The Midnight Dress(14)

The room smells nasty. Old. Fusty. It smells like the bottom of an old lady’s handbag, perfumed, powdery, dusty. When Rose looks closer she sees that much of the material is spotted with mildew and the bolts have gone black along the edges.

Her heart sinks.

There are dresses there too. Some hang on dressmaker mannequins and others on coathangers. Beautiful dresses: an ivory satin dress with an organza skirt crumbling at the hem, a red gown eaten away by moths, a wedding dress turned yellow slung across the back of a chair.

Rose chews the end of a black fingernail.

‘Do you see any colours that you like?’ asks the old woman.

‘Not really,’ says Rose. She’s looking for black and she can tell Edie knows it.

‘What about this turquoise?’ Edie says instead. ‘Turquoise was the colour worn by Cretan princesses. Or this pink? This pink organza is always very popular with girls.’

‘It’s got holes in it,’ says Rose

‘We would use something else as well, to go with it,’ says Edie. ‘Or what about this yellow? Queens in England wore yellow to their coronations.’

‘No one would ever wear yellow to a dance,’ says Rose.

‘It probably wouldn’t suit your colouring, anyway. Redheads are best in emeralds and deep blues and, of course, the darker shades of red. But you’re young and these colours aren’t really for girls but women.’

‘I’m nearly sixteen,’ says Rose. ‘And I’m not a redhead.’

Edie makes the small humming noise in her throat.

‘I don’t think you understand,’ says Rose.

‘I understand perfectly well,’ says Edie.

‘There is something here for you, Rose, it’s only a matter of finding it,’ Edie says as she leaves the room. ‘You can use anything you like.’

Rose hears the house creaking away beneath the old woman’s feet, stands still in the room, thinking. She could climb out the sash window and run away. She pushes a dusty dress, gold brocade, out of the way and tries the window but it’s jammed. She reaches her hand up to smooth down her hair; a pin is removed and replaced.

She moves slowly from pile to pile, pulls down boxes from the cupboards, opens up suitcases on the ground. She touches speckled linen, stiff lawn, gaberdine disintegrating where it has been folded. She holds up tattered tweed, ragged serge, shabby shalloon. Georgette shredded by silverfish. Threadbare velvet. She touches dimity, gingham, chintz and Holland silk. She knows none of the names, of course, only that all is ruined.

It’s a joke. Why has she listened to Pearl Kelly? Pearl bloody frangipani Kelly, who knows everything and nothing, going through her Moscow addresses, how has she persuaded Rose to have a dress made? Pearl bloody Kelly is probably getting a brand-new dress from a brand-new shop on a brand-new street in a brand-new town. She’ll shine like one of the baubles in her mother’s crystal shop.

Rose Lovell will have a dress made out of rags.

Now she’s crying. It’s unexpected.

I don’t care about the stupid dress, she tells herself. But she does. It’s dark and beautiful. It’s a mystery inside herself. She can’t work it out.

They’re painful tears, the sort that swell in the throat. She feels enraged. She’s going to march out of that room, march over the plinking plonking floorboards, the house will rattle with her steps. She’s going to march past Edie. She’ll tell her to f*ck off if she has to.

But there’s one more wardrobe. A tall narrow one with laughing kookaburras painted on the doors. Rose wipes her eyes. Afterward, in dreams, she’ll open that door again and again, return again and again to that moment, turn that little dark key.

She leans forward, there’s a sudden applause of rain on the roof.

‘Oh,’ she says.

There is one dress hanging inside the cupboard. It smells like dirt, Rose thinks, dirt and rain and sky. She touches the dress hanging there on its plain wooden coathanger. It is made of the most lustrous, midnight-blue silk taffeta. It makes a soft sound, as though it is glad to be touched after all these years.

She takes it out and holds it up in front of her and immediately sees it’s damaged. There’s a long violent tear across the full skirt and it has separated in parts from the bodice. The taffeta is brittle and in places stained a shimmery brown.

‘I’m not sure about that dress,’ says Edie. ‘What about the orange organdie? We could lay it over the turquoise.’

Rose didn’t hear her come to the door to stand with her hands held together in front of her.

‘I like this colour,’ says Rose. ‘This is exactly the colour I’ve been thinking of.’

‘What about the red taffeta? Did you look at that?’

‘You said I could choose whatever I wanted,’ she says, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. ‘Is there any material left over from this dress?’

Edie hesitates. She looks at the midnight-blue dress, takes it from Rose and holds it across her arms, feels the dreadful weight of it.

‘There is a dress inside, yes,’ says Edie. ‘I can see it. There is a dress in here.’

She holds the dress across her arms, cradling it; it makes Rose feel uncomfortable.

‘We’d have to unpick what we have here, it has a lot extra in the seams, and in the hem, I remember making it that way.’