The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1)

by Nicholls, Sophie

  ‘The combination of charm placement with chosen totem words and especially colour should also be considered carefully. Some colours – red, for example - are often powerful enough and need no further help. We should aim for subtlety and comfort for the wearer. Over time, this will always have the appropriate effect.

  Before use, charms should be ‘cleansed’ by placing them on a windowsill in sunlight or moonlight, by burying them in complete darkness or passing them through the flame of a red candle…’

  In complete darkness, thought Ella, thinking of the gap under the floorboards. She reached back into the box. And yes, here was a bundle of red candles tied with a white ribbon and here was a small screw-top jar. The contents rattled against one another – charms, the little brass and silver weights that Mamma liked to sew into the hems of lighter weight fabrics, so that they hung just so. Ella tipped a handful onto her palm: an owl, not much larger than her little fingernail, but still perfect in its detail, with eyes and beak and tufted ears; a lucky horseshoe; a pair of angels’ wings.

  This was more interesting. And she’d been right. It was magic. Everyday magic, maybe. But magic just the same. Mamma’s charms and words. They were more than a game. Madaar-Bozorg, at least, seemed to think of them as spells.

  Ella had never seen anything lying around on a windowsill – although now she thought about it, it was certainly true that Mamma liked to sit in a patch of sunlight to do her most delicate work, what she called ‘finishing,’ the last point in the fitting or alteration of a garment. She’d angle her chair to catch the sun or, when the weather was warm enough, she liked to sit outside.

  Her heart fluttered in her chest as she turned to the next page.

  ‘Words,’ Madaar-Bozorg had written, the letters fiercely underlined. ‘The best words are not chosen. They choose themselves. Whilst working on the garment, try to relax your mind and focus only on the feel of the fabric, the movement of your fingers. Let the words find you.’

  Underneath, in tiny cramped script, she’d made a list of dates and details:

  ‘19 June 1953 – blue scarf, both hems – open your heart.

  6 July 1953 – yellow silk gown, interlining at décolleté – courage, a sunlit hour.

  18 September 1953 – embroidered housecoat, hem – patience.

  29 February 1954 – red wool suit, jacket pocket lining – carry your truth.’

  At the end of this list, in large capitals she’d added: ‘I EVENTUALLY CONCLUDED THAT WORDS SHOULD NOT BE RECORDED ANYWHERE BUT IN THE CLOTHES THEMSELVES.’

  Ella shivered. Was she imagining the little breeze that seemed to blow quite suddenly through the chinks in the old wooden window frame and whirl around the room? She felt a cool touch on her cheek.

  It was clear that Madaar-Bozorg had believed in the power of these charms and word spells, that she’d passed them down to Mamma. So why was Mamma so determined to keep these things hidden from her? Why did she go on insisting that it wasn’t magic? She felt that hot bead of anger bubble up in her again. It wasn’t fair. Didn’t Mamma trust her? It wasn’t as if she was a child anymore. Why couldn’t Mamma just explain these things instead of being all cloak and dagger about it?

  She closed the book, tying the black ribbons in a precise bow, returning it and the jar and the candles to the box, replacing the lid, being careful to wipe away her fingermarks from the film of dust.

  She lay staring up at the ceiling for a long time, watching the patch of orange from the nextdoor café’s security light waver over the pale plaster. She counted the Minster bells chiming the hour – ten and then eleven…

  And just as she was drifting down that familiar wide black river, the stars swooping down to touch her face, she heard the jingle of the shop bell far below her and the sound of Mamma’s muffled laughter. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands, tucked her knees up under her and dived deeper into the cloudy darkness.

  *

  Mamma came back from London minus most of her hair. When Ella woke up the next morning and came into the kitchen, she was there, peering at her reflection in the kettle, patting and primping the cropped tendrils.

  ‘Blimey,’ Ella said, still feeling cross. ‘That’s drastic.’

  Mamma spun round and crossed the kitchen, flinging her arms wide. ‘Tesora. There you are. Were you OK? You weren’t too lonely? I had such a lovely time! Next time, you have to come with us…’

  Her eyes were more luminescent than ever in her small heart-shaped face, newly framed by the short dark hair.

  Ella let herself be hugged.

  ‘Are you alright, Ella? Has something happened?’

  She shook her head, helping herself to a piece of toast, buttering it fiercely.

  Mamma bent over the chrome toaster and examined her reflection. She fingered a tendril of hair.

  ‘It was just… how do you say?... an impulse? We were walking past a salon and I thought, well, I haven’t done anything with it in so long… And then I thought, why not cut it all off! Be modern! Be brave!’ Her voice was higher than usual, coming out in little breathy gasps.

  Ella remembered all the evenings that she’d taken the tortoiseshell comb to Mamma’s hair, moving her arm down its shining length, feeling it softness stroking the backs of her hands, the rhythmic motion calming her.

  ‘It’s lovely, mum,’ she relented. ‘It’s cool. It really suits you.’

  Everything was changing so fast.

  13.

  Apron, vinyl-coated cotton with slogan. British Home Stores.

  ‘Want to come with me somewhere?’

  She had her head out of the window, letting the afternoon sun, reflected off the rooftops, wash her face clean. A pigeon basking in the guttering rattled upwards in a hiccough of feathers.

  Billy was standing in the courtyard, shielding his eyes from the sun, squinting up at her. ‘Well, then. Are you coming with me or not?’

  ‘Give me five minutes.‘ She rushed to the bathroom to clean her teeth and tidy her hair. She’d started doing this lately. Whenever Billy called for her, she felt her stomach flip. It was like having a goldfish swimming around her insides. Intensely annoying.

  She often caught herself wondering if Billy preferred her hair like this, or like this instead, arranging it this way or that, and pinching colour into her cheeks in the freckled bathroom mirror, a tip she’d read in one of Katrina’s mum’s magazines.

  ‘Where are you off to, Billy?’ Mamma was calling, ‘Where are you taking my daughter? I need to know.’

  Billy was pacing up and down the courtyard, jumpy with impatience. He tapped his nose with his finger. ‘It’s a surprise, Mrs Moreno,’ he said, ‘Don’t make me give it away.’

  ‘Well, you be careful.’ Mamma summoned her sternest tone, ‘I’m holding you responsible, young man.’

  Billy had crept under Mamma’s skin somehow, in that way he had. The quick grin, the winks and nudges, they worked on you sideways, like a magic all of his own.

  As she stood watching them throw words back and forth, easily, fluently, like sunlight across the cobblestones, she wondered what her magic was. No one seemed to respond to her in that way at all.

  Billy produced a mock swagger. ‘Now you know you can trust me, Mrs Moreno. What am I going to do, anyway? Shove ‘er in the river?’

  ‘Who knows? I wouldn’t put it past you.’

  He was still chuckling to himself as they turned out of the courtyard to join the polite push of Saturday shoppers along the narrow streets.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ he said, ‘Something I bet you’ve never seen before.’

  ‘What? Why can’t you tell me now? I hate surprises.’

  But he refused to be drawn.

  They reached the cool damp of the trees that fringed the approach to the river bank. The new leaves hung down in shimmering tassels, almost touching her face.

  ‘Seen ‘em yet?’

  In amongst the trees and over the grassy banks, the geese were honking loude
r then she’d ever heard, picking up their webbed feet in a proud and determined march, making short-sightedly for the river.

  ‘You don’t need to be scared of them,’ Billy had told her before. ‘They’re all mouth and no trousers, geese. Their eyes are on the side of their heads so they can’t see in front of ‘em at all.’

  He’d demonstrated by clapping his hands in front of a hissing beak. ‘See. Can’t see anything in front of their faces. Most people don’t realise that.’

  This morning, the geese seemed unusually determined. A woman hurried past on the riverside path with a bag of shopping and swerved to avoid a convoy of geese, sticking out their sinewy necks and snapping their wings.

  As Ella looked more closely, she suddenly saw the reason why. In front of them, in a doddery line, several fluffy goslings tottered towards the water.

  Billy grinned. ‘Want to get closer?’

  They found a place on the grassy bank that was still unspattered by goose droppings and watched. She rested her back on a tree trunk, feeling its warmth through the material of her blouse. The heat was already gathering just above the river’s surface. Flies hovered in the shimmer, like stray sequins. The hawthorns and chestnuts were draped with fat loops of pink and white blossom like feather boas, and when she closed her eyes for a moment she could see the sun stamped on the insides of her eyelids in two perfect discs of gold.

  ‘Look. These ones here have only got one,’ said Billy as a mother and father goose urged their single gosling in front of them.

  ‘Like me, I suppose.’ Ella wondered if it was only her imagination that saw the expression in the eyes of these geese parents, they way they walked more hesitantly and quietly, a little apart from the other raucous families.

  ‘Them over there is more like me and my brothers, then,’ laughed Billy, watching a group of six or seven jostling one another into the water. ‘Speaking of which,’ he added, ‘let’s go.’

  ‘Where?’ she said, ‘Where now?’

  Her limbs were heavy and drowsy. She didn’t want to move.

  ‘Well, you wanted to come, didn’t you, have a cup of tea with Mum? She’s desperate to meet you, I can tell you…’

  *

  So this, Ella thought, was what Billy had meant. Mrs Vickers poured tea from a huge brown pot, the glaze crazed from years of just-boiled water. Ella balanced the cup and saucer on her knee in the dark front room and sipped carefully.

  She really didn’t like tea. She’d only tried it a couple of times before and she thought that it tasted like perfume, tart and chemical on her tongue. The milk looked faintly sickening, making white whorls across the top of the pale brown liquid. She was used to black coffee in tiny cupfuls, the hot sips of fragrant steam.

  ‘We’ve heard a lot about you, dear.’ Mrs Vickers was smiling. She had a kind face, grey hair scooped up into a bun on the top of her head from which wisps escaped and floated around her cheeks like a fuzzy halo. The sun coming in through the window made this halo of hair flare and shimmer so that she seemed almost to glow.

  She looked more like a grandmother than a mother, Ella thought. She wore a wipe-down apron, bright pink and printed with the words, ‘KEEP CALM AND EAT CAKE.’ Underneath it, her body looked soft and floury, like a well-baked loaf.

  ‘All those stories. Billy tells them to me sometimes,’ she said. ‘I love to hear ‘em. I’ve always liked a good story.’

  ‘You should come into the shop some time, Mrs Vickers. I’m sure my mother would love to meet you.’

  Mrs Vickers, looking amused. ‘Now what would I be doing in a posh shop like your mum’s? I wouldn’t know where to put myself.’

  Ella asked if she could use the bathroom. It was a small room built on the back of the kitchen, smelling of bleach and cold.

  She pressed her cheek against the cool of the wall. Her hands felt clammy and her heart pounded in her chest. She wasn’t sure why.

  Mrs Vickers had said that the shop was posh. Ella had always thought that ‘posh’ was for people like Katrina, with wedding-cake houses and gardens the size of parks. She didn’t want to be posh. That was just one more way of being different, wasn’t it?

  She bent over the sink to pat water onto her cheeks. Behind the taps, a plastic beaker bristled with toothbrushes, so many that they didn’t all quite fit. On a small painted wooden chest, several sets of razors and shaving brushes were laid out, each on a neatly folded towel.

  On the back of the door hung a set of greasy overalls and a scrubbed enamel bath, which she guessed was for Billy’s brothers to wash outside in the yard. The proper bath was so large aFClub

  nd deep that she thought she might be able to float on her back in it, her hands hardly touching the sides at all. At the bottom of the bath were two coarse and crinkly black hairs, left behind by the bathwater. Yes, Billy’s house was a house for men.

  When she emerged from the bathroom, the house had filled up with them. In the front room, Billy perched on a small wooden footstool whilst two large men spread themselves across the settee and another leaned in the doorway.

  The seated men stood up as she came in and nodded their heads.

  ‘Well, now, this must be the beauty that’s captured our Billy’s heart,’ said one, his face creasing with a familiar grin, and he took Ella’s hand and bowed so low that his head nearly touched his knees. ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘Don’t mind Tommy, love. He’s just messing about.’ Another brother held out his hand to her, ‘I’m Chris, the handsome Bill’s other brother’.

  Billy sprung up from the stool and made as if to punch Chris in the leg but Tommy’s hand shot out from his side and pulled Billy into a headlock so that all he could do was flail his arms around, muttering, ‘Gerrof, Tommy, gerrof,’ under his breath.

  ‘Get on with you,’ Billy’s mum said. ‘You’re only embarrassing the poor girl.’

  The older man, Billy’s father, rolled his eyes heavenward, smiled and took Ella’s hand in both of his. She noticed that he didn’t have the wide grin of Billy and Tommy. His eyes were quiet and watchful. ‘Nice to meet you, love.’

  ‘C’mon then, you daft lumps. Get yourselves washed and sorted,’ said Mrs Vickers, ‘There isn’t room for all you in here. We’re trying to have a civilised conversation.’

  Without another word, the men stretched themselves and moved off. Their boots clattered up the narrow hall and stairs and Ella watched Mrs Vickers wince as doors banged and floorboards creaked overhead.

  ‘What a great lot of ‘em,’ she said as if she was suddenly surprised to find herself here in this house with all these men and couldn’t quite remember where they’d all come from.

  Ella crumbled Mrs Vickers’ cake between her fingers, a buttery sponge that left a white film of icing sugar on the willow pattern plate. She wiped her hands on the starched napkin and swirled cold tea in the cup and tried to say the right things in the right places and not anything that sounded posh. All the time, she felt Billy watching her from his stool in the corner, his head cocked to one side.

  Mr Vickers joined them again, his face pink and clean-shaven, his hair Brylcreamed back from his forehead.

  ‘So, Ella,’ he said. ‘Billy tells us you were down on the south coast before coming up ‘ere. What was that like?’

  ‘It was, erm… nice, I think,’ she said, searching for an image or a phrase where she could find a foothold, something real to say. ‘I liked the sea. I used to swim. But I like it here too, very much.’

  ‘I hear there’s a lot of trouble down there, lately,’ said Mr Vickers, clearing his throat, watching her intently. ‘Down there on the coast. Problems with the workers at the docks, in the packing houses, the factories and so forth…’ He nodded to himself. ‘Yes, trouble, so we’ve heard through the Union. Things getting a bit hairy down there, to say the least…’ and he looked at her again, a long searching look.

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Vickers. I suppose I wouldn’t really know much about that…’ She c
ould feel a dark gap like a stain beginning to spread itself inside her.

  ‘‘Course you wouldn’t, love,’ said Mrs Vickers, fixing her husband with a look. She cleared her throat. ‘So you like to swim, you say. Well, Billy, you’ll have to take Ella to the swimming platform.’

  She turned to Ella, the light sparking the silver threads in her hair again.

  ‘Yes, you might like that, love. I used to be a real one for swimming in the river when I was a girl.’

  Then her face clouded over.

  ‘Oh, but of course, what am I saying? Billy, you’ll have to check with Mrs Moreno first. Yes, ask your mum, love. She might not want you going there. Better to ask her.’

  Later, Billy walked her back home over the bridge.

  ‘My idiot brothers,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I did try to warn you. But you know they were only having a laugh, with what they said and all that, don’t you?’

  A pair of geese flew low over their heads, so low that Ella could feel the movement of the air made by their wings.

  The evening was warm and spread out all around them. The surface of the river was smooth, the water moving beneath them like one long muscle.

  She tipped back her head and felt the sky fall into her.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Don’t be silly.’

  *

  She didn’t like to admit it, even to herself, but Jean Cushworth was feeling more than a little annoyed by the Moreno woman.

  First, and it was undeniable now, she seemed to have got her claws into David Carter.

  David. He’d caused quite a stir among her circle of ladies when he’d joined the local surgery as the new partner. Some of them, discovering that he was still unmarried, had taken to making quite crude jokes, remarking on his bedside manner, that kind of thing. Some of them, she was convinced, had even invented various aches and pains, just as an excuse to unbutton their blouses and have him pay them some attention. Sad, really.