The Memory Dress

Chapter Two

TWO

Jayne

BATH

JULY 2018

Margot is so much like me. Hates unnecessary noise. Prefers to be alone. Very happy just to sit, as we are now, side by side, her weight leaning into my right arm, watching the early-morning mist lift off the grass, the city far below us starting to stretch and wake.

The realization that I have more in common with a scrappy Jack Russell than I do with most people always makes me smile. A smile that is 80 percent genuine—this dog has a lot going for her—and 20 percent denial, but at least I can admit that. I am okay with the fact that Margot and I share a love of peaceful solitude, but I have some awareness that others think I shouldn’t be.

It’s eight a.m. and we have just completed the two-hour skyline walk of the city, as we do at least twice a week together. Her at my heel, fiercely obedient until her nose lifts, she catches a whiff of something she likes, then she’s gone. I learned early on not to panic. Unlike some of the other dogs I walk, Margot always comes back. I don’t even have to pause for her to catch up. She will find me again. Loyalty is everything to her. Plus, she knows I’m carrying tripe sticks.

As I stretch my long nettle-scratched legs out in front of me, I feel the heat of the new day starting to burn away the last of the clouds, and the sharpness of the scorched grass on the back of my knees. It’s going to be another brilliant blue-sky day. Margot’s owner, the highly impressive Davina, will be manhandling her two children off to school by now, while I sit here, surely the lucky one, feeling a deep contentment. I have made this dog happy and I didn’t have to say a single word. That’s the great thing about dogs. The more you get to know them, the better they are. I can’t always say the same for humans.

We didn’t see anyone on our walk this morning. Too early for the tourists who always get lost in the network of fields and trails and need redirecting, or the grumpy older men determined to make me solely responsible for every poop bag thoughtlessly left behind. Not even a text from Mum. Two hours of uninterrupted isolation with just a series of kissing gates and stiles between me, Margot, and the space we both crave. Would the air have smelled any fresher, would my lungs have expanded any further, would this dog like me any better if I was something more than just me, doing what I love? If I was more boldly striding through this life with great confidence, as the world likes to remind me that I should be in my final year before I hit thirty?

I look down onto the rooftops of Bath, the honey glow spreading across its network of famous Georgian terraces, already warming in the early sunshine. Just the odd spire, construction crane, or church tower asserting itself above the other buildings. I notice the city’s beauty first, but while Margot is loudly crunching on her well-earned breakfast, I think about all those people packed into those buildings. Beautiful town houses just like the one I live in, that have been converted by ambitious landlords keen to see the best possible return on every square meter. Every day the same. Up. Commute. Work. Repeat. What confrontations, negotiations, problems might they face today? Will they feel energized at the prospect of it all or intimidated by it? Are they making themselves live a life someone else convinced them they should desire? Am I too?

I was always the quiet, awkward one. The girl not to sit next to. The girl whom everyone loved to talk about rather than to. Most people understood why I was quiet, the sadness that had written itself through my family history. All it took was one careless mum to lower her voice over coffee and retell our story to others, forgetting that a hushed tone was the quickest way to pique the interest of the children in the room next door. Unfortunately, as a kid, that made me intriguing, the focus of the last thing I wanted: more attention. For some I was just that strange girl who never talked much. For others I presented a challenge. Could they provoke me enough to make me talk?

I hear a siren, a police car or an ambulance some way off in the distance, and its urgency reminds me that I also have the second part of my own working day to get to at a local florist, Bouquets & Bunches.

I wait until the last possible moment to slip Margot back onto her lead and then we walk the thirty minutes or so back to Lansdown Crescent, her home and mine. My eyeline never dipped on the walk, I was taking everything in, absolutely reveling in the landscape and all it has to offer. But once I’m back on the streets of the city, it’s my walking shoes I see, my gaze lowered, not wanting to interact or be seen but knowing that my height, a lofty five foot ten, will always make me visible in a crowd. Margot seems to share my discomfort, too, and she picks up her pace, keen to return to the comfort of her dog bed and an empty house.

When I finally plucked up the courage to leave Mum’s place, this address was an easy choice. Lots of people wanted it. Mum and Dad’s money helped. It’s the best terrace in Bath, the estate agent said, you’ll rarely see a FOR SALE sign. He was right about that.

But it was the sheep that sold it to me. I can look out the window of my top-floor apartment at the sweeping view over the city skyline and at the livestock that roam the private patch of land directly opposite—with no idea quite how lucky they are to have claimed this space in the middle of an overcrowded city.

It’s also sufficiently far enough away that Mum or my older sister, Sally, has to call before visiting, they can’t risk a casual drop-by. Mum gets it, but Sally, always the loudest of us two, still doesn’t understand why I don’t fancy the improv comedy night at the Theatre Royal, or the live debate at the Assembly Rooms on the city’s relevance to modern architecture. Why is it considered somehow lacking to want to sit alone with your thoughts or a good book?

Margot’s owner, Davina, an overworked event planner who keeps the kind of hours that would kill me in less than a week, will be at her office by now. I let myself into her ground-floor apartment and immediately trip on a trail of odd shoes that includes a stray flip-flop, a filthy trainer, and a scuffed school shoe, its sole flapping open. I follow them like breadcrumbs down the hallway into the kitchen, where Margot’s bed is and where domestic chaos reigns. Whoever paid for this kitchen obviously has very good taste, and if you took away the dog and the lived-in family mess it’s exactly the sort of room you might see under a Pinterest search for stylish family living spaces. It has chalky coffee-colored walls, impossibly high ceilings, and a central island that this morning is barely visible under the clutter. The sink is piled with breakfast dishes and half the cutlery didn’t quite make it that far. There are opened pots of jam and peanut butter, their lids discarded, littering the counter—I can’t help myself, I wipe them off, close them, and pop them back in the fridge—and a saucepan on the hob with porridge crusted around it, which won’t be the most appealing welcome home later on. I can’t leave that either. I wash it up and pop it back in one of the bespoke wooden cupboards, the sort I know I’ll never own. No one thought—or had time—to turn the radio off and I can see tiny greasy fingerprints all over the low lights that hang above the island. It’s Monday so the usual stack of Sunday papers sits on the kitchen table, still cellophane-wrapped and unread. An optimistic attempt at some weekend downtime that never came.

Davina’s must be the largest apartment in our town house, with uninterrupted views of the shared rear garden from the floor-to-ceiling sash windows in the kitchen.

I stand for a minute and take it all in, as I have many times before. It’s staggering how much you can learn about people from the space they inhabit. For a start, there are never any men’s shoes. Willow and Maggie, Davina’s daughters, claim the lion’s share of the apartment and its air space. I’ve heard the unbridled laughter and the shrill arguments that can erupt at any time of the day or night. I first met her elder daughter, fourteen-year-old Willow, when I moved in about a week after the new year. Small talk doesn’t exist in Willow’s teenage world. She speaks only when she thinks she has something worth saying. I could tell the day we met that the excitement of Christmas had already receded. Davina was back at work and Willow’s handwritten Post-it notes had begun to build up on the kitchen work surfaces, her preferred, perhaps only, means of communication. Just as I am letting go of my own mother more, Willow is trying to claim a larger stake of hers. Sometimes they’re reminders that I’ve run out of toothpaste or Have you signed the school forms yet? But occasionally they tug at my heart a little stronger. Will you be home for dinner tonight, Mum? or Will you have time to finish watching the movie with me this evening? The really sad ones— I’ve forgotten what you look like! or Remember me, your daughter? —I am tempted to dispose of to save Davina the hurt, but I know I mustn’t. I just do a bit of extra tidying or make it clear I am available for more dog walks if she needs me, anything that might give her a little more time with her girls.

This morning I notice the full lunch box that’s been forgotten—right next to the empty bottle of Sauvignon—and I wince at the problems it’s going to cause Davina later when someone realizes. The younger daughter, the energetic eight-year-old, Maggie, gets collected from school by a childminder Monday to Friday—I’ve seen it marked on the family planner on the kitchen wall—and I think this might be her tea. Then I see a note for me. Jayne, would you mind picking up my suit from the dry cleaners next to the station? I know you’ll probably walk that way and I haven’t got time. I’ve put the extra money with the dog walking fee, next to the microwave. Also, we’re out of dog food. Sorry! There is no money there, just a potted fern, dehydrated and desperate for resuscitation. I want Davina to be pleased with the job I do, so I pour a half-drunk glass of water on it, make a mental note to collect the suit later, and give Margot a quick ruffle on the head to let her know I’m off but I’ll be back with something for her to eat. I let myself back into my place on the top floor, the smallest apartment of the four in the town house but with priceless views from my little roof terrace.

My alarm went off at five forty-five this morning and that’s when I laid out my clothes for the day—a plain dark navy linen dress, a gray tee underneath, and a pair of flat sandals. I set up my usual breakfast in the kitchen last night before bed so I can be back out the door in under thirty minutes. It’s Monday, there will be the week’s delivery of fresh flowers arriving at Bouquets & Bunches for me to arrange and a stack of orders from the weekend to process. I get ready then wait ten minutes until I hear the front door downstairs bang shut.

That will be Jake, the man who lives in the coach house at the bottom of our shared garden, checking his postbox in the hallway on his way out to work. He’s one of those people who’s impossibly handsome, late thirties, I’d say, a bit of gray hair peppering the outline of his face, the kind of casual good looks that don’t appear manufactured by expensive face creams and hours in front of the bathroom mirror. The sort of guy who’d look all wrong in a suit and someone I actively avoid. From what I’ve seen he has plenty of admirers, he doesn’t need another.