The Dress

3.

Baby’s blanket. White merino wool. Hand-knitted.



Ella had always been different from other children. Fabbia knew this from the moment she took the newborn bundle in her arms, gathering the soft bird bones of her, feeling the tiny heart beating fast and strong against her own.

The baby was strangely quiet and calm and looked at her with wide eyes that were not-quite-green and not-quite-blue but perfectly focused in a way that made Fabbia wonder what she was already saying to herself inside her mind.

She was born just before midnight on All Hallows’ Eve, the time when, so Madaar-Bozorg would have said, the worlds of the living and the dead overlap for a while. A lozenge of moonlight fell through the window of the third-floor hospital room and spread itself across the sheets. The baby seemed to reach for it, her little rosebud fists opening and closing as if trying to hold the light in her hands.

Her name came easily. Fabbia saw the shape of it very clearly in her mind – or was it that she heard it, blown in on the autumn wind, like an eddy of leaves or the smoke from the first fires? Isabella, for Isis, Brilliant One, Great Lady of the Moon and Magic, protector of the dead, queen of beginnings in all the old stories.

But she would always call her Ella, in honour of that first night, hers and Enzo’s. The smell of jasmine and honeysuckle, the chink of glasses, the sounds drifting on the heavy air to the balcony where Enzo had stood waiting for her.

‘Do you like, jazz, bellissima? Billie Holliday? Nina Simone? Listen, this is my favourite. Ella Fitzgerald. Magnifica. What a goddess…’

You go to my head and you linger like a hearty refrain and I find you spinning round in my brain like the bubbles in a glass of champagne…

He’d put his hand on the small of her back, his hips swinging gently to the rhythms snaking around them and between them.

‘Don’t you love how you feel it all through you, like… like…’ He’d lifted his hand as if to pluck the right word out of the air. ‘Like e-lec-tricity?’

You go to my head with a smile that makes my temperature rise, like a summer with a thousand Julys, you intoxicate my soul with your eyes...

The high notes tangled with his words, breaking against her in shivers of green, red, gold.

That night, the night of Ella’s birth, she let herself remember all of that, testing herself, fondling the memory as if she were fingering an old wound.

The nurse wrestled with the window latch, slamming it shut against the wind. But the baby, Ella, lay perfectly quiet, seeming to take in everything with her calm, clear gaze.

‘This one’s been here before,’ said the nurse, stroking Ella’s cheek, letting her tiny fist close fast over her finger. ‘She’s not going to let go...’

And yes, Fabbia thought, turning the words over in her mind, this was true. She’d been thinking about nothing else but this moment for months now, wondering what it would feel like, to go through it all alone. She’d expected to feel so small, not up to the task, so afraid. Because Enzo wasn’t here with her, to stroke her hair or play her his compilations of favourite jazz tracks or distract her by laughing at his own terrible jokes.

But when the moment had arrived, she hadn’t felt any of those things.

She flexed her feet under the white sheets, wiggled her toes. Exhausted, yes. Every muscle in her body ached and throbbed. But as she looked down at this baby in her arms, her baby, hers and Enzo’s, something inside her seemed to soften. She didn’t really know how to put it into words. Except that it had a colour, this feeling, the softest blue, spreading through her stomach, reaching up towards her heart, turning purplish at the edges and opening into a velvety pink, like the petals of the orchids that grew in Madaar-Bozorg’s garden.

Now the baby kicked her feet and made a small mewing sound. Her eyes searched Fabbia’s face. I wonder what I look like to her, right now, Fabbia thought. An enormous moon-face, blurry, all out-of-focus.

‘You’re safe,’ she whispered. ‘We don’t need to worry about anything any more.’

But she knew that she was only trying to convince herself.

In fact, Ella had never been a moment’s trouble. Whenever Fabbia thought about those first difficult years, which she tried hard not to do, she saw herself as a small figure in a flimsy coat and worn shoes with Ella tucked under her arm, traipsing from one town to another, one life to another; and she saw how Ella had simply looked out at everything around her from those clear blue-green eyes, as if perfectly resigned to whatever might happen next.

Fabbia had placed her carefully in her Moses basket in the middle of all those other women’s kitchen floors while she scrubbed and polished, tidied away, scraped stale food from stacks of dishes, loaded and unloaded dishwashers, ironed and folded clothes. And all the time, Ella had lain quietly, clasping and unclasping her little pink fists, opening and closing her eyes and murmuring to herself from time to time.

And now they were here in York, the final destination, Fabbia hoped, at the end of their long journey. Just three weeks ago, she’d watched her daughter, fifteen years old now, half-child, half-woman, with wild brown hair and that steady gaze, standing in the middle of the courtyard as the men lugged the boxes and shouted to one another and a little dog yapped.

She’d seen how Ella stood observing with her usual calm and serious expression, as if a part of her were somewhere else, somewhere far away and completely unreachable.

Fabbia Moreno felt, and not for the first time, a stab of fear for her daughter. She wished that she would giggle and shriek and fidget and get impatient, even stamp her feet and complain and make unreasonable demands, in the way that she saw other young girls doing.

There was always a part of Ella that seemed unreachable somehow, even to Fabbia. You never knew quite what she was thinking. And always with her nose in a book.

And then, of course, there was the other thing, all the signs that Fabbia knew to watch for in a daughter. The Signals. The gift that all the women of her family had been born with, in one way or another.

Seeing things, hearing things, feeling things. Knowing who was arriving at the door before they were even there. Feeling your way into another’s thoughts. Ella had this, she knew. But she wondered if Ella herself was aware of it yet.

Now she looked down at the top of Ella’s head, her hair a wiry halo that blazed in the sunlight.

‘You are holding on to this ladder, aren’t you, carina?’ she said, preparing to balance on one leg and reach her arms above her head to drive the last screw into the ceiling fixture.

Ella turned from gazing out of the window and grasped the stepladder with new determination.

‘I didn’t know you could do all this stuff, mum,’ she said.

‘Neither did I.’ Fabbia laughed as the chandelier in her hands bounced rainbows over the white walls. ‘But what is it they say here. That funny thing. Don’t tell me. Let me remember… Sink… or swim?’

Even now, almost sixteen years after arriving in England, she was still grappling with the language. She missed things out, forgot the correct sequence of the words. The vowels never seemed to feel quite right in her mouth somehow. And here in the North, she felt even clumsier. People here spoke in such a different way. Sometimes her head ached from concentrating so hard just to keep up with what they were saying.

It was so frustrating. She was an educated person, an intelligent person and yet she couldn’t always make herself understood.

‘We need a new dress shop, something a bit different.’ The pink-cheeked girl at Braithwaite’s Fruit & Veg had smiled. She reminded Fabbia of a ripe fruit herself, her bosom looking as if it might burst the stiff sheath of her overalls at any moment.

‘Vintage, you say? I like all that old stuff. It’s in all the magazines now, innit? I might have to pop in and ‘ave a look.’

She’d slipped an extra peach into the brown paper bag and winked at Ella.

Fabbia liked the hum and lilt of her talk, the ease of her body under the tight green cotton as she reached up to drop apples onto the scales suspended from the beam above her head, sending the silver dish bobbing and swaying.

‘I make some of the dresses too,’ said Fabbia, ‘and little alterations. Because, well, perhaps you know that vintage is very hard to size. And we have shoes, handbags, scarves, perfume…’

She stopped and felt herself blush at the sales pitch tripping out of her mouth so freely. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… Please. Come. Have a look…’

She tried to hide her embarrassment, burrowing to the bottom of her plastic shopper, fishing out a flyer from the pile and propping it against a pineapple. ‘We have little opening party. Glass of wine, yes? And… how do you say it here? Canapés…’

‘Oooo. Very nice,’ said the girl, her cheeks dimpling again. ‘Cana-what’s its. Those snacky things, innit? Want to give me a few of your leaflets, then, lovey? I’ll put ‘em on the counter.’

And as she left the shop, a trail of the coloured flyers fluttering behind her, Fabbia had felt a kind of fizz and crackle returning to her body after all the months and years of sadness. It was like throwing off a heavy blanket after a long illness and stretching her arms wide.

She’d done it. She was here. She’d made her new beginning. She could almost believe now that it was going to be alright.

She put back her head and laughed, opening her mouth and swallowing big lungfuls of the chilly air.

‘Mum! What are you doing?’ Ella was looking at her self-consciously.

‘Breathing it in, carina. Breathing it all in…’

Ella laughed, her eyes losing their worried expression, her cheeks flushing. For a moment, Fabbia thought she might join her, throw back her head too, take gulps of air.

Instead Ella seemed to check herself, glancing around her nervously, pushing her hands deeper into her jeans pockets. But she looked at Fabbia and smiled, in the indulgent way you might smile at a small child playing.

She feels it too, thought Fabbia. She’s relaxing a bit. She’s going to be happy here.

Because, above all, Fabbia wanted Ella to be happy.

All these first weeks, she’d busied herself, unpacking boxes for the shop and the flat, finding furniture, hanging curtains, cleaning and painting and tweaking.

She’d discovered that she could sand the old varnish from a table and paint it in smooth creamy strokes of duck-egg blue or grey. She could glue the broken spindles of a chair or improvise a headboard from a piece of wood and a length of flowered fabric.

But she wished she could do more, spin a circle around them both, keep the happiness in and any badness out.

She watched Ella carefully those first weeks, feeling relief on the days when she lost that far-off look, when she smiled or laughed or even put aside the book she’d buried herself in to help with painting a wall or emptying a box.

And when Billy appeared in the shop, tagging along in Ella’s wake, his face split in that wide smile, Fabbia felt her heart lift. Ella would make friends now. Nice young people like Billy. And this friendly woman in the grocers, was she old enough to have a daughter? Someone around Ella’s age?

She’d begun to believe that they were safe here. People were kind.

Stupid, Fabbia. So naïve. To trust. To relax in this way.

Because then, when her guard was down, that awful man had come sniffing around, with his black coat, all grubby at the hem, and his eyes, tiny eyes, too deep-set in his face - and never trust a man with too-small eyes, Madaar-Bozorg always said - looking into everything, picking up a handkerchief or a hat with the tips of his long white fingers, replacing each item with a look of distaste as if it were contaminated.

She’d felt her hand in her skirt pocket itching to leap out and grab his hands, to make those horrible probing fingers go still and quiet.

She’d had an almost overwhelming urge to pick up an embroidered cushion or a silk scarf and place it firmly over his thin, hard mouth so that she wouldn’t have to look at that expression on his face for one minute longer.

But instead she’d smiled and smiled and laid her hand gently on his arm – he’d certainly liked that, hadn’t he? – and she’d gestured towards the doorway gently, carefully, so that he wouldn’t feel pressured, so that he wouldn’t know, even for a second, that she was ushering him away, across the floor and out of the door. Away. Please. Leave us now. Watching as the last flick of his black coat disappeared around the corner like a rat’s tail.

Fabbia Moreno knew how to make a shop. She knew how to make a high waist and a concealed seam, how to drape a neckline or cut on the bias, how to sew stretch jersey, remove the scuff marks from a 1920s evening slipper or restore the nap of a blush-pink leather glove.

But she didn’t know how to keep Ella safe, how to shield her from the prying fingers, the hard faces, the questions and looks, the words half-whispered behind the back of a hand or tossed over a shoulder, words made to cut you or hook you in.

And wherever they went, there was no getting away from those words, it seemed.

Foreigner. Dirty Arab. Osama Bin Laden. Terrorist cell. Excuse me, madam, may I see your papers? Passport? How long do you intend to stay here? Taking our jobs. Why don’t you just go home?

What had this man said as he stood, holding her flyer between his long wormy fingers? She tried to remember.

‘I take it you have a permit for this little opening party. If you’re going to serve alcohol, Mrs Moreno, well, you’ll need certain permissions from my office. But I’m sure that can all be arranged…’

Fabbia knew exactly what that meant.

‘Oh,’ she’d said, offering him her best smile, ‘I wouldn’t want to cause your office any extra trouble, Councillor. In that case, I will offer my guests some very nice homemade lemonade. Thank you so much for advising me.’