The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) (16 page)

She ran back up the stairs again, taking them two at a time, and slipped her hand under Mamma’s pillow. Her fingers closed over something. She drew out a single tarot card, a picture of a woman sitting on a throne in pale blue robes with a large cross around her neck and some kind of strange horned crown on her head. Her face was inked with a serene expression and she held what looked like a scroll in her hands. Behind her, between two pillars, was a pattern of palm leaves and pomegranates, their skins split to reveal glistening red seeds. At the woman’s feet was written: THE HIGH PRIESTESS.

Ella felt her heart banging against her ribs. Her skin felt hot and tight with frustration. What did that
mean
?

The card seemed to quiver slightly in her hands and she thought she could almost imagine the air stirring around her again, and voices, somewhere out there beyond the corners of the room, laughing and laughing at her.

She threw the card on the bed and then, thinking better of it, replaced it carefully under Mamma’s pillow, smoothing the quilt.

But later as she lay in bed with her book, the words swimming in front of her, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being laughed at, tricked in some way. It wasn’t fair. What was it that she wasn’t allowed to know?

She let her eyes close, let her mind contract to that still, quiet point and then let herself drift backwards inside her mind, back to the day when she’d first seen the book.

She’d been standing in the doorway of the bedroom, just a few days after they’d arrived here, watching Mamma stooped over the bed, the book lying on the quilt in front of her. She could just glimpse flashes of colour and hear a crackling sound, like dry leaves, as Mamma carefully turned the pages.

‘Mamma?’

She saw Mamma whip round, her tight, forced smile, the way that she’d closed the book with a snap.

‘Mamma, what are you doing?’

‘Oh, just looking at a few old things,
tesora
. Things I’ve found in all these boxes. Things I haven’t seen in ages. Be a darling, would you. Put some coffee on for me? I’m exhausted…’

And then, as she’d turned to leave the room, Ella had seen, through the chink in the door jamb, Mamma kneeling by the bed, lifting the quilt, pressing the floorboards with the flats of her hands, the faint creak of wood.

That was it. That was Mamma’s hiding place. It all made sense now. She threw off her covers and scrabbled on her hands and knees under Mamma’s bed, feeling along the edges of the painted floorboards for a break, a gap, a loose nail. Her fingers butted up against a splintered edge. She pulled the quilt impatiently over her head and peered into the darkness, levering with her fingernails. There was a groaning sound as one of the boards came up in her hand, revealing what she could just make out as a long narrow cavity.

When she put her hand in, carefully at first because the dark space made her cringe, thinking of the scratching sounds she sometimes heard at night - mice perhaps, or even something worse - her fingers closed around a long flat box and she lifted it out, running her hand over the red, cloth-covered surface that was slightly grainy with dust.

And even though she knew that she was alone in the flat, she couldn’t help looking quickly over her shoulder before setting the book in the middle of the rug. She felt the air gathering again, bunching up all around her, heard those voices, half-real, half-imagined:
She’s here, she’s here, she’shereshe’shereshe’shere…

She lifted the lid. Yes, here it was. The book.

It was a strange book, its covers made from two rectangular pieces of board, covered with green watermarked silk and tied together with thick black ribbon. The cover was stained in places, marked with grease and age, and the pages were thick and uneven. At certain points between the pages, scraps of fabric and what looked like the edges of paper dress-making patterns poked out. 

Ella’s fingers fumbled with the ribbon. She felt her heart banging again, noticed that her hands were trembling slightly as she opened the cover, turned to the first page and read the inscription:

‘This book belongs to:

Zohreh Jobrani

Farah Jobrani

Fabbia Moreno’

The first name – Madaar-Bozorg’s name – was written in small, neat cursive handwriting, the ink faded to a brownish-black. Ella recognised the style – but firmer, less spidery back then - from all the blue airmail envelopes with the exotic stamps that had arrived intermittently through the letterbox throughout her childhood.

The names beneath it were added in what Ella immediately knew as Mamma’s own confident copper-plate. And Farah, of course, was her mother’s original birth name, her given name from the Old Country, carefully scored out here with the tip of her fountain pen.

She turned the pages again, noticing the faint rustling in the corners of the room and the way that the air stirred over the backs of her hands like the beating of a thousand tiny wings.

Here was one of Mamma’s sketches, a red tea gown with a sweetheart neckline, a few tiny red beads stitched to the page, a scrap of red silk.

And then the notes, scribbled in the margins: ‘
Red: ruby, scarlet, vermilion. Look for a good red fabric with a warm orange base, rather than blue. This sample from Borowicks of Berwick Street, London. Variations – remake from red wedding sari, edged with gold lace? Chinoiserie – too stiff?
’

She flipped forward in the book again, stopping at a page that shimmered with green – a green feather, sewn to the paper with carefully-matched  embroidery silk, a short length of sequin trim in emerald, a little pouch made of bottle-green satin with a card spool of glittery green thread tucked inside it. A picture cut from a magazine, showing a model wearing a green pillbox hat at a jaunty angle, a large peacock plume falling half over her face. ‘
Vogue 1948
,’ Mamma had written underneath. ‘
Use dyed ostrich feathers
?’

Samples, sketches, ideas. Nothing here to be hidden away, surely? Why all the secrecy?

She turned back to the front of the book, which seemed to be written mainly by Madaar-Bozorg, with Mamma’s notes squeezed into the margins.

‘
The story of the selkie
,’ she read, fingering a folded pattern in translucent paper, one edge stitched to the page. She pulled at it carefully and it opened in a concertinaed arc, forming the shape of what looked to her untrained eye like a bodice. And yet, she’d never seen Mamma use a pattern. She always cut the cloth directly on the table, her scissors snipping swiftly, barely hesitating as she formed the shapes that she would piece together.

Ella held the pattern up to the light, squinting to make out the miniscule writing that covered it: ‘
Once upon a time,
’ she read, ‘
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…’

She smiled to herself, thinking of the many times she’d heard those same words from Mamma’s lips. Carefully, she folded the pattern back into place, imagining Mamma as a little girl, her head resting on her grandmother’s shoulder, as Madaar-Bozorg told her this same story of the sealskin.

But still, this wasn’t magic. Certainly not secrets. It didn’t explain why Mamma was hiding this book away. Her fingers moved between the pages more hastily now, looking for clues.

‘
Placement of charms,’
she read, finding a well-thumbed page.
‘
The effect of a particular word can be augmented by combining it with a particular charm, or by placing it in a certain position in the garment. Placement at the collar, for example, can give extra confidence, helping the wearer to hold her head high. Placement at the hem can have a grounding effect. (Consider also the insole of a shoe.) The edge of a sleeve can assist with interactions with others, ease relationships.

‘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.