The Paris Seamstress by Natasha Lester (24)

June 2015

Estella’s funeral was held at the Church of St. John the Divine as per Estella’s instructions. Antique French peonies, all in white, sourced especially from hothouses, overflowed the altar, spilled down the ends of the pews and scented the air with a fragrance Fabienne had always associated with Estella. So many people came that a crowd had to gather in the vestibule, all the seats long since taken.

Fabienne sat in the front row near her grandmother’s coffin, all the people who’d worked at Stella Designs filling the pews around her. Fabienne’s mother had been too busy to fly from Australia. Or too scared of seeing the ghost of Fabienne’s father in the pictures of Estella adorning the church.

Fabienne made it through the eulogy with only one long and dreadful pause but she knew she owed it to her grandmother to honor her properly, and so she pulled herself together and continued to speak. “Estella told me the thing that most comforted her after the people she loved had died was a poem, which I’d like to read now:

Fabienne’s voice cracked on the last line and she swallowed hard to stop the sob that wanted to break free. “My grandmother might not be here with me anymore, bodily, but I know she did not die. Her legacy is sweeping. More than the soft stars or the birds in flight, she is walking the streets of Manhattan, of Paris, of any city in the world where women buy her clothes. She is in the button on a sleeve, the pleat of a skirt, the peony on the shoulder of a dress. She did not die,” Fabienne repeated, knowing she had to finish or she would break down utterly, “and I’m so very glad that I was lucky enough to call her my grandmother, that my life was blessed by her presence. I’m so very glad that she lived.”

Her hand flew up to her mouth as she stepped away from the microphone and the applause rang out, more beautiful than any hymn, for Estella.

Fabienne saw Will briefly at the wake in Gramercy Park.

He kissed her cheek. “Your eulogy was beautiful,” he said.

Then she had to turn away and talk to and thank all of the other mourners, to laugh with her grandmother’s employees over stories of Estella and her grandfather and their two desks, which had sat opposite each other in their shared office, a desk her grandfather rarely used, preferring to be on the floor of the atelier. Two desks that had been empty now for a year or more, her grandfather’s for longer, and Estella’s since she’d been too frail to go to the office anymore.

As they talked and reminisced, Fabienne felt the proof of her assertion that Estella was not in her grave, but here in the room in the hearts and minds of so many people. And in their souls, or in Fabienne’s soul at least.

The most difficult moment of the day was when Kimberley, the designer who’d been in charge of the atelier for the last year or so, approached Estella. “What will you do with the business now?” Kimberley asked.

Fabienne shook her head. “I don’t know.”

All of it was hers—the business, the house in Gramercy Park, the house in Paris, the furniture, the archive of clothes, the paintings, the money. She had more things than she could even comprehend and she had no idea what to do with any of it. Because she lived in Australia and had a job in Australia and she could not imagine sweeping into the enormous void left by Estella.

Finally the guests left. Will had waved to her before he’d departed a couple of hours before, extracting himself from Kimberley who had either been exchanging design stories with him or who had seen in him the same things that Fabienne had. And Fabienne wasn’t jealous, just sad. Kimberley would be so perfect for Will. She lived in New York for a start. And she was an artist.

Alone at last, Fabienne looked around the front living room of the Gramercy Park house, at the champagne glasses pinked with lipstick, at the plates and napkins and bits of food clinging to dishes and tables, at the coat someone had left on a chair, at the phone abandoned and beeping on a sideboard, at the detritus of celebration and sadness. Tiredness descended upon her.

She turned on her heel and walked out of the house, all the way to her grandmother’s offices on Seventh Avenue. Stella Designs was one of the few fashion businesses that still operated there, clinging onto the long history of the street, which was now being swept away like litter as clothing factories were transformed into twenty-first-century capital-raising and technology businesses.

On the fourteenth floor, she unlocked the doors; everyone had been given the week off and she knew it would be quiet and peaceful. Perhaps there she might recapture the sense of what she’d said at the funeral, wouldn’t feel the utter lack of Estella.

But Estella’s empty desk only made the lack more visceral. There was the sewing box that had come with Estella from Paris when she was twenty-two years old, the photographs of Fabienne, her father, her grandfather, and Janie, her grandmother’s best friend who’d died—was that ten years ago? Nothing lasted. Nothing.

Her grandfather’s desk sat opposite, kept dusted and neat by Estella’s secretary, Rebecca, who’d done the same with Estella’s over this last year of disuse. More peonies, pink this time, sat extravagantly in Estella’s favorite orb-shaped aquamarine vases, dragging France across an ocean and laying it down at Fabienne’s feet. But it all looked wrong without Estella being wheeled to her desk or, if Fabienne was to look back a decade or so, without Estella walking into a room in that way she had, model-like, as if life was a catwalk and she would continue to parade on it forever.

Fabienne sat down gingerly in Estella’s chair but it was too capacious and she jumped up, not wanting anyone to catch her, the impostor, unable to take Estella’s place.

“Fabienne?”

“Jesus,” Fabienne exclaimed, bringing one hand up to her chest and whipping around to the door. “Rebecca, you scared me.”

Her grandmother’s diminutive and young but extraordinarily organized secretary smiled. “Your eulogy was so lovely.”

“Thanks,” Fabienne said. “I thought I gave everyone the week off?”

Rebecca held a box out in front of her. “I came to get this. I thought I’d drop it off to you tomorrow but you’re here so you should take it now.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. Estella gave it to me about five years ago. She told me to keep it for you until…”

She died. The words hung in the air. Fabienne stepped forward and took the box. “I’m going back to Gramercy Park,” Fabienne said. “It doesn’t feel quite right being here yet.”

Rebecca hesitated, then put her hand on Fabienne’s arm. “She told me to put fresh flowers in the vases every week. To make sure it was always welcoming. She said, one day, you’d claim it. When you were ready.”

At the house in Gramercy Park, the mess was exactly where Fabienne had left it. She sighed and sank onto the couch, box on her lap, opening the lid and pulling out a stack of papers.

“Oh,” she gasped as she realized what they were. Sketches, dozens of sketches, sketches Fabienne had drawn on scrap pieces of paper while lying on the floor of her grandmother’s office, or sitting at her grandfather’s desk, every summer in New York from the time she was old enough to hold a pencil until the time she stopped drawing. Estella had kept them all.

Looking over them now was like falling down a shaft and into the past, fashions and trends rushing past her: early noughties boot-cut trousers, baby-doll dresses, and colored denim; nineties khaki, slip dresses, velvet, faux fur. Some of them made her laugh at her sheer outrageousness at age six, others made her shake her head at her timidity, and in others she could see the lineage of her grandmother but also something more, a slight curve in the road that took her grandmother’s sense of style to a place it had not yet ventured.

She sighed and put the sketches on the couch beside her, reached into the box again and pulled out a CD, which made her smile. When was the last time she’d seen a CD? She inserted it into the player.

A song, bluesy and sad and pining filled the room. Norah Jones, “The Nearness of You,” Fabienne read in her grandmother’s hand on the CD case. She picked up a handful of glasses then stopped as she caught the words of the song, a hymn to the breath-stealing charm of stepping into the arms of the person you loved.

The doorbell rang through the music and Fabienne glanced at the video screen, meaning to ignore it but it was Will. She opened the door.

“Hi,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to speak to you before.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “There were too many people. Come in.”

He followed her into the living room, where Fabienne suddenly remembered the aftermath of the funeral still despoiled every surface.

“I gave Estella’s housekeeper the week off,” she said by way of explaining the plates and glasses and napkins and crumbs. “She was upset. I didn’t really think through the mess that would be left after a wake.”

“I’ll give you a hand.” Will gathered up a stack of plates.

“You don’t have to do that. I was just about to start.”

“It’ll be quicker if I help.” He smiled at her.

“Thanks,” she said, feeling the hint of a smile curve her lips. She went into the kitchen to fill the sink with suds and water.

Will came in and out, ferrying plates and glasses and rubbish and the only conversation was her telling him where to put everything and him asking mundanities like: Where’s the bin? And that was fine, the wash of water over crystal, the appearance of something clean out of the soap, the steady diminishment of dirty dishes was a problem easy to solve with a little hard work, the immediate satisfaction of their efforts apparent in the gleaming pile that now lay to her right and which Will began to put into cupboards.

“The housekeeper is going to kill me when she gets back and finds everything in the wrong place,” he said.

“She won’t mind,” Fabienne said, aware of how dull she sounded, discussing dishes with a man like Will, Head of Design at Tiffany, used to beautiful things. “You don’t need to do any more. I’m almost finished.”

“There’s some stuff on the sofa in there.” He indicated the living room. “Do you want me to put it back in the box?”

Fabienne shook her head. “Those are things my grandmother saved for me. It’s funny how much a piece of paper or a song can mean. I still remember what she was wearing when I sketched those pictures, or what she said when I gave it to her: The color is very good, and I like the length of the skirt, but the sleeves are too short.” Fabienne mimicked her grandmother’s voice.

“Show me?” Will asked.

Fabienne put down the dishcloth and led the way into the living room where the streetlights stippled the night time blackness of the park, visible through the windows, with gold, the greenery almost absent, hiding until the morning sun reappeared. Her grandmother’s favorite Frida Kahlo painting, two women joined by a skein of blood, hung over the fireplace as it always had. The women seemed more tranquil now, Fabienne thought, as if their joined hands were gripped a little tighter, as if the bond implied by the vein that connected their two separate hearts had finally been achieved. She sighed. She needed sleep. She was imagining changes in a static painting.

She pressed play on the CD and the words—“The Nearness of You”—spilled back out into the room like the tears she suddenly found on her cheeks.

“Oh God!” she said as she slid down the wall and sat on the floor, wishing she could just stop crying, wishing she wasn’t behaving like such a mess in front of a man who meant so much to her.

Will sat on the floor beside her, reached into his pocket and passed her a clean, white, perfectly pressed handkerchief.

“My grandmother would have loved you,” Fabienne sniffed.

“I’d rather her granddaughter did,” he said quietly.

Her head snapped to the right. “What did you say?” she asked, sure she hadn’t heard him correctly.

“I said I’d rather her granddaughter did.” Will reached out and touched her chin lightly. “I’m in love with you, Fabienne. Which is why I’m going home now. Because I want to kiss you—want to do more than kiss you—but not like this. Not when you’re so sad.”

Fabienne leaned her forehead in, pressing it against his, so aware of his lips not far from hers, of the quickness of his breath, of the nearness of Will Ogilvie. If he kissed her then she knew exactly where they would end up and she also knew that he was right; it would be an act of forgetting when what she wanted to have with Will was an act worth remembering.

He kissed her forehead gently and stood up. “I’m prescribing you a glass of whiskey and bed,” he said, cheeks flushed like hers.

Fabienne did what he’d recommended, swallowing down the whiskey and climbing into bed, Will’s words—I’m in love with you, Fabienne—accompanying her into sleep.