The Dress (12 page)

She came here because she wanted to make it as a fashion designer. Nonetheless, she might have sacrificed today and gone along with Barbara, if she had not believed she could be on the verge of a breakthrough. After their experience with the white dress, Monsieur Breton had come back from the Christmas break and asked to see some of her sketches. The following morning, they had finally arranged for him to look at her drawings and Honor was hoping, beyond hope, that he might be impressed enough to allow her to design some garments for his next collection.

She opened the sketch pad on her lap, then began frantically sketching the landscape and scribbling hasty notes:
Still grey water, mirrored, sequins, slub silk – water-marked velvet.
Under the hastily drawn landscape she wrote:
Reflection of trees, high collar, black lace, satin fabric dipped in black, like branches bleeding? Embroider or lace?

She outlined the dress with a long sweeping skirt, an ornate high black lace collar and a landscape detail along the hem, to give an illusion that the wearer was emerging from a pool of water.

Honor closed her pad, then opened it again and held it in front of her as if looking at the dress for the first time.

It was a beautiful image, but somehow, Honor knew that it wasn't enough.

In the past few days, Honor had come to feel that her work was not up to scratch. She had always believed the opposite: that she was as good a designer as anyone and better than many. However, since the debacle with the lace collar, her opinion of herself had changed. She thought there was something missing from her work, although she could not quite put her finger on it. She knew she could draw – her sketches were as beautiful and as functional as any design Monsieur Breton put in front of her – and her current work was as good as it had ever been, better, in fact as her drawing had become more skilled. Some might say she was brilliant in both her speed and form. Aside from that were the practical dressmaking skills she had learned from her two-year tenure with Sybil Connolly. She knew everything there was to know about structure, fabric, and the line an outfit should take to fit the various shapes and sizes of a woman's body. Honor believed her work was also unique, in that she drew her inspiration from that greatest of female forces, Mother Nature. Honor knew she had everything she needed to produce extraordinary designs and yet, prolific and skilled as her drawings were, she sensed that they were somehow... lacking.

‘When you know there is heather under the snow,' the maestro had said. Now she wasn't even sure she knew what that meant. She had thought he had been alerting her to understand every detail of her work, but now she was not so sure. Perhaps he was just fobbing her off as not good enough? The idea that she might not be a good designer terrified Honor.

Shaking with nerves, she showed her work to the maestro. He leaned over Honor's sketches, which were scattered chaotically across the large mahogany table in his office. One or two of them had fluttered from the smooth surface onto the floor, but Honor was too anxious to rescue them. She had been up all the night before, arranging her sketches in the particular order she wanted Breton to view them, intending to take him through each one, explaining the ideas and inspiration behind it. However, he snatched the pile from her as soon as she walked in, as if he was either in a hurry to get the meeting over with, or anxious to see them; he placed them quickly and haphazardly on the table, then walked around, viewing them as a whole, before lifting them up, one by one, with the tips of his thin fingers, in order to inspect them in more detail. Breton flicked at the edges of the paper as he put each picture down, in a gesture that suggested he thought it worthless; but then, she had seen him display this peculiar tic before, with his own work. Honor felt sick, and when he finally spoke she was bitterly disappointed.

‘Yes, this is nice. Very good.'

Nice? Good? Cups of tea are nice, she thought, well-behaved children are good. A well-designed dress is sublime, or beautiful, or even magnificent. He was obviously just being polite – he hated her work.

‘Yes, I like this one,' he said, holding up a sketch she had done the day before. ‘Slub silk, you say? Yes. Good, I approve this...
and
this two piece...' He handed her another sketch, of a green tweed day suit, with a full skirted dress and tiny cropped jacket. ‘This one is good. A black dress, but it needs something more. Trim on the sleeves? Think of something,' he said as he passed across another sketch. ‘And a belt on
this
.' He passed across three more designs, with instructions, and it was only when she got the last one that she fully understood Breton was putting six of her designs into his collection.

‘Can I just be clear,' Honor said as he waved her away, ‘are we going to
sell
my designs?'

‘No,
we
are not going to
sell
your designs,' Breton snapped, already back behind his desk and clearly irritated that she was still there. ‘
You
and the women are going to make samples, and we are going to
show
them and then we will see if people want to buy them... then we will
sell
them.'

Colette had come into the room and, interrupting them rudely, shut the door behind her and said in a hurried whisper, ‘Joy Fitzpatrick is here!'

Breton's harshly impassive face was suddenly alight with anxiety. He leapt from his desk, with an almost comical agility, straightened his jacket and ran to the mirror to check his moustache.

‘Mon dieu,' he cried. ‘I need more time to get ready. I must prepare...'

‘It's too late, she's
here
. I couldn't stop her...'

The door opened and a woman walked in. She was tall, elegant, almost impossibly beautiful and was wearing a dark navy dress, with a scoop neck and three-quarter length sleeves; its unadorned simplicity and elegant lines were instantly recognizable as Balmain. Breton was sensitive about Pierre Balmain. He did not like to think that any of his clients bought in Paris (‘
Why
would they go to Paris when
I
am here? In New York. For them,
only
for them?'), but if they did go, at least come back with something that was widely copied (Dior) or somebody new and up-and-coming (Givenchy). Breton knew Balmain through the now-retired Paris-based English designer Edward Molyneux – but was deeply jealous of his friend's wildly successful protégé. It hurt him deeply that his most feted client was wearing Balmain, although she would never have turned up in such a dress, had she known. He had dressed her late mother and knew that the Rogerson women, for all their grandiosity, had impeccable manners.

Breton turned his couturier charm up to maximum, which was ebullient if not always entirely convincing.

‘Joy!' he exclaimed and held out his arms like an excited Italian bistro chef welcoming a favoured customer. ‘And wearing my friend, Balmain. How...
wonderful
.'

The woman gave him a smile so dazzling it was as if somebody had turned a light on in the room. Honor thought she had never seen anyone who possessed such natural glamour.

‘It's two seasons old but I just love the line of it. I didn't know you knew Pierre, Mr Breton?'

‘Oh, please. Call me Jean. But of course I know Balmain, from Paris, he worked for my old friend Molyneux.'

‘Of course,' she insisted. ‘How dreadfully silly of me not to remember that. He made quite a point of mentioning it to me the last time we met.'

She is humouring him, Honor thought, and it was working; Breton was almost faint with delight.

‘Are these your new designs?' she said, walking over to the table which was still covered in Honor's drawings. She began picking through them.

Colette looked as if she might collapse with anxiety. This woman was like nobody Honor had ever encountered before: beautiful, yes, but there was also a cleverness and an honesty about her that Honor liked. Colette and Breton were clearly overawed by her style and her great wealth but Honor wasn't: she liked her.

‘These are good.'

Again, that ordinary word ‘good' to describe Honor's work. ‘Oh, no, this is exquisite, actually – I
love
this one.'

She held up the sketch of the dress with the black lace collar and ‘liquid' hem.

As the woman stood there holding up her sketch Honor felt a little kick in her stomach. In her mind's eye she stripped the woman, Joy, then draped her in steel grey silk and quickly drew an intricate lace around her neck and shoulders. She was, this stranger, this woman, a magnificent canvas waiting for a designer to draw on. In a flash of inspiration Honor suddenly knew what had been missing from her work, and knew too that at last she had found it: a muse.

*

Joy had woken that morning feeling anxious, for no particular reason. The sun was streaming in through a crack in her bedroom curtains and Frank was already dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed, putting on his shoes.

‘Come back to bed,' she said.

‘I'm late for work,' he replied.

Joy sighed. She longed for her husband's affection but didn't feel she could just ask for it straight out. So she got out of bed and went over to her dressing table.

‘Urgh, I am getting old,' she said, grimacing then patting the side of her eyes with the tips of her fingers.

‘You look fine to me,' Frank said without looking over.

‘I am going to be thirty soon,' Joy said. ‘Will you still love me when I'm old?'

‘Of course I will. We're married aren't we?'

‘That's not a good enough reason.'

‘Well, it will have to do for now.'

Things had improved with Frank since she had been dry. They were making love again and the fighting had stopped, but Joy still felt there was something missing between them. Something she could not put her finger on. A slight cooling of passion. Was he taking her for granted, perhaps? Life was becoming rather humdrum and ordinary and Joy wasn't sure that she liked it.

‘I think I'll throw a party. Let's make some plans, darling. Small at the Plaza Palm Court or a huge bash at the Waldorf?' She was bluffing, but if she kept talking, kept charming, he would come around and join in the fun.

‘I really don't mind, Joy. I'll go along with whatever you want.' Frank stood behind her and straightened his tie in the mirror. Joy caught sight of her own disappointed expression. Frank did not seem to notice. He barely appeared to notice her at all, these days.

‘You'll do whatever you want to do, my darling, so it makes no difference what I think.'

‘The Waldorf, then, the biggest party anyone has ever seen.'

Keeping busy was the best way Joy knew of holding her cravings at bay and this party would offer her the perfect excuse.

After Frank had given her a cursory kiss and left, Joy decided to spend the day planning her party. She wandered over to her dressing room and had begun rifling through the cupboards for ideas, when she spotted the white dress she had worn on New Year's Eve.

That terrible night had tainted Breton's dress. She had got drunk and almost lost her husband in it, then she had stayed up all night emptying bottles in it. It was certainly the first couture garment she had cleaned in (possibly the first garment of
any
kind she had cleaned in); she had wept into it, fallen asleep in it, then taken it off in a drugged fumble and left it in a tangled heap on her bedroom floor. Nonetheless, Joy felt drawn to it as if its terrible provenance was revealing some kind of truth to her. Despite the overwhelming drama she had experienced in that dress, the garment itself still sang to her. Not loudly – like her gaudy but magnificent Dior – or with the steady assertive tone of her sturdy Chanel two-piece, but in a gentle, tuneful whisper, like a small bird singing above the traffic beside a slightly opened window. It was in the detail: the lightly stained embroidered collar and cuffs. As Joy gathered the dress up from its hanger she noticed how the delicate fronds of silk were the same as they had been the moment she had put the garment on, fresh from the bag. Despite her vicious treatment of it the lace had not torn, or even weathered. It still looked fragile and delicate – new, untouched by the trauma it had experienced. Underneath the beauty this garment was clearly well built and strong. It was this realization that drove her back to Breton's studio.

Joy did not like the man himself – she thought him a cliché with his thick French accent and his flourishing hand gestures. Worse than that, he was average. Joy believed Breton produced couture for the ladies of New York who didn't know any better. His clientele had never shopped in Europe because they lacked either the resources or the refinement required to do so and so didn't mind that his designs were safe and lacked imagination. But Joy did. She wanted her clothes designed by an artist, not by a glorified dressmaker, and that's why she was always adding instructions and design flourishes of her own. For these reasons, Joy was loath to admit that the dress she had commissioned for that fateful New Year's Eve was the best garment she had seen in a while. In the name of all that was fashion, she had to return to his studio.

When Joy entered Breton's office, her eyes were immediately drawn to a sketch of a long flowing gown with an endless black hem and high collar, and she immediately recognized that it was not Breton's work.

As she picked up the drawings, she noticed a rather plain young woman standing behind the desk.

‘Are these yours?' Joy asked.

And it was then that the girl began babbling like a fool.

Honor could see that Mrs Fitzpatrick was the kind of lady used to getting her own way, and not the sort of person she should address directly. However, when Joy picked up Honor's sketch of the black-hemmed gown, she found herself shaking her head emphatically and saying, ‘No, that's too dark, black is not right for you. Your frame is too slim, it would make you disappear. Besides, black is too
obvious
, it's elegant I agree but not for you, not for evening. You're already
strikingly beautiful
– you need something to offset your beauty. You could carry something more subtle, perhaps a light grey, maybe tapering down to a dark navy. Oh, emerald green – not many women can carry green but you could...'