The Gown

by Jennifer Robson

  A heartbeat later he was kneeling before her, so tall that it put them eye to eye. He touched his brow to hers.

  “Don’t cry,” he whispered. “Please. I can’t bear it.”

  “I never meant for this to happen. Any of it. But there you were in the street, rescuing my shoe. Rescuing me.”

  “No,” he said. “You rescued yourself. Never forget it.”

  “I was so sure I would be alone. That it would be easier, better, after what I had lost. It comforted me to know it.”

  “Why? Solitary confinement is the worst sort of imprisonment. Nothing is worse than being alone, my darling. Nothing.”

  “I—”

  “You survived. Do you think yourself unworthy of it? I fear that you do.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Did you collaborate with the Nazis? Of course you did not. Did you take up with a German, and make use of his weakness for your protection? I don’t believe for one second that you did, but even if you had I would not condemn you. We all found ways of surviving the war, and the enemy who sought to kill you was a far more determined and pitiless foe than the enemy I faced at a distance.”

  “Please do not make me think of it, not now. Not tonight.”

  “I won’t,” he said, and he bent his head in contrition. “Only believe me when I say I am glad beyond measure that you survived. Every selfish particle of me is glad, because without you I would have been alone, too. I won’t pretend to have suffered as you did, but when Mary was killed I thought I might die from the grief of it.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “Of course I do,” he said, and now he looked up and met her gaze steadily, his pale eyes shining with emotion. “She was my friend, and my lover, for many years. But I don’t see her when I look at you. I don’t long for her when I’m with you.”

  He pulled off his spectacles, tossing them on the table, and took her face in his hands, cradling it ever so gently. And then he touched his mouth to hers, deepening the kiss by degrees, and she leaned forward, almost tipping off her perch on the sofa, so eager was she to reciprocate.

  He pulled away, only far enough to scatter kisses across her cheek, and then to whisper in her ear. “You are the woman I want, the woman I desire, and I will wait for you as long as you need. For years, if it comes to that.”

  “You do not need to wait,” she said, and if she was trembling it was only out of happiness and excitement and more than a little apprehension. But she was safe with this man, and sure of his intentions, and she wanted this intimacy with him more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life.

  He sat back on his heels, his breathing a little ragged, and looked her in the eye. “I love you. I need you to know that.”

  “And I love you,” she told him. “I do.”

  “Then will you be with me now, and tomorrow, and the days after that? Is that something you can give me?”

  “I will,” she promised. “And now, if you are ready, I should like for you to kiss me again.”

  Epilogue

  Ann

  March 21, 1997

  It had been years since Ann had gone to downtown Toronto on her own, and she was more than a little nervous of getting lost on the way to the gallery, but it wasn’t enough to deter her, nor did she want to ask her daughter to come along. This was something she needed to do on her own.

  It was a Friday afternoon, the day of the week when she usually took care of the sort of errands that couldn’t be done on the weekend. Visits to the bank, medical appointments, that sort of thing. Today, though, she took the subway all the way downtown, and then, instead of getting on a streetcar, she decided to walk. Her route took her through the heart of Chinatown, which had always been one of her favorite parts of the city, but she didn’t have time to stop. Not today.

  She soldiered on, and just as she was beginning to feel a little tired she caught sight of the banners.

  MIRIAM DASSIN

  VÉL D’HIV

  ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO

  SPRING 1997

  She couldn’t remember, now, how she’d learned that the embroideries would be exhibited in Canada. Most likely she’d heard it on the news. Their coming to Toronto was nothing short of a miracle, for she’d wanted to see them for years and years, and it had been hard to wait out the crowds. She hoped the gallery wouldn’t be jam-packed today.

  Ann paid her entrance fee, politely declined the suggestion that she become a member, and made a beeline for the gallery where Miriam’s embroideries awaited her. According to the pamphlet she’d been given, the exhibition was set up as three separate spaces. First was the historical context for the embroideries; this she bypassed, for she already knew more about Miriam than any potted history could tell her.

  The second space was set up like a small theater, with a short film that repeated every ten minutes. This, too, held little interest for her, particularly since Miriam herself had not been interviewed.

  She was rushing, she knew she was, but she could come back to all of this later, after she had seen the embroideries. She walked on, drawn to the final room, and found herself before the first panel. Un dîner de Chabbat, the one Miriam had first imagined while sitting at Ann’s kitchen table fifty years before.

  Ann had seen pictures, of course, but nothing could have prepared her for the actual thing, so vivid and vibrant that the people it depicted seemed more real, somehow, than any of the strangers who surrounded her. She stood and stared, and suddenly she realized that she was staring at her own face. Her younger self, no more than twenty-five, her hair the color of marmalade, her skin unlined.

  She lost track of how long she stood there, her heart alternately seized by joy and grief. Her friend had thought of her long after they had been parted. Miriam had not forgotten her.

  She circled the room, admiring the other panels for long minutes, and when she was done she returned to Un dîner de Chabbat, and only after every detail of it was fixed in her mind did she step back and away.

  What would she say to Miriam, if ever she had the chance to speak with her again?

  She would tell her friend that she had been happy. Her daughter was happy, too, and was married to a good man, and she had a daughter of her own.

  She would tell Miriam about Heather, her only grandchild, and the light of her life. A single smile from that child was worth more than everything Ann had left behind, and she had never, not once in all the years since, ever had cause to regret what she had done.

  So little remained of her life before Canada. A few pieces of her mother’s rose-patterned china, the cup and saucer from her nan, a handful of photographs, the heather in her garden. The embroidery samples, still packed away, unseen and unloved. She had never shown them to her daughter, for they would have provoked questions she couldn’t, even now, even after half a century, bear to answer.

  She would leave them to Heather. As soon as she got home, she would take the box down from the top shelf of her linen cupboard, she would look through the samples one last time, she would let herself remember, and then she would put them away for good. Only this time the box would have a label. For Heather.

  Outside the sun was shining and the air smelled like spring, even in the middle of the city. It was a beautiful day, the first day of spring, and soon the Balmoral heather would be in bloom.

  She had a family who loved her, and she had made something of herself. She had survived. She had been happy. She was happy, now, in this sunshine, on this spring day, with the surprise and delight of Miriam’s embroideries a delectable secret to savor and cherish.

  It was enough.

  Miriam

  October 2, 2016

  Nearly everything was ready for dinner. With the help of Rosie, her home help who came in every morning, Miriam had polished her silver and rubbed the dust from her best wineglasses, and they had spread her best cloth upon the table. The cloth she had embroidered for the first Rosh Hashanah she and Walter had celebrated together. There were stain
s here and there, and her children often said she should hand it over to a museum to be cleaned and preserved for posterity, but in this she ignored them.

  Most days she tried not to dwell on how much she missed him. She thought of Walter constantly, and when she was alone in the flat, she often spoke to him as if he were still at her side, listening as attentively as he had always done. Their life together had been good, and long, and she was very nearly certain she would see his face again.

  Sometimes, in the early morning, in the long, quiet minutes between her dreams and the day, she let herself imagine that moment. He would be waiting for her, his shoulders stooping a little, his hair bright against the sun, and his cold, pale eyes would be ever so warm for her. And she would reach out to him—

  But today was not a day for sadness. It was the beginning of the new year, and soon her children and grandchildren would be arriving for dinner, all of them including Daniel, who had come home for the holidays though he’d moved to New York City only two weeks before. It had been selfish of her to insist, but it was, she felt, her prerogative as matriarch.

  Her guests would bring most of the food, excepting of course Grand-Mère’s Friday-night chicken, which Rosie had helped her make the day before. It wasn’t the most traditional dish to serve at Rosh Hashanah, but the prunes were sweet, as were the memories it evoked, and it was Hannah’s favorite.

  Hannah was the youngest of her great-grandchildren, and she was little enough to still want hugs and kisses and cuddles in Walter’s big old Morris chair by the sitting room windows. When Hannah arrived they would sit in the Walter chair, as the child liked to call it, and they would speak in French together, and Miriam would tell her about Rosh Hashanah when she, Mimi, had been a little girl long, long ago.

  Yesterday she had taken down one of her favorite embroideries from her bedroom wall and wrapped it in layers of tissue, for she was sending it back to America with Daniel, with instructions that he give it to Heather when she visited him in New York. Miriam had held it back from the retrospective, for reasons she hadn’t understood at the time. She had assumed, then, that she couldn’t bear to be parted from it, but in that she’d been wrong. Now she knew that she had been waiting for Heather.

  “Mimi! Mimi! Where are you?” came Hannah’s piping voice from the front hall.

  “Here I am! And what is this you have for me?”

  “Uncle Daniel and I looked for peonies, because those are your favorite, but the man in the flower shop didn’t have any. So we brought you some dahlias. I hope you aren’t disappointed.”

  “Not at all, and they are very lovely. Come with me now and we will put them in water. Then we will sit together in the Walter chair, if you like, and I will tell you some stories.”

  Heather

  October 14, 2016

  Her flight from Toronto had arrived early, and the train ride in from Newark had been easier than she’d hoped, and her hotel in Manhattan’s West Village was just around the corner from Washington Square and had a main-floor lounge with Django Reinhardt playing softly in the background and twenty different wines by the glass on the menu, and even though Daniel wasn’t supposed to show up for another half hour, she’d made sure to sit where she could see the front door. She was thinking about a glass of white wine, even though it was barely five o’clock, and had gone so far as to snag a menu from a nearby table, when some impulse made her look up.

  Daniel stood in the doorway, a solid twenty minutes before she’d hoped to see him there, and he looked tired and serious, and for a moment she wondered if she’d made a mistake in coming to visit. Maybe it would have been better to stick to texts and emails for a little longer.

  He turned, as if he’d somehow divined what she’d been thinking, and for a moment she forgot to breathe as he stared at her. And then he smiled, crossed the room, and kissed her until they were both a little breathless.

  “Hello,” he said. “You made it.”

  “Hello. I did.”

  He shrugged out of his coat, dumped it and his messenger bag on the far end of the banquette where she was perched, and sat next to her, just as she’d hoped he would.

  “What do you think? I’ve stayed here myself a few times.”

  “I love it. Teeny tiny rooms, but that’s New York, right? And this common area is amazing.”

  “It is, although later on it’ll be overrun by NYU students. God knows I didn’t have the money to pay fifteen bucks for a glass of wine when I was an undergraduate.”

  “Me neither. Although I do feel like splurging on a glass of something. I got some good news just before I left.”

  “The story about your nan and Mimi?”

  “Yes.” She looked around, a little nervous of being overheard. “It isn’t official, but I sold it.”

  “You did? That’s fantastic. Was it to the same place we talked about? The one that despite its title has absolutely no connection to William Makepeace Thackeray?”

  “Ha ha. Yes. That one.”

  “Then we definitely need to celebrate. But first I have to give you something.” He opened his bag and retrieved a flat box about ten inches square. “Here you are.”

  “What is it?”

  “A gift from Mimi. She was nervous about putting it in the post.”

  “Why? Is it delicate?”

  “Yes, and also rather valuable. I put my laptop in the overhead bin on the way home, but this I held in my lap.”

  “You know what it is?”

  “I do. Go on.”

  Inside, under half a dozen sheets of tissue paper, was a framed embroidery of a wreath of flowers: antique roses, the spidery apricot blossoms of a honeysuckle, tiny sprigs of lavender and lilac, and three sumptuously perfect peonies, their petals as ripe as berries. Wedged into one corner was a small notecard, the handwriting bold and almost calligraphic.

  October 1, 2016

  Ma chère Heather,

  I embroidered this wreath in 1949 when I was pregnant with my daughter, Daniel’s mother, and the flowers were inspired by my own mother’s garden, a place long vanished but ever dear to me. Its creation brought me great happiness, and no small measure of peace, and I hope that whenever you see it you will be reminded of my love for your grandmother, the joy she brought to my life and yours, and the friendship I now extend to you, ma belle.

  With my affectionate good wishes,

  Miriam

  Acknowledgments

  My greatest debt of thanks must go to Mrs. Betty Foster, one of Norman Hartnell’s seamstresses, who graciously agreed to be interviewed about her memories of working at Hartnell and her involvement in the creation of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown. Without Mrs. Foster, I would have struggled to finish this book, and I am deeply grateful to her.

  I would also like to thank Juliet Ferry and Jessica Jane Pile of the renowned bespoke hand embroidery studio Hand & Lock for helping me to understand the mechanics of the work done by my characters. My day at Hand & Lock was a delightful experience and I am very grateful to both of them for their enthusiastic support. Thanks to Natalie Woolman and Eleanor Scoones of Oxford Film and Television, who put me in touch with Betty Foster and shared some of their knowledge of the royal wedding, as well as the staff at The Royal Collection for early assistance with my research. I would also like to thank Dr. Carolyn Harris of the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies for reading over passages concerning the royal family, and Chrystel Turcotte for her advice regarding my usage of colloquial French.

  In the course of researching The Gown, I relied upon the collections of a number of libraries, archives, and museums. I would specifically like to acknowledge the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, the British Newspaper Archive, the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, the Museum of London, the National Archives (UK), the National Art Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Toronto Public Library.

  To my literary agent, Kevan Lyon, and her colleagues at t
he Marsal Lyon Literary Agency, in particular Patricia Nelson, I once again extend my heartfelt thanks. I would also like to thank my personal publicist, Kathleen Carter, for her inspired and creative support.

  I am profoundly grateful to my editor, Tessa Woodward, for understanding what I wanted to do with this book long before I had figured it out, and for guiding me with such sensitivity and certainty. I am so fortunate to have her (and her keen appreciation of all things royal) at my side.

  I am also very grateful to Elle Keck in editorial, as well as my HarperCollins publicists Camille Collins, Jessica Lyons, Melissa Nowakowski, and Irina Pintea for supporting me so ably.

  I want to thank the amazing team at William Morrow, in particular Samantha Hagerbaumer, Jennifer Hart, Martin Karlow, Julia Meltzer, Carla Parker, Shelby Peak, Alison Smith, Diahann Sturge, Serena Wang, Molly Waxman, and Amelia Wood. Thanks to the producers at HarperAudio for once again creating a beautiful audiobook. I’m also very grateful to the incredible sales staff in the U.S., Canada, and the international division, as well as the wonderful people at HarperCollins Canada, among them Leo Macdonald, Sandra Leff, Cory Beatty, Colleen Simpson, Shannon Parsons, Suman Seewat, and Kaitlyn Vincent.

  Closer to home, I’d like to thank my friends for their love and support: Amutha, Ana, Clara, Denise, Erin, Jane D, Jane E, Jen, Kelly F, Kelly W, Liz, Margie, Mary, Mary Ellen, Michela, and Rena. I would not have survived the race to the finish without the counsel and group texts from my band of sisters, aka the Coven: Karma Brown, Kerry Clare, Chantel Guertin, Kate Hilton, Elizabeth Renzetti, Marissa Stapley, and Kathleen Tucker. My sincere thanks as well to fellow authors and friends Janie Chang, Megan Crane, Karen Lord, and Kate Quinn for their sage advice and unflagging support.

  My loving thanks to all my family, in particular my sister Kate and my children, Matthew and Daniela, for all they did to support and encourage me when I was buried in the world of The Gown. Most of all I want to thank my husband, Claudio, whose loving and steadfast heart is the inspiration for all of my heroes. (Now just go out and get that Wilfred Owen tattoo, okay?)