Chapter 14
Ed in school mode:
Light blue cotton shirt
Beige chinos
Leather-strapped watch
Brown lace-up ankle boots
‘That woman! That woman! This time she really is going to tip me over the edge,’ Annie was complaining to Ed that evening once he was back from work. Some of her annoyance was being taken out on the Bolognese sauce that she was smacking and pounding at in its big pot on the stove.
‘Oh, boy… I guess this is right out of your hands now…’ Ed tried to be reassuring.
‘Do you want it to be out of your hands?’ he asked.
‘I know how much you love to fix things, rush in and solve problems. Maybe you’re the one who needs to do the planning application, go down and beg for permission at the town hall…
maybe you’re the one who needs to find an amazing new venue at a moment’s notice.
Face it, Annie, if I needed the impossible done, I would come to you. ’
She turned from her slightly grudging attempt at rustling together a family dinner to look at her husband. ‘That’s a very nice thing to say,’ she told him. ‘Do you really mean that?’
Ed smiled at her. His proper smile, the one that spread wide across his face and emphasised his cheekbones. She particularly liked the pale blue shirt he was wearing today and the fact that his hair was a little overdue a cut.
‘Of course I do… come here.’ Then they were hugging in front of the stove, until Ed couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder at what was happening on the stove. He picked up the wooden spoon and from still over her shoulder, gave the Bolognese a stir. ‘Have you added the herbs?’ he wondered.
‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘C’mon, stop interfering this is my supper, I’m sure I can manage. So… which herbs would be the best ones for this?’ she tried to sound casual, as she scanned the spice rack.
Ed ran his eye over the little bottles and pulled out his top three recommendations. ‘A good teaspoon of these… maybe even two teaspoons of the oregano,’ he suggested.
‘OK and thank you, now go and say hello to the twins. They’re in the sitting room where they have been allowed an hour of telly to let me cook.’ And I will add ketchup to the blinking Bolognese.
‘Aren’t we calling it “screen-time” these days, not telly. How was Max’s day away from nursery?’
Annie pointed to the biro scribbles on the kitchen island by way of reply.
‘Oh, damn… you know that’s going to involve sanding back and re-oiling?’
She nodded, then added, ‘Or we could leave it until they’re both old enough not to scribble on the worktops… maybe another five or six years. But then we might be sad that they’re about to be teenagers and we won’t have their scribbles any more.’
‘It’s a problem. And talking of teenagers who don’t scribble any more, how’s Owen, any word from him today?’
‘Yes, all good. Up early rehearsing before class today.’
‘Music to my ears – no pun intended. And what about Lauren? Feels like ages since we’ve heard from her.’
‘I know,’ Annie agreed. ‘There have been messages, pics, Insta things, but I haven’t spoken to her for over a week.
No windows, apparently, I think she’s rushing about in a work and social whirl.
’ And it was true, Annie had been trying to talk to her oldest daughter, a little spooked by what Svetlana had mentioned, but so far, no success.
And that did make her wonder if maybe Svetlana had picked up the wrong end of the stick and Lauren was absolutely fine.
Hope so, fingers crossed. She gave the Bolognese another vigorous stir.
Over the bubbling sauce, the chatter of the kitchen radio, the laughter coming from the sitting room where Ed was no doubt joking about with the twins, Annie could now hear the faint chiming of the doorbell.
‘Ed, can you get the door?’ she shouted because the sitting room was closer and if she left the sauce now, it might catch on the bottom of the pan. She was a bad enough cook to have learned that lesson plenty of times. The bell chimed once again.
‘Ed! Door!’ she bellowed.
‘OK!’ she heard him reply, followed by the door opening, some chat she couldn’t make out and the door closing again.
‘Who was that? Delivery for next door?’ she asked. ‘I’m not expecting anything.’
‘Annie not expecting anything… how unusual…’ Ed said as he came into the room with two of those upmarket bags for life that the supermarkets sell you, absolutely packed full.
‘Groceries?’ Annie sounded surprised. ‘But I’ve not ordered anything. Are they for next door?’ Ed shook his head and set the bags down on the kitchen island. ‘Not groceries,’ he said, ‘clothes… for your show. Someone was responding to your flyer apparently.’
‘Oh! Did you get their details?’ she asked, because she was supposed to do a gift aid form and all that kind of paperwork type thing that certain people never seem to bother with.
Ed nodded. ‘Details are all in the bag, apparently.’
‘Ooooh, sorry, but I need to have a quick look, just let me make sure there isn’t a trace of tomato sauce on my hands,’ Annie replied, unable to resist the temptation to check out the latest offerings for the show… even if it wasn’t entirely clear if there was still going to be a show.
Ed went over to the hob once again, and glancing down at the sauce with some concern, he told her, ‘You look, I will stir… and maybe even tweak where necessary.’
* * *
Hands now scrupulously cleaned of any tomato flecks, Annie went over to the bags.
In fact, she didn’t want these items within any kind of radius of sauce, cooking or the biro scribbles, so she took them to the other side of the room where the table and chairs were set out.
Here, she set the bags on the floor and began to carefully unpack the first one.
The item on top was already giving her hope that this was going to be a properly interesting haul, as it was made of softest black velvet.
As she lifted it out and it unfolded, she could see that it was a delicate evening jacket.
Vintage, 1960s maybe, or even older, designed to be worn over your going-out clothes.
Amazing condition, she couldn’t help noticing, and a French label that she didn’t recognise.
Many more lovely vintage sixties and seventies items followed: a plum velvet bolero jacket embellished with lavish designs worked in gold thread, and a silver beaded evening dress.
Everything was incredibly beautiful. This was such a generous donation.
She could see all these things walking down the catwalk and making numbers in the high hundreds, maybe even four figures.
Even though the labels weren’t ones that she recognised.
Carefully, she folded the clothes back together into the bag and then decided she would just take a quick look before supper at the top one or two items in the second bag.
First, she lifted out the white silk jacket at the top of the bag, then what she saw underneath this made her give something of a double-take.
Pale cream silk but with a startlingly bright orange design…
was that… the claw of a lobster?! She put her hands on the dress and pulled it out of the bag.
Oh my God… someone had made the most glorious homage to one of the fashion world’s most famous dresses.
Casual followers of fashion might think that the most famous dresses are perhaps – Chanel’s little black dress, or Marilyn Munroe’s white halterneck, but for real fashion insiders, the original version of the lobster dress by Elsa Schiaparelli, that was fashion collector’s gold.
And what an incredible homage to those legendary dresses this was.
Beautiful silk, bright colours, gorgeous details around the hems, the covered buttons, oh my word, it was glorious.
A dazzling white summer dress, decorated with beautifully hand-painted lobsters.
Annie laid the dress down on the table so she could undo the zip and look at who had made such an amazing job of copying this legend.
Surely, they had to have left a label of some kind in the back of the dress?
She slid the zip down, looked for the label and could hardly trust her eyes when she saw a hand-sewn tag with the words:
Elsa Schiaparelli, Paris
She stared at it for a moment… had the copier copied the label too?
That was the first question to come to mind.
Because the alternative, that she was holding a genuine, Schiaparelli lobster dress in her hands, that someone had come to the door and just casually dropped it off for a charity sale – well, that wasn’t going to have happened, was it?
That couldn’t possibly have happened! She folded the dress tenderly and laid it across the chairs, then had to see what else was in this bag.
Quite genuinely, her hands began to shake as she pulled the next item out.
Could this really be… another Schiaparelli dress and a Schiaparelli evening jacket of black silk velvet with a sun embroidered in gold on the back?
‘Ohmigod, Ed!’ she called out. ‘Ed! You need to come over and take a look at these… but stand back, keep your distance, we can’t risk any kind of tomato sauce stains.’
Her husband came and stood close enough to look at the dress in her hands but not anywhere near enough to harm it.
‘That looks very lovely,’ he said carefully, obviously understanding that this was a beautiful thing and judging by Annie’s face, an important, maybe even wondrous thing, but he didn’t exactly know why.
‘This is like fashion gold dust, fashion plutonium… whatever is the rarest possible thing you can think of in the real world, this is the fashion equivalent,’ she said.
‘I just can’t believe someone has dropped it off at the house without any kind of explanation.
And currently we have no show… no show, Ed.
Yesterday we had a show and no showstoppers.
Today we have three of the most incredible showstoppers I could ever have hoped for. And no show!’
‘That is a bit of a problem,’ Ed had to admit.
‘That’s putting it mildly… and so far, I haven’t found any details,’ she realised. ‘There’s nothing in the bags – no name, no address, no way to register for gift aid.’
‘Really?’ Ed sounded surprised. ‘But she said she had put everything on a sheet of paper inside.’
‘She? She?’ Annie asked, emptying out the bags once again with care but with speed this time and double-checking for any sign of details. ‘There’s nothing here! And who was she? Where did she come from? Have you got any clues for me at all?’
Ed just slowly shook his head.