The Dress

Start Reading

About
The Dress

About Kate Kerrigan

Reviews

Table of Contents

    
    

www.headofzeus.com

F
OR
N
IALL
, L
EO
AND
T
OMMO

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that
beauty is goodness.

Leo Tolstoy.

Ireland, 1935

The schoolmaster found the boy collapsed against a stone wall at the side of the road. His nose was smashed and bloody and his right eye so swollen that he could barely see out of it.

‘Dear God, Francis, what happened to you?'

The boy looked at him and shrugged. His eyes were defiant, angry.

‘Your father?'

John Conlon held out his hand to help the child up, but Francis waved him away and forced himself to stand alone. His legs were shaking. He had taken some battering that morning. His father had caught him unawares and dragged him from the bed. To stop himself from crying Francis reminded himself that he had fought back and given his father as good as he got. It was the first time he had stood up to his father, and that was how Francis knew it was time for him to leave.

The last thing Francis wanted was his teacher's pity. He was a man of fifteen, he could look after himself now. John held out a handkerchief and he took it.

‘I'm leaving anyway,' he said, wincing slightly as he put the cotton square up to his nose to stem the flow of fresh blood. ‘I'm going to America.'

John Conlon leaned against the wall with his pupil. He had taught the Fitzpatrick boy from when he was five, until last year. His mother had died and his younger brother, Joe, had been put in with the nuns, so Francis was left alone in the house, with his brutal pig of a father. The area they belonged to was broad and remote, a vast hinterland of bog and mountain. It was a place where a man could hide his wife and children away from the eyes of the world, but not those of a prying Irish schoolmaster. John Conlon made it his business to know every child in the area and managed to persuade most of the parents to leave them in school, until they could read and write. Francis had been with him until he was thirteen, but had left then to stay at home to nurse his sick mother. Now she was dead and the baby had been taken away, so there was nothing left at home for him. He was a bright young man and John believed he could have had a future. However, with a father like that, he never stood a chance.

‘America? That's a long way off,' said John.

Francis glowered at him; he could feel himself starting to crack. He had no idea how he was going to get there, but his mother had a brother in New York and before she died she gave him a letter, saying he would secure Francis a job if he could get himself to America. The only thing Francis knew for certain was that he was never going back home. Not ever.

‘Will you come back to the house and have a bite to eat with us, before you head away?'

Francis knew he could not walk another step that day; it would be dark soon and he did not want to sleep on the side of the road, so he followed the teacher to his horse and cart. He hated to take charity from anyone, but John Conlon was different, and Francis felt the teacher genuinely liked him. Maybe John would lend him enough money to get him as far as Dublin, where he could pick up a job and start earning for his passage to America.

They drove to Bangor town in silence. John could see the boy was exhausted, scrawny and weak; he hadn't eaten for days. Francis was five miles from his home when the teacher picked him up. He might have died there and would anyone have cared? Would anyone have even noticed?

When they arrived at the Conlons' terraced townhouse, John's wife Clare made a huge fuss of him at the door.

‘Would you look at the state of the child? Mother of God, he should be in a hospital!'

She sat Francis down on the settle, fetched a blanket, draped it over his shoulders, then set about cleaning his face.

‘This might hurt a bit,' she said and, before he could object, she twisted his broken nose back into place with a loud crunch, then wiped away the blood with a warm cloth.

Francis leaned his cheek into her hand. Her touch put him in mind of his own mother. When he was very small, he remembered her tending to him like that, but not for a long time now. Clare Conlon was assured and matronly: a strong loving woman. His own mother had been too weak, too afraid to love her sons, for fear of upsetting her husband.

Francis closed his eyes and, as his face reached for the touch of maternal love, he felt tears starting to pour down his cheeks. Clare wiped them away softly, pretending not to have seen, until he opened his eyes and said, ‘May I use the toilet?'

‘Of course,' she said, laying down the cloth. ‘You go out back and I'll fetch you some clean clothes. Then we'll have tea. There's no better medicine than a cup of hot, sweet tea.'

As he left the kitchen to go out into the yard, Francis paused in the scullery and overheard the couple talking about him.

‘Surely to God, John, something can be done about that man.'

‘I'll go and have a word with him.'

‘You'll do no such thing – your interfering will only make things worse. Francis can stay here with us.'

‘Clare, be practical. We have the baby now.'

‘Well, we can't send him back to that brute, and I'll not see him in one of those industrial schools...'

The boy had heard enough. He had intended to ask John for a loan, but he could tell, now, from the way they were talking, that they thought he was still a child. They could send him to the reform school, which was no better than a prison, and he might never get out of it. No. He had to get away. He knew Clare kept cash in a tin on the second shelf of the dresser, next to where he was standing. He had seen her take it out to pay a turf man, once, when he was studying there, after school. Francis would eat with them, stay overnight on the settle bed in their kitchen and then leave at first light. Clare would not notice the money gone for days, weeks maybe. He wasn't a thief. He would write from America and explain. He would send her a gift – jewellery perhaps, a pair of gloves – he just needed a start.

His heart was thumping as he reached up for the tin. His hands shook. He reached in and took out a handful of notes, but as he was stuffing them in his pocket he heard a noise behind him. He started slightly, then saw that it was the Conlons' baby, who was in a pram just outside the open back door. She was sitting up and looking straight at him, her head, in a frilly bonnet, cocked to one side. She was frowning, as if she knew what he was doing. If she started crying, John and Clare might wonder why he wasn't already outside in the lavatory, in the yard, and guess what he was at. He went over to placate her, but as he moved forward, something in the child's gaze stopped him in his tracks. Her eyes were locked on his. She was not a pretty child. She had a big round face and an almost comical scowl, but her eyes radiated the kind of deep knowing you would expect from a wise old woman. It was as if the baby could see inside his soul. In that moment Francis felt so ashamed that he turned to put the money back in the tin, but, as he was reaching to take it out of his pocket, Clare walked in, so he kept it where it was.

‘Ah,' she said, ‘you're back. I'll just feed the baby, then I'll put the dinner on. You go and sit by the fire with John and rest yourself.'

As Clare picked up the baby and laid her across her shoulder Francis looked across at the strange child and, as he did, she smiled, a huge toothless grin. All is forgiven, he thought. He pulled a face at her, and the baby giggled.

‘She likes you,' Clare said, laughing.

Francis looked at the plainly dressed master's wife and her peculiar looking baby. As they smiled at him, he suddenly had an overwhelming sense of their beauty and a feeling of deep happiness opened up inside him. Francis Fitzpatrick had never felt anything like it before. He did not know that this unfamiliar emotion was simply his birth right, the thing that every child should have: the knowledge that, above all else, they are safe and loved.

London, 2014

There it was, exactly what Lily had been looking for: a large 1940s sideboard radio with the original Roberts tag on the front, perfect for the vintage accessories shoot she had booked for the following day. The window of Old Times was the usual messy jumble, but Lily liked it that way. The squinting old mannequin was wearing a wretched fake-fur coat, and the beautiful old radio was almost hidden, tucked behind a stack of 1980s albums and a coffee table piled with mismatched crockery. Gareth, the owner of this place, had a talent for picking up interesting bric-a-brac but a useless one for marketing. Lily smiled. She could tell from where he had placed the radio that he didn't want to sell it. Lily did that all the time, splashed out on an exquisite vintage piece for her online store then hid it in some distant corner of her website in case somebody actually wanted to buy it. While the world was rushing around consuming the next new thing, people like Gareth and Lily stood firmly at the centre of the fray, hanging on to the old stuff, guardians of the cool and the beautiful.

Lily worked from home and had needed to get out of the house today. The shoot tomorrow was kind of a big deal. She'd been invited to style a vintage set for a Sunday supplement but she had hardly given it any thought. Instead she had stayed up half the night researching a blog about the influence of Dior's ‘New Look' on the current designer collections.

The door opened with a satisfying ‘ping' and Lily got the frisson of excitement she always experienced when she stepped foot inside a second-hand shop. Old Times was one of her favourites. Most of the shop was taken up with huge boxes of records and comics from the 60s to 80s, but there was always some well-chosen bric-a-brac scattered randomly on the shelves, and a few baskets of old clothes just crying out for a rummage. Gareth had a good eye but at the same time he wasn't that interested in anything much apart from his old records, so you could nearly always knock him down in price.