The seamstress didn’t think that the shape the bride wanted for the dress would suit her, and tried to gently steer her toward something that would flatter her generous hips rather than accentuate them. She understood that photographs portrayed things differently from how they looked in life, and worried that the bride wouldn’t like how her hips looked in the wedding photographs, which were obviously important images that she would hopefully treasure.
The bride was not for steering, however, so the seamstress sketched the shape of the dress and the bride approved it.
The bride’s parents paid for the dress upfront – unasked for, yet the seamstress appreciated it. There was a lot of work in a wedding dress, much of it the tending of the emotions of the bride – and sometimes her mother and bridesmaids.
They had three fittings and the bride was thrilled with the dress. She had been losing weight since they began the process – so many brides did – and the seamstress anticipated having to do one last alteration as the day approached.
Except the day never came. The bride’s mother called a week before the wedding and said that the bride had broken off the engagement. She didn’t say why.
Later the seamstress would hear – given the bride’s family lived locally, gossip inevitably reached her – that the groom had taken a job in Western Australia without consulting his fiancée, thinking that she would just accept his choice. The bride didn’t want to marry a man who would make such decisions without her; she thought it boded ill for their life together.
The seamstress was secretly proud of the bride. She had once been married to a man who did a similar thing, and she’d gone along with it. Then he kept making more huge decisions without her, and eventually she left him and took their children back to her parents’ home in Lindfield. There were times – although she didn’tindulge in them often – when she wondered what her life would have been like if she hadn’t gone along with that first decision her ex-husband made. If, instead, she’d left him before finding out what he would do next. True, she may not have had her children. But she would have had her freedom.
So she told the bride’s mother that she wished the young woman well, and that she would refund them the cost of the dress.
‘Absolutely not!’ the mother cried. ‘You’ve done so much work. We wouldn’t dream of it.’
The mother urged the seamstress to sell the dress if she wished. She could do whatever she wanted with it, she said.
It didn’t feel right to sell it, though. Instead the seamstress had it dry-cleaned and kept it in her wardrobe for a while, wondering if maybe she’d come across a bride who wanted a similar shape.
She never did, so eventually she gave it to a friend who was collecting donations for her local charity shop in Mosman. Wedding dresses weren’t easy to shift as second-hand items, the friend said, but as this one was unworn, perhaps it stood a chance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Apart from the occasional trip to see her sisters in the Blue Mountains, Christina has spent most of her time at home or at the frock shop. After years of living in a whirlwind – or so it felt – of auditions and meetings and costume fittings and filming and interviews and parties, of being told where to go, what to do, how to pose, how to smile, how tobe, she’s had to adjust to having days that contain not much at all.
She felt guilty about the lack of activity for a while. Not that she’s been idle – at home she cooks, she cleans, she helps her mother with various things; and at the shop she styles, she catalogues, she talks to customers, some of whom recognise her and want a longer conversation. Then she realised that if she hadn’t had this period of relative idleness after what happened to her – the assault, then the story that came out in the press, then her banishment from her own career and her self-imposed exile – she may have simply collapsed.
Some days she still feels the shock and the grief of it and gasps. Some nights she can’t get to sleep until one, two or three o’clock in the morning. She goes over and over the events that led to this place, to this feeling that she’ll never see her old life again. She knows it will get her nowhere but she’s not able to stop.
It is irrelevant that she left Los Angeles of her own accord. She couldn’t have stayed. All the people she knows there work in film and television, but there would be no work for her. Her days would be as idle as they are now, except she’d be surrounded by people who were still working. That doesn’t mean the self-imposed exile feels any better than actual banishment, though. Perhaps it’s worse, because she can’t blame anyone else. She can’t say she was made to leave.
Except she was, wasn’t she? All of those people she knew in film and television took the side of the man who tore her down, in more ways than one. She didn’t have to talk to them to know they did – it’s just the way things work.
She’s thought about trying to find an agent in Sydney. Even though she and Lindsay haven’t ended their agreement in writing, she took their last phone call to be a severance. And she still wants to work in the profession that chose her. Which is how she thinks of it – a vocation, almost. So she finds herself trying to build a new life when she can’t access even the splinters of the old one. She has to find a way to be Christina O’Flynn again – that’s what she’s realised. Christina Clarke is, it seems, dead. She’s mourning herself, and it’s the strangest thing.
There are people here who can help her be Christina O’Flynn. Her mother, of course; her sisters. And Duncan, who calls every few days to see if she’ll go out for a drink with him.
She keeps coming up with excuses, but the mere fact he’s asking makes her feel noticed. And flattered.
‘He’s a nice fellow,’ her mother keeps saying. ‘Why don’t you say yes?’
Because it’s not time yet.
That’s the answer that keeps popping into her head, and it’s nothing to do with Patrick, her LA boyfriend, whom she hasn’t heard from at all. So maybe the more correct version would be:Because I’m not back to beingheryet.
Duncan is interested in Christina O’Flynn, not Christina Clarke. Which may be the most attractive thing about him at this stage of her life – but she’s still not ready to abandon her old-new self.
There will always be traces of her anyway: in the money she invested, so sensibly that Christina wonders how she knew to do it. She bought a flat in London years ago that’s generating income, and she has an investment portfolio managed by a trusted adviser. So she doesn’t need to worry about money for a while.
And volunteering at the frock shop doesn’t just help her pass the time; it exercises her brain. She has fun styling the mannequins, and especially getting to know Daphne, who has stories galore about clothes and customers over the years.
Daphne is out on the floor today as Christina is making them coffee. She’s already spooned out the instant coffee – two spoonfuls for her, one for Daphne – but manages to spill the sugar across the countertop. Swearing at how so many granules can escape from one little spillage, she moves aside the in-tray to find escapees – and notices a pile of papers underneath.
She pulls them out – they’re drawings, of clothes. Jackets, skirts, dresses of all kinds. Some of the designs are innovative, fresh, playful even. And there’s aDin the bottom right corner of each sketch.
They can only have been made by Daphne. There are no other Ds here. But when did she do them? Has she always been designing clothes? Christina feels the tingle of curiosity about a story she doesn’t yet know.