The dress had acquired a waist since Mara last saw it.
Not much of one. A thickening on the left, where the silk ought to have fallen cleanly past the hip. Whoever had closed it had caught the lining as well as the outer layer, and now the two fabrics pulled against each other like people trying to leave through the same door.
“That,” Elias Vale said. “That's what I want removed.”
Mara put her bag on the floor. There was a perfectly good table behind him, but he had covered it with exhibition drawings. Her scissors were wrapped in a tea towel with an old brown scorch on it. She had meant to change the towel before coming.
“I'm going to look at the whole dress first.”
“We've had it looked at. The silhouette is wrong.”
“Yes. I can see.”
He was standing too close to the window, taking a portion of the grey October light. Beyond him a man in a yellow waterproof dragged wet terrace chairs into a stack. The sea was the colour of a dirty teaspoon. Mara had driven forty minutes along it, with an almost empty petrol tank and a coffee she couldn't reach without braking.
Inside, the hotel smelled of polish and something frying far away. It wasn't quite closed and wasn't quite open. A temporary barrier divided the ballroom; beyond it, somebody was moving glass with care. On this side stood the dress, its covered display form, a tall mirror and a heater that made a noise like a small animal breathing.
Elias moved one of the drawings. “Is there something you're waiting for?”
“For you to get out of the light, mainly.”
He looked behind him as though the light might have become a different light while he was talking. Then he stepped aside.
She unwrapped her tools.
There were advantages to being thirty-eight and recently divorced. She no longer felt obliged to call a man important just because a room appeared to have been built around him. The disadvantages were mostly financial, and standing in this room with this dress she could feel each one waiting patiently in her bank account.
Six weeks. A restoration fee paid in three instalments. Enough to keep her ordinary customers, replace the failing motor in her machine and perhaps stop describing the room behind the florist's as temporary.
She had said yes before asking whose dress.
Now she bent to the hem and found the little hand-worked eye that nobody had mentioned in the photographs. Her eye. A hook had been moved there on the final morning because Clara had wanted to dance without someone carrying the train. Mara had been twenty-six, sitting on the floor in a vest while the hotel hairdresser borrowed all her clear elastic. Clara had put one bare foot on Mara's knee and said, You could do anything, couldn't you?
For years Mara had remembered the foot with affection. It seemed an absurd thing to have been allowed to keep.
“Do you know the construction?” Elias asked.
She stood too quickly. The ballroom shifted; she waited for it to settle.
“I know this kind of construction.”
His eyes remained on her. He had a tired crease between his brows that did not disappear when his forehead smoothed. At forty-three—she knew because the exhibition proposal had made rather a meal of his biography—he looked younger than he did in the brochure and less approachable. In the brochure he had been laughing at something outside the frame. Here he seemed to have dispensed with the thing and the laugh.
“There are records, if you need them.”
“Later.” She lifted the skirt and found the understructure. “For now, could you hold this?”
He reached for the silk.
“Underneath. Both hands. We aren't lifting a bedsheet.”
He changed his grip. Large hands, clean nails, a pale band where a ring had been. She looked at them long enough to establish that he was no longer pulling.
“If you open it now,” he said, “will it leave marks?”
“Probably. Everything leaves something. I need to find out why it was done.”
“To fit Clara.”
“This wouldn't make it fit her. Unless she grew an extra hip.”
She heard herself and went still.
He gave a short breath through his nose. It might have been a laugh. “She didn't.”
“Right.”
She lowered the lining. The seam ran just beneath the waist stay, through a narrow inset that had always been almost invisible from outside. She knew that because she had made it. Not to shape the dress. Not to support anything.
A pocket.
Clara had wanted somewhere to put the key to the bridal suite. Not a practical request in a closely fitted wedding dress, but she had refused a bag and wanted to leave the party without asking her husband. They had laughed about that. Mara, careful with her small cleverness, had made a little suspended pocket in the lining and hidden its opening along the side inset.
The present stitches crossed its mouth.
Mara put the skirt down. “Has anyone altered this since the wedding?”
“For our eleventh anniversary. There was a portrait.”
“When?”
“Fourteen months ago. The Thursday before she died.” He said it as a date he had been required to furnish too often. “It was fitted for a proposed display as well. None of that went ahead.”
“And since?”
“It stayed in the textile store. In its cover.”
She glanced at the long cream cover over the chair. A rectangle of dust remained at its folded edge.
“I said to leave her clothes alone,” he added.
There was no accusation in it. She had not asked for an explanation of his grief, and he looked faintly irritated to have supplied one.
“I think there's a pocket under this.”
“A pocket?”
“Brides have things to carry. They're still people under there.”
This time she saw the laugh arrive, slight and unwilling, before he turned toward the window. She watched the changed shape of his mouth. Then she pulled her stool close enough to reclaim the light.
“Now can you open it?” he asked.
“Now I know which threads to cut.”
She took photographs on her phone before touching the stitching. The outer cloth was sound beneath the tight basting; she could slide a blunt needle under one thread without moving the silk. Elias crouched at the opposite side of the form and held the skirt where she showed him. His trousers would be picking up dust. She resisted telling him. He was capable of encountering a floor.
Three snips. A pause to release the lining. Two more.
Something knocked softly against the waist stay.
Mara stopped.
“What?”
“There's something in it.”
She supported the pocket from below and brought out a brass key on a flat oval tag. The room number was stamped deep enough to hold dark polish: 614. A folded piece of paper followed. It was small, softened at one corner where it had rubbed against the metal.
Elias let the skirt go by inches until it rested on the cotton sheet below the stand. He looked first at the key, then at the paper.
Mara's name was on the outside.
For a moment it didn't seem like her name. It belonged to the note, to Clara's long hooked M. Mara was an arrangement of letters one might find in an old shop account. She could look at it without becoming involved.
“May I?” Elias asked.
She had not realised she had closed her hand around it.
“It's addressed to me.”
“I can see that.”
He didn't reach again. She laid the key on the table after pushing one of the drawings out of its way.
The paper opened into four uneven squares.
Mara—this dress belongs with you. There are things in 614 I should have given you years ago. I will explain on Monday.
Clara.
No apology. No date. The C pressed so hard it had almost pierced the paper.
Mara read it twice. Then she turned the sheet over, as though the sentence she wanted might be on the back.
“What is six fourteen?” she asked.
Elias had stood. He put a hand on the back of the stool and missed it on the first attempt.
“Her workroom.”
“Is it still there?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn't know about this?”
“No.” He looked at her. “Did you?”
“I wouldn't have spent twenty minutes arguing about a pocket if I had.”
“You didn't tell me you'd made it.”
She glanced at the dress. Under this light the silk was a warm grey, nearly the colour of milk when someone had stirred tea into it. Clara had wanted white. Mara had brought her the ivory swatch instead and put it beneath her face. They had both known at once.
“You hired me to restore it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I wasn't aware you wanted a biography.”
The heater clicked off. Beyond the partition, someone swore at the glass and someone else said it hadn't broken. Ordinary events continued without their permission.
Elias drew the stool out for her. She remained standing.
“Do you want water?”
“No.” Then, because her mouth had dried so completely that it hurt: “Yes. Please.”
He fetched a bottle from the far side of the room. He opened it and left the cap beside her hand, instead of holding it out until she had to take it from him.
She drank. She had had the coffee after all, out in the car park, and it had been foul. She could taste it beneath the water.
“I need to keep this,” she said.
“For the present, nothing leaves the archive without a record.”
She set down the bottle. “My name isn't on the archive.”
He looked at the note again. “All right. We'll make a record.”
He sounded annoyed, but not at her, she thought. She had no reason yet to trust the distinction.
They photographed the key and both sides of the note. Elias wrote a short record: where they'd found them, and that Mara would keep the originals. She checked her copy had reached her phone before she slid the paper and key into an envelope.
“Wednesday,” he said. “I'll arrange access to the room.”
“You own the hotel.”
“The archive is being prepared for the exhibition. I need to know what's been moved.”
It was a reasonable answer. She disliked wanting an unreasonable one, wanting him to open every door now because the dead woman had finally addressed her by name.
“I'll come Wednesday,” she said.
He was still looking at the dress when she packed her tools. Without the trapped lining it had fallen into its old shape. The change was so slight she might have struggled to explain it to a person who didn't look at clothes for a living.
At the door she turned back. “Don't let anyone steam that side. Those marks need time.”
“I won't.”
He had one hand beneath the released fold, holding it away from the floor. She had forgotten to tell him he could stop.