent, por-tent, popp-y, yell-ow
and that strange word
snow
. The names of things:
table, kettle, leaf, river, star
. And her favourite words of all, the names of the goddesses in her storybooks:
Hestia, Demeter, Kali, Persephone, Ariadne, Inanna, Morrigan, Seshat, Selene
.

Now Fabbia slipped her arm from beneath the quilt, extending it out from her body as far as she could until her fingers almost touched the low attic ceiling. She moved her hand slowly, dreamily, tracing little circles in the air, watching the shadows made by her fingers drifting over the sunlit walls.

She felt herself slip from that other earlier version of herself, back into her grown-up body.

Gradually, she became aware that Ella’s breathing had changed. She turned her head and saw her daughter’s face peering from behind the dividing curtain.

She was looking at her with that inquiring and ever-so-slightly disapproving expression, her eyes large in her face, her hair springing from the sides of her head in a tangle of fuzzy curls.

‘Mum, what’re you doing?’

Fabbia’s hand fell to the bed, making a dull thud. She hoisted herself up, twisting her body, placing her feet neatly on the floor, one next to the other.

‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘nothing at all. Just thinking about things. Coffee,
tesora
?’ 

6.

Eau d’Esprit in original crystal bottle. Paris. House of Cacharel. 1955.

Mamma was busy with a customer. She threw Ella one of her Meaningful Looks and tilted her head silently in the direction of the fitting room.

The curtain twitched and then the brass rings rattled across the rail as Mrs Cossington, Ella’s geography teacher, strode purposefully toward the larger mirror in the centre of the shop floor. She stood, turning herself this way and that.

‘But do you think it’s really
me
?’ she said, examining her reflection, extending her foot in its stout brown lace-up shoe, pulling her shoulders back, patting her stomach.

Ella felt her face flush. Mrs Cossington, who’d merely raised an eyebrow at all her day-dreaming in class, the comets she’d drawn in the margins of her geography exercise book, their long tails tangling with the dates and letters. She hadn’t made sarcastic comments, as other teachers might have done. Instead, she’d said quietly, tracing a comet’s tail with her finger, ‘Perhaps, Ella, we’ll look at astronomy next, the planets, the earth’s composition…’

‘Oh, yes,’ Mamma was saying. ‘The colour, yes, most definitely. Let’s see…’ and she took a piece of scarlet fabric from the counter, folding it into a sash and smoothing and pinning it around Mrs Cossington’s not inconsiderable ribcage.

‘Yes, this gives it a kind of line here, like this…’ and Mamma traced a shape in the air with her hand. ‘It lifts the décolleté here… and here… and then the skirt falls just right. It’s much more… er, how do you say?’

‘Flattering,’ said Mrs Cossington, her mouth set straight, ‘I think that’s the word you’re looking for, dear. You see, when you eventually reach my advanced age – and that, by the way, is
positively ancient
– you’ll understand that your body does not go in at the places where it used to go in. Or, for that matter, out at the places where it used to go out…’

She twisted in the mirror to get a look at her back and sighed over her shoulder.

‘Yes, dear, you’ve performed a miracle. You’ve given me back a figure again. Quite, quite marvellous,’ and she allowed herself a small smile.

‘I can make these little alterations,’ Mamma said, removing a pin from the corner of her mouth. ‘We can remake this seam right here… and have it ready for you to collect on Friday. Then on Saturday night…’ she clapped her hands together, ‘Ta-da!’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Mrs Cossington, ‘but I’ll look a darn sight better than I ever thought I could at one of these gatherings. You know, I’d quite given up on the entire performance...’

And then, for the first time, she looked over at Ella, hovering, just inside the door. ‘Good morning, Ella. And how are you?’

‘Fine thanks, Miss,’ Ella said, hardly daring to breathe. She had a feeling that Mrs Cossington might demand, any moment, that she tell her,
come on,
sharpish now,
the population of Canada or the exact circumference of the earth, something she was sure she couldn’t possibly remember because she wouldn’t have been listening.

Instead, Mrs Cossington beamed at her, the angles of her face softening in a way that Ella hadn’t seen before.

‘Ella, I’ve just discovered that your mother has a great talent,’ she said and then she disappeared into the fitting room, swishing the velvet curtain after her.

Ella blushed to think of Mrs Cossington standing in their shop in only her underwear. She wouldn’t tell Billy about this. He’d laugh and laugh, imagining Mrs Cossington’s white arms like uncooked puddings and her big bra that made the creaking noise when she bent over your desk to inspect your work.

She busied herself with folding and refolding a silk scarf printed with tiny poodles.

Mrs Cossington appeared again, still doing up the buttons on her thick sludge-coloured tweed jacket.

‘Now, my dear…?’ she said, expectantly.

Mamma waved her hand, making that
tsk
-ing noise. ‘Please. We can settle all that on Friday when you come in to collect. When you’re happy that everything is just so,’ she said, showing Mrs Cossington a slip of paper where she’d jotted, discreetly, the final figure. ‘It’s good?’

‘
Very
good, my dear,’ said Mrs Cossington, her eyes already roaming over the counter, the pyramid of soaps arranged like fondants, the branch of artificial blossom from which Mamma had hung earrings that sparkled like raindrops.

‘Oh,’ she breathed, ‘I think I’ll take these too,’ crooking a cautious finger around a pair of green cut-glass gems. ‘I’m the little girl in the sweetshop today, dear. You’ve made me feel quite… quite
young
again…’

Mamma unhooked the earrings and held one of them to Mrs Cossington’s left lobe, sizing her up as if she were an artist making a sketch.

‘Yes, definitely your colour,’ she said, holding up the hand mirror for her customer to admire the glint and gleam. ‘
Che bella
!’ 

Ella held her breath. When Mamma pronounced her verdict in this way –
Che bella
!
Che figura!
– it seemed to Ella that everything in the shop grew still for a moment. The velvet busts on the tables seemed to lean in closer, the hat stands nodded their feathered heads and the dresses hanging from the ceiling gave a little silken shiver of their wings. She could almost hear the rows of shoes clicking their heels together and the jackets on the rails elbowing one another, the gowns puffing out their skirts and passing a breathy whisper down the line in a flurry of silk and sateen:
che-bella-che-bella-che-bella-che-sei…

Mrs Cossington, oblivious, was fishing for her purse in her voluminous black handbag as Mamma arranged the earrings in one of her best boxes, the kind she usually reserved for the semi-precious stones, wrapping it all in a crisp of pink tissue and tying the ribbon in an expert bow.

‘May I?’ Mamma said, unstoppering one of the bottles on the counter as Mrs Cossington offered up, solemnly, the white insides of her wrists. The fragrance of sandalwood, cinnamon and rose filled the shop.

‘When I lived in Paris,’ Mamma smiled, ‘they used to say that every woman needs a signature, a fragrance that lingers in the air when she leaves a room. Subtle, of course, so that no one can even say it’s there…’ She leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Our secret weapon.’ She smiled again. ‘And this, I think, is yours, Mrs Cossington.
Eau d’Esprit
. Made for sixty years to very secret recipe by head of the famous Cacharel family himself. To me, it says:
This woman knows something. She is free spirit. She doesn’t belong to nobody.
Live with it for a little. Find out how it suits you.’

Ella watched Mrs Cossington lift her wrist to her nose and breathe deeply. Her eyes, those eyes with their big, hooded lids that could dart all over a classroom and spy out a yawner or a doodler at a hundred paces, now drooped a little and then finally closed. Her hand went to her bosom, which rose and fell in a sigh as if she were breathing in something at the very edge of memory. After a long moment, she opened her eyes again.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ she said, ‘thank you.’

From her place just inside the door, Ella could see that the stockinged legs and jacketed arms of Mrs Cossington were stepping
quick-smart-now
into Grape Lane, but her head and her naked heart were somewhere else entirely.

This was Mamma’s magic, of course, the great talent that Mrs Cossington had just discovered. Fabbia Moreno could recognise the shape and scent of someone’s private longing. She knew how to interpret people’s dreams.

‘She says you are a very good student,’ Mamma was saying now. She put her hand to her heart in that dramatic way that Ella usually found so irritating.

‘Really,’ said Ella, trying not to look too surprised. ‘Did she?’

‘Yes. Today, Ella, you make me very proud.’ And then Mamma raised an eyebrow. ‘She said you like dreaming up stories more than you like geography. So like your father…’

The story of the sealskin

One of Ella’s favourite stories was a story that Mamma never told in public, an old story that Ella had been hearing since she was a very small girl. She knew every word by heart. But still, some evenings when dinner was over and the dishes were put away and Mamma was settled on the sofa with her feet tucked up under her, Ella would say:

‘Mamma, tell me again the story of the sealskin, the selkie skin.’

And Mamma would put her head to one side, as if listening for something, and Ella would know that she was travelling back inside herself, back to the Old Country, hearing the waves washing in and out of Madaar-Bozorg’s words as she wove the story of all stories.

Then she would begin:

‘Once upon a time, in the land of long hot summers and short cold winters, where the corn grows high and golden, where the oranges glow like lanterns in the trees and the bread is the sweetest and most delicious that you’ve ever tasted, there lived a sad and lonely man.

And this man was not just a little sad, and not just a little lonely. The loneliness inside him was as deep as a well and, when he tried to laugh, no sound came out of his mouth, only echoes from a dark place inside himself. People said that something terrible had happened to him, but no one knew for sure what it was.

Some tried to guess, of course, as people do, but the man kept himself to himself in a small house at the edge of the village and he wrapped his loneliness around him like a thick black overcoat.  

Like most of the men in the village, this man was a fisherman. He’d leave the harbour in his boat every morning, just as the sun was showing above the horizon and he’d return home every evening, just as the sun was setting, with a long face and a heavy heart. He’d watch the other men tying up their boats as their wives and sweethearts and children stood on the harbour wall, smiling and shouting out their names and welcoming them home. And each day his sadness grew darker and wider.

Soon he began to fish only at night so that he wouldn’t have to feel the gap between his own life and the lives of other men, which seemed to him to be as wide and bottomless as the sea itself.

One night, as he was making his way out to fish under the full moon, he rounded the dangerous rocks outside the harbour and came upon an incredible sight.

At first, he thought he might be imagining it, that it was a will o’ the wisp, an illusion rising up out of the sea spray and the moonlit mist to taunt his lonely heart.

Resting his oars, he let his boat drift in close, closer, closer until it was dangerously close to the clefts in the rocks. From this hiding place in the shadows, he watched. And truly, it was a sight to soothe his weary eyes.

There on the rocks were three women, their naked skins as white as milk in the moonlight. Their hair was loose around their shoulders and glittered – one red head of hair, one black, one golden – under the stars.

As he watched the women throwing up their arms to the night sky, swaying and dancing and singing together, the man felt his heart clattering in his chest like a rusty engine. He felt the black spaces inside him begin to melt away.

The sound of the women’s voices and laughter drifted out to him across the water but it was the voice of the woman with long red hair that he heard most clearly. She was the youngest and, he thought, the most beautiful of the three and her voice rang out across the water and reached all the way inside him and filled the dark spaces with light.