The Gown(30)

And suddenly it was too much to take in. She’d come back to it tomorrow, or on the weekend when she wasn’t so tired, and maybe by then her mother would have more for her. Maybe then she’d understand why Nan had hidden so much.

THE EMAIL FROM her mom arrived the next morning, just as Heather was about to go into Bay Street’s weekly editorial meeting.

From: Mom & Dad

Subject: Some pix for you!

Dear Heather,

First things first. No birth certificate or marriage certificate. Not sure I ever saw either although she must have had copies at some point. I guess we could try to order a copy of her birth certificate from the English government. Let me know if you’d like to do that. It seems funny that I don’t know her maiden name but I tended to just accept things as they were when I was growing up. I do have some good news about the pix. Dad and I stayed up late looking through old albums and some boxes of stuff from Nan and we found some photos we hadn’t seen before. Only the three but I hope they will help. Dad scanned them. The first one is of Nan. It’s hard to tell from the picture but she looks to be in her twenties. This is on the back: “109 Morley Rd, Barking, June 46.” The second one, of her and the other woman, must have been taken at the same time. I’m not sure but I think it’s my aunt Milly. She was married to Mum’s brother, Frank, the one that was killed in the Blitz. From what I remember Milly came over to Canada first and my mum joined her in Toronto. She was still pretty young when she died in the 1950s but I can’t remember from what. Mum and I moved out to Etobicoke after that. Again I never thought to ask more and as you know she wasn’t one to volunteer information. The third picture has me stumped as I’ve no idea who this woman is with my mum or why they were all dressed up. From their hats and gloves and the whole shebang I’m thinking maybe they were going to a wedding or maybe it was just their Sunday best? Sorry we didn’t unearth anything more.

Lots of love, Mom xoxo

There were three pictures attached to the email. The first was Nan, younger than Heather was now, dressed in the same sort of clothes she’d always worn: a knee-length skirt, plain white blouse, knitted cardigan, sensible shoes. Her hair came to her chin and was tucked neatly behind her ears. In the next photo, the one with Aunt Milly, she was smiling, her eyes squinting against the sunshine, and their happy expressions gave no hint of the war they’d just survived, let alone the sadness they must have felt when Uncle Frank was killed. They stood in a garden that was so small the neighbors’ fences were visible on either side.

The third photograph had also been taken in the garden. Nan was about the same age as in the other pictures, but this time she was dressed up in a gorgeous dark coat, its wide collar wrapping around her shoulders like a shawl, and on her head was an elegant little hat.

The woman with her, the one her mom didn’t recognize, was very beautiful, with dark hair and delicate, almost elfin features. She wore a tailored suit, its full skirt falling well below her knees, its fitted jacket flaring out sharply at the waist, and she looked, Heather decided, a little bit like Audrey Hepburn in that old movie where she was actually a princess and she escaped for a day or two.

Well, Nan hadn’t been a princess. She knew that for sure. But what was her connection with Norman Hartnell? And who was the woman in the third photograph? If Nan had saved the photo, she must have cared about the woman. Have known her well. Might they even have worked together?

The night before, just before turning out the lights, she’d scanned the picture of Nan in the embroidery studio and emailed it to herself. She opened it now and began to study the features of the others in the photograph. Just to Nan’s side, where she had been all along, was the mystery woman, her expression just as serious as Nan’s.

Her phone rang; it was the boardroom extension. “Sorry, Richard—I got caught up in an email. I’m on my way.”

She would have to leave off her search until after work.

THAT EVENING, AND at every lunch break for the rest of the week, Heather scrolled through online archives, searching for anything that even mentioned Norman Hartnell or the royal wedding of 1947 in passing. She began to haunt the downtown reference library after work, ordering up book after book from the stacks, and though she failed to learn anything more about Nan, she did acquire a working knowledge of midcentury fashion, postwar clothes rationing, and the history of royal wedding attire.

She even emailed the press office at Buckingham Palace, asking if they would connect her with the curator responsible for the queen’s wedding gown and other Hartnell-designed garments, but they didn’t respond, not even after she sent three separate inquiries.

Late one Saturday night, long after she ought to have gone to sleep, Heather decided to play around with variations on search terms she had already used. Hartnell embroiderers royal wedding 1947 yielded nothing new, as did Princess Elizabeth wedding dress embroiderers 1947. Suppressing an enormous yawn, she forced herself to think. What hadn’t she tried? What snippet of information had she overlooked?

There was a reason that Nan had left the embroideries to her. Nan hadn’t wanted to talk about her life in England, or maybe she hadn’t felt able to do so, but she had saved the flowers for more than sixty years, and she had put Heather’s name on the box, and she had known that Heather would look for answers. She must have expected it—and that, in turn, meant she must have wanted Heather to know.