The Dress Shop of Dreams

by Menna Van Praag

  Walt frowns. “I’m glad, but—”

  “I’ve known you all your life, Walt. How could I not know?”

  Walt lets out a sigh.

  “Don’t worry.” Etta smiles. “I’m not going to drape myself all over you. I only wanted to say that you have a wonderful gift, the ability to fill people with a sense of possibility, make us believe in everything, most of all in ourselves.”

  “Do I?”

  “Oh, yes,” Etta says. “Most people think this world we live in is mundane, but you remind us that it’s magical. You wrap reality in the wonder and joy of fiction, until it infuses us and becomes true.”

  “Well, I …” Walt falters.

  Etta smiles. “You’re one of life’s magicians. You simply haven’t realized it yet.”

  Walt contemplates her words. He’d dismiss this notion, coming from anyone else—from any of his fan letters, even from Milly or Cora—but he’s looked up to Etta since he was a boy so he pays her the compliment of considering what she says.

  “I’ve never thought about it like that,” he admits. “I know people are moved by my voice, when I read, but I’ve never experienced it, I’ve never heard—”

  “Of course you haven’t,” Etta says. “Unfortunately most magicians are immune to their own magic. We see behind the veil, we live inside the nuts and bolts, the element of surprise is lost on us. But we can help each other. Last night, when you were reading Cyrano de Bergerac I started thinking again about something, a secret I’ve been keeping for a long time. Now I’ve decided at last to tell him, and Cora, as I should have done years ago. That’s thanks to you.”

  Etta sees the look of sorrowful longing that passes over Walt’s face at the mention of her granddaughter’s name.

  “Why Cora?” he asks. “What secret have you been keeping from Cora?”

  Etta takes a deep breath. “Her grandfather. He’s … It’s complicated, but he’s a priest now, at the Catholic church on Regent Street—at least he was, nearly fifty years ago—I actually have no idea if …”

  “Sebastian?” Walt asks. “Is he Sebastian?”

  Etta’s heart quickens at the sound of his name. She nods, unable to speak.

  “He’s there,” Walt says. “I, um, I talk to him quite a lot.”

  In her surprise, Etta finds her voice again. “You’re Catholic?”

  Walt glances at his feet. “Not exactly, no. But he’s a really good listener.”

  Etta smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, he is.”

  A little sigh of relief escapes Etta’s lungs. She’d always believed that Sebastian was still alive and still in the same church. She’d counted on it, she’d imagined him for so long, felt his presence all the way across town. She’d have been stunned to learn he’d moved or—God forbid—died. But it’s a relief nevertheless to have her faith confirmed.

  Etta looks at Walt, waiting for him to catch her gaze and hold it. “You need to talk to Cora,” she says. “You need to tell her how you feel.”

  “W-what?” Walt splutters. He gazes down at the floor, the tips of his ears turning red. “I can’t. I tried. I couldn’t—”

  “You can,” Etta says, “and I can help you. Follow me.”

  With an alacrity that belies her age, Etta scurries across the velvet carpet and into her sewing room. Walt follows considerably more slowly, dragging his feet until he reaches the doorway.

  “I won’t wear a dress, no matter what you—”

  Etta giggles. She slides open a drawer, rummages through a rainbow of fabric swatches then pulls out a piece of maroon-colored velvet, an off-cut from the hem of Cora’s dress. Then Etta takes her needle and thread and sews six quick stiches in the shape of a star at the corner.

  “Here you go,” Etta says, handing the velvet to Walt.

  He examines the cloth. “I don’t understand.”

  “Just keep it in your pocket. And make sure you’ve got it when you talk to Cora. It’ll give you courage.”

  “No, I can’t,” Walt protests, “I can’t—”

  But even as he’s speaking he can feel a surge of courage rise in his chest, making him stand slightly taller. Cautiously, Walt rubs the velvet between his fingers as he wonders at what he might be about to do. What about Milly? How would it be fair to her? Surprisingly, as he holds the fabric tight, Walt feels the answer to a question he hasn’t asked tug at his heart and whisper in his head. Faith, it says. Have a little faith.

  Cora sits in the passenger seat of Henry’s car. He speeds around a bend and she grips the handle of the door, trying not to gasp. A traffic light ahead turns red and they slow, having just screeched past 14 cars, 21 pedestrians and 3 dogs. Cora exhales, fingers still tightly clasped, and stares at her feet, silently praying to St. Christopher that they reach their destination in one piece.

  “Sorry.” Henry glances over at the rigid figure next to him. “I’ll go slower.”

  “It’s okay,” Cora says. “I’m fine.”

  “There’s one thing you might want to know about me,” Henry says, “since we’re working on this together. I can tell a liar at a hundred paces.”

  Cora glances over at him. “You can?”

  Henry nods. “Not just in a cop way,” he says. “I don’t just have a feeling in my gut, I don’t just suspect, I know.”

  “Really?” Cora says. “So, just then, you—?”

  “Well, it didn’t take much of a sixth sense to see that you weren’t fine. Your white knuckles were a bit of a giveaway.” Henry smiles and nods at the door handle around which Cora’s fingers are still wrapped.

  She rests both hands in her lap as the car glides along the road. They are heading to the house of Nick Fielding to pay him an impromptu visit. They had been sitting in the café when, gulping down her second espresso, Cora found herself telling Henry everything: about her parents, Walt, Etta, losing her job and the dreams she had for her life.

  “Do you find people often confess their entire life stories to you?” Cora asks.

  “Not as often as I’d like. I tend to find that hardened criminals and corrupt police officers are usually tougher nuts to crack than scientists. But yes, I suppose I have a way about me that encourages people’s confidences.” Henry thinks of his ex-wife. “Except in some cases.”

  “Oh,” Cora says. “I see.”

  “You’re in love with that guy, Walt, right?”

  Cora sits up straighter, hands now clasped together, knuckles quickly turning white. “I didn’t say that. What makes you say so?”

  Henry shrugs. “Some things are just obvious.”

  Cora glances out of the window as they turn into a street of terraced houses. “Maybe,” she admits. “But it wasn’t to me.”

  “Yes, well,” Henry says, “that’s usually the way, isn’t it? We can’t see what’s closest to us. I have no idea what’s going on with my ex-wife. I think once the heart is tangled up in something we lose all sense of perspective.”

  Cora nods. With a half smile she thinks of Walt and wonders again how, given that she knows and understands some of the most complex subjects conjured up by man and nature, she could have failed to see something so simple. Henry has already revealed his own painful tale, a generous offering to reciprocate the flood of personal information she’d poured out on the table. Somewhere during her third espresso Cora had told him about visiting the coroner, and the fact that her parents had never drunk alcohol, so it was impossible that they’d been drunk that night and set the fire themselves. At this point Henry had almost leaped up from the table, and dragged her out of the café and into his car.

  “Are you really sure I should come with you?” Cora asks as they pull up outside Nick Fielding’s house and Henry starts reversing into a rather tight parking space.

  “Yes,” Henry says. “You’re going to tell him what you told me, while I watch him for clues. He’s a bit of a bastard, so he’s not going to tell us anything, not out loud at least, but that doesn’t matter.”

  “I
t doesn’t?” Cora asks as they push open the car doors and step onto the street. “Why not?”

  “Because he’ll give himself away anyway, then we’ll know what to do next.”

  Dylan chews the tip of his pen. He’s been writing and rewriting the same sentence for more than an hour but just can’t find the best way to say what he needs to. He knew this time would come sooner or later. His conscience would catch up with him and he’d have to put a stop to the crazy thing he’d started. He should have done it days ago, weeks ago, he never should have let it get this far. He never should have written to her in the first place. But, of course, once he’d begun it became harder and harder to stop. With each letter he fell a little more in love with Milly, and Dylan found that letting go of love wasn’t an easy thing at all.

  Dylan has every one of Milly’s letters, eighteen in total, stored away in a dark oak box lined with green velvet and locked in the bottom drawer of his desk. He rarely takes them out to reread, since he learned them by heart on the day they first arrived, and he can’t risk anyone finding them, but he certainly can’t burn the letters, and having the pages, inscribed with her handwriting, close to him brings Dylan comfort. He will always have them, at least, even if he won’t have her.

  Dylan puts his pen to the paper again. In truth he knows that he’s finding this final letter so hard to write not because he doesn’t know what to say but because he doesn’t want to say it. He’s never been in love before, never imagined what it would feel like to want another person more than anything else in life, so much so that you’d be willing to compromise everything in order to be with them, if only on the page. And Dylan desperately wants to keep going, to exchange written words with Milly until the day he dies. But he can’t, unless he tells her who he really is. But, if he does that, she’ll probably tell him to go to hell anyway, as well she should.

  Yesterday Dylan, who tells his father everything, finally confessed his crime. He waited for a lucid moment one night and began reading Ralph the letters. The sun was rising by the time Dylan finished and both men were wiping tears from their eyes.

  “I’m sorry, son,” Ralph said at last, “but you must stop.”

  “I know.”

  “Write to her one last time,” his father suggested, “to say good-bye.”

  “Yes.” Dylan nodded. “I will.”

  “Good boy.” Ralph patted his son’s knee. “You’re a good boy. Now, what are we having for lunch?”

  At dawn Dylan had absolutely promised his dad he’d stop writing to Milly but, ultimately, it was listening to Walt last night that finally pushed Dylan into forgoing the whims of his heart and doing the right thing. As part of a compilation of plays, Walt read the last act from Cyrano de Bergerac and, at ten minutes to midnight, his voice had stuck a knife into Dylan and sliced him clean through:

  “How obvious it is now—the gift you gave him. All those letters, they were you … All those beautiful powerful words, they were you!… The voice from the shadows, that was you … You always loved me!”

  The burgeoning guilt, the feeling Dylan had been successfully suppressing for the past few weeks, suddenly rose in a wave and crashed down upon him. It wasn’t just for Walt, but for Milly, too. They deserved a chance to be happy together, without Dylan standing in their way with his own selfish love and his letters. So now Dylan takes one deep breath, summons up the words in his throat and starts to speak them softly as his pen scratches across the page.

  My dearest Milly, this will be my last letter to you. I don’t think we should write anymore. I’ve loved every one of your letters, and will treasure them always, but I think it’s time to stop …

  Cora and Henry sit perched on the edge of Nick Fielding’s plastic-covered sofa. Cora’s fingers tremble under the old man’s angry gaze of pure hatred and she slips them under her knees, the palms of her sweaty hands squeaking as they stick to the plastic. Cora counts silently to herself. 68 green stripes on the sofa. 12 pictures on the walls, 5 paintings and 7 photographs. 9 silver trophies for golf tournaments. Zero books.

  “So,” Nick snaps, “what the hell do you want this time? You’ve got less than five minutes before Countdown is on so you’d better bloody well hurry up.”

  Cora glances at Henry, who gives her a slight nod.

  “Go on,” he says, “tell him what you told me.”

  A surge of panic floods through Cora’s chest and her palms sweat. She stares at the coffee table just beyond her feet and speaks to that, doing her best to pretend that she’s alone in the room, merely voicing her thoughts.

  “My parents never drank, not ever. So if there was alcohol in those blood samples then either it wasn’t their blood or their drinks were spiked …”

  It’s several seconds before Cora can look up again and, when she does, she glances over at Henry, who hasn’t taken his eyes off Nick Fielding. The old man shrugs.

  “So? They made a mistake at the lab. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened. Bunch of bastard boffins,” Nick says, “with their chemicals and science, thinking they’re better than the rest of us doing the real police work.”

  “Nice try, Nick.” Henry’s voice is sharp as glass. Next to him, Cora shivers. “But you’re lying.”

  “What the hell do you know?” Nick barks. “You never even worked on the case, it was twenty years ago.”

  Henry stands and walks slowly over to the plastic-covered chair in which former chief superintendent Nick Fielding is reclined. Cora watches him walk, a man suddenly transformed into someone hard and cruel and ruthless, someone who might threaten to snap an old man’s neck in order to get a piece of information he needed. Cora can’t see his face but she knows he must look like an entirely different man from the one she shared coffee with less than an hour ago. She can tell by his walk, by the way he holds his shoulders. This is a man who could terrify someone into a confession.

  “What do you know?” Henry stops at the chair and leans in so close that Nick Fielding shifts away until his back is pressed against the chair.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I did nothing wrong.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Henry leans in closer still, dropping his voice so low that Cora has to shift nearer to hear. “The blood samples are still on file, I checked. And with her blood to compare them to—” Henry nods in Cora’s direction. “—I can reopen the case based on corrupted evidence. You’ll be dragged through the mud. Your reputation, for what it’s worth, will be ruined. You may even go to prison. So tell me what you know.”

  Nick Fielding stares at the man standing above him. He spits out his words, firing them into Henry’s stomach.

  “I’m not saying anything without a lawyer.”

  “You don’t have to, I’ve got everything I need,” Henry says with a smile. “Thank you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “What do you know?” Cora hurries alongside Henry as they walk down the path toward the car. “He didn’t tell you anything.”

  “Oh, yes he did,” Henry says, opening the car door and sliding inside. He’s himself now, soft and gentle again. No longer someone Cora would be scared to meet in a dark alley, but someone she’d confide all her secrets to over coffee. Henry starts the engine, pulls out of his parking space and does a U-turn in the road. Cora slides across her seat and scrambles for her seat belt.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the scene of the crime.”

  Etta can’t quite believe she’s about to do this. It has been nearly fifty years since she last saw the man whose heart she’s held in her own all this time. She’s wearing a dress she has made especially for the occasion: dark blue velvet to the knee with patterns in emerald green beads around the hem, collar and cuffs. A scarf of shot silk, green and gold, drapes over her navy coat. Red patent-leather shoes complete the outfit.

  Once Etta had made the decision to
go to Sebastian she wasn’t able to wait. She stayed up all night sewing, finally finishing the dress just before dawn, and has now closed the shop in order to complete her mission, even though it’s a Wednesday, which is usually her busiest day. As she walks along King’s Parade, hands tucked deep into her pockets and head down against the wind, Etta smiles at the silliness of her urgency. She’s been sitting on her secret for nearly half a century and now, all of a sudden, she can’t possibly wait another minute before seeing Sebastian.

  When Etta reaches Downing Street she stops. Fitzbillies stands at the corner. Now she can hardly believe that she’s spent the last fifty years sitting in the café three times a week gazing into no-man’s land, on to the street that divided her territory from his. How many hours has she wasted at the window, drinking tea and consuming near-deadly doses of sugar and hoping she’d one day see Sebastian? How had she never broken their pact, how had she had the willpower to never before cross over into his side of town?

  With a single deep breath, Etta walks past Fitzbillies and turns onto Downing Street. She walks slowly now, taking her time to look at everything, anxious to see how it has changed in such an age. Surprisingly, excepting the addition of a rather soulless hotel and multistory car park, Etta finds the street hasn’t changed much at all. Though perhaps she shouldn’t be shocked since university buildings take up most of the space and it is an institution that holds hard and fast to tradition, avoiding change. Etta walks past the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, past the Zoology Department where she once saw the skeleton of a finback whale. When Etta turns onto Regent Street she begins to hurry, almost breaking into a run, the landscape now forgotten as she’s overcome by the desire to see Sebastian again. Right now.

  Etta can see the Catholic church before she reaches the end of the street. She has to stop and lean against a lamppost for a full minute before she can keep walking. When she reaches the crossroad leading to Hills Road, Etta lets the traffic lights change three times before she finally scuttles across the road on a red light, narrowly missing a car that honks at her as it screeches off. When she’s standing outside the open door to the church, Etta waits with her hand pressed against the wall. Perhaps Sebastian is saying mass or giving a service. Etta leans forward, poking her head halfway into the open doorway to listen for a voice she hasn’t heard for so long she wonders if she’ll remember the sound.