The whole of the ground floor was taken up by Auntie Jackie’s “business” – Ballgowns, Evening Wear and Accessories for Hire. The front room was entirely given over to dresses of every size and colour: rail upon rail of taffeta, silk, velvet and tulle; sequins, feathers and pearls. In the back were chests of drawers containing shawls and scarves and elbow-length gloves, and above our heads, beaded evening bags hung in clusters like chandeliers. In one corner was a curtained changing cubicle, and the rest of the space was occupied by a workbench and sewing machine, for repairs and alterations. Dad, typically, had got it wrong and told us Auntie Jackie worked in a second hand clothes shop, which made it sound one step up from a car boot sale.
The pride of the collection was displayed on a tailor’s dummy in a glass case. It was a midnight blue strapless dress which flowed out from knee level into a fishtail of hundreds of tissue-thin layers, all embroidered with sprays of silver stars. I wondered why it had been singled out for this attention – it was one of the least ostentatious of the lot – until Rachel gave me a nudge and pointed to a framed photograph on the opposite wall, and it suddenly made sense. In the picture, greeting a line-up of celebrities and smiling her famous, modest smile, was Princess Diana in that very same dress.
“Is that really…?” I asked Auntie Jackie.
She nodded, amused by our gawping. “You’d have been too young to remember, but Princess Diana auctioned off most of her wardrobe for charity in 1997. I’d just got an insurance payout for a whiplash injury – nearly $18,000 – and I blew the whole lot on one dress. I didn’t have the business then – I just wanted it for myself. My husband was hopping mad: he didn’t speak to me for a week. And then within two months she was dead.”
There was a solemn pause as we looked again at the holy object.
“Have you ever worn it?” asked Rachel.
Auntie Jackie shook her head. “Sadly, no.”
“Because it’s too precious?”
“No. Because I’m too bloody fat. Every time I try a new diet I think ‘I’ll be wearing Diana’s dress by Christmas!’ but it never happens.”
“It must be worth a fortune,” said Rachel wistfully She was probably thinking how much stuff she could get from Topshop if she put it on eBay
“Priceless,” Auntie Jackie agreed. “But I’ll never sell it. I could end up living in a cardboard box under the promenade, but I’ll still have my dress. They can bury me in it – it’ll probably fit me like a glove when I’ve died of starvation.”
“I wouldn’t sell it either,” I said. Although I’m the Sensible One, I do have a romantic streak.
Auntie Jackie left us to unpack and “freshen up”, as she called it, while she put away her groceries and began to prepare dinner. I could hear her clattering around in the kitchen cupboards and singing along to the radio, while I hung my few decent clothes in the wardrobe. In the absence of any empty drawers, I left the rest in the bottom of the suitcase, which I pushed under the bed. Various other items from home – my clarinet, music stand, books, tennis racquet – I deposited around the room as though marking out my territory It was only now that I came to unpack that I realised how little I’d brought. We had left in too much of a hurry. The last item to be rehoused was a cream shawl, crocheted in softest baby wool, which I used to cover up a depressed-looking armchair. It was the only thing I owned that my mother had made especially for me, which made it even more priceless in its way than Princess Diana’s dress.
Four Big Sister, Little Sister
Mum died when I was one and Rachel was nearly four. I don’t remember a thing about her of course. I used to think I did, but then I realised that all my memories were photographs. Rachel doesn’t really remember her either, which is even worse. All those years Mum spent playing pat-a-cake with her, and being patient and kind, for nothing! Nowadays, whenever I see some toddler kicking off in the supermarket and the mum trying to negotiate and be all reasonable, I feel like going up to her and saying, “For God’s sake, just smack him! He won’t remember!”
I can’t say I “miss” her because you can’t miss someone you never knew, but sometimes, when school work’s piling up, and things indoors are a bit disorganised, and Dad’s too preoccupied with his job to notice, I can’t help thinking that one parent isn’t quite enough. I suppose it must be like being an only child. You wouldn’t spend all your time grieving about the brothers and sisters you don’t have, but now and then you’d look at those big, boisterous families and feel a twinge of envy.
It’s only in recent years that Dad has talked to us about how he coped or rather didn’t cope when Mum died. He’d always talked about Mum of course, so that we would know how wonderful she was and never “forget” her, but not once about himself and his own feelings. To begin with, Nanny Chris (Mum’s mum) came to stay and look after us while he was out at work. After a while, they had a bit of a falling out because she didn’t approve of the way he let us sleep in his bed, and he thought she was too strict about mealtimes and TV rations, so she went back up to Scotland in a strop and we didn’t see her for some time.
That was when Mum’s sister – Jackie – came. She was only twenty-five – ten years younger than Mum – but she gave up her job in London and left her flat and her friends, and moved into our spare room in Oxford so that she could take care of us all until Rachel started school and I went to nursery I suppose Dad must have paid her. She wouldn’t have done it for nothing.
It all worked well for about a year, and then Auntie Jackie started to make friends of her own and go out in the evenings a bit more. Before long she’d got a new boyfriend and wanted to move him into the spare room with her. Dad was furious and said he didn’t want some strange bloke in the house with us when he wasn’t around, and they had this huge row and Auntie Jackie walked out. Within three months, she and the boyfriend had got married and moved to Chicago, where he was from, and we didn’t see her again for another eight years.
The rest of the family was outraged that she had deserted us, convinced that the husband was some sort of gangster and it would all end in tears. Which it did eventually, but nothing like as soon as the family had predicted (and no doubt hoped). After twelve years she came quietly back to the UK, and with her share of the divorce payout, she acquired the house in Brighton and started up her business.
During her time in America she had sent gifts at birthdays and Christmas, and cards signed “from your loving Aunt”, and at Dad’s insistence we had dutifully replied with bland reports of our progress and copies of our school photographs, but as far as we knew, Dad never wrote to her himself.
There had been just one visit, the year that Nanny Chris died. I’m afraid to say that it was the memory of this that had given me a pessimistic view of Auntie Jackie’s reliability
I am ten years old, standing in the wings at the school concert, sucking nervously on the reed of my clarinet as I listen to Elizabeth Gallup play Minuet in G on the piano. Although I can’t see them, I can sense, from the occasional distant cough and rustle, the bulky presence of the audience beyond the stage. Even so, I am surprised by the storm of applause that greets the end of Elizabeth’s performance. The hall must be full. I am on next. A lone, metal music stand, like an instrument of torture, glints coldly in a shaft of light from the high hall windows. For a moment I am completely paralysed: my eagerness to perform, to show off and be applauded is brought down by a crippling attack of stage fright.
Something I have known all along, and buried, rises up now: I am not meant to be here, playing in this concert. I am not good enough. It is a mistake.
“Ruth, I’ve put you down to play a solo in the school concert,” my clarinet teacher said at the start of a music lesson, three weeks ago now
“I’m