The Dress

13.

Apron, vinyl-coated cotton with slogan. British Home Stores.



‘Want to come with me somewhere?’

She had her head out of the window, letting the afternoon sun, reflected off the rooftops, wash her face clean. A pigeon basking in the guttering rattled upwards in a hiccough of feathers.

Billy was standing in the courtyard, shielding his eyes from the sun, squinting up at her. ‘Well, then. Are you coming with me or not?’

‘Give me five minutes.‘ She rushed to the bathroom to clean her teeth and tidy her hair. She’d started doing this lately. Whenever Billy called for her, she felt her stomach flip. It was like having a goldfish swimming around her insides. Intensely annoying.

She often caught herself wondering if Billy preferred her hair like this, or like this instead, arranging it this way or that, and pinching colour into her cheeks in the freckled bathroom mirror, a tip she’d read in one of Katrina’s mum’s magazines.

‘Where are you off to, Billy?’ Mamma was calling, ‘Where are you taking my daughter? I need to know.’

Billy was pacing up and down the courtyard, jumpy with impatience. He tapped his nose with his finger. ‘It’s a surprise, Mrs Moreno,’ he said, ‘Don’t make me give it away.’

‘Well, you be careful.’ Mamma summoned her sternest tone, ‘I’m holding you responsible, young man.’

Billy had crept under Mamma’s skin somehow, in that way he had. The quick grin, the winks and nudges, they worked on you sideways, like a magic all of his own.

As she stood watching them throw words back and forth, easily, fluently, like sunlight across the cobblestones, she wondered what her magic was. No one seemed to respond to her in that way at all.

Billy produced a mock swagger. ‘Now you know you can trust me, Mrs Moreno. What am I going to do, anyway? Shove ‘er in the river?’

‘Who knows? I wouldn’t put it past you.’

He was still chuckling to himself as they turned out of the courtyard to join the polite push of Saturday shoppers along the narrow streets.

‘I want to show you something,’ he said, ‘Something I bet you’ve never seen before.’

‘What? Why can’t you tell me now? I hate surprises.’

But he refused to be drawn.

They reached the cool damp of the trees that fringed the approach to the river bank. The new leaves hung down in shimmering tassels, almost touching her face.

‘Seen ‘em yet?’

In amongst the trees and over the grassy banks, the geese were honking louder then she’d ever heard, picking up their webbed feet in a proud and determined march, making short-sightedly for the river.

‘You don’t need to be scared of them,’ Billy had told her before. ‘They’re all mouth and no trousers, geese. Their eyes are on the side of their heads so they can’t see in front of ‘em at all.’

He’d demonstrated by clapping his hands in front of a hissing beak. ‘See. Can’t see anything in front of their faces. Most people don’t realise that.’

This morning, the geese seemed unusually determined. A woman hurried past on the riverside path with a bag of shopping and swerved to avoid a convoy of geese, sticking out their sinewy necks and snapping their wings.

As Ella looked more closely, she suddenly saw the reason why. In front of them, in a doddery line, several fluffy goslings tottered towards the water.

Billy grinned. ‘Want to get closer?’

They found a place on the grassy bank that was still unspattered by goose droppings and watched. She rested her back on a tree trunk, feeling its warmth through the material of her blouse. The heat was already gathering just above the river’s surface. Flies hovered in the shimmer, like stray sequins. The hawthorns and chestnuts were draped with fat loops of pink and white blossom like feather boas, and when she closed her eyes for a moment she could see the sun stamped on the insides of her eyelids in two perfect discs of gold.

‘Look. These ones here have only got one,’ said Billy as a mother and father goose urged their single gosling in front of them.

‘Like me, I suppose.’ Ella wondered if it was only her imagination that saw the expression in the eyes of these geese parents, they way they walked more hesitantly and quietly, a little apart from the other raucous families.

‘Them over there is more like me and my brothers, then,’ laughed Billy, watching a group of six or seven jostling one another into the water. ‘Speaking of which,’ he added, ‘let’s go.’

‘Where?’ she said, ‘Where now?’

Her limbs were heavy and drowsy. She didn’t want to move.

‘Well, you wanted to come, didn’t you, have a cup of tea with Mum? She’s desperate to meet you, I can tell you…’


So this, Ella thought, was what Billy had meant. Mrs Vickers poured tea from a huge brown pot, the glaze crazed from years of just-boiled water. Ella balanced the cup and saucer on her knee in the dark front room and sipped carefully.

She really didn’t like tea. She’d only tried it a couple of times before and she thought that it tasted like perfume, tart and chemical on her tongue. The milk looked faintly sickening, making white whorls across the top of the pale brown liquid. She was used to black coffee in tiny cupfuls, the hot sips of fragrant steam.

‘We’ve heard a lot about you, dear.’ Mrs Vickers was smiling. She had a kind face, grey hair scooped up into a bun on the top of her head from which wisps escaped and floated around her cheeks like a fuzzy halo. The sun coming in through the window made this halo of hair flare and shimmer so that she seemed almost to glow.

She looked more like a grandmother than a mother, Ella thought. She wore a wipe-down apron, bright pink and printed with the words, ‘KEEP CALM AND EAT CAKE.’ Underneath it, her body looked soft and floury, like a well-baked loaf.

‘All those stories. Billy tells them to me sometimes,’ she said. ‘I love to hear ‘em. I’ve always liked a good story.’

‘You should come into the shop some time, Mrs Vickers. I’m sure my mother would love to meet you.’

Mrs Vickers, looking amused. ‘Now what would I be doing in a posh shop like your mum’s? I wouldn’t know where to put myself.’

Ella asked if she could use the bathroom. It was a small room built on the back of the kitchen, smelling of bleach and cold.

She pressed her cheek against the cool of the wall. Her hands felt clammy and her heart pounded in her chest. She wasn’t sure why.

Mrs Vickers had said that the shop was posh. Ella had always thought that ‘posh’ was for people like Katrina, with wedding-cake houses and gardens the size of parks. She didn’t want to be posh. That was just one more way of being different, wasn’t it?

She bent over the sink to pat water onto her cheeks. Behind the taps, a plastic beaker bristled with toothbrushes, so many that they didn’t all quite fit. On a small painted wooden chest, several sets of razors and shaving brushes were laid out, each on a neatly folded towel.

On the back of the door hung a set of greasy overalls and a scrubbed enamel bath, which she guessed was for Billy’s brothers to wash outside in the yard. The proper bath was so large aFClub

nd deep that she thought she might be able to float on her back in it, her hands hardly touching the sides at all. At the bottom of the bath were two coarse and crinkly black hairs, left behind by the bathwater. Yes, Billy’s house was a house for men.

When she emerged from the bathroom, the house had filled up with them. In the front room, Billy perched on a small wooden footstool whilst two large men spread themselves across the settee and another leaned in the doorway.

The seated men stood up as she came in and nodded their heads.

‘Well, now, this must be the beauty that’s captured our Billy’s heart,’ said one, his face creasing with a familiar grin, and he took Ella’s hand and bowed so low that his head nearly touched his knees. ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance.’

‘Don’t mind Tommy, love. He’s just messing about.’ Another brother held out his hand to her, ‘I’m Chris, the handsome Bill’s other brother’.

Billy sprung up from the stool and made as if to punch Chris in the leg but Tommy’s hand shot out from his side and pulled Billy into a headlock so that all he could do was flail his arms around, muttering, ‘Gerrof, Tommy, gerrof,’ under his breath.

‘Get on with you,’ Billy’s mum said. ‘You’re only embarrassing the poor girl.’

The older man, Billy’s father, rolled his eyes heavenward, smiled and took Ella’s hand in both of his. She noticed that he didn’t have the wide grin of Billy and Tommy. His eyes were quiet and watchful. ‘Nice to meet you, love.’

‘C’mon then, you daft lumps. Get yourselves washed and sorted,’ said Mrs Vickers, ‘There isn’t room for all you in here. We’re trying to have a civilised conversation.’

Without another word, the men stretched themselves and moved off. Their boots clattered up the narrow hall and stairs and Ella watched Mrs Vickers wince as doors banged and floorboards creaked overhead.

‘What a great lot of ‘em,’ she said as if she was suddenly surprised to find herself here in this house with all these men and couldn’t quite remember where they’d all come from.

Ella crumbled Mrs Vickers’ cake between her fingers, a buttery sponge that left a white film of icing sugar on the willow pattern plate. She wiped her hands on the starched napkin and swirled cold tea in the cup and tried to say the right things in the right places and not anything that sounded posh. All the time, she felt Billy watching her from his stool in the corner, his head cocked to one side.

Mr Vickers joined them again, his face pink and clean-shaven, his hair Brylcreamed back from his forehead.

‘So, Ella,’ he said. ‘Billy tells us you were down on the south coast before coming up ‘ere. What was that like?’

‘It was, erm… nice, I think,’ she said, searching for an image or a phrase where she could find a foothold, something real to say. ‘I liked the sea. I used to swim. But I like it here too, very much.’

‘I hear there’s a lot of trouble down there, lately,’ said Mr Vickers, clearing his throat, watching her intently. ‘Down there on the coast. Problems with the workers at the docks, in the packing houses, the factories and so forth…’ He nodded to himself. ‘Yes, trouble, so we’ve heard through the Union. Things getting a bit hairy down there, to say the least…’ and he looked at her again, a long searching look.

‘I don’t know, Mr Vickers. I suppose I wouldn’t really know much about that…’ She could feel a dark gap like a stain beginning to spread itself inside her.

‘‘Course you wouldn’t, love,’ said Mrs Vickers, fixing her husband with a look. She cleared her throat. ‘So you like to swim, you say. Well, Billy, you’ll have to take Ella to the swimming platform.’

She turned to Ella, the light sparking the silver threads in her hair again.

‘Yes, you might like that, love. I used to be a real one for swimming in the river when I was a girl.’

Then her face clouded over.

‘Oh, but of course, what am I saying? Billy, you’ll have to check with Mrs Moreno first. Yes, ask your mum, love. She might not want you going there. Better to ask her.’

Later, Billy walked her back home over the bridge.

‘My idiot brothers,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I did try to warn you. But you know they were only having a laugh, with what they said and all that, don’t you?’

A pair of geese flew low over their heads, so low that Ella could feel the movement of the air made by their wings.

The evening was warm and spread out all around them. The surface of the river was smooth, the water moving beneath them like one long muscle.

She tipped back her head and felt the sky fall into her.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Don’t be silly.’


She didn’t like to admit it, even to herself, but Jean Cushworth was feeling more than a little annoyed by the Moreno woman.

First, and it was undeniable now, she seemed to have got her claws into David Carter.

David. He’d caused quite a stir among her circle of ladies when he’d joined the local surgery as the new partner. Some of them, discovering that he was still unmarried, had taken to making quite crude jokes, remarking on his bedside manner, that kind of thing. Some of them, she was convinced, had even invented various aches and pains, just as an excuse to unbutton their blouses and have him pay them some attention. Sad, really.

But now she felt a nip of jealousy. She was willing to admit to that. For so long, she’d been looking for something more. And, yes, she may occasionally have toyed with the idea of David Carter.

Nothing serious, of course. She hadn’t made a fool of herself over it. No one else would ever have known. It was only that he’d begun to feature quite prominently in her private afternoon fantasies.

For over a year now, the combination of her anti-depressant – a very mild dose – and her lunchtime glass of wine meant that, most afternoons, she found it necessary to take herself off for a little lie-down. She’d pull the curtains and tell Leonora that she mustn’t be disturbed and then she’d be perfectly free to abandon herself to a kind of half-dream in which the ordinary world receded for a while and she became her younger, more carefree self.

Lately, she’d found herself looking forward to this time when she had nothing to do but sink into a mound of soft pillows and let her mind roam untethered. Sometimes it seemed as if this afternoon dream world was more real to her than any other. It was certainly much more enjoyable.

And lately, especially since her last consultation with David Carter, she’d particularly liked running a certain scenario in her mind where she would perch on the edge of his desk, which she’d noted was large and sturdy and covered in embossed leather, and begin to unbutton her dress.

And David Carter - ‘Please, call me Dave,’ he’d purr - would bury his face between her breasts and inhale the expensive scent that she always applied at the base of her throat and begin to kiss her neck.

Just thinking about this now made her heart beat faster and she felt a hot flush – part pleasure, part embarrassment – or maybe it was just her hormones. Perhaps she really did need to make another appointment, after all. Get herself checked out properly.

She moved restlessly on the pillows, trying to find a more comfortable position, but she couldn’t get the image of Fabbia Moreno out of her mind.

She’d been shocked when Katrina arrived home, full of the news. Katrina had been quite bursting with it, almost desperate to tell her, with such a particular look on her face that Jean even wondered for a moment if her daughter could know what she was thinking.

She’d made out, of course, that she wasn’t the least bit interested in schoolgirl’s gossip but she’d felt as if a hand had gripped her insides and was twisting slowly.

No, Fabbia Moreno didn’t waste much time. Jean Cushworth had met her type before. Ambitious, determined, used to getting what she wanted. It was all really quite irritating.

And so imagine how she’d felt today, visiting the shop for a fitting, to discover that the woman had this new haircut – short, very short – and which, there was no denying it, made her look even more ravishing.

What annoyed Jean Cushworth more than anything about this was that both Vincent and James had been trying to persuade her to cut her hair shorter for the last year or so. Long hair can be terribly aging, Mrs C. Maybe it’s time for a change. It will lift your face. You’d love it. And so much easier to look after… On and on, until she was forced to get quite snappy with them.

Her hair was her thing, her crowning glory. All her life, everyone had said so. She couldn’t imagine – really, could she? – what it would feel like not to be able to put up her hand and feel it there, silky and reassuring, or move her head at the right moment and feel it swing around her shoulders like the women in the shampoo adverts.

But Vincent had said those words and now they couldn’t be unsaid. Beyond a certain age… She didn’t like that at all. The idea of doing something bold and dramatic, something new, had its appeal. She’d been turning the idea over in her mind for some time now. When she brushed her hair at night, she’d gather it in a handful at the nape of her neck, letting it loop below her cheekbones, trying to imagine what it would look like.

But the Moreno woman had got there first. If Jean decided to go shorter now, it would only ever look like imitation.

Maybe it really was true, what Graham had told her, just the other day.

‘The thing is, darling,’ he’d drawled, slurping at a glass of his precious Chateau Neuf with that maddening expression on his face, ‘you never do know what you want, do you? You always want what you didn’t choose. You always think you should have done, could have done X, Y, Z , instead of focusing on what you do have, right in front of your pretty little nose and what you can make happen, if you only put your mind to it. You’re scared, that’s all, and you don’t know how to be happy and you can’t bloody admit it, so you make everyone else, Katrina and I included, bloody miserable. And you never want anything until the minute that someone else tells you that you can’t have it. If I were to take up with some young nubile thing, you’d suddenly want me again, not because you love me – I’m completely aware that you don’t – but just because you wouldn’t want anyone else to have me… The thing is, darling, why don’t you just start being honest with yourself?’

Now she hoisted herself up on the bed, taking the sheaf of menus from the bedside table, noticing crossly that her new gel manicure was already beginning to peel away at the cuticles.

She tried to think of the party, casting her eye down the catering company’s suggestions. There wasn’t a thing she could find fault with, really. Canapes, buffet, drinks. It was all perfect.

She regretted now that she’d asked Fabbia Moreno to design her dress. She’d already invited her, of course, and now she and David were almost certain to come together. She’d have to watch them making eyes at one other whilst Graham strutted around in his jeans and trainers – because she could never persuade him to dress up for anything – boring the pants off everyone with his corny jokes and endless chatter about his toys and gadgets and investments.

There’d be Pike, of course, but he didn’t really count. She should have put an end to that, long ago. She didn’t really know why she hadn’t. He followed her around like a little yapping dog. It was embarrassing. It made her despise him. And although he was very attentive, in a way that Graham could never seem to be bothered with any more, he wasn’t exactly what she’d call interesting or exciting.

Jean let her mind drift back then, as she’d developed the habit of doing. She saw herself as a girl of eighteen, in a pale pink dress, standing on the terrace of her family home, Dunston Park, waiting for the guests to arrive. It had been such a warm evening. She could still remember how the air felt, fragrant with jasmine and roses and the way that new dress had felt, the silk clinging at her breasts and swirling around her ankles. She could almost imagine that it was made of rose petals.

Everyone had admired her that night. She’d danced and danced and drunk too much champagne and handsome Bobby Phelps had walked her out to the tennis courts and kissed her, a long lingering kiss. Her first. What had happened to Bobby? Married? Divorced? She couldn’t remember.

And suddenly it seemed that she couldn’t remember what had happened to anything. Thirty years or more. Gone. Just like that evening, it had all slipped through her fingers. And Laurence, her beloved boy. She could see him now, his hair wet from the shower after football, the dark curls stuck to his scalp making his green eyes appear even more luminous, and his body just beginning to fill out. It wasn’t fair, that he’d been taken away from her. None of it was fair.

Here she was, with hair that wasn’t even a real colour any more and a body that was starting to sag, lying on a bed with the curtains drawn in the middle of the day. A solitary tear ran down her cheek. She pulled the quilt up around her. She felt ice-cold, almost numb. She couldn’t even cry properly.

Finally, she flung the quilt off and fished in the back of the bedside cabinet. Her fingers touched the smooth glass of the bottle.

Hurriedly now, her hand trembling, she unscrewed the top, pressed the bottle to her lips and gulped.

The liquid warmed her instantly. She could feel it spreading through her insides. She took another gulp and then another.