Threads by Sophia Bennett Page B

carefully labelled, stuffed with couture.
    This is irritating. I've been asking Granny for books on Saint Laurent, Vionnet and all the greats since I was tiny and it is a known family fact that I am more than slightly interested in fashion – in fact it's practically the only thing I know anything about. Yet it's never occurred to Granny to mention that she PRACTICALLY OWNS A MUSEUM OF THE STUFF. She says casually over dinner one evening that ‘being interested isn't enough, darling. You have to be able to do something with it. Otherwise I'd have every fashion student in the country round here, rummaging through my things.’
    It's true. She would.
    Crow is delicate and meticulous. She doesn't rummage. Each day, while Granny and I play cards and read, she goes up to the attics like she's climbing thestaircase to heaven and carefully removes half-a-dozen outfits from their coverings. Her long fingers delicately trace the fabrics, the trimmings, the edgings, the seams. She's allowed to pick one outfit a day that Granny will try on for her. Granny, needless to say (and she often does), can still get into her wedding dress and anything else she wore in her twenties. She looks a bit scrawnier than she probably did then, but the fit isn't bad.
    ‘I would have handed them on to you, darling,’ she says to me, rubbing salt in the wound, ‘but your mother's too tall and you're too short. It's a shame your father was so . . . petit .’
    There isn't much Granny likes about my father. If she hadn't discovered he was the grandson of a count I'm not sure she'd ever have spoken to him. He thinks she's great, but he still calls her ‘la belle dame sans merci’.
    One day, about a week in, I go into the bedroom Crow's using to tell her it's teatime and get the shock of my life. A midnight-blue lace cocktail dress is lying under the window in pieces. The bodice has been separated from the skirt and several seams have been undone. Petticoats litter the area. For a moment, I feel as if I've wandered into a crime scene, and I half expect to see a chalk line around it and forensics experts crawling over it, looking for DNA.
    I go in closer. The label says Dior. This is sacrilege.
    Crow comes in behind me and gives me a cheerful smile.

    ‘My God! What's Granny going to say?’ I gibber.
    ‘It's all right. She said I could,’ Crow tells me calmly. ‘I'm borrowing it.’
    ‘But it's in bits.’
    ‘Of course. I have some adjustments to make. I'm just examining the seams.’
    ‘Examining the seams? Do you really think you'll be able to put it back together?’
    She shrugs her shrug. ‘Yvette will help me, but it's clear how the dress was made.’
    It's clear to me how people do bungee jumping, but that doesn't mean I'd ever attempt it myself. But Crow seems to think it's perfectly natural to try and recreate the stitches of a Dior couturière . So does Granny, apparently. She doesn't seem remotely bothered when I nervously mention it at tea.
    In the evenings, Granny reminisces about her Paris days and rumbles on about how things have changed.
    ‘In my day, the regular clients were European princesses and American heiresses who dressed like ladies. Now it's all mobsters’ molls and pop stars who dress like glorified tarts. I've lost track of the number of nipples I've seen on the catwalk. It's quite disgusting. One of them was your mother's once, Nonie. I'm not sure I ever recovered.’
    Granny doesn't often talk about Mum's career. I'm starting to suspect that she might be jealous of Mum wearing all those fabulous outfits, day in day out, andgetting paid to do it. Granny was born to be a model. She had the height and the pouty looks and the theatricality. She could have posed for England. But in her day, nicely brought-up girls didn't do that sort of thing. Or so Great-Grandma told her.
    Crow doesn't comment. She just listens and occasionally you can see her fingertips moving, as if she's trying to remember the feel of a particular