Secrets of a Charmed Life (32 page)

Make that, I haven’t had any luck.

The ones I have spoken to have been quite taken by the story of the brides box, and especially moved by what happened to you and me. They’ve all found it intriguing that I want to see your sketches become real dresses at last, but the designs aren’t in style, said one; the sketches are too faded to be of any use, said another; and they aren’t mine to give away or sell, said several others. Technically they are still your property, Emmy.

I wish I knew the name of the person you were to meet the day of the bombing. I remember your telling me how this was your one chance to be discovered. If I knew who that person was and where to find him or her, I would waste no time in arranging a meeting.

I can’t remember the name of the lady you worked for at the bridal shop, either. The shop is gone. Everything on the street near where the butcher shop was is gone; it’s all new buildings now.

I will keep trying, Emmy. I haven’t given up.

In the meantime, Simon and I have set a date and I am now wearing the engagement ring he tried to give me last spring.

Our wedding date is April 7.

Your birthday.

November 1, 1958

Dear Emmy,

No news to report on the sketches.

I found a seamstress willing to make one of the drawings a reality—I’ve actually found several who make custom dresses all the time, for a pretty price—but the one I like best is not interested in being part of launching a line of wedding dresses with your name on them. She will make a dress for me from one of your designs, but it won’t be to sell in a boutique somewhere. It will be for me to wear.

I am discovering that if I want your drawings to become real wedding gowns, I will need a treasure chest full of money to fund the project myself and then peddle them to bridal shops door-to-door.

I don’t have a treasure chest full of money.

Gramps isn’t a rich man, but he’s done well. I can only hope I can convince him to help me do with your sketches what you would have done with them.

But first I will have to tell my grandparents about the brides box.

And what I did.

Julia

November 9, 1958

Dear Emmy,

Gramps said no.

Simon and I took the train to Woodstock and had tea at Granny and Gramps’ house this afternoon. Gramps said he was sorry but neither he nor I know anything about the bridal gown business. We don’t have the know-how, the instincts, the connections.

He said it would cost thousands of pounds to have your drawings made into dresses, provided I could find a suitable seamstress able to read the faded sketches, and then I would have to traipse around London on foot, carrying them from store to store, hoping some shop owner would want to buy a gown that was in style twenty years ago, designed by an unknown who has disappeared off the face of the earth.

Gramps can’t see the value of plodding across London with an armload of wedding dresses no one to date has expressed any interest in.

He also commented that the designs aren’t truly mine to do this with. They belong to you. I don’t have your permission and I’m likely not going to get it.

Gramps and Granny were both appreciative of my desire to make things right between you and me, but they don’t think I’ve anything to regret. You and I both made mistakes that day. Mine were less egregious, perhaps, but that’s not the point, Gramps said. The point is, London was bombed a few hours after you and I arrived. The war is the true destroyer of your dreams, not I. So it’s not up to me to restore what the war shattered.

Simon was sitting next to me the whole time, stroking my hand under the table and saying nothing. I wanted him to say,
But Emmy’s designs are really good.
Or
I’ll drive Julia around London so she won’t have to tramp across the West End on foot with an armload of dresses.
Or even just,
Don’t we owe it to Julia’s sister to at least give her dresses a chance?

He didn’t. We left soon after that.

What was the good in finding Emmy’s sketches if not to do something with them?
I asked Simon on the way home.

He said maybe the finding was just for me. Maybe I was meant to find the brides box now because I happen to be in need of a wedding dress.

Pick the one you want for you,
Simon said.
Wear one of your sister’s designs to your own wedding. Wouldn’t that be the good in finding them?

I suppose he’s right.

I laid out all the sketches on my kitchen table tonight after Simon dropped me off. The most faded ones I put back. A couple others just weren’t right for my body shape.

Of the seven that were left, I picked the one I used to call the button dress. Remember it, Emmy? You had tiny pearl buttons going down the front, all the way to the floor. And a high, fitted waist. Lacy sleeves you can see through, a heart-shaped neckline, and a swishy skirt with a lace petticoat underneath.

I wonder if you ever imagined that someday your little sister would wear one of your dresses.

Perhaps Simon is right. Perhaps finding the brides box so I can wear one of your designs is what you would have wanted.

I am eager to take it to the seamstress who said she will make one of the dresses for me. I know what Gramps will say when I tell him my dress is to be custom made and might cost a
little more than he thought he wanted to spend. He will say he doesn’t care. The dress is for me, for my wedding.

It’s for my happy ending.

One of us should have one.

I guess it will be me.

At least, as happy as I can make it.

Julia

November 19, 1958

Dear Emmy,

The seamstress who agreed to make the button dress for me told me she’d like to change the skirt to a tea length and drop the tops of the sleeves to off the shoulder. She said the style of the button dress is terribly outdated.

I wanted to throttle her.

Instead I told her I liked the original design just the way it was.

She said,
You do know no one is wearing this style of wedding dress anymore?

And I said that wasn’t true because I was wearing it.

But I know now why I can’t seem to generate interest in your sketches, Emmy.

I’m too late.

I waited too long to look for the box.

Julia

December 2, 1958

Dear Emmy,

I had my first fitting today. I nearly cried when I tried the dress on, even though it’s only partially sewn.

It’s so beautiful, Emmy. So incredibly beautiful. April seems like such a long way off.

Granny came with me to the fitting and she started to cry.

See how talented my sister was,
I said to her as she blotted her tears away.

It’s a wonderful dress,
Granny said.

The seamstress just clucked something like
Every bride looks like a princess in a wedding gown that she loves.

When I came home, I could feel the dress still on my skin. Your dress, Emmy. I still feel it on me, caressing me. Holding me.

I think I can be happy marrying Simon in the dress that came from the very heart of you. I think you would want me to be happy marrying him.

Snow is falling outside my window now, diamond white in the spreading dusk.

I feel you here with me, Emmy. It’s as if you are looking down on me from heaven, for surely that is where you are, and the snow is a gift you’ve been allowed to give me so that I can mark this day.

The brides box is sitting on the table here next to me and it occurs to me that I shall marry only once.

I have no need of the other sketches in the box.

I have your forgiveness. I see it in the snow outside my window and I felt it earlier when your folds of white caressed my trembling body.

Across from me, my little coal fire is whispering condolences.

And something else.

I see it now, how I can hold you forever and also let you go.

The happy fire is sighing in agreement, the little beggar. It is eager to play its part for me.

The journal I will keep to remind me, should I ever need to be reminded, that you and I did indeed find each other again, within the seams of my wedding dress.

Good-bye, dear sister.

I will love you always.

Julia

KENDRA

WHEN
I look up from Julia’s journal, Isabel is asleep on the sofa. Her head is bent forward on her chest and a gentle wheeze floats across to me every time she exhales.

For several long minutes I am torn between waking her and letting her sleep.

I am dying to know how Isabel got her hands on the journal. She had to have been reunited with her sister. Had to have been. How else could she have come by it? I turn my head toward the window as the thought occurs to me that perhaps Julia is in the garden with the rest of the family.

As I ponder this, Isabel stirs awake, sees that I have closed the journal, and she sits up abruptly.

“Oh! I must have nodded off. What time is it?”

I glance at a clock on the wall behind her. “Just a bit after two thirty.”

“Did you read it?”

“Yes.”

She takes the journal gently from my outstretched hand. “You’re the first to read it in many years.”

“How did you get it?” I hear urgency in my voice.

She smiles knowingly. “Do you mean, did Julia herself give it to me?”

I nod, wanting very much to hear that this is exactly what happened.

Isabel runs her hand across the top of the journal. “She did.”

Relief floods me. “Thank God,” I whisper, and her smile widens.

“Yes, I’ve God to thank for refusing to let me continue with my stubbornness.”

“How did you find each other?”

Isabel thinks about her answer for a moment. “Gwen brought us together, you might say.”

“She finally told you about Julia coming to the house that day, didn’t she?” I say, sure that this is what happened.

“I guess that is one way of looking at it. The short story is Julia handed the journal to me, from where you are sitting right now. The long story is a bit more complicated than that.” She settles into the sofa cushions behind her and I settle into mine. “We’d been back in the UK for nearly a year, Mac, Gwen, and I. We decided to stay at Thistle House after Mac joined us that first summer. He and I needed a quiet place to rebuild our marriage, and since Gwen’s best friend back in the States had recently moved to the West Coast, Gwen was amenable to staying and trying the high school here. I soon had other reasons for wanting to stay, which I will get to. But I still lived as though Emmeline Downtree had never existed. I still went by the name Isabel. I didn’t see any great
need to shatter the myth, and being back at Thistle House after so many years was rekindling old aches that I thought Isabel could handle better. The only person who deserved to know the truth was Gwen, and what was the point in finally confessing to her that not only was I living my life with a borrowed name, but I had also abandoned my seven-year-old half sister on the day the Germans bombed London and she was likely dead because of me? I was looking for ways to bond with Gwen rather than distance myself from her, and since Mac hadn’t taken the news well when I finally told him the truth about who I was, it was easy to decide that nothing good would come from dredging it up for Gwen, either.

“So the three of us were in Oxford on a Sunday afternoon the following April for an art exhibition. Gwen and I had made some progress in our relationship, and she was fairly happy at Thistle House and with the new friends she had made. Things between Mac and me had improved, too, which was why the two of them had decided to come with me to this show. The Umbrella Girls had taken off, as the saying goes, and were selling well. The original was still hanging in Charlotte’s old bedroom at Thistle House, and, strangely enough, it was the one daily reminder of Julia that didn’t sting. It had quite the opposite effect, actually, which was why I was inspired to create more.”

My eyes are naturally drawn to the Umbrella Girl painting hanging behind her. “Painting Julia over and over was like finding her?” I venture.

Isabel nods slowly. “Perhaps it was. Painting the Umbrella Girls was definitely therapeutic, and selling them made me feel that at last I had something to give back to the world.” She draws a deep breath before continuing. “Anyway, Mac had bought a London newspaper to read over lunch that afternoon at the art show. When he was
finished with it, Gwen began thumbing through the sections. She stopped at a page and said, ‘Well, would you look at that,’ and I asked her what she had seen. She folded the section over to isolate a picture. From upside down I could see that it was a wedding photo.

“‘I guess I can tell you this now,’ Gwen said, ‘if you promise not to go crazy,’ and I said, ‘Tell me what?’ As she handed the paper to me, Gwen said that way back when we first came to Stow, the woman in the wedding photo had come to Thistle House on a day I had been out. But, Kendra, I heard nothing after those first few words. I was now looking at a photograph of a bridal gown I had only ever seen in my head. Buttons down the front, fitted bodice, sleeves of illusion. The dress was one of my gowns. And then I looked at the face of the happy bride. The woman was Julia.”

“Oh my God,” I murmur.

“Indeed,” Isabel said. “You see, too, what lengths God had to go to reunite me with her. He had to practically move heaven and earth to undo all my mistakes.”

“What did you do?” I ask.

“Well, I had to have Gwen repeat everything she’d said, because I had heard none of it, and I did go a little crazy, which she had asked me not to do. Mac, who was looking at someone else’s paintings nearby, rushed over to see what I was fussing about. I thrust the paper toward him and through my sobs said who it was in the photo. I had not uttered Julia’s name in a very long time.

“Mac kept saying, ‘Are you sure?’ but there was no mistaking that dress, and that face, even twenty years after I had last seen it. And, of course, the bride in the photo, the former Julia Waverly, had known about the brides box. This Julia was my Julia.”

“So, you looked her up? You contacted her?” Stunned
at the play of events, I am already picturing the sisters in a tearful embrace.

Isabel pauses to inhale deeply, as if the memory of that day still took her breath away.

“I asked Mac to get in touch with her. I didn’t know what Julia’s feelings would be toward me, though I should have guessed that wearing one of my dresses at her wedding was evidence that she did not hate me. But I could not lift the phone to call her when Mac found out where she was. It wasn’t difficult for him to locate her. The announcement in the newspaper said the couple both worked at the same mapmaking company in London. The hardest part was waiting for Monday to arrive so that Mac could ring up this place and ask for her.

“I didn’t want to be in the house when he called her. I stood at the edge of the pond while he and she talked. When he joined me outside a few minutes later, he said Julia had wept with joy to hear that I was alive, and that she and her husband would be driving out to Thistle House the next day. I sank to my knees on the wet grass, as overcome with emotion as I had been the day I lost her. Gwen had come out with Mac, and she dropped beside me, begging me to forgive her for not telling me that Julia had been to the house nearly a year before.

“But I knew Gwen owed me no apology. Everything was suddenly bright as a July noon, even though rain clouds spanned the horizon that morning. It was as if a great curtain that had been strung above me had fallen into a heap on the ground, and the sky was aflame with light. I could clearly see that fear and regret had made me so protective of Gwen, she had felt as if she were suffocating. That she’d had no desire to tell me about a stranger who had been by inquiring about a box of sketches had been my fault, not hers. And my inability to forgive
myself for what I had done had made Julia an anonymous shadow to Gwen, a ghost whose name I never said nor allowed Mac to say. Gwen owed me nothing.”

Isabel pauses a moment, as though gathering strength from the seconds of silence.

“I couldn’t sleep the night before Julia was to come, so I had plenty of quiet hours to ponder my new reality. I had been Isabel longer than I had been Emmy, you see. No one knew me by any other name. And I had my Umbrella Girls by then. Emmy was no one. When Mac had reached out to Julia for me, he had to tell her who I had become. Who I was. And who I wasn’t.”

I shake my head. “But it’s not true that Emmy was no one.
You’re
Emmy.”

“Am I?” Isabel looks intently into my eyes, as if seeking affirmation of some kind.

“Of course you are. None of this would’ve mattered if underneath that name you stole, you weren’t who you’ve always been.”

Isabel breaks into a wide smile. She looks like a proud parent whose child has figured something out.

“Right you are, Kendra. Right you are. But you can already guess I have been slow to realize what should have been clear to me the second I saw Julia again.” She cocks her head to one side and I can see that she is remembering the moment she saw her sister after nearly two decades. I wait for her to tell me what it was like. A few moments later, she does.

“Mac led her into this room. I was sitting right here where I am now. She was so tall and beautiful. Taller than me, and looking so much like Mum, so very much like Mum. She wore a dress of pink with a ruby pendant at her neck. Had I passed her in the street and not seen her face, I might not have known her. But her eyes were
locked on mine, and they were Julia’s eyes. She ran into my arms as though no time had passed, as though she were simply rising from the sofa where I had left her, and there had been no war, no slow waltz of time, no silent years of longing. She was a little girl inside a grown woman’s body, putting her arms around my neck, and saying the name Mum had given me—Emmy—over and over.”

Isabel is looking past me, into that long-ago moment. A tear is slipping down my cheek and I finger it away.

“That was the happiest day of my life, Kendra. I did not think I would ever live to see the heaviness of losing Julia lifted from me.”

I wait for her to tell me more. Several seconds later she continues.

“I was Emmy to her, not Isabel, but I really didn’t know how to be Emmy to anyone else. Julia seemed to understand that I became Isabel so that I might find her and I stayed Isabel so that I would be able to live with myself when finding her proved impossible. She told me she had her own ways of coping with her mistakes and then she handed me the journal she had written to me.”

Isabel raises her gaze to meet mine. “The journal answered many questions for me, and yet it raised new ones. If only I had gone to Mrs. Billingsley for help or answered the door when her butler came to the flat, either one would have told me that Thea had taken Julia to Neville’s parents, and wouldn’t I have been able to find her from the start? Or, if I had remembered Mum had gotten that letter from Neville’s parents, wouldn’t I have thought to look for it in the flat after Julia disappeared? Would I have figured out that since the letter was missing, someone had taken it? Or if I had been honest with Gwen from the start about who I really was, wouldn’t she have known that the woman who came to Thistle House inquiring
about an old box of bridal sketches was the sister that I had lost? Or if I had never tried to sneak away with those sketches in the first place, wouldn’t Mum have lived?”

I see her terrible logic, but I also see that a larger force had been at work. “There was a war,” I venture.

She nods slowly. “Yes. Strangely enough, war has a way of absolving us of the mistakes we make while in its dreadful shadow, but it keeps this absolution a secret. I didn’t realize I was playing my cards against a cruel opponent that had its own cards to play.”

We are quiet for a moment “So you remained Isabel, then,” I say. “Even after you and Julia were reunited.”

Isabel nods. “To all but family, yes. What is a name, really, but letters on a page, or a sound on the tongue? To the rest of the world, I was Isabel MacFarland, wife of the American writer, painter of the Umbrella Girls, half sister to a woman named Julia Waverly Massey.”

“Is Julia here today?” I finally ask, even though somehow I can already sense she is not.

“No.”

The word has never sounded more final to me.

Isabel continues as she strokes the cover of the journal. “Her son and daughter-in-law are here from York, and their three adult children and a great-granddaughter. Simon passed away five years ago. He married a lovely woman from Leeds many years after Julia was taken from us, but we stayed close, he and I. Losing her was very hard on Simon. He knew that I understood more than anyone what that loss felt like.”

A sliver of silence rests between us. At last I ask, “What happened to her?”

“Breast cancer.”

“I am so sorry.”

She nods once, accepting my meager condolences,
and then turns her gaze to the Umbrella Girl just to her right. “You know, I tossed away twenty years of Julia’s life, but I was given them back—all of them. She died twenty years after we found each other again. They were very happy years, Kendra. Happier than I could have imagined. Much was restored to me.”

I am suddenly reminded of the letter in the bedside table that Charlotte had mentioned. I ask her if she wants me to know what it said.