The Dressmaker's Gift - Fiona Valpy Page 0,1

of smaller companies and start-ups who can’t afford their own in-house communications personnel. She doesn’t usually take on interns but my letter and CV were persuasive enough to make her call me at last (after I’d resent them twice, that is, and she’d realised I wasn’t going to leave her alone until I’d had an answer). The fact that I was prepared to do the job for a whole year on minimal pay, coupled with my fluency in French, led to a more formal Skype interview. And a glowing reference from my university tutor, emphasising my interest in the fashion industry and my commitment to hard work, finally convinced her to take me on.

I’d been prepared to look for a place to rent in one of the less salubrious suburbs of the city, eking out the small inheritance which had been left in trust for me in my mother’s will. So the offer of a room above the office was a fantastic bonus as far as I was concerned. I’d be living in the very building that had led me to find the Agence Guillemet in the first place.

I don’t usually believe in fate, but it felt as if a force was at work, drawing me to Paris. Leading me to the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Bringing me here.

To the building in the photograph.

I’d found the photo in a cardboard box of my mother’s things which had been pushed to the back of the highest shelf of the wardrobe in my bedroom, presumably by my father. Perhaps he’d wanted to hide it away up there so that I’d only find it when I’d grown up enough to be ready to see its contents, once the passing years had softened the edges of my grief so that they could no longer inflict such pain. Or perhaps it was guilt that made him push the taped-up box out of sight and out of reach, so that he and his new wife wouldn’t have to see this pathetically meagre reminder of the part they’d played in the unbearable sadness which finally led my mother to take her own life.

I’d discovered it one damp day when I was in my teens, home from boarding school for the Easter holidays. Despite the trouble they’d gone to – making sure I had my own room, letting me choose the colour for the walls and allowing me to arrange the books, ornaments and posters I’d brought with me however I liked – my father and stepmother’s house never really felt like ‘home’ at all. It was always their house, never mine. It was the place where I had to come and live when my own home had suddenly ceased to exist.

I’d been bored that wet April day. My two younger stepsisters were bored too, which meant they were niggling at one another, and the niggling had inevitably escalated into name-calling, a full-blown argument and then a good deal of loud screeching and door-slamming.

I retreated to my room and plugged my earbuds into my ears, using my music to block out the noise. Sitting cross-legged on my bed, I began to turn the pages of the latest copy of Vogue. At my request, my stepmother had given me a subscription for my Christmas present. I always savoured the moment when I opened the latest edition of the magazine, poring over each of the glossy pages, expensively scented with samples of the latest perfumes and lotions, a portal into the glamorous world of high fashion. That day, there was a picture of a model in a primrose-yellow T-shirt heading up a feature entitled ‘Early Summer Pastels’. It reminded me that I had one quite like it somewhere in my wardrobe among the summer clothes that I’d washed and folded carefully last autumn, swapping them over on the top shelf for the warmer tops and jumpers that were stashed there.

I laid the magazine aside and dragged the chair from my desk over to the wardrobe. As I reached for the pile of summery tops, my fingertips brushed against the age-softened cardboard of the box pushed to the back of the shelf.

I’d never paid any attention to it before that day – probably because I hadn’t been tall enough to see the writing – but now, standing on tiptoes, I pulled the box towards me and saw my mother’s name written in thick black marker pen on the parcel tape that sealed the top shut.

All thoughts of early summer pastels forgotten for the