Granny has arrived.
I head gingerly for the sitting room and poke my head round the door.
Granny is sitting in the largest armchair with her back to the window and the light streaming through her perfect coiffure. Her posture is straight as a ruler, her ankles crossed. Her expression, as usual, is severe.
‘I'm staying,’ she says, ‘at the Ritz. At least it has a view of the park. I notice my room here has been commandeered.’
‘Hi Granny. Good to see you.’
‘What are you wearing, child? You look like a Brillo pad.’
I'm in a silver net mini that Jenny brought back from LA, worn over a grey tee-shirt dress, with a silver flower in my hair. It could have been a lot worse. Granny wouldn't have liked the romper suit at all.
‘Come and give me a kiss.’
I kiss her powdered cheek, with its signature smell of Arpège. Granny, I have to say, is looking good, as usual. She has first-class cheekbones, the Chatham speedy metabolism – so no spare fat – an expensive hairdresser and an innate knowledge of what suits her. Today she's in a tailored purple cotton dress accessorised with a massive turquoise necklace and purple patent Bally heels.
‘Like the outfit, Granny.’
‘Of course you do, darling. You have taste. Or you will shortly, when you grow out of this metallic phase. I've come to meet your friend Crow. Your mother has told me all about her. By the way, Sally's taking an age to make tea and I've been here for hours. Will you be so kind as to introduce me?’
I'm a bit surprised. Granny doesn't usually ask to meet my friends. She wasn't remotely interested when Jenny came back from her first trip away shooting with Hollywood's Hottest Couple, and only talks to her because she met Sir Lionel at a few house parties in the seventies. She's tried to make an effort with Edie, but having established that they don't have any friends or relatives in common, she quickly ran out of things to say. Edie thinks Granny is a certifiable loony and doesn't like to be left in a room with her, which doesn't exactly make for a great relationship. So what Granny's going to make of a little black girl who lives with her aunt in a flat off Gloucester Road, I can't imagine.
Nevertheless, I'm curious. I'm about to take Granny downstairs when I realise that Crow's been standing behind me all the time, observing Granny from the shadows with a sort of half smile. So I bring her into the room and Granny holds out her hands.
‘Darling child! What a pleasure! Sally has been telling me all about you. I've been looking at those beautiful drawings you do. I sense the influence of Dior and Balenciaga. Are you a great fan of Dior?’
‘Yes,’ Crow whispers, sitting at Granny's feet. She doesn't know this, but it happens to be the perfect thing to do. Granny was brought up in an age when children sat at their elders’ feet and looked up at them adoringly. We, of course, tend to curl up on the sofa and eye people like Granny a bit suspiciously, which doesn't go down so well.
‘My mother bought one of the original New Look designs in forty-seven. Do you know,’ Granny goes on, ‘when I was a girl I wore Dior regularly to all the best places? Oh, those Paris fittings! What a joy!’
‘Did you know Yvette Mansard?’ Crow asks eagerly. ‘She worked for Dior.’
‘Yvette?’ Granny thinks for a minute. ‘In the atelier flou? She specialised in dresses, didn't she? She was a legend. Is she still alive? She must be ninety.’
‘She's ninety-two. She's been teaching me.’
Granny smiles a huge smile and practically kisses Crow, who's succeeded where all my other friends have failed. She and Granny have a friend in common. And not only that, but a friend who reminds Granny of the happiest time in her life, before all her family money was spent on her mother's boyfriends, death taxes, repairing the roof, and educating Mum and Poor Uncle Jack (who lives in a bungalow in East Anglia, mends MG sports cars and is rumoured to Take Drugs), as we are so regularly reminded.
At this point, Mum arrives with a tray laden with china cups and saucers, teapot, milk jug and sugar bowl (Granny doesn't take sugar but is appalled if the bowl isn't included). Granny waves her away.
‘Your delightful guest and I are going to visit the workroom. We have lots to talk about. Please don't disturb us.’
And off they sweep, Crow happily trailing in Granny's wake. Mum and I look at each other in mild disbelief and I help her take the tray back to the kitchen.
As usual when Granny visits, she takes over all our lives. Luckily for him, Harry's travelling in India, so he's spared the normal inquisition about his studies and his love life. Mum, however, is investigated at length about her love life (lack of) and pronounced SO disappointing. I'm allowed not to have one, for the time being. Instead, I become the family fetcher and carrier and have half my wardrobe vetoed as too weird or too tarty. Crow is treated like the family star.
Granny takes us all to the Ritz and gets Crow to invite Florence and Yvette Mansard too. For someone who spends a large proportion of her life complaining about the absolute lack of family funds after they were ‘frittered away’ by her parents and children, she always seems to have a surprising amount of cash stashed away for slap-up meals, the latest shoes and glamorous jewellery (or, as she would say, ‘the basic essentials’).
Yvette, it turns out, has been living quietly for years in London after moving here to live with a girlfriend when she retired. Yvette is totally cool. If anything, she is more amazing than Crow suggested. She and Granny reminisce for hours about the clients, the fittings, the suits, the dresses and little places in Paris they used to know. Crow laps up every word and hardly eats. Then Yvette says that Crow is one of the most talented seamstresses she's ever encountered, as well as being able to produce original designs, and Granny couldn't be nicer to her if she were a visiting maharaja.
There's a pause during the meal when the older members of the group take to sighing and looking nostalgic.
‘What happened to all those clothes?’Yvette murmurs sadly.
‘Oh, I've still got them,’ Granny says. ‘Mine and my mother's. They're heirlooms. I wasn't giving those away.’
Mum and I look startled. Mum's probably thinking of the millions of occasions she could have done with borrowing something couture-ish before her modelling career enabled her to buy some of her own. I'm thinking of all those wasted childhood holidays when I could have been checking out the clothes for ideas. Crow and Yvette look reverent, as if she's mentioned a bunch of sacred relics.
‘Can I see them?’ Crow whispers so quietly the words hardly make it out.
‘Come and stay,’ Granny says imperiously. ‘Bring Nonie for company. I haven't looked at those things for years, although goodness knows my banker tells me to sell them often enough. I've got a couple of evening gowns you might find interesting. Some jackets. Some Ungaro and a bit of Chanel. Saint Laurent, of course. Unlike Mother, I wasn't always faithful to Dior. You like studying techniques, don't you, darling child? I'm sure you'll have some fun.’
Crow says nothing else for the rest of the meal. I can tell she's busy trying to imagine Granny's cache of couture. I don't think Florence says a word throughout. Mum and I are quiet too because spending time with Granny is always a bit exhausting for us. But Granny and Yvette quickly bond like old school-friends and get busy making plans to see each other again and go to a bistro Yvette knows where they make proper café crème.
‘What about Rebecca?’ I whisper to Crow in the taxi on the way back from the Ritz. ‘Aren't you due to deliver another batch of dresses? You know she just sold out of the last lot.’
Crow shrugs nonchalantly and looks out of the window. I'm shocked. She can be quite ruthless when she knows what she wants. Rebecca's clients will have to wait.
If I were Crow, I'd be worried sick about letting people down, but everything seems to be remarkably simple in her world. It occurs to me that she probably won't even bother to mention that she's going away. Dogsbody over here had better do it.
I spend the rest of the journey worki
ng out the best way of breaking the bad news. Crow puts her head against the taxi window and within two minutes is asleep, clearly dreaming of Dior and smiling quietly to herself in anticipation.
Before we go to Granny's, Crow and Jenny come up with a design for a dress to wear at the National Film Awards that, for once, won't make her look like some sort of hunchback mutant. Yvette comes over and, with Granny in attendance, shows Crow how to pad out her tailor's dummy to Jenny's precise measurements and start fitting the pieces of calico that will form the pattern of the dress.
It's not going to be quite as loose and dreamy as the things Crow's been designing so far. It's going to have a very fitted bodice and a skirt with lots of petticoats. (‘Very New Look,’ in Granny's happy opinion. Dior, not High Street.) Skye and Crow go on an extended shopping trip to find the perfect silk to make it with and Jenny writes an ENORMOUS cheque for the fabric.
By the time we come back, Crow will only have two weeks to make the dress. But she seems, as ever, relaxed about managing it. I still can't quite believe we're relying on a twelve-year-old to rescue Jenny from her fashion nightmares. But the worst that can happen is that she'll look incredibly stupid on the red carpet and the boy she fancies won't talk to her and thousands of people will write nasty things about her in magazines and on the internet. And that's already happened.
I had all sorts of plans for the rest of the holidays – loads of friends to see, a festival to go to and a couple of very promising parties. But this was before Crow took over my life. Granny's house is in the depths of the country and there isn't a café or a cinema for miles. The nearest villagers probably wouldn't know a smoothie if it was piped through the tap. I predict being so thoroughly bored that I'm reduced to packing next term's Eng. Lit. syllabus so I can start on my reading.
Crow's satchel is even heavier than my bag and once I've carried it in from the car to her new room, I simply have to peek inside. It turns out she's brought her Singer sewing machine. I think it's her version of a teddy bear. And the history of the House of Dior. She's on chapter two.
Granny's home is enormous, old and crumbly. There are, for example, nine rooms that could be bedrooms, although only five of those have beds in and only three have beds in that you might ever want to sleep in. It was great for riding our bikes in when Harry and I were small, but once you've done things like wash your granny's old tights in the sink in the laundry room, it tends to lose its charm. It's also freezing, even in August. I'm glad I've brought a couple of Crow's magic Arctic-cobweb jumpers. They're super-warm and make the stay possible. I think she owes me this at least.
Most of the downstairs rooms are grand, but when we visit we tend to live in the kitchen, which was last decorated in 1972, when Granny had some spare cash that wasn't required for ‘basics’ like Roger Vivier evening slippers. I last visited the attics when I was about five and had no idea that two of the rooms (there are several) are floor-to-ceiling cotton bags, carefully labelled, stuffed with couture.
This is irritating. I've been asking Granny for books on Saint Laurent, Vionnet and all the greats since I was tiny and it is a known family fact that I am more than slightly interested in fashion – in fact it's practically the only thing I know anything about. Yet it's never occurred to Granny to mention that she PRACTICALLY OWNS A MUSEUM OF THE STUFF. She says casually over dinner one evening that ‘being interested isn't enough, darling. You have to be able to do something with it. Otherwise I'd have every fashion student in the country round here, rummaging through my things.’
It's true. She would.
Crow is delicate and meticulous. She doesn't rummage. Each day, while Granny and I play cards and read, she goes up to the attics like she's climbing the staircase to heaven and carefully removes half-a-dozen outfits from their coverings. Her long fingers delicately trace the fabrics, the trimmings, the edgings, the seams. She's allowed to pick one outfit a day that Granny will try on for her. Granny, needless to say (and she often does), can still get into her wedding dress and anything else she wore in her twenties. She looks a bit scrawnier than she probably did then, but the fit isn't bad.
‘I would have handed them on to you, darling,’ she says to me, rubbing salt in the wound, ‘but your mother's too tall and you're too short. It's a shame your father was so . . . petit.’
There isn't much Granny likes about my father. If she hadn't discovered he was the grandson of a count I'm not sure she'd ever have spoken to him. He thinks she's great, but he still calls her ‘la belle dame sans merci’.
One day, about a week in, I go into the bedroom Crow's using to tell her it's teatime and get the shock of my life. A midnight-blue lace cocktail dress is lying under the window in pieces. The bodice has been separated from the skirt and several seams have been undone. Petticoats litter the area. For a moment, I feel as if I've wandered into a crime scene, and I half expect to see a chalk line around it and forensics experts crawling over it, looking for DNA.
I go in closer. The label says Dior. This is sacrilege.
Crow comes in behind me and gives me a cheerful smile.
‘My God! What's Granny going to say?’ I gibber.
‘It's all right. She said I could,’ Crow tells me calmly. ‘I'm borrowing it.’
‘But it's in bits.’
‘Of course. I have some adjustments to make. I'm just examining the seams.’
‘Examining the seams? Do you really think you'll be able to put it back together?’
She shrugs her shrug. ‘Yvette will help me, but it's clear how the dress was made.’
It's clear to me how people do bungee jumping, but that doesn't mean I'd ever attempt it myself. But Crow seems to think it's perfectly natural to try and recreate the stitches of a Dior couturière. So does Granny, apparently. She doesn't seem remotely bothered when I nervously mention it at tea.
In the evenings, Granny reminisces about her Paris days and rumbles on about how things have changed.
‘In my day, the regular clients were European princesses and American heiresses who dressed like ladies. Now it's all mobsters’ molls and pop stars who dress like glorified tarts. I've lost track of the number of nipples I've seen on the catwalk. It's quite disgusting. One of them was your mother's once, Nonie. I'm not sure I ever recovered.’
Granny doesn't often talk about Mum's career. I'm starting to suspect that she might be jealous of Mum wearing all those fabulous outfits, day in day out, and getting paid to do it. Granny was born to be a model. She had the height and the pouty looks and the theatricality. She could have posed for England. But in her day, nicely brought-up girls didn't do that sort of thing. Or so Great-Grandma told her.
Crow doesn't comment. She just listens and occasionally you can see her fingertips moving, as if she's trying to remember the feel of a particular fabric. Or else she's drawing her dancing girls, but this time they're in more recognisable outfits. I can see bits of Dior and Saint Laurent, Chanel and Ungaro and others of Granny's favourites. She'll quickly sketch the outline, as she usually does, but then she'll spend ages tracing the line of a pocket, or a line of buttons, or a flash of crystal embroidery. I have a feeling that by the end of our stay she'll be able to recreate every one of those outfits from memory.
When it's time for us to go, Crow as usual doesn't bother to say thank you. She just climbs into the car beside the big basket containing the remains of the Dior dress. Granny gives me a look as I squeeze in beside her – the first time I've seen her disappointed by Crow's manners, or total lack of them.
But by the time we get home, she's been on the phone to Mum – practically in tears, Mum says, which is a first since Grandpa died. It turns out that Granny went up to her bedroom and found a new outfit on the bed. Crow had brought some purple velvet down and made Granny a new tunic dress to show off her latest jewellery. And she's guessed her measurements so perfectly from handling the clothes in the attic that she didn't even need to give her a fitting.
I think if Crow were fifty years older
and a bloke, Granny would probably marry her.
It turns out Mum was right.
All Jenny needed was corsetry. A bodice with boning sewn into the fabric can make your curves look shapely, instead of lumpy, and can emphasise your thin bits to the max. It's not the most comfortable thing in the world, but it works. Women have been using them for centuries.
Crow's design for the National Movie Awards, is effectively a corset with a puffy skirt. As well as being not the easiest thing to wear, it's also not the easiest thing to make. The last week of the holidays is so manic with cutting, sewing, fitting, pressing and remaking that I almost forget to go to school. And that's only the toile – the cotton practice version of the dress that creates the pattern. Then Crow has to do the whole thing again in white silk. And just because that isn't enough of a challenge, she's decided to embroider the bodice with crystals. Yvette watches over her, approvingly, showing her shortcuts and special stitches to make the fabric do exactly what she wants.
The result is stunning. Worth every pinprick and late night. Jenny gives us a mini fashion-show the day before the awards and she doesn't look like Quasimodo any more. She looks like a movie star. She has a waist. A tiny one. And delicate ankles. And beautiful peachy skin on her shoulders. The full skirt hides her hips and thighs. The bodice makes her boobs look like they're supposed to be there. And the Louboutins are the perfect finishing touch.
The style may be inspired by the New Look, but whereas Dior relied on enough fabric in the skirt to make a large marquee, Crow has done clever things with seams and petticoats so it uses a fraction of the material and seems as light as air. The overall effect is ‘Oh, this little thing? I just threw it on my perfectly proportioned body’.
Granny loves it because it makes her nostalgic. I love it because it reminds me of Marilyn Monroe, which is the direction I think Jenny should be going in with her curves. Jenny loves it because it makes her feel pretty. Crow loves it because she enjoyed every second of putting it together.
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