The Dress

The Dress - By Sophie Nicholls



Prologue



It all began with a dress.

‘As so many things do, tesora,’ I can hear Mamma saying now in her rich, slow voice, stirring sugar into her cup. ‘As so many things do…’

It was a simple dress, a slip of oyster-coloured silk, made to fall over the body like a sigh of pleasure. On the morning that it appeared in the window of our shop on Grape Lane, I stood in my bedroom window, watching the women stopping to admire it in the street outside, some of them setting down their bags of groceries, folding their arms over their bosoms, cocking their heads to one side, imagining themselves into the swish of its silk, which Mamma had accessorised with a single strand of pearls, looped over the mannequin’s fingers.

The story that I’m about to tell you is not so simple. It has complicated seams and concealed fastenings. It has deep pockets and interfacings that won’t sit quite true. I’ll shape it for you here, as Mamma taught me to do, rolling the hem between my fingers, teasing the stray threads with the lightest touch I can manage.

You’ll have to forgive me if at times I’m clumsier than I ought to be. Mamma didn’t believe in following a pattern. She taught me to trust the fabric itself, letting the texture and colour of it find its own form on the cutting table. If I asked her what to do next, she’d smile and tell me to close my eyes while she brushed the edge of a half-made sleeve or the fold of a skirt across my cheek.

‘What do you feel, carina?’ she’d say, ‘What do you feel, deep inside you? What does this fabric already know? What does it want to be?’

I wish I had the family gift, the gift of Mamma and Madaar-Bozorg and their mothers and grandmothers before them. Back in The Old Country, they used to say that the Jobrani women could divine a dress from the fragrance of the wind or the memory of the sun on the sea.

Mamma lives in America now, her America, the New Country of possibility that she always longed for. Without her, I’m learning to be my own diviner but I don’t have her knack. I’ll piece this together for you as best I can from everything that I remember, the things I’ve guessed at and the things that, no doubt, I’ve added in myself as I’ve told and retold this story over the years.

Some of it’s difficult to work with. It slips through my fingers like fine jersey or rucks up under my needle like brocade. But some of it, when I smooth it on my lap, is as light and easy as gingham, with straight lines that my thread can follow as I attach one story to another, one word to another. And that’s how I’ll make this beginning.

Now that I’m so much older and a mother myself, I can see that what I’m making here – my story, the story of Mamma and me - is a story that belongs to all of us, if it belongs to anyone.

You only need to stop for a moment, lift your arms over your head – there, that’s right, just like that – and allow the rustle of it, the soft gatherings of it, to settle over your body, just so.

And now it’s your story, yours to make and remake again, in your way, until it’s perfect.