The Dress Shop of Dreams (2 page)

The only bright and beautiful thing in Cora’s flat are her pajamas:
Indian shot silk, the color of a sunset, sprinkled with 34 pink peonies and 69 blue morpho butterflies. She trundles into the kitchen now, opens the fridge and pulls out a bag of coffee beans. She weighs the bag in her hand—1,233 beans, approximately. These, along with a week-old loaf of bread, are the only edibles in her flat.

Cora switches on the kettle, marking the seconds until it boils. Whenever Cora is worried—about life, science, loneliness—counting soothes her. She’s always had an extraordinary ability to count, to just
know
facts and figures at a glance. Of course, to her it’s perfectly ordinary, since she’s always been able to do it. But she understands that other people can’t and that those same people might find her strange, so she tries to do it only in private. While sixty-seven seconds tick by, Cora imagines her day. In an hour she’ll be at the lab. Three hours and fifty-five minutes after that she’ll eat lunch. Or, more likely, forget to eat lunch. Six hours and twenty minutes after that she’ll nod at her colleagues when they leave for the day. Three hours and forty-seven minutes later she’ll leave. Then she’ll come home and go to bed. Three days a week she adjusts the schedule for an evening visit to a bookshop. Within that she fits in her teaching commitments and visits to Etta. Otherwise, her days all follow the same pattern, yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Then, as she pours the hot water into the French press, Cora remembers the date. March 14. Which means that today is a bit different; today she’s having dinner with her grandmother. Today is her birthday.

Chapter Two

E
ven though Cora must have stepped into her grandmother’s shop twenty thousand times, she usually walks past the little blue door and the window draped in dresses. If she’s lost in thought, counting the cobbles on the street or the bricks on the walls, then it only takes a second before she’s back onto the main street and has to turn around again.

Apart from A Stitch in Time, there’s one other shop on All Saints’ Passage that Cora frequents—a bookshop, with a little red door and a little window crammed full of fiction—a rotating stock of 983 volumes. Inside, both places are much bigger than it seems possible they could be. Bigger than Cora’s flat; not big enough to get lost in but big enough to hide in (which she does three times a week), if no one was particularly intent on finding you. She has known the owner, Walt, since she was a girl. Apart from her grandmother, he’s her closest friend, and if Cora was
interested in romance she’d be interested in him. However, since she isn’t, she hardly gives him a second thought.

No matter how many times she’s done it, every time Cora walks into the dress shop she gets a jolt of surprise. Stepping through the door is like stepping back in time. 1,349 (at her last count) dresses in every style hang on racks, clustered together as if holding hands and gossiping among themselves. Sequins flash from sleeves, sparkling beads swish from hems, and every color that one could possibly imagine (and a good number that one couldn’t) shimmer and twinkle like galaxies of stars bottled in jars. Rows of shoes sit on shelves above the clothes, dyed every hue and tone, each pair a perfect match to one of the dresses beneath. The walls are wrapped in silk, the floor carpeted in velvet, the colors changing according to the shifting seasons.

Music is the breath of the shop, though Cora has never seen a record player. Music—from Stravinsky to Sinatra—plays every moment of the day and night, gentle and low when the shop is empty but quickening whenever the bell above the door chimes and someone new steps inside. Then the tinkling piano riffs speed into double time joined by wild saxophones, trumpets and beating drums. Perry Como, Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Waller sing and shout, their voices leaping and jumping, bouncing off walls and sweeping through the air so each new customer glides like Ginger Rogers off the street and into the shop. Cora has seen dowdy women with gray faces and buttoned-up shirts skip across the floor, their faces suddenly lit with shock and delight. Even Cora, who’s never danced a step in her life, sometimes catches her disobedient hips swaying to the beat of “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” or “It Don’t Mean a Thing.”

Tonight Cora dawdles along the tiny, tight passage, counting
as she goes: 86 leaves on the ivy inching up the wall, its vines concealing 28 bricks. She doubles back after missing the little blue door. The shop greets Cora with “One O’Clock Jump” as she rushes past curtains of clothes to arrive in the sewing room, tucked away behind the counter, where her grandmother sits with a skirt of crimson silk on her lap. It’s the same shade the walls turn on December 7 until the twelfth day of Christmas when they sparkle bright white, the color of fresh fallen snow. Now the walls are green-blue silk, for early spring.

“Happy birthday,” Etta says, giving her granddaughter a kiss. “And you’re still late, as usual. I suppose the life cycles of amoebas are far more fascinating than your boring old grandmother.”

“Of course not.” Cora smiles. This is how it goes every time, this is the routine between them. Etta has no idea what her granddaughter spends her days doing, no matter how many times Cora has tried to explain. “You aren’t old or boring. Life would probably be a lot easier if you were.”

“Pish-posh.” Etta gives a dismissive wave as she stands, dropping the silk skirt onto her sewing table. The room where Etta works her magic, mending and altering the clothes she sells, is even more chaotic than the shop itself. Hundreds of ribbons and threads hang from hooks on the walls, swathes of fabrics are piled up on shelves, open drawers overflow with buttons and beads of thousands of different shapes and sizes: 3,987, to be exact. It is an Aladdin’s cave of couture.

“How do you find anything in here?” Cora asks, yet again. “I’d go crazy.” Her lab, home and office are all obsessively well ordered, everything in its never-changing place.

“I don’t need to know where anything is.” Etta shrugs. “Whatever I need finds me. It’s as simple as that.”

Cora frowns at her grandmother. She has never been able to
make sense of her. Not since she was a girl. They are polar opposites. Where Etta loves flamboyance and frippery, color and chaos, Cora likes everything in life to be structured and simple, plain and predictable. She prefers even numbers over odd. She likes to know what’s going to happen next, or at least be able to estimate the probabilities. Etta had long ago tried to sprinkle some frivolity into her granddaughter’s life, telling her that little girls were meant to have fun. She bought Cora silly toys, organized treasure hunts and
Alice in Wonderland–
themed tea parties. She turned a corner of the shop into a playroom where they could dress up together and dance to the Charleston with feathers in their hair. But it was no use. Cora went along with it all, dutifully smiling whenever her grandmother asked if she was having a good time. But her heart was never in it. After her parents died her heart was never really in anything again.

“I know this is the only time you ever eat properly.” Etta clears space on the table and produces two plates of roast-chicken salad. “I’m going to wait until you eat every bite. We’re having cherry pie for pudding. Walt’s bringing it over later. I would have baked a cake, but I know how much you love his cherry pie.” As she says this, Etta gives her granddaughter a sideways smile.

Cora frowns. “What?”

“Nothing,” Etta says. “Then we’re having cheese and biscuits after that; I’ve a rather delicious-looking Barkham Blue I’ve been saving for the occasion.”

Cora resists the urge to raise her eyebrows. “It’s only a birthday,” she says. “It’s not a reason to celebrate.”

Why not?
Etta is about to say, but she holds back because, of course, they both know the answer to that. As they sit down the bell in the shop tinkles and Etta jumps up from the table.

“That’ll be our pie.”

Cora eyes her grandmother suspiciously as she hurries out of the sewing room and onto the shop floor. A moment later she is back, bustling through the doorway, one hand wrapped around the elbow of a tall, thin man dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt, whose messy black hair falls over his eyes but doesn’t conceal his large but handsome nose.

“Hi, Walt,” Cora says.

He nods in return and, with a sizeable nudge from Etta, stumbles forward into the room. He hands a plate of cherry pie to Cora and steps back.

“Happy birthday,” he says, his eyes fixed on the plate. “I made it twice as sweet, and with ground almonds instead of flour.”

“Thank you,” Cora says. “It smells delicious.”

“I only took it out of the oven twenty minutes ago.” Walt lingers a moment then steps back toward the doorway. Etta grabs his arm as he passes her.

“Stay for some,” she says. “It’d be wrong to eat it without you.”

Walt glances at the food on the table. “No,” he says, “you’re still eating, I—”

“Nonsense, it doesn’t matter, we’re nearly done.”

Walt hesitates then shakes his head. “No, I’d better go. I, um … like to do a stock check on Thursdays and it’s getting late.”

As Walt disappears, Etta throws a look of frustration in her granddaughter’s direction, but Cora just returns it blankly. Etta turns and hurries after him. She stops Walt as he reaches the door. The dresses displayed in the window rustle as if a breeze had just blown through them.

“Wait,” Etta says and he turns, fixing his gaze just above her
head. “You know, some people don’t see the things right under their noses. They mistake the everyday for what’s ordinary and unimportant.”

Walt glances down at the tiny woman and meets her gaze, seeing the acknowledgment and affection in her watery blue eyes.

“Especially those people searching for something,” Etta continues. “They don’t know exactly what they’re looking for, but they always imagine it’ll be far away and hard to find. They think it’ll come with whistles and bells. Those people need shaking up to see something as simple as”—Etta dropped her voice to a whisper—“true love with someone they’ve known forever.”

Wide-eyed, Walt shakes his head. The thought of him shaking Cora up makes him slightly sick with nerves. “I don’t really know what you …” he begins. “Anyway, I’ve got to go. Enjoy the pie.”

Walt turns the wooden doorknob but Etta is too quick. She grabs the back of his shirt and holds on.

“You’ve got a loose thread, just let me fix it for you.”

“Don’t worry.” He pulls away. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It’ll only take a moment,” Etta says as she plucks her special needle from her pocket. “Wait.”

Since he has little choice in the matter, Walt waits. Less than a minute later he leaves with a tiny red star stitched into the lining of his shirt.

When her daughter and son-in-law died, Etta was the first and only family member on the scene. She rushed to the hospital, scooped her sobbing (but otherwise unscathed) granddaughter up in her arms and promised the little girl that she’d protect her forever, that she’d never suffer again. And so, when it became
clear that—as some sort of subconscious coping mechanism—Cora had suppressed all memories of her parents, happy and sad, Etta let it be. She allowed her granddaughter’s heart to remain shut down even as she grew older. But now she realizes it must stop, or the cost will come at too high a price.

Etta’s always been aware that the numbing of Cora’s heart has suppressed her urge for laughter and desire for love as well as protecting her from pain. Most of all it’s left Cora oblivious to
him
. Of course, it didn’t matter while Cora was younger. Etta knew Walt would wait then, but he won’t be able to wait forever. Eventually, he’ll give up. And Etta can’t let that happen. If Cora doesn’t have the chance to love the man who loves her more than anything else, it would be a tragedy, a loss on a par with Etta’s own: the man she thinks about late at night with a bottle of bourbon and a box of chocolates. Fifty years ago, when Etta lost him, she still hoped life might be full of other lovers. And it was—just none who held her heart the way he did. Now Etta knows that great love only comes once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky.

Etta stands at the bathroom sink, looking into the mirror. Cora is downstairs, doing the washing up. Etta turned sixty-nine two months ago, but she doesn’t look a day over sixty-one. Which is some comfort, she supposes, but not much. Every day she sees a new wrinkle in the mirror, another line etched on her once beautiful face. She pulls the sagging skin back from her eyes, stretching it almost taut again, consoling herself that the one advantage of her fading sight is she can’t see her fading face so sharply. Her granddaughter insists that she’s still beautiful, but Etta knows she’s not. Cora only thinks that because she loves her; she’s blinded to the depressing truth by sentimental feelings. But Etta doesn’t suffer under such illusions.

She hasn’t been with a man since her husband passed away twenty years ago, the same year her daughter died. If she hadn’t had Cora, Etta would have given up on life herself. While she was in her fifties, even in her early sixties, Etta still harbored hopes that she’d experience intimacy again, that one day she’d be held tight in a masculine embrace. But she knows it probably won’t happen again, not now.

Cora and Etta sit on the sofa in the living room halfway through watching
Gone With the Wind
. Etta gazes at the screen while Cora fidgets.

“You know we’ve watched this film 28 times before, don’t you?”

“Hush,” Etta hisses, “we have not.”

“We have. And it’s two hundred thirty-eight minutes long. That’s one hundred eleven hours. That’s four and a half days of our lives in the Deep South.”

Etta smiles. “And every minute very well spent.”

“You’re obsessed with Clark Gable.”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. A girl could do a lot worse than Gable.”

Cora smiles. “You know he’s dead, right?”

“I’m old,” Etta says, “not senile. And, at my age, one has to take what one can get. Unlike you, who could be with a real flesh-and-blood man instead of her grandmother on her birthday night.”