The Dress (21 page)

‘Can I do it on the dress, now?' she asked.

‘If you mess this up I'll have to remake the whole bodice. You know that, Joy? You do it
exactly
how I showed you, and you have to work on the garment here, in situ.'

‘Standing up?' Joy asked, shocked.

‘Yes, Joy, standing up – just like a common shop-girl. It's already been pressed, so you need to be incredibly careful with it. Do not sneeze or yawn or drool...'

Joy looked at her, highly insulted.

‘...place any part of your body too near the fabric. In fact, Joy, don't even breathe on it. Just sew the buttons on, one at a time and for goodness sake, take your time.'

‘You go to bed,' Joy said. ‘I'll call you when they're done.'

After two hours Joy had completed five buttons, but after three hours she had sewn fifteen of her mother's pearls onto the back of the dress. She woke Honor, with a cup of her disgusting Irish tea, then hurried her out of bed, to show her what she had done.

Honor was genuinely impressed. For the rest of the day she taught Joy how to do a lot of simple but time-consuming sewing, leaving Honor to get on with the one or two special touches. She was still designing a front panel for the bodice, to incorporate Joy's mother's diamond necklace which was too sturdy to take apart. Honor thought it was astonishingly well designed and constructed, for a piece of paste. She also had a small flower-shaped piece of antique lace. It had been given to her by her own mother and she had carried it around with her since childhood, as a luck talisman. Her luck had changed since meeting Joy and now Honor wanted to put something of her own into the dress. She felt it could perhaps work as the centrepiece of a wrist corsage, worked up with some tiny pearls and coloured crystals.

Joy sat on the floor beside the train, in her stockings. Honor had advised her to take off her skirt. ‘You wouldn't be the first seamstress to sew herself into a piece of couture.'

Honor sat at the table, but they had barely started when it was teatime. ‘Hell, I'll ring Frank and tell him I'll be late home.'

Honor didn't like the way Joy's husband insisted she be home to cook his dinner every night, although that was all men, really, and if there was one thing Honor knew, it was that Joy wasn't doing any actual cooking. The way Joy doted on her husband didn't entirely feel right to Honor, anyway. Either he was a tyrant, or she was afraid he had lost interest in her. Honor couldn't imagine any man losing interest in a woman as beautiful and funny as Joy.

Joy spoke quietly into the phone and Honor could hear from the tone of her voice that they were fighting. She sat down again and seemed to gather herself.

‘How are things with you and that new man?' she asked. ‘Have you heard from him again?'

‘No,' Honor said. ‘I don't expect he was that interested in me, really.'

‘Well, if that's the case, he sounds like a rotten cad and you are better off without him. In any case, I told Frank you had a sweetheart. He was beginning to get jealous of all the time we were spending together.'

Honestly, Honor thought, Joy's husband sounded like a rotten bit of stuff altogether. They were better off without men at all, she thought. Both of them.

However, when Joy left later that night, Honor's curiosity was aroused. The telephone line had been put into her parents' house a few weeks before, so she dug out her mother's last letter and dialled the number. It was their first phone call, and the Conlons were enormously excited, her mother giddy about talking into the phone.

After a few minutes, Honor asked, ‘Mam, do we know anyone called Francis from Bangor, who went to New York. A man in his thirties, well built...'

‘You've met a man...'

‘No, Mam, not like that, just someone I met. I think he's from Bangor.'

Her mother shouted to her father. ‘She's met a
man
, John, in New York – from around here, a Francis...? What's his surname, love?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Well, that's not much use, then. Oh, here's your father, talk to him. Honestly John, it's amazing. It's like she's in the room with us...'

John came on the phone and asked how she was. She hadn't told her parents about leaving her steady job with Breton. She didn't want to worry them. She'd tell them when she was firmly set up on her own. As she was about to finish, John said, almost as an afterthought, ‘The only Francis I know that went to America was that poor Fitzpatrick lad. He'd be nearly forty now. I heard he did very well – changed his name to Frank.'

Jones came to collect Honor and the dress at ten in the morning to take them all to the woods.

Vogue
had heard that the beautiful Mrs Fitzpatrick had made a new fashion discovery and they wanted her to sit, in the dress, for Horst. Joy and Honor agreed that the magazine would have to wait until after the grand unveiling at the party, but the request gave Honor the idea that she would like to take some photographs of Joy in the dress herself. But she wanted to take them out in the area in Hastings-on-Hudson where her ideas had first been conceived.

‘You want to take me out into a
rural
area?' Joy said, in her sharpest amused-yet-horrified voice.

‘Yes,' Honor said. ‘Nature is where I get all my ideas from and, in a way, the dress was conceived there. There is an amazing old oak—'

‘I thought
I
was the inspiration for the dress, not some dirty old tree?'

‘I think it would make a wonderful backdrop for you, in the dress. Please, Joy, it will be wonderful. I promise.'

‘Oh, all right, I'll get Jones to do us a picnic hamper...'

‘Great, and I'll eat it for you.'

Honor had not told Joy that her husband had made a pass at her. Not, indeed, that he had made an actual pass at her but his intentions had clearly been, well, wrong, if not precisely dishonourable. Frank Fitzpatrick was an out and out cad: poor Joy. That was the story Honor kept telling herself, to drown out the nagging of the real truth: she had been deeply attracted to a stranger, with whom she had flirted wildly, without even checking if he was wearing a ring. Of course the man was Frank Fitzpatrick. It could only have been him. He hadn't wanted to say he was from Bangor because he was ashamed of where he came from. Her father had told her all about the terrible circumstances of his childhood – poverty, violence – of course he hadn't wanted all of that dredged up, that was why he had rushed off. The truth was that Honor could have seen all of that at the time, if she'd cared to stop and think. She had not done so, she saw now, because she had been selfishly following her own foolish desires. She had seen a man she was attracted to and had not looked beyond that.

Honor had wrapped the dress in a long, heavy cotton bag, then doubled it over. It was so heavy that she could barely lift it and was afraid to think of how Joy's slender frame would be able to support it. Jones spread it out in the large trunk of the Chevrolet and they headed out of the city.

There was more to this outing for Honor than just taking photographs. Joy had introduced Honor to her world, now Honor wanted to share some of hers with her new friend.

As the car quickly moved away from the cluttered, tall splendour of the island, over the bridge, to the seemingly endless suburbs, crammed with neat gardens and row upon row of identical low-rise housing, high streets with cheap shops and small churches, Joy could feel a kind of panic rise up in her. She felt uncomfortable being out of the city. They had a house in Aspen, and Frank, who hated hotels, insisted on keeping modest apartments in Boston and Washington, the two main cities where he did business.

Her parents had always kept a house in the Hamptons, but Frank hated it down there; a playground for the rich, he called it, as if that was a bad thing. Joy had no attachment to the place, so they sold the house and banked the money and, if Joy wanted to get out of the city for a summer, they would rent a place on the beach. However, in recent years Joy had found herself reluctant to travel anywhere in America outside Manhattan. She told her friends that this was because Europe was her true spiritual home, but in truth, she had developed a kind of fear of moving too far from the city, too far from Frank. When he went away she had more or less stayed in the apartment, drinking, waiting for him to come home. Since she had stopped drinking he had not left town at all. Joy thought maybe he was afraid she would drink again if he was not there to keep an eye on her, and she also thought that perhaps he was right.

As they passed through the suburbs, out into the broad, dusty stretch of highway, Joy reached over and took Honor's hand. It was a habit Joy had picked up as a girl. When her mother was taking her back to boarding school, holding her hand on the journey was an exclusive gesture of affection. The search for reassurance and comfort continued whenever she was in the car with Frank. Honor was surprised, but could see that Joy, who was gazing wistfully out of the window, was barely aware she had reached out. Honor recognized it as a peculiar gesture of vulnerability and enclosed her friend's manicured fingers in a comforting clasp.

They drove through the charming hamlet of Hastings-on-Hudson and came to a clearing at the side of the road.

‘Park here,' Honor said.

‘Really?' Joy said. ‘Are we really getting out here?'

‘Are you going to make this hard, Joy?' Honor said, and then, as she was unloading the dress out of the trunk, she turned, looked her straight in the eyes and added, ‘This is
my
thing, Joy. These woods, nature, is where I get my inspiration; you're my muse and I want to share it with you.'

Joy nodded. She never knew what to say when Honor said honest things like that; it made her want to disappear, or cry.

‘Will I bring lunch, ma'am?' Jones asked.

‘No, thank you, Jones,' Honor answered before Joy had the chance. ‘We'll be less than an hour, we can have lunch when we get back, if that suits.'

Jones gave her a disapproving look, then turned to Joy, who nodded approval.

Honor thought, her husband may be a womanizing pig, but that man, Jones, clearly adores her.

Joy followed her into the woods, picking through the bark and leaves on the dry mud path. She was wearing slacks, a sweater and flat leather brogues which she had bought in London years ago, but never had occasion to wear. Even though the air was more fresh than cold, Honor had told her to wear a warm coat because she might need something over her shoulders while she was changing into the dress. Joy was wearing a three-quarter length fur. They walked in silence for twenty minutes, before Honor veered off the path and into the woods proper.

‘Is it much further?' shouted Joy.

She was getting frightened; it felt remote here, far away from everything. Joy told herself that Honor was with her, she wasn't alone, nothing bad could happen. She had promised Honor she would do this, but now she wished she had put her foot down and said no. Dragging her and the valuable dress out into the woods to be photographed was a stupid idea. She should have talked Honor into going to a studio. One phone call to
Vogue
and Horst could have been booked. Honor really was the most impulsive, silly person sometimes, and Joy was worse, for going along with her.

‘Here we are.'

Joy stopped and looked up.

Honor was standing in front of a huge tree, its trunk as wide as four men and as gnarled as the face of an old wizard. On the ground all around it was a carpet of tiny yellow primroses and beyond it, a sea of bluebells.

‘What do you think?'

Honor was standing in front of the tree with her arms spread, as proud as if she had grown it herself.

‘It's lovely,' Joy said, although she was still unsure that there was any real point to this exercise.

Honor started to unpack, spreading cotton sheets out on the dry ground in front of her and laying the dress on top of it.

‘Well, come on,' she said. ‘Start stripping.'

‘Here?' Joy said.

‘Well, what did you think was going to happen? Come on, you agreed to this...'

Joy mumbled some objection and started to take her clothes off under her coat.

‘There's never anyone here,' Honor said. ‘We could both run around stark naked, for all it matters.'

‘I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you,' said Joy primly, struggling to take off her sweater, while maintaining some modesty beneath her coat.

Honor walked over and held her coat while Joy stripped down to her underwear.

‘Bra, too,' Honor said. ‘It'll show under the dress.'

Joy groaned. ‘Are you certain there aren't people lurking in those bushes?'

‘None, I promise. Although I'll sell tickets, next time, if you don't get a move on.'

‘There won't be a next time. This is such a stupid idea...'

It was fighting talk, but Honor noticed that her friend was shaking. She was clearly afraid. For a second she felt sorry. In truth, she would never dream of stripping off here herself. It was a public wood and people might walk by at any moment, although Honor really,
really
hoped that they wouldn't.

As Joy bent to take off her lace bra, Honor looked at her friend's thin, pale body. Her spine was as delicate and defined as the string of pearl buttons on her dress and her breasts were tiny, negligible. Dressed, she was a strong, elegant powerhouse, but naked, her body had the vulnerable slightness of an underfed child.

Honor gently pulled the dress up over Joy's body. As her torso filled the strapless bodice and Honor buttoned the line of precious pearls up from the base of her spine, she imagined she could feel Joy's body grow into the dress. This was not, Honor felt, simply a small, shaking girl turning into a confident couture-clad woman; there was something more to it, although she could not have said what it was.