Page 49 of The Dressmaker's Gift
‘Fate is a strangely complicated thing, is it not?’ she continues. ‘But I have lived so long now that very little surprises me. When Simone told me that Claire’s granddaughter was sharing the apartment with her in the Rue Cardinale, I had a premonition that you would come here one day. Although I had no idea that you would do so having saved my granddaughter’s life. And so we come full circle,n’est-ce pas?If I hadn’t gone to save Claire that night when Billancourt was bombed, you would not have been there to save my Simone all these years later. So it seems that fate still has a few surprises up its sleeve, even for someone of my advanced age. Which is just as it should be.’ She chuckles and pats my hand.
‘Pour the tea for us, Simone. And I will show Harriet the pictures of her beautiful grandmother.’
She heaves the album on to her lap and begins to turn the pages until she comes to the pictures she’s looking for. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m looking at. There’s a bride, in a beautiful dress whose full skirt emphasises her tiny waist. Her dark curls are tied back loosely and woven with starry flowers. The lines of the dress are breathtaking. It’s a perfect example of Dior’s New Look, the style that made him world-famous in the post-war years.
And then I look at the figure standing next to the bride: her maid of honour. Her white-blonde hair is caught up in a smooth chignon and she holds a posy of pale flowers which match the bride’s more lavish bouquet. There’s something fragile about her, something almost other-worldly. But it’s her dress that makes me gasp. It’s midnight blue, cut on the bias, draping softly over the thin lines of the young woman’s body. And just visible where the light catches them, I can make out a scattering of tiny silver beads along the neckline which sits beneath the sharp wings of her collarbones.
‘Wasn’t she beautiful?’ Mireille turns the page, showing me more photographs from her wedding day. ‘Your grandmother Claire ... and that’s Larry, your grandfather, of course. A very handsome couple they made. Do you recognise the dress, Harriet?’
I nod, unable to speak, my eyes shining with tears of joy and sadness. ‘It’s the one she made,’ I whisper at last. ‘The one pieced together from scraps.’
‘When I moved out of the apartment in the Rue Cardinale, I found the dress in Claire’s wardrobe. I packed it up and brought it home with me. I told her I had it but when she came for my wedding she didn’t want to look at it at first, wanted to tear it to pieces and throw it away. She said it was a reminder of her vanity and naivety, and she’d prefer to forget. But I told her she was wrong to think that way. That it was a triumph. A thing of beauty that she’d created from those off-cuts, a manifestation of the way she managed to create something so beautiful in a time of hardship and danger. I made her promise not to throw it away and asked her to wear it to be my maid of honour. That way, from then on it would also be associated with something joyous. I wanted to turn it into an emblem of survival and of the triumph of good over evil, you see.’
‘It’s so beautiful,’ I agree. ‘And so is your wedding dress, Mireille. Did Monsieur Dior design it for you?’
She laughs. ‘He did. Well spotted. You really do have an eye for fashion, just as Simone told me. Can you guess what it is made from?’
I peer closely at the photograph. The fabric is a creamy white, so fine that it looks almost translucent. ‘From the way the skirt falls in those folds, I’d guess it was silk.’ I look up at her. ‘But where did you get such fine material so soon after the war?’
‘My husband, of course.’ Her eyes twinkle with amusement. ‘When Philippe came to find me in Paris at the end of the war, he had with him a large kit bag. There were almost no personal belongings in it. But it did contain one large army-issue parachute. This time, he hadn’t buried it in a turnip field. He kept his promise to me and saved it for me to make something from. As it turned out, what I made was my wedding dress!’
As I hand the photo album back to her, she catches sight of the gold charm bracelet on my wrist. ‘But how wonderful to see this being worn still!’ she exclaims. ‘I gave it to Claire on my wedding day as a gift for being my maid of honour and my friend. Knowing that she was going to make a new life in England, with Larry, I wanted her to take a little bit of France with her. It had just the one charm on it –la Tour Eiffel. She wrote and told me that your grandfather gave her a charm each year on their wedding anniversary.’
She peers closely at the bracelet, separating the charms with the tip of her gnarled finger so that she can see them more clearly: the bobbin of thread, the scissors, the shoe, the tiny thimble. When she comes to the heart that Thierry gave me, she pauses. ‘This one looks brand new.’ She smiles.
‘It is,’ I say. ‘Perhaps Thierry and I will keep the tradition going. Or maybe start a new one of our own.’
We sit for over an hour, sipping tea and poring over the album of photographs. At last, Mireille sets the book aside. ‘It’s nearly time for you to go home for lunch,’ she says to Simone. ‘But before you do, help me to my feet. There is something else I want to show Harriet.’
Back inside the cottage, she leads the way down the hall to a formal sitting room. The shutters have been closed to keep out the bright sunlight and she instructs us to open them. Two long, ghostly shapes hang from a shelf on one wall and Mireille shuffles over to them. They are sheets, covering two garments on coat-hangers and, very carefully, she begins to un-pin the first one. Simone moves to help her and, as I watch, the Dior wedding dress emerges from its wrappings. In real life it’s even more beautiful than it was in the photograph. The bodice of the dress is embroidered with cream flowers and the centre of each is picked out with a tiny seed pearl. Mireille gently runs the tip of her bent forefinger over the tiny stitches. ‘Claire’s work,’ she says. ‘I made my dress and she did the embroidery for me. She was always the best at that.’
Then she turns to the second draped sheet. ‘And this is for you, Harriet.’ She undoes the pins that hold the sheet in place and as it falls to the floor it reveals an evening gown of midnight blue crêpe de Chine, whose neckline sparkles where the sunshine that floods the room catches the constellation of tiny silver beads scattered across it. It’s only when you look closely that you can see that the body of the dress has been pieced together from offcuts and scraps, with stitches so tiny and perfect that they are almost invisible.
‘Claire’s dress,’ I gasp.
Mireille nods. ‘When she left after my wedding, to start her new life in England with Larry, she decided that she didn’t want to take the dress with her. “It belongs in France,” she told me. And so I kept it, all these years. I didn’t know it at the time, but I kept it so that when her granddaughter finally came back, she would have this piece of her grandmother’s life. And through it, she would understand a little bit more of who she was and where she came from. Take it with you, Harriet. It’s time its story was told now.’
Carefully, I take the dress down from its hanger and the fine silk whispers as I let the folds of deep blue fabric run through my hands. Simone helps me to wrap it in tissue paper to preserve it for the journey back to its original home in Paris.
As we say our goodbyes, Mireille reaches into the pocket of her apron. ‘I have one more thing to give you, Harriet,’ she says.
She pulls out a silver locket which hangs on a fine chain. She hands it to me, saying, ‘Go ahead, open it.’
Even before I prise open the catch, stiff with age, I know what I will find within. And, sure enough, when the two halves open, the faces of Claire and Vivienne-who-was-really-Harriet smile up at me from the palm of my hand.
2017
The exhibition is finally ready now. As I leave the gallery and go to join my colleagues for a celebratory drink at the bar around the corner, I turn out the lights. But just as I’m about to press the last switch, I hesitate.
In the centre of the darkened gallery the display case is still illuminated, the light catching the tiny silver beads scattered along the neckline of the midnight blue dress. From a distance, you might think it’s been cut from one single piece of fabric. It’s only when you look more closely that you can see the truth.
I understand it a little better now; the truth about my grandmother and my great-aunt; the truth about my own mother; the truth about myself.
This extraordinary dress – this piece of living history – has helped to tell the stories of Claire and my great-aunt Harriet. They were ordinary people, but the extraordinary times that they lived in saw them step up to become extraordinary too. No matter how tough it got, no matter how dark the night, they never gave in.
And their stories have helped to illuminate the truth about my mother. At last the fog of anger and pain that have enveloped my feelings for her for all these years have dissipated, letting compassion shine through. She was the daughter that Claire and Larry had, late in life once Claire’s broken body had finally healed enough to bear a child. They named her Felicity for the joy she brought them, and they had poured into her all their hopes. But perhaps she had carried the burden of their guilt and grief as well. Was it something that was inherited through the genes? Or was it passed on to her in other ways that were subtly invasive, ways that Claire couldn’t prevent? The night fears, the trauma, the knowledge that human beings are capable of being so inhuman? Were they all still there, beneath Claire’s scarred skin, those deeper scars that could never be healed? And did my mother pick up on that, on some subconscious level?
I realise, too, that in spite of everything else they went through, my grandmother and great-aunt never had to endure being abandoned through their darkest days and nights: they were there to comfort and reassure one another, come what may. Perhaps that, therefore, is the most powerful feeling of all, the feeling that you are not alone in the world. And perhaps, when my mother found herself abandoned, by her parents who had died and by the husband who left her alone with the daughter that should have bound them together, she didn’t have the resilience to carry on. It was abandonment that broke her heart.
