The Dress

5.

A house coat of green cotton, embroidered with hummingbirds in red and yellow. Antique fabric. Circa 1900s. Hand-sewn in Tehran.



Fabbia lay watching the shadows moving on the ceiling. She didn’t need to reach under her pillow where she kept her watch, to know that it was very early.

From the other side of the curtain, she could hear the rise and fall of her daughter’s breathing: a soft, even murmur. The sound soothed her, somehow; perhaps because, unlike so many other things in Fabbia’s forty-three years, it never changed. It never sounded like anything else.

She relaxed her mind and began to feel her way back along the delicate thread of other mornings in which she’d lain listening to her daughter in this way. It was like a necklace, each memory a coloured glass gem, the string reaching back into the past and forwards into the future.

And now Fabbia’s mind began to whir again, making silent calculations, adding and subtracting columns of numbers. She was determined to get it right this time, absolutely determined that she wouldn’t leave any room for things to slide.

Her previous shop had been little short of a disaster. Not enough money in Eastbourne. And if she was really honest, she’d known that all along. She’d allowed herself to be convinced by the rental agent’s talk of professional people, young couples, people in film and television and website design, just the right people to have a keen interest in vintage fashion and how they were being squeezed out by rising property prices in Brighton into Eastbourne’s affordable family-sized houses.

She’d seated herself patiently on one of the white plastic tulip-shaped chairs – a replica, she’d vaguely registered, of some mid-century designer – Jacobsen? Saarinen? – and let the young man with hair sculpted into a cartoon crest in the centre of his forehead talk her into a cheap six-month trial rental of a shop on Marine Drive.

The truth was, she’d been exhausted, sick of cleaning other people’s kitchen floors, tired of the asides and the snide remarks. She needed a way out. She had a little money saved. And she knew about two things: about clothes and how to make them and about how to sell things, present things.

It hadn’t quite worked out that first time. But it had given her some breathing space, some time to see how it could all be done so much better.

And then the York shop had come up. The old friend of Enzo’s, a chance remark, a few phone calls. It had been easy. So easy, really. And that, Fabbia thought, was always a good sign. When the Universe was in the right alignment, as Maadar-Bozorg would say, everything moved effortlessly.

Now Fabbia allowed herself a luxurious stretch. She was feeling something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Trickles of blue and green, starred with intent points of silver and yellow. Excitement. Nerves. Anticipation.

She’d calculated that there was just enough left over from the move and the sale of old stock and the lease money paid up-front for them to get by for three months. After that, one could get loans, the lady at the bank had told her enthusiastically, even some kind of grant for women in business.

She’d smiled at Fabbia across the lacquered desk, unfolding the special leaflets in front of her.

But Fabbia knew that all those things – loans, grants, special awards – meant negotiating with people, people like that Pike man, and she’d rather not tempt Fate that way. Once people started asking questions, looking into your accounts, wanting to know this, that and the other, you never knew where it would end. She’d learnt that the hard way.

She wasn’t afraid. She’d been in worse situations. At least she didn’t have to spend her days with her head down other people’s toilets any more.

Outside the window, the city began to clatter into life. Fabbia imagined the shopkeepers throwing open their metal shutters, the vans from the countryside trundling into the market, unloading crates of flowers and boxes of fruit onto the trestle tables with their striped awnings. Soon the narrow streets around the market place would be a press of people and some of them would be making their way along the uneven pavements and into Grape Lane. She, Fabbia, would be ready. She’d welcome them into the shop with a smile and she’d try not to watch too closely as they held up her dresses in front of the mirrors and cooed over her beautiful scarves and shoes and then, slowly, gently, she’d work out what it was that they really wanted.

But, for now, she’d just let herself lie here a little while longer.

She knew that when the Minster bells began to chime eight o’ clock, Gracie from the next-door café would swill the courtyard with a length of yellow hose, unwind a sun-faded canopy and set the tables and chairs out with a bad-tempered clatter.

‘I’m not going to be doing this much longer,’ she’d said, when Fabbia went over to introduce herself. ‘Terrible sciatica. All this standing and running around after folks. It’s a young person’s game. You’re welcome to it, love. It’s killing me.’

Fabbia was sorry for old people in this country whose families shirked their responsibilities. It was not like that in Iran.

She thought about Maadar-Bozorg sitting in her chair out on her tiny balcony and hoped that her cousin would not forget this week to take her to the swimming pool for the Ladies Only swimming session.

One day, Fabbia thought, when things are different, I’ll go back. I’ll make a pool at the old village house where Madaar can swim whenever she wants and a new patio where she can grow her herbs and plants.

The walls of the house will be sparkling white and I’ll have the old floorboards sanded and polished and the roof and the windows fixed and a proper bathroom put in. Nooone in my family could ever afford to do that. But I can, if I work hard enough.

It was thoughts like these that eased her guilt, but beneath these thoughts, her mind was busily working away.

She wondered if she would ever see the village and Maadar-Bozorg again. She wondered if she’d ever sit on the patio, resting her back on the sun-warmed wall, feeling the rough stone through her dress, watching the patterns made by the shadows on the old crazed concrete or tracing spirals in the dust with the tip of her finger.

She thought of the summers they’d spent there, in the mountains, in the place where her grandmother had been born and then a memory, something she hadn’t thought of in a long time, began to focus itself in her mind. It was like looking down a long telescope, back into the past. One of those mornings of shimmering blue that happen only in the mountains.

She would have been eight, maybe nine, standing there on the terrace that ran the entire length of the house. It had been early, very early, before anyone else was up.

She was wearing her nightdress, thin white cotton, embroidered with tiny white roses. The stones of the terrace were already hot under her bare feet. There were strands of hair, damp with warmth, clinging to the nape of her neck and a trickle of moisture curled between her shoulder blades. She felt the air move around her as she stepped off the terrace onto the baking earth, cautiously, looking back over her shoulder at the shuttered house behind her, because she knew she shouldn’t do this, not without her sandals. There might be scorpions or even snakes.

Her eye had been caught by a pomegranate, round and fat and red, nestled in the pointed leaves of the nearest tree. There were so many trees in that garden – oranges and lemons, as well as the pomegranates – but it was pomegranate fruit that Fabbia loved and this one was the biggest and reddest that she’d ever seen.

She reached up on her tiptoes, stretching her arm into the tree and her hand closed over it. It came away easily. When she held it in her palm it was heavy and perfect. Its burnished skin seemed to glow from the inside. She traced the shape of it with her thumb, feeling the smooth curves that ended in that funny puckered star shape.

She stepped back onto the terrace, holding her prize in both hands. As she did, something moved in the corner of her eye. A flash. A flicker of something.

She stood still, listening.

From where she stood, the garden sloped downwards, through the groves of fruit trees, following the contours of the mountainside. Down there somewhere, Fabbia knew, the gardener Hamid had a small hut. She had never seen it. She wasn’t allowed to go down into that part of the garden, where the land was left uncultivated except for a few vegetables Hamid grew for himself.

Sometimes she would see the thin wisp of smoke from Hamid’s cooking fire. She never went closer. She mustn’t disturb Hamid’s privacy, Madaar-Bozorg had told her.

But now she could hear something. Was it the sound of someone laughing or crying? She couldn’t tell. Then that flash again, like sunlight reflecting off glass. And then the sound and she was sure now that it was not laughter. A long moaning sound, that seemed to spread out through the still trees and disturb the air.

Should she call out, in case Hamid was down there and needed help? But Madaar-Bozorg said she mustn’t make a nuisance of herself and perhaps Hamid would be angry with her.

She stood there, listening, until the moaning sound subsided. Then she crept back indoors.

In the kitchen, she laid the pomegranate carefully on the wooden board and took a knife and a spoon from the drawer. She scored the skin of the fruit with the knife and broke it open, admiring the spill of glistening seeds, turning one on the tip of her finger like a red jewel. She took one half of the fruit and, as Madaar-Bozorg had shown her, she smacked at it with the back of the spoon, carefully, precisely, so that the seeds flew into the bowl, spattering their red juice.

She was just beginning to spoon the sharp-sweet seeds into her mouth when Madaar-Bozorg appeared at the back door, the door that led from the kitchen to the garden. She was wearing her cotton housecoat, the green one, embroidered with hummingbirds, and her hair was loose down her back.

She tried to cover her surprise at seeing Fabbia already at the table.

‘Hello, little early bird,’ she said, smiling, but Fabbia could see that she was using the smile to hide something. Her hands fluttered to her hair, smoothing the parting, gathering it up at the nape of her neck. She didn’t even seem to notice that Fabbia was eating stolen pomegranate.

She walked quickly out of the room and Fabbia noticed the crumbs of soil that fell from her feet onto the tiles. When she appeared again, she was dressed and in her sandals and her hair was pulled into a neat chignon.

They’d spent a lot of time at the house in the mountains, she and her grandmother. As Fabbia grew older and began to understand things, she watched Hamid closely, noticing the way that he never met Madaar-Bozorg’s gaze, how if she came into the garden, he would quietly slip away around the corner of the house or into the trees.

Sometimes when he was working near the house, Madaar-Bozorg would ask her to take him a glass of lemonade or a sweet cake or a plate of cut fruit. She would never take them herself. Hamid would smile at her, a beautiful smile, showing his white teeth. He would wipe his hands on his trousers and take the plate or the glass gratefully, almost reverently.

This was how she came to understand what passed between Hamid and her grandmother. That and, of course, The Signals.

Because Fabbia noticed that whenever Hamid and Madaar-Bozorg were in one another’s vicinity, something in the air changed suddenly. It was so strong that she could almost touch it – like static or that too-tight feeling just before the rain comes. And if she relaxed her mind and breathed deeply, she found that she could almost see it too – not in the usual way that she saw things but somewhere in the deepest parts of her mind. Squiggly lines that fizzed and jumped and crackled. Red, the colour of pomegranates; brown, the colour of the earth; and with the sharp green scent of leaves.

Fabbia was careful not to go into the garden so early in the morning after that. Sometimes she would hear the creak of a floorboard or the squeaky hinge of the backdoor as Madaar-Bozorg let herself back into the house.

She loved her grandmother and questioned nothing. Things were as they were.

Her mother had left when Fabbia was so little that she could hardly remember her.

The woman in the photograph on her bedside table, posing for the photographer, was a stranger to her. Occasionally, she would take the photograph in her hands and hold it up very close, scrutinising the woman for signs. Did she have her mother’s nose or her mother’s eyes? Impossible to say. The photograph was black-and-white and a little blurry. The mysterious woman seemed to be turning away from the camera as if she didn’t want Fabbia to really see her.

‘Where is my mother?’ she’d once asked, a long time ago, at her cousins’ house.

‘She’s with the angels, now,’ her aunt had replied, quick as a flash, crossing herself with her index finger, then bringing her hands together in the shape of a prayer. Madaar-Bozorg had actually snorted then, banging her teacup down on the table.

‘Don’t tell the child such nonsense,’ she’d said, fiercely.

Later, she’d taken Fabbia to a spot outside the city where they could look down on the grid of streets far below. She pointed to a huge tree, its leaves casting a circle of shade.

‘This is where your mother is,’ she’d said. ‘Here. This is where I scattered her ashes. So the real answer to your question is that she is in the soil here, under our feet, and in the leaves of that tree, and in every blade of grass and tiny shoot and little flower that grows on this hillside. She’s part of everything around us now. That’s where to look for her. That’s what happens to us when we die. We go back. We return to where we came from.’

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?’