The Memory Dress

Chapter Thirty-Two

THIRTY-TWO

It’s eight forty-five a.m. when Meredith, looking completely disheveled, opens the door. There is toothpaste on her chin and her cardigan. Her hair is unbrushed and she is barefoot. She stands perfectly still waiting for me to introduce myself. We have taken a massive step backward.

“Morning, Meredith, it’s Jayne from upstairs. Are you okay?” I wish I’d had the foresight yesterday to get her some forget-me-nots. They would have helped.

“William is missing.” She hugs her arms around herself, rubbing her hands up and down, trying to comfort herself. “He didn’t come home last night, and he’s missed his breakfast this morning. I made him bacon, but it’s all gone to waste.”

That explains the unmistakable smell of charred meat that immediately takes me back to cold school camping trips.

“Shall I make us a warm cup of tea and you can tell me all about it?” I smile, trying my best to reinstate some familiarity between us.

“That could be nice,” she says, and steps aside. I’m reminded again of how vulnerable she is, how easy it would be for the wrong sort of person to gain access to her apartment and her life.

The oven grill is still on and the remains of the bacon are now just a brown crisp of rind. I turn off the grill, scrape the lot into the kitchen bin, push a window open, and put the kettle on. Meredith looks on. “He prefers it well done,” she offers as an explanation.

We settle side by side on the sofa in the drawing room and I pour the tea, already doubting if this is really the best day to play Meredith the film. But I know the clock is ticking over us all, and will there ever be a perfect time?

“There is something I was hoping to share with you this morning, if that’s okay, Meredith?”

“Oh, what’s that?” she asks, balancing her teaspoon on the edge of the bone china saucer.

“It’s a film.”

“ Steel Magnolias ? I love that one.” She nudges forward, excited at the thought of it.

“Not exactly. It’s about you, actually.”

She laughs. “Why would anyone want to watch that?”

“I was hoping you might enjoy it. I thought it might remind you of some of the important and special times in your life. Make them seem real to you again.”

“Oh. Well, all right then, since you put it like that. Let’s watch it. We may even learn something we didn’t know before.”

I place my laptop on the low coffee table in front of us, propping it up on a stack of books so the screen is balanced higher. I’m nervous. There’s very little predicting how this next fifteen minutes might go. My phone screen lights up and I see it’s a message from Olivia.

OLIVIA: Good luck this morning. I’m just upstairs if you need me.

My finger hovers over the mouse. I watch it shake before I tap, and the film starts. I sit back, subtly shifting my body weight on the sofa, so I am facing Meredith and not the screen.

The second it starts I hear her intake of breath. Then she places her cup and saucer back on the table.

She doesn’t say a word. The images flash and fade, the music starts and recedes, her beautiful dresses cross the screen in all their glory. I watch her face closely as they do. How her eyes widen and contract, fill with tears the moment the image of her and William on the steps of Chelsea Old Town Hall appears. She raises her right hand to her heart on seeing the pushchair, and when Fiona’s graduation shot fills the screen, she says, “Oh, look at her, all grown up.” There is no hint that she is anything other than immensely proud of her daughter. The only time her focus leaves the screen is when the image of the dress in her bedroom appears. Her eyes cast off in the direction of her room, then snap back again.

The film finishes and I hear her exhale, like she’s been holding her breath throughout, but she’s calm, her face looks soft, not tense.

“I have the missing dress, don’t I.” It isn’t a question, she knows.

I nod. “I think so.”

“She knows I love it. It’s 1992, the India tour. Such a sad time for her but a very exciting one for William and me. Fiona is on her way. I feel like I am on the start line of the happiest years of my life.” I watch her shoulders slacken, perhaps with the knowledge that she is no longer living those days.

“I’m not sure she decides to give me the dress until that day at Kensington Palace, when we all had our picture taken together. We chatted a little. I had a chance to explain that I worked on the dress while I was pregnant, that it was truly a labor of love, as all her dresses are— oh .” I can almost hear the penny drop. I think she can too.

She takes a breath. “Did—did I make that dress for her?” She raises her fingers to her lips. “Did I make all the dresses for her? With my own hands? With William?”

“I believe so, Meredith. I think that’s why your recollections of those times have been so vivid. Because you were there.”

“ We are there. We do it together. We always do it together.” Before I can prompt her any further, she shouts, “My essentials bag!” She shoots off the sofa and across the room, toward her bedroom. When she returns, she is holding the black bag in her hand. She sits back beside me and slowly unzips it to reveal its closely guarded contents to me for the first time: steel pins, a tightly rolled cloth tape measure, a pair of very small, sharp scissors, a thin paper pocket of needles in varying sizes, and identical spools of different-colored cotton.

“Can you play it again, please?” she asks.

This time she watches it with the laptop balanced on a cushion on her lap, so she is much closer to the screen, greedily absorbing every image and sound.

“Again, please,” she says as soon as it finishes.

By the third viewing, her mood has shifted. The elation of the surprise discovery has left her. She passes me the laptop and then collapses over into her own lap, sobbing. This is exactly what I was worried about, it’s too much in one go. Nearly a decade of missing memories, all firing back at her at once.

“Oh no, I am so sorry, Meredith, I genuinely thought this might help.” I shouldn’t have let the others persuade me. I should have trusted my instincts. Who knows what the longer-term effect will be on her now, how much it may set her back?

When the intensity of her sobbing subsides, she reclines back on the sofa, drained, wiping the last tears from her face.

“You don’t understand. It’s the relief. It always has to be me, you know? William makes sure of that from the very beginning. I think she trusts my discretion. I am great at slipping into the background. Going unnoticed. Disappearing when I have to.”

I sigh because this is exactly the problem, why Meredith has lived unseen, right under our noses, for so long.

“Of course, I need the skills to do the job. But they need someone who understands the spotlight is not theirs to seek. It is always made clear that I shouldn’t talk about any of it.”

“But…it’s your life , Meredith. You can talk about it as much as you like now. I hope you know that?”

“I do, thank you. Watching this beautiful film is like watching my memory room come to life. You’ve made all my favorite people and places real again. I feel like me again.” She bites down on her bottom lip to stop it quivering. “I can’t believe you’ve done this for me.” Then her arms are around my shoulders and she is hugging me harder than I have ever been hugged before. I feel her fingers press into my shoulder blades. Still she squeezes tighter. My hand finds the back of her head and I cradle her there, my mind tripping back through all the steps we have taken to get here. Right back to my grandmother’s sitting room, her lap, all the hugs I should have given, being channeled into this very special one now.

Finally, she releases me.

“I can’t take all the credit. I had a lot of help. Davina, Carina, Jake, and Olivia, they all put this film together while we were in London. Do you remember Davina? You met her before we went to London.”

“And her little girl, so full of life.”

“Maggie, that’s right. So, the question is, How do you feel about rejoining me for the second leg of our trip? There are two more dress sketches in your memory room that I think we should explore. If you’d like to? One was worn to Sandringham.”

“The Big House. That’s what she calls it.”

“And the other is Althorp. Tomorrow is Saturday, so if you feel up to it, I think we should travel to Sandringham, stay overnight somewhere, and do Althorp on Sunday on the way back home. How does that sound?”

“It sounds wonderful! I better get packing.”