The Dress

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.

He felt all his sadness and loneliness fall away from him like an old wrinkled skin.

Quickly, soundlessly, he pulled his boat right up to the rocks and, trying not to splash in the shallows, he dropped to his hands and knees and crept ashore. There he saw another strange sight.

At the edge of the water was a heap of empty sealskins and he guessed that these belonged to the dancing women.

So it was true, the man thought to himself. All the tales that his grandfathers had told him were true, after all. These women must be the selkies, the seal people, part human, part seal-spirit. His hand trembled over the pile of skins, his palm hot as if it were burning.

Without really knowing what he was doing, he quickly selected the most beautiful of the skins, the one that glinted at him with its fine red hairs, and rolled it up and stuffed it under his sweater where it felt soft and warm against his skin.

Then he waited.

And he waited.

And as the moon began to set, the women stopped dancing and climbed down over the rocks, one by one. Two of them slipped easily back into their sealskins and slithered and splashed into the sea.

But of course, the youngest woman, the woman with red hair to her waist and the voice like music, couldn’t find her skin anywhere. As she searched, she began to cry out.

‘Where is my skin, my sealskin?’

It was nowhere to be found.

It was then that the man stepped out from his hiding place.

‘’Beautiful lady,’ he said, ‘I want you to be my wife. Until this moment, I’ve been the saddest and loneliest man in the world but you’ve sung away all my troubles.’

He saw the look of horror pass over the selkie’s face. She flushed with shame and clasped her arms around herself to shield herself from his gaze.

“No,’ she cried, ‘Of course I can’t be your wife. I’m not of your kind. I’m of the Others, the sacred ones, the ones who live and sing beneath the waves.’

But the man was insistent. He clasped the skin to him. Now that he’d at last found his happiness, he had no intention of ever letting it slip away.

‘Be my wife,’ he said. ‘Live with me and be my wife and I give you my word that in seven summers, I’ll return your sealskin to you, and then you can choose to stay or go, exactly as you wish.’

A long rippling sigh escaped from the young selkie’s lips.

She let her arms fall to her sides. She studied the man’s face for a long time. He could see that she was thinking – and perhaps, he thought, she was a little curious about what life woud be like among humankind.

Slowly, gradually, a smile appeared at the corners of her mouth as she looked him up and down.

“Very well, Fisherman,” she said, “I will live with you for seven summers. But after that,” she told him, “I must return to my true home and be with my sisters.”

The fisherman lifted the young seal woman into his boat and rowed her back to the village. Although his nets were empty, his heart beat proudly in his chest for he knew that he’d landed himself the biggest catch of all.

Months passed in the village. The corn on the hillside grew tall under the hot sun, the oranges began to ripen and the man and the seal woman had a baby together, a little boy. His mother told him stories, just as I’m telling you this one now, tesora, stories of a secret world under the sea where the people lived on sunlight and starlight and wove songs out of the ocean waves.

And the seal woman tried to be happy. She really did try. She mended her husband’s nets, whispering powerful charms into the knots, and his catch was always the best of the village and so they never went hungry.

But as the years passed, the young selkie’s skin began to wither, her hair began to come out in handfuls, the roundness of her hips and breasts began to wither away and she could no longer see very well to cook or clean or mend.

‘You’ve kept my sealskin for seven long years and now it’s time for you to honour your promise and return it to me,’ she said to her husband, ‘The eighth autumn is arriving.’

‘Woman, you must think I’m stupid!’ Her husband laughed. ‘If I ever give it back to you, you’ll leave me alone without a wife.’ He strode off into the night, slamming the door behind him.

The little boy loved his mother and was very afraid of losing her to the world beneath the waves but, at the same time, he couldn’t watch silently as she suffered in this way. That night, as he was sleeping, he heard the wind and the water whispering to him.

He jumped out of bed and ran out into the night, scrambling over the rockpools. As he looked down into the waves, he saw a big bundle, clumsily tied with string, rolling out of a cleft in a large rock. He picked it up and held it to his chest, and gasped as he felt the strong scent of his mother unfolding itself all through him like the sea itself.

He ran back to the house and fell through the door where his mother was waiting for him. She snatched him up and snatched up the skin.

‘Mother,’ he cried, ‘Don’t leave me!’

But something older than herself, something older then the rocks and older even than the sea, was calling to her.

With the little boy tucked under her arm, she staggered to the rocks, stepped into her sealskin and drew it up all around her. Already she could feel her strength returning. Now she dove down deep under the water, still clasping the boy tightly to her body, and the boy discovered that he too could breathe easily under the water and swim with all the grace and slipperiness of the seals.

Seven days and nights passed and the boy lived among his mother’s selkie-people. They danced and sang in their world under the waves and feasted on starlight and sunlight from plates of shell and drank the moon’s reflections from goblets of pearl.

The seal woman’s skin turned lustrous again and shone more brightly than ever before. The little boy laughed to see how plump and soft she was becoming. He could no longer circle her wrist with his hand.

But on the seventh night, he noticed tears in his mother’s eyes and knew that it was time for him to return to the upper world.

‘Little one, my precious one, one day, many years from now, it’ll be your time to come and join us,’ his mother told him, guiding him up to the shore and sitting him gently on the rocks. ‘But until that time you’ll live here in the world of people, of human beings,’ she told him, ’and I’ll never leave you.’

And, sure enough, as the years passed, the boy became a man and well-known in the village as a poet and a singer and a teller of wonderful stories. And every evening, his nets were filled with fish.

People said that this was because as a very small boy he’d survived being dragged to the bottom of the sea in a terrible storm and he’d learned how to talk to the selkie-spirits.

Even today, you can see him, tesora, on moonlit nights, sitting on the rocks, talking softly to a certain female seal with a pelt of shining silver who often comes near the shore.’



Then Mamma would let out a long sigh and rearrange herself against the cushions.

‘And you know, of course, that although many have tried to hunt that seal, none have ever succeeded,’ she’d say, stretching her long legs out in front of her and yawning. ‘And now, my Ella-issima, it’s time for bed.’

And Ella would throw her arms around Mamma’s neck and breath in her scent which was of Mamma’s favourite French perfume – irises, lilies, sandalwood – and the Marseille soap that she sold in the shop and something else, her own rich scent, that was impossible to define.

And for a long time after Mamma had left her for her book or her sewing or her letter-writing, Ella would lie and imagine that she was drifting out to sea in a boat with stilled oars, feeling the slow lap of the waves, watching the stars.