The Midnight Dress(49)

My father, before he left, sometimes he touched these dresses. He’d drift past them and stop, feel with his very fingertips, gently, and I saw some of his gentleness, which I’d never known. His voice was very quiet, you could hardly hear him speak, and he was always trembling with a quiet rage, but when he touched those dresses . . . well, I can’t explain. He got up one morning and went and joined the ranks of men who walked past the front gate, their numbers had swelled, the drifters, the men with no home. He woke one morning and put on the suit my mother had made him all those years before. His good hat. Stuffed a few coins in his pocket. He didn’t say goodbye, although he came to my door and looked down at me. I know he did, but I kept my eyes closed. He just walked off and never came back. And that morning the magpie was gone.

That first night my mother waited up for him but not after. She seemed to know he wasn’t coming home.’

Rose sews. Edie will get to the part about love soon, she always does, she just takes strange circuitous routes. At first these detours angered Rose, but now she settles back into them, waits.

The rain comes at last, a monumental downpour that makes the floorboards tremble beneath her feet.

‘I fell in love with someone else altogether the year my father left,’ Edie says, when it has passed. ‘His name was Luke Grace, and he was the only son of Mr Grace who owned Grace Fabrics. Very handsome, Rose: black hair, blue eyes, very tall. He was not stooped at all like his father, who’d spent his life bent over the counter, cutting and counting buttons into paper bags and writing receipts. I can still remember how that shop smelt. Each fabric contains its own scent, you know, it’s true. Satin like eggshell, linen like freshly mown grass, but the top note in that shop was gaberdine suiting. The whole shop smelt like a newly made suit, like the inside of a pocket. I would go there, Rose, to collect my mother’s orders.

I would buy five small bone buttons for myself or ribbons or a certain coloured embroidery thread. Luke Grace, if he was home from boarding school, might glance at me and I might glance at him. Yet at home I could lie on my bed and open the paper bag containing the ribbons, and the whole shop would be inside. At night I would sleep with that paper bag and those bone buttons and it was like he was lying beside me.

Mr Grace taught his son everything there was to know about the shop. He’d say, ‘This lovely lady wants the floral dimity and Dresden blue, see that she has chosen a colour that is most compatible with her eyes, remember how we must cut fabric with a pattern, Luke?’ Luke watched very solemnly. He did exactly as his father told him, spilling eyelets into packets and wrapping ribbons into figure eights. Or, his father said, ‘Now, the buttons that this young lady has chosen are, I believe, amongst the most beautiful buttons in the world. They’re made in Italy – yes, that is right, Italy – and see on the side of the jar there is even the address – isn’t that wonderful, Miss Edith Baker? See, you can smell Rome when you put them to your nose.’

These things made me blush and Luke also.

I don’t recall when he suddenly grew up. One day he was home from boarding school and almost a man. ‘Can I help you?’ he said.

‘I’m just looking,’ I said.

‘Are you making something special?’

‘No, nothing special.’

‘You’re all grown up.’

‘So are you.’

He cut me an extra length of ribbon when his father wasn’t looking and winked. He sometimes walked with me out the door into the sunshine, and afterward I would forget to breathe and later, walking home, would have to take huge breaths to make up for it.

Mr Grace at first did nothing to stop our courtship. He’d always been very kind to me, nothing like old Mrs Rendell, who kept the post office, and wouldn’t say good morning and whispered under her breath, ‘Well, look what the cat dragged in.’ And the women at Coolibah Cafe, where my mother sometimes took me on Saturday morning, they’d stop talking as soon as we entered, and wouldn’t start again until we left.

Mr Grace encouraged us in a way, when he thought it was all very harmless; he called us ‘the lovebirds’ and his laugh floated down from the high shelves. He thought, perhaps, it was just a fleeting thing. Sometimes on a Saturday Luke and I would walk a ways to the creek. No, he never went up the mountain with me, Rose, just to the creek, and it was there he asked me to marry him. I was sixteen and he was seventeen.

Do you know what love is like, Rose? It’s like having a sky, a whole sky, racing inside of you. Four seasons’ worth of sky. One minute you’re soaring and then you’re all thunderclouds and then you’re deep with stars and then you’re empty.

Once in the shop in the button aisle, he put his hand up to my face when his father wasn’t looking, and kissed me on the lips. It was nothing like that kiss from Peter Hansen. Luke Grace’s kiss was delicate, gossamer-light, sweet.

Don’t be stupid, must have been what Mr Grace said, or something like that. I tried to imagine his reckoning. It wasn’t because I was dirt poor. My mother did well enough with the dresses, enough to keep us fed and clothed. Not even because I’d once had a pet magpie. Not because we lived in a house that was once splendid and now ruined. There were certain things being said, since my father left, and I was only just becoming aware of them. They were things said about my mother, who was good and kind and never in all her life hurt a soul.’