The Dress (32 page)

‘Can it really be that simple?' she said to Dolores.

The older woman smiled and said, ‘It's simple, honey, but that don't make it
easy
.' Then she put her hands over Joy's and held them for a moment, before adding, ‘If you don't mind me saying – you look just about beat to me.'

It was then that Joy began to cry. Tears streamed down her face until she took her shaking hands from under those of her new friend to wipe them away in large, messy swipes.

Dolores reached in her pocket for a handkerchief and handing it to her said, ‘You ready to get to work, lady?'

Joy nodded silently, like a shy child on her first day at school.

‘No time like the present. Dan can drive us where we need to go. You got a home, right now, or are you sleeping rough?'

Joy tried to hide her shock. ‘I have a flat,' she said.

‘Lucky you, more than I had when I came in. Is it dry?'

Joy laughed and said, ‘Are you
kidding
? Do I
look
like someone who keeps a dry house?'

Dolores and Dan laughed and so did Joy. It was the first time she had laughed in months.

Dolores picked up her bag and said, ‘Come on. Let's go and clear out your cupboards – then we can get to work on your head.'

As she sat in the back of a shabby car, with these two kind strangers up front, Joy thought about her life. At thirty, she felt as if she had been on this earth too long already, yet did not feel as if she had happily lived one single day of it. In the honesty of these strangers' stories and the certain, yet gentle, tone of their voices, Joy felt she was being handed, not simply a second chance at life, but the opportunity to begin her life all over again.

Ireland, 2014

It took almost three hours for Lily to drive from Knock airport to the town of Bangor where her grandfather had been born. The sat nav had said two hours but the roads were so narrow in parts that Lily kept slowing down to allow the oncoming cars to whizz past her.

The weather was changeable. Leaving the airport it was warm with a fine misty rain, what her grandmother always described as ‘a grand soft day'. As she passed through the small towns of Swinford, Foxford, Ballina, the sky cleared into bursts of sunshine with heavy intermittent shows. One minute the windscreen wipers would be going full lash, then after switching them off a rainbow would suddenly appear, so clearly and with such multi-coloured crispness on the horizon that Lily felt she was inside
The Wizard of Oz
.

‘Ah, here,' she said, mimicking her grandfather's expression, when, just as she was passing through the small village of Killala, two rainbows appeared one after the other. ‘That is
unfeasible
,' she said to herself out loud.

Lily felt happy, she realized. Despite being let down by Sally she was just happy being in her own head. Tears welled up in her eyes as she realized that the person she felt closest to right now was her grandfather, Joe; perhaps he was behind the rainbows, leading her on.

The sat nav guided her through a town called Ballycastle then on along a seemingly endless narrow road into the heart of a mountainous, sea-edged bogland that was so beautiful and remote it took her breath away. Although she had never been here before the mountains and cliffs and soft heathery purple bogs felt achingly familiar, as if their history was buried in her blood, like a splinter in her soul placed there by some ancient force. The sun moved like a spotlight across the vast landscape, lighting up sections of a mountain then sweeping across to another one.

In that moment, nothing mattered and Lily just drove and drove until the sat nav instructed her to turn left towards Bangor.

As she drove into the one street town, she saw a sign for the graveyard and headed towards it. It was barely two miles outside the town and Lily's stomach churned as she saw the white curved wall and the crosses behind it facing out into miles of remote boglands and mountain. Would her family be here, her grandfather's people?

She pulled the car up and, surprised by the sharpness of the wind, pulled her cardigan around her tightly. The front part of the graveyard seemed newer, with lots of marble and polished granite, so she walked to go over to the left hand corner where the grass was higher and the graves seemed older.

Her eye was drawn to it straight away, an ornate cross, taller than all the others, pushing up from a base of weeds.

Frank Fitzpatrick, 1920–1984,

of Bangor and New York.

A man is born alone, and dies alone.

He died in the year Lily was born, a man in his sixties. Lily felt impossibly sad. Frank Fitzpatrick was not alone in 1984 – he had a brother, living in London, and a nephew, her father. Yet he had chosen to stay away from his own family. Next to his gravestone was another, smaller grave. Lily pushed back the high weeds and was barely able to make out the wording carved into the cheap stone slab of a headstone:
Joseph Fitzpatrick and his wife Mary Fitzpatrick. RIP.

Lily thought of all the people who had turned out for her grandfather's funeral and the vast crowd standing around eating sandwiches and drinking whisky and telling anecdotes about him. Joe had been a warm, happy man full of love and mischief and Lily wondered what kind of people his family must have been to have left the world behind them in this sad way. Her parents and grandparents had loved her. There had been no pain; problems were things that happened to other people. Sally's mother had had an affair when she was ten and run off with her lover to France, leaving behind her three small children and a devastated husband who developed a daily dope habit. Sally spent as much time as she could in Lily's house after that, lapping up her mother's home cooking and relishing the stability of regular mealtimes and TV squabbling. She kept telling Lily how lucky she was to come from an ‘ordinary' home but secretly Lily sometimes envied the drama of Sally's house. Affairs and drugs and her actor father bringing home girlfriends barely older than Sally. Her own life seemed so staid, so boring in comparison. Standing here looking at the misery of her family history Lily suddenly felt a sense of gratitude that Joe had kept her away from this place and whatever dark history it held.

She was curious about what had happened to the Fitzpatricks; there was clearly some great drama playing out in the placing of these graves. However, the greater part of Lily understood that it must have been something so painful that her grandfather had had to escape it and keep himself and his family away from it all of his life. If there was drama in the emotions of a conflicted family, there was mostly just plain old pain and in that moment Lily came to understand that she was very lucky to have been spared the hardship of an unhappy family. In the past few months she had lost Joe and, standing by these cold gravestones, she felt her heart ache at the finality of death again.

As Lily turned and walked away from the Fitzpatricks' headstones it was this very thought that led her to look up as she walked past a headstone that was about the same grand height as Frank Fitzpatrick's, but the grave itself beautifully kept with flowers planted in a big terracotta pot on the carefully weeded white gravel.

Set into the front of the gravestone was a 1920s style wedding portrait of a couple and the words:

John Conlon, 1900–1990, schoolmaster of this parish,

and his beloved wife, Clare Conlon. 1910–1992.

Beloved parents of Honor Conlon of New York,

they will be sadly missed. RIP.

Lily could not believe her eyes. Could it be the same Honor Conlon? If it was, why was she not buried with her husband Frank Fitzpatrick? The fact that Honor was not buried here could mean she was possibly still alive. The grave was well kept so there must still be family or friends in the area. Lily looked at the old but surprisingly clear picture of the young couple. The Conlons' happy, friendly faces reminded Lily of her own parents and she was overwhelmed with a feeling of affinity with Honor. These must be the parents of the woman whose dress she was replicating. This is fate, bringing us closer together, she thought. She took out her iPad and snapped a picture of the smiling couple, then, fizzing with excitement, she drove back into Bangor and stopped at the first pub she could find.

There wasn't a soul in there and, despite the pine bar and booths, it seemed more like somebody's living room. A woman of around her mother's age came out from behind the bar and Lily, awkward about diving straight into an interrogation, asked if they did food. The woman said no but she could make her something small. She disappeared behind the bar and when she came back with a pot of tea and a ham sandwich Lily took a deep breath and asked her straight out, ‘Did you know John and Clare Conlon?'

‘The best people this town ever produced,' the woman said, sitting down. ‘He taught me, and all belonging to me and he never raised his hand to a child in his life.'

She saw Lily looking slightly shocked. ‘That was the way at the time,' the woman said, ‘but John Conlon was a kind and compassionate man and so was his wife. Were they relations of yours?'

Lily thought of her dead relatives' unkempt grave and decided not to declare her connection.

‘I'm looking for Honor Conlon,' she said, ‘their daughter.'

The woman visibly bristled. ‘She went to America when she was very young,' she said curtly. ‘I never knew her.'

The woman's lips tightened in a disapproving pout but she didn't move away so Lily realized she was looking for more information. She felt herself feeling slightly hurt by the woman's chilly reaction to Honor.

‘I don't know her myself, actually,' Lily said. ‘I am just trying to find her. I'm researching... something.'

‘Well, you won't find her around here,' the woman said. ‘She came home for her parents' funerals, but that was over twenty years ago now. She was here for three days for Clare's funeral and nobody has seen hide or hair of her since.'

‘Oh,' Lily said, disappointed. All this way for a dead end.

The woman went back behind the bar then paused, turned around and said, ‘Wait on here for a few minutes,' then left through the front door.

Lily sat alone in the pub, until ten minutes later the woman came back in and handed her a slip of paper.

‘Honor Conlon left this address with the solicitor after her mother's funeral,' she said. ‘I don't know if she's still there but as far as I know she sent some money over for the upkeep of the grave a few years ago.' Then she muttered, ‘Not that she needed to. Everyone here loved the Conlons. The people around here look after their own...'

Lily thought of the Fitzpatricks again and for a moment she thought of asking the woman about them but then realized that she didn't actually want to know what had happened to them. She had seen the grave, and that was enough.

Lily thanked the woman then got back on the road to Westport for her lace. She kept her phone switched off and spent the journey looking out at the mountains and lakes of Mayo and thinking about what she had seen in the graveyard. This place was so beautiful but it felt sad too. The green fields were hemmed by glittering lakes and magnificent cliffs and the thin, winding roads were lined with purple rhododendron and pink-rose hedgerows. The sky lit up with shifting amber clouds and disco-rainbows. But the land was built on endless black bogs as deep as the earth's core. This place held secrets in its history, some of which were best forgotten, like her family, but some which she felt she was uncovering. The more she saw of this rich landscape the more Lily came to feel that Honor, the woman who had created that beautiful dress, was from this extraordinary place where its fluid light and shadows changed as rapidly as the shimmering of good silk and its graveyards held stories as complex as the finest Carrickmacross lace. There was something here that was connecting her to her dress, something connecting to her Honor, something this place was trying to tell her.

The rest of the day was busy. Lily found the lovely English woman, Sandra, she had contacted by phone and bought nearly her entire collection of Carrickmacross lace over tea in her small cottage on the edge of a mountain. Business was slow enough, Sandra said, out here in the middle of nowhere, but she had come there on holiday seven years ago and loved it so much she had stayed. Houses were cheap and as a dealer in vintage fabric she could work from anywhere. She could not believe her luck in finding a buyer like Lily and gave her a coin-sized brooch of stiffened antique lace as a gift to thank her for the business and ‘as a good luck charm. Sounds like you'll be needing it to get that dress finished on time.'

Lily drove back to her hotel and used the spa, thought about ordering room service but then decided to get dressed up and go down to the restaurant. As she sat there, alone, at her table for one, Lily felt curiously grown up and content. As an only child Lily had always spent a lot of time alone, but this trip had given her a taste of what it felt like to be truly independent. Alone, but in a good way. At the grand old age of thirty, this was the first time Lily had eaten by herself in a restaurant and she thought to herself, how many more things are there out there that I haven't done? This had been an adventure; her life, she was starting to realize,
was
an adventure.

Back in her hotel room Lily switched on her iPad and emailed Zac the address she had been given for Honor (in Brooklyn), quickly switching off again before her social media alerts came up. She was enjoying being apart from her online life and decided to keep it going until she got back to London.

She wanted to savour her Irish adventure a while longer.

*

The spell was broken as soon as Lily opened the door of her empty flat and started walking up the stairs. She threw her bag down on the sofa and without taking her jacket off, distracted herself from the emptiness by checking in with her abandoned Twitter account. There were 500 notifications on her #TheDress stream with #ScottsSilent #PopShopMegaDress #VogueLOVESLucy and a link to a fashion news blog article about the challenge telling her that Lucy Houston had signed up for the cover of
Vogue
in anticipation of winning #TheDress and PopShop's artistic director Sally Thomas had released early sketches. In the meantime, they said, Scott's blog had gone silent and when Jack Scott was asked to comment, he refused. In the blogger's opinion Scott's was bluffing. Who and what was this ‘Lily' nobody-person anyway, please? Was she a blogger or a designer? Lucy, with her clean lines, impeccable attention to detail and, hullo, her impeccable track record? She was
obviously
the clear winner.