The Dress Shop of Dreams (3 page)

“I’m perfectly happy as I am.”

“Are you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Very well.” Etta shrugs. “If you insist.”

“I do.”

“Then there’s not much I can do about that,” Etta says. It’s a lie, of course. Etta has rather powerful means at her disposal, methods she uses every day to transform the women who venture into her little shop, but she’s been putting off using them on her granddaughter, hoping that it might happen naturally instead. As the years pass, however, Etta’s hopes have dwindled, which is why, tonight, she’s pinning them on Walt instead.

She hopes that her pep talk with Walt may have had some effect. Perhaps, for the first time, he’ll stop waiting in vain for Cora to notice him and do something to seize her attention instead. Etta doesn’t hold out much hope, since she must have given him a hundred similar nudges over the years and he’s never found the courage to act on them. Of course, this time is different, for this time he has a little red star stitched into the lining of his shirt to help him along. If
that
doesn’t work, nothing will, and then it’ll be time for Etta to take matters into her own hands.

Chapter Three

W
alt has loved her forever, for nearly as long as he’s been alive. He was four years old the first time he saw her. It’s his earliest memory. A simple, ordinary day, made special and extraordinary by first love and first words.

Walt’s father had been shopping with his son on a Sunday afternoon when he’d wandered into All Saints’ Passage and found the bookshop. A silent boy, Walt still hadn’t spoken, so there was no reason to think he’d be interested in reading yet. But when Walt snuck through the door, under his father’s arm, he let out a gasp of delight.

He had stepped into a kingdom: an oak labyrinth of bookshelves, corridors and canyons of literature beckoning him, whispering enchanting words Walt had never heard before. The air was smoky with the scent of leather, ink and paper, caramel-rich and citrus-sharp. Walt stuck out his small tongue to taste
this new flavor and grinned, sticky with excitement. And he knew, all of a sudden and deep in his soul, that this was a place he belonged more than any other.

Hours later, staggering along the passage with armfuls of books, Walt had glanced up at another shop window to see two bright green eyes and a mop of blond curls peeking out under a beaded hem. The eyes blinked as he stared and the sad little mouth opened slightly. Walt stopped.

“Come on, Wally,” his father had called, “we’re late for dinner.”

He’d said this as though there was someone at home cooking it for them, a wife and mother who anxiously expected them. He always spoke this way, as though denying his wife’s death could bring her back, if only momentarily.

“But Daddy,” Walt protested, “I want see the girl.”

His father had dropped the books then, pages fluttering to his feet. Tears filled his eyes and fell down his cheeks. Four years of silence, of doctors, specialists and speech therapy. Four years of nothing and now a whole sentence, in an instant. It was a miracle.

“What girl, son?” The question was a whisper on his lips.

Walt turned back to the window, ready to point, but the girl had gone.

There are people who like to connect, to make eye contact and smile. Walt is not one of them. At school he learned to make himself invisible, to watch people without being seen. And so he watched Cora growing up: staring out of the shop window while raindrops slid down the glass, wandering along counting paving stones, flower petals, leaves of ivy and anything else that inhabited All Saints’ Passage, sneaking into the bookshop to
read biographies of Marie Curie and Caroline Herschel while entire afternoons slipped out of sight. He watched, biding his time before he finally found the courage to speak with her. And, even then, when they formed a tentative friendship in the years that followed, he was never able to look Cora in the eye and tell her how he felt.

When Walt turned sixteen, with enormous relief, he abandoned school to fulfill his second greatest wish (his first being the wish for Cora) and work in the bookshop full time. When Walt turned twenty his father died, finally succumbing to the broken heart he’d been nursing for two decades. With the inheritance Walt bought his beloved bookshop along with the flat above it, and as soon as he moved in he stayed. He’s there for twelve hours a day, every day, even though the shop is only open for eight. But he loves the empty hours best of all, when he can walk along the aisles and bask in the warmth of the books, their glittering gold letters, their stories softly pulsing between pages just waiting to be opened and read and loved.

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are Walt’s favorite days, for these are the ones when Cora—at exactly 6:26
P.M.
—opens the door and steps inside his kingdom. She stays for an hour while Walt gazes on, his eyes peeking out above Shakespeare or Milton or García Márquez. He watches her weave along the aisles until she reaches the science section, slides a book off the shelf and sneaks into a hidden corner to read it. When Cora slips into the book she forgets herself entirely, allowing Walt to watch without worry, to gaze unabashedly at the wispy curls that fall over her face, delicate fingers cradling the book, lips absently mouthing the words, breath that occasionally quickens with excitement and shivers through her body in the most alluring way.

The very second the hour is up Cora, without looking at her watch, shuts the book then stands. On her way out she stops at the counter for a slice of cherry pie and a double espresso. She declines cream with the pie but takes four sugars with the coffee. Sometimes, if the book has been particularly brilliant and she’s forgotten to eat lunch again, she’ll have a second slice.

Sometimes Cora chats absently about scientific subjects Walt can’t understand, though he listens avidly anyway, nodding along and making agreeable sounds in what he hopes are the right places. Sometimes Cora only nods hello and says nothing, just eating, lost in thought. Since Walt rates the odds of his lips ever touching hers as less than his chances of winning the lottery, instead he bakes cherry pies so he can watch her eat. And, despite the sadness of knowing that this is the closest he’ll ever get to Cora, it’s still the most sensual moment of his day.

Apart from his love for Cora, Walt has another secret. A secret he’d love to share with her but knows he never will. He has always loved to read aloud, to hear words float about a room, to swim in stories and breathe in poetry. And he has a powerful voice, a beautiful voice, as deep, thick and rich as melted chocolate. Characters seem to come alive when he speaks, sliding off the page to stalk the bookshop aisles and relive their fictional lives in 3-D and Technicolor. At night, after Walt flips over the “closed” sign on the front door, he sits back behind the counter and opens doors to other worlds: bookshelves transmute into swamp trees, floors into muddy marshes, the ceiling into a purple sky cracked with lightning as he floats down the Mississippi with Huck Finn. When he meets Robinson Crusoe, the trees become heavy with coconuts, the floorboards a barren desert of sand dunes whipped by screeching winds. When he fights pirates
off the coasts of Treasure Island, the floors dip and heave, the salty splash of ocean waves stings his eyes and clouds of gunpowder stain the air. As a rule Walt sticks with adventures and leaves romances untouched, preferring to escape his own aching heart rather than being reminded of it.

Occasionally, picking up a book during a quiet afternoon, Walt forgets himself and reads aloud to an unsuspecting and delighted customer. And, two years ago, on one fortuitous Friday, that particular customer happened to be the producer of BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. Walt didn’t need to be told that his was a face made for radio (not that the producer even thought this, let alone said so) but he needed some persuading that his voice was, too. He’d be perfect for the
Book at Bedtime
slot, the producer urged. Every night at ten o’clock he could pour words into perfect silence and assist drowsy listeners to slip off to sleep. It was the thought of
Cyrano de Bergerac
that convinced him. Cyrano had been Walt’s personal hero for the last fifteen years, and he’d always wished that they’d shared an eloquent tongue as well as an enormous nose and an unfortunate penchant for unrequited love. But now, since he didn’t have any great words of his own, Walt was being offered those of great writers—now he could have a voice without a face. He said yes.

Tonight, Walt is sharing the wretched tale of Madame Bovary with his listeners. The story has sharpened its fingers on Walt’s fragile heart, snatching up little slices of flesh. This is exactly what he’s always striven to avoid, but for some reason his producer (a sorry sucker for romances) insisted on this particular book and now it’s wrapped the tragic twists of its plot around Walt’s chest, constricting his breath so the woeful words are barely audible anymore:

“Her real beauty was in her eyes. Although brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her look came at you frankly, with a candid boldness …”

The sentence scratches his throat. Walt thinks of Cora. He thinks of what Etta said:
Some people don’t see the things under their noses. They mistake the everyday for what’s ordinary and unimportant. These people need shaking up
. He isn’t a fool, he isn’t deluded by desire, he knows perfectly well what is possible and what is not. Cora is just a friend. She’s never shown the slightest physical interest in him so he knows absolutely that he’ll never experience anything with her, let alone
passion
and
rapture
. But he’s always accepted his hopeless situation fairly happily: the sight of her smile, the smell of her double espresso, the sound of her footsteps on the floorboards, this has been enough. Seeing Cora three times a week is enough. Almost.

It isn’t as though Walt has no other options, at least in theory. He has fans: women who phone the radio station asking for his address, phone number and marital status. They call him the Night Reader. They send him lustful letters and, occasionally, their underwear. They declare their undying desire, their dreams of making love to him while he sprinkles them with words and kisses until they explode. Of course, he never replies. And not because he believes they’ll change their minds as soon as they see him, but because he simply isn’t interested in anyone but Cora. And it’s been that way since the first time they spoke.

He was five and she was eight. He was sitting on the steps outside the bookshop, half-reading
The Three Musketeers
and half-watching her standing in front of a willow tree that grew over the alleyway wall, counting the leaves that dripped down to the pavement. Walt knew that was what she was doing, not only because he knew her quite well by now, but because she
mouthed the numbers staring into the branches. Why he was suddenly seized by the courage to finally address her, he never knew. Perhaps the devious Milady de Winter, who’d just swept onto the pages of the tale, dared him to do it.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She’d turned to him with a deep frown, instantly terrifying him. About to turn to escape back into the bookshop, Walt was stopped by her shrug.

“Cora.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“It isn’t, actually.” Cora’s frown deepened. She pulled herself up to her full height of four foot three inches. “Officially my name is Cori, but Grandma calls me Cora. I’m named in honor of Gerty Cori, the first woman winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine. I bet you didn’t know that.”

“No,” Walt admitted, embarrassed. “I didn’t.”

“What’s your name?”

“Walt,” he offered quietly, expecting her to retort that his was an even sillier name, but she didn’t.

“After the scientist?”

Walt frowned, thrown. “What scientist?”

Cora shrugged. “Maybe Luis Walter Alvarez or Walter Reed, but … actually Walter Sutton is the most famous. He invented a theory about chromosomes and the Mendelian laws of inheritance.” Cora let slip a little smile of satisfaction at the blank look on the boy’s face. “Or maybe Walter Lewis—”

“No,” Walt interrupted, “I’ve never heard of any of them.”

“Oh.” Cora folded her arms and tilted her nose upward. “Then who are you named after?” she asked, as if this was a given.

“Walt Whitman,” he retorted. “The poet.”

Cora considered this for a moment then shrugged again, a careful gesture this time, as if she were unburdening a heavy coat from her shoulders. “That’s okay, I guess. But poems, stories and that stuff are a waste of time anyway. They don’t answer any questions. They don’t help anyone.”

Walt swallowed the protest that rose up inside him and slid his book out of sight. “Don’t you like reading at all?”

“What a silly question,” she said, and then seemed to regret it and was kinder. “I have to read, to find things out. I’m studying to be a scientist,” she added. “When I grow up I’m going to save the world.”

If he’d been curious, enchanted and infatuated with her before, that was the moment he actually fell in love.

“How?” Walt asked, though the answer didn’t even matter. Just the fact that she
wanted
to do such an incredible, enormous, ambitious thing was enough for him.

Cora shrugged for a third time. “Maybe I’ll discover a cure for cancer, or invent a special food that can grow anywhere and feed everyone, or a way to kill every mosquito or … something special like that, anyway.”

Walt just stared at her. Most of his time was spent lost in stories or playacting out their plotlines—pretending he was twenty thousand leagues under the sea or journeying to the center of the earth—and most of his thoughts were wasted on similarly pointless subjects. He’d never considered even attempting to do something so noble and amazing. That this girl had not only considered it but was, he was certain, actually going to do it, left him without words.

Cora narrowed her eyes at Walt, seeming to suspect him of mocking her with his stare, then her face relaxed. “What are you going to do when you grow up?”