Free The Dress by Kate Kerrigan Page B

pushed the hair back from her face, marvelling at the smooth cream of her skin against the coarse lines of his large, rough hand.
    She looked so innocent asleep like this, like his Joy, and he was relieved to have her back. When she was asleep like this, he was able to fall in love with her again.
    Frank lay down next to her and realized he was exhausted. He checked his watch. It was not yet 1 a.m., not so late for a Saturday night, yet he felt as if he had been run over by a truck.
    He was glad the day was over. Tomorrow was Sunday; Joy could sleep her hangover off, then on Monday he would be back at work and able to resume some semblance of the ordinary life he craved.

8
    New York, 1958
    Honor looked out of the window: New York was glistening under the streetlights. From the shabby brownstones of Harlem to the verdant green lawns of Central Park everything was covered in a blanket of thick snow. It was nearly 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve 1958 and Honor Conlon was the last person left at work.
    â€˜It’s so beautiful,’ Rosa, the newest seamstress had said that morning. ‘In Mexico we don’t have snow. You have snow in Ireland?’
    â€˜Yes,’ Honor said.
    She was tired of all the chatter and gossip in the workshop. Endless exchanges between the dozen women on how their husbands annoyed them, what they cooked for Thanksgiving dinner, and now, ‘Look how pretty the snow is!’
    Honor was the best seamstress there. She could machine-sew an evening skirt to couture finish in less than two days or embroider the collar and cuff of a blouse so that a socialite would pay a small fortune for it. Even Colette, Monsieur Breton’s right hand woman, acknowledged that the young Irish girl had an instinctive way of interpreting the designer’s drawings, which baffled the elegant older seamstress, who had been working for the renowned couturier since their early days together in Paris.
    â€˜She is the best I have ever seen,’ Colette told Breton, after he had admired a piece of crochet work Honor had done overnight.
    â€˜The Irish learn to crochet from their mother’s breast,’ he said. ‘They do it to keep their hands warm.’
    Nothing could have been further from the truth. Honor had learned to sew and crochet in the workshop of the great Irish designer Sybil Connolly in Dublin, but her teacher parents had made her finish school before she was allowed to take up an apprenticeship. The Conlons were puzzled by their daughter’s determination to become a ‘humble dressmaker’. Honor’s own mother Clare could barely darn a sock.
    â€˜Will he ever let me work with him in the design studio?’ Honor asked the old French woman.
    â€˜Perhaps...’ Colette said, elusively, always stopping short of praising Honor to her face.
    Barbara, who had been there six years, to Honor’s three, said, ‘They’ll never let you out of here. You’re too good.’
    Honor’s dream of designing clothes, instead of merely making them, was fading with each passing day. Now, here she was, on Christmas Eve, working into the early hours on a finicky white-on-white embroidered panel for some spoilt rich woman’s New Year’s Eve party dress. It was her own fault she was still here.
    â€˜Something pretty, something feminine,’ Breton had said, rubbing his long slim fingers with his thumbs, in a soft, fluid motion, like her mother binding fat and flour for pastry.
    Honor could have started something simple. She could have done daisies, or snowflakes, in a few hours. Instead, she thought of the fine grey frost on the window of her small cottage bedroom in Ireland and tried to replicate it with the thinnest embroidery thread she could find. Before she knew it, she was making panels of lace that would have taken five Kenmare nuns a full week. She knew it was madness but she could not help herself: once she had an idea she was driven to create it.
    The light