The Memory Dress

Chapter Fourteen

FOURTEEN

Meredith

1990

She’ll be photographed from every angle. The dress and coat must reflect that. Metallic embroidery sits at the nape of the neck, the back vents where the tailcoat meets the slit of the skirt, the elongated shape adding to its femininity, lengthening the waist, achieving the right degree of formality.

By now, Meredith appreciates the role Catherine must play, why her diplomacy is so legendary. She understands the clothes are a line of defense to all the scrutiny Diana faces, down to the color of the nail polish she chooses. Catherine never once bows to it. Her loyalty is solid. She won’t trade even the smallest morsel of a valued friendship for a quick compliment from the fashion press, words that could bring more business through the door.

Her research is meticulous and lengthy. The team have got used to her regular trips abroad.

A dress cannot be designed until she absorbs the function it will perform, the cultural sensitivities it needs to negotiate. And Meredith has seen enough now to know there is no better woman for it, one who combines directness and patience with the determination of a self-made businesswoman and the protective resilience of a genuine friend. They grew together. That’s what drew them close. It was a slow evolution. Catherine discovering her designs. Diana finding her voice. Now Meredith realizing her dreams.

Can it really be that the little girl who used to sit next to her mother, inches from their tiny black-and-white TV screen, watching the royal family wave from the balcony of Buckingham Palace, will make a dress to be worn by that very royalty? As that small girl she longed to see the clothing come to life in full color. She remembers how her own mother, so close in age to their young monarch and a proud royalist, would sit motionless, never saying a word until the footage ended. Then the two of them would loudly debate the merits of one outfit over the many others they loved, Meredith reaching for her sketch pad, making childish scribbles to show her mother what improvements she would make. Her mother helped plant the seed of ambition in the mind of young Meredith. She saw no reason why her daughter couldn’t be the one who reached the top.

It became the thread that bound them together. When Meredith returned from school in the early afternoons, they would cut out easy patterns, bringing them to life on her mother’s sewing machine. By the time she was ten years old, Meredith could make basic garments and alterations to loved-but-outgrown clothes she couldn’t bear to part with. The greatest compliment of all was being trusted to rehem one of her mother’s favorite slim-cut skirts or her tapered capri pants. She knew then this was all she ever wanted to do. Maybe one day she would share her love of fashion with her own daughter.

She may have dreamed of a career in fashion, but Meredith couldn’t have predicted what it would also bring her. The long nights she and William are sharing in the workroom, hours after everyone else has left. When they dim the lighting and Meredith feels his soft lips whisper across the back of her neck.

Still no one knows. The thrill of the secret they both keep is almost unbearable in the daylight hours when they professionally negotiate their way around each other, knowing how they held each other last night and will do again tonight. This man, so respected at work, so privately passionate with her.

Meredith feels she will explode some days from the strain of avoiding eye contact, fearing her reaction, the way he lights her up, giving them both away. It isn’t that their closeness would be frowned on by the company, not when their work is as exceptional as it is. But neither of them wants to share what they have with anyone else. They don’t want their every word listened to with a new intensity, every meaningful look belittled to workroom gossip.

But even they can’t resist fully, and Meredith cherishes every accidental brush of William’s finger against hers. His every snatched opportunity to touch her when they find themselves briefly alone, their bodies pressed tightly together in the narrow stairwell before footsteps force them quickly apart. The moment when the door has closed behind their last colleague and it is just the two of them again, and he gives in to the overwhelming temptation to lift her onto one of the worktables, to direct his total dedication and passion to every inch of her, his hands moving with a devotion even he has never known before.

Meredith’s work is incomparable. Better than it has ever been. She holds her needle more confidently, she feels the tension of the fabric in her fingers more astutely, as if every emotion, every sense has been heightened. They collaborate in a way no one else can match. He may write his instructions in full in the margins of his paper patterns, but she barely needs to look at them, knowing instinctively what is required. Now it is William who will ask her advice on the construction of a complicated design, and later she may ask him to check the pitch of a sleeve before she progresses. Only they know what lies between them and how it has made everything better now they are together. Their love feels deep-rooted already, moving through each of them every day, flesh and blood.

Neither could predict what it might become, how something born of so much love could twist and turn and change, eventually ripping them all apart.