The Black Dress

The Black Dress

Deborah Moggach

This one is for Susan Jeffreys and Helena Ramsay, with love

Prologue

I saw it in the window of a charity shop. A little black dress. Scoop neck, clingy. It spoke of cigarettes and Martinis—a surprisingly vampish garment for a seaside town at the height of summer. It was worn by a mannequin with painted eyebrows and crimson lips, who bore a distinct resemblance to Petula Clark. She leaned at a slant and her head was tilted towards me, as if she were about to burst into song. A feather boa was draped around her neck.

They have a certain smell, don’t they, charity shops? All those pasts, all those lives; no amount of laundering can wash that away. After fingering a few cardigans I’m usually out of there, but not that day.

My swim had invigorated me. For half an hour it had washed away my past few months, the horror and betrayal. The sun shone. I felt purified, and about time, too. I’d lived in darkness for far too long. I gazed at the dress, waiting for me behind my own ghostly reflection in the glass. I had no idea why I was drawn to it, not yet. Or whether it would fit.

But it did. Knobbly black wool, snug but not outrageously tight—I was seventy, after all, mutton and lamb—hinting but not revealing, with its scooped neckline and quarter-length sleeves. Standing in the curtained cubicle, I gazed at myself in the mirror. Even in that pitiless light, with my hair damp from swimming, the transformation was startling. I was an alluring woman of a certain age, hardly recognisable even to myself.

It all spins on a sixpence, doesn’t it? Chance, decisions. Why that high street, in that town? Why that dress? Why did somebody throw it out just then? Did somebody die, or get too fat, or simply realise that nobody has cocktail parties any more?

I stood at the counter. ‘I’ll take it.’

Part One

One

It was a sort of madness. I realised that at the time. How could a woman like me be capable of such a thing? But I’d been horribly betrayed, and was reeling from the shock. I was in freefall, all the branches cut off, nothing to catch me as I fell. And I was insanely lonely.

That’s no excuse either, but maybe you’ve never been there. Howling loneliness, month after month. I was alone when the lawyer’s letter arrived. No Greg beside me to look at those words wiping out our life together. What’s this all about? Leave it to me. It must have come to the wrong address.

I was alone when the car broke down on the North Circular Road at one in the morning. When a gutter got blocked and water ran down the walls. When a plumber ripped me off, and my laptop crashed.