Magic

Magic

‘Your clothes are magical,’ Cilla said. ‘I mean, there’s money in that.’

Magical. It was nice that her daughter thought so, even if the word was slightly – not barbed, exactly, but definitely pointed. It could be a lot worse. And Cilla wore great stuff, even if her style was considerably more conventional than Ruth’s tended to be. But most people were considerably more conventional than she was. She didn’t set out to be that way. It just happened. How she was never felt totally in her control. Did other people have more control? Was that what made the difference? Was it her high-class, low-rent career teaching English Literature, its aftermath as a critic for various publications whose essays eventually found their way into books, always published by the same academic publisher to the same slow, sad rate of royalties? Or were those things the symptoms, not the cause, of her natural desire to keep her head beneath the parapet? Not that that expression would bring about anything but hilarity from Cilla. Or most people, come to that. Parapet. It sounded like one of those endangered animals she’d seen online somewhere, or one of those fake animals people tended – parapets, like paraphrase.

Cilla was waiting. She was used to seeing her mother disappear into a blue funk (another expression that showed her age and stage of hopelessness). She had never been able to convince her daughter of the sheer fascination of words.

‘Money,’ she said uncertainly. She was usually uncertain about that word, and that thing. ‘Money,’ she repeated.

‘Influencers.’

She’d heard the term. But for her, an obsessive reader, it had a literary context. ‘The anxiety of influence,’ she said dreamily, ‘That’s Harold Bloom, the brilliant critic who decided what was in the Western Canon. He thinks it comes from misunderstanding -.’ She was stopped by Cilla’s face.

‘Ok, Boomer,’ her daughter laughed. ‘

She deserved that, for Harold Bloom and the Western Canon and her once-job teaching at a pretty-good college, while reading Vogue and especially, Harper’s Bazaar religiously, and spending every penny she could on clothes. The Boomer thing was a joke between them, and if it sometimes wore a bit thin for her, if she wanted to protest that she couldn’t help when she was born and besides, she was had never gone after money and had marched for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War, even been arrested – she didn’t. Cilla would take it as a hint that she should get out there and get arrested, and that was the last thing she wanted.

‘I don’t see how my wearing stuff you think is witchy will make my fortune,’ she couldn’t help saying. ‘My clothes are for me, Coco,’ she added, to soften it. They called each other Sciap and Coco, another joke, that one more from her turf than Cilla’s. She was the one who had brought their names into the house, the books filled with their creations, the legends she had memorized.

‘Just go on YouTube and write about Schiaparelli and how you try to dress like her on a shoestring and how Zandra Rhodes makes you feel her energy,’ Cilla told her. ‘You’ll get followers and then you get subscriptions and then you make real money.’

Real money was not something she had ever made or ever aspired to make. But right now, a bit of real money would not go amiss. And the idea of witing about fashion rather than literature appealed to her. She could churn out essays for literary journals, even turn out the odd poem for a little mag. But the returns, if there were any, were pitiful. Signing up to the Brave New World of YouTube and Influencers was way out of her comfort zone, but she was broke, and otherwise she’d have to start selling off her wonderful wardrobe. And during the not-infrequent periods when her thirty-six year old daughter disappeared for a few weeks and Dudley, Cilla’s father, hid from her like the frightened ex he was, clothes were a large part of what kept her going, the more surreal the better. Wasn’t life surreal? Or maybe, like Frida Kahlo who famously said she wasn’t a surrealist but painted her reality, maybe Schiap had painted her reality too, in her designs, as she tried to do in her own charity- shop-assembled outfits? For which she was famous, or infamous, during her professorial years.

Cilla always came back and Dudley always apologized, in his sheepish way. It wasn’t as if she ever asked him for money. It wasn’t as if he ever had any. In all times of crisis and in between crises, she turned to Schiaparelli and Zandra Rhodes for inspiration, Vivienne Westwood and Katherine Hamnett in a pinch or when a more political mood took her. But Schiap was her patron saint. She craved clothes that were divinely crazy, clothes that were hilariously gorgeous. That was how she described them in the first piece intended for the miracle of YouTube to convert to hard cash. Or virtual cash, whatever that was. She was living in a virtual world now. A virtual universe! The idea frightened her into looking up the derivation of virtual, hoping it came from virtue, which it did, through the Medieval virtualis to virtual, originally meaning Influencing by physical virtues or capabilities, effective with respect to natural qualities.

That persuaded her. There was prospective virtue in the project, which would only work if she possessed the requisite natural qualities, thereby guaranteeing some degree of integrity, at least. She would be the prospector in the stream who found its golden glint, the alchemist who turned base metal into gold. She’d talk about the Schiaparelli’s whimsical newspaper hats, her lobster dress and, of course, the aspirin necklace! Little turquoise beads in the shape of aspirin – wasn’t that virtual medicine?

‘You have to go viral, to get anywhere,’ Cilla told her. She was hip enough (though that was not the word; savvy enough? with it enough?) to know that going viral was a good thing, not a case for antibiotics.

She showed off her own stuff first, her blue turquoise beads which reflected Schiap’s aspirin beads, or distilled them, homoeopathically, a further distillation of Schiaparelli’s original. Close enough to have the same virtual effect. Her form of fashion was, precisely, homeopathic. Even Coco Chanel, especially Chanel, so mean in so many ways, had welcomed knockoffs of her designs.

‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and she loved flattery,’ she told Cilla, then laughed, remembering, ‘there’s a great story about the two of them. At one of the many balls that went on just before the start of World War II –‘ she never said just before the war, as if she was stupid enough to think there had not been any wars since – ‘anyway, they were both there and Coco asked Schiap to dance. Of course she couldn’t say no – they were huge rivals – and Chanel danced her right into a candelabra and set her on fire! Schiap had to be rolled in a carpet to put her out!’ The story was true but she was less than one hundred per cent certain of the carpet part. In face when she thought about it, it was almost certainly a curtain they had wrapped poor Elsa in. But she left it. Was she joining the post-truth brigade? She hoped not. When she took the story to her post on YouTube, she changed it to curtains, having looked it up. Cilla never mentioned it, if she even noticed the change.

Yes, she agreed with her followers, you had to be built like a lamp post, for Schiaparelli. But Chanel required you to be a prepubescent boy, so take your pick! And you could adapt Elsa’s designs without losing the wit. It was the wit you were after. You could copy Coco’s classic cuts in colourful tweeds or tweed-like material. Distil, distil, it was all good homeopathic medicine. All you needed was a tiny drop of the original spirit – she was tempted to say the original aesthetic, but didn’t. She was learning.

Her following grew. Someone sent a picture and asked her advice, and she immediately offered them something from her back closet, something magical whose magic had never quite worked for her. After that, the requests came pouring in. She exhausted her own mistakes quite quickly and was off to her favourite haunts, charity shops all, bargaining with her followers, asking only slightly more than what she paid to fill out their expensive, tired wardrobes. The demand was such that she had to enlist Cilla, who dealt with the more conservative element. Homeopathic fashion was a thing. People wanted homeopathic Jean Muir, homeopathic Moschino and St. Laurent and Dior and all the rest. They researched the designers and mimicked – distilled – their looks. The word distilled came with a mixed scent of well-being and alcohol. It was a winner.

In six months she had a pared-down, more or less perfect wardrobe. In a year she had more money than she would ever have dreamt of, had she ever dreamt of having money. People said her clothes were magic. It had all started with that word and when she handed it over to Cilla with herself as consultant specializing in Schiaparelli, she went on her last Oxfam safari and found what she thought was likely to be an original Schiaparelli from the Pagan Collection of 1935, a dress made to look like a suit in deep maroon, black and white print. The print wasn’t bugs, like many prints in that collection. It was a literally dazzling geometric print – but only if you could see it.

‘A trompe d’oeil,’ she explained to Cilla. ‘A trick of the eye,’ she translated, ‘kind of like a Bridget Riley painting today,’ she realized she was leading her daughter deeper into confusion. ‘Never mind,’ she took the dress away and put it on, and it was just as perfect as she’d known it would be. When she came out to show Cilla, she was unable to keep herself from noting, ‘It’s like The Girls of Slender Means - you know, that great book by Murial Spark? They had one Schiaparelli dress, an evening dress made out of taffeta that one of their aunts gave her, and they shared it. One of the girls goes back for it when their building’s on fire, and she never comes out .’

Cilla looked briefly upset. ‘For a dress?’

‘Yes, darling, for a dress,’ she said, looking down over her fabulous dress, smoothing it with her hands, aware that she, a highly educated, highly literate woman, would dash into a burning building to save it without a moment’s hesitation. ‘She wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,’ she added, and was rewarded by a nod.

‘Maggie Smith. Great flick.’

‘It was,’ and her Oxfam find should really find its way to the V&A. But it wouldn’t, at least not till her will was read, and even then, maybe Cilla -? – but no. Their styles were different, and that was as it should be. This dress was made for her, in the 1930’s, by a genius. She would wear it till she died and then it would go where other people could admire it. She would not be buried in it. That would be a terrible waste. Just keeping it was selfish. It was almost like stealing. Oxfam had no idea of the value of what they had. She would make a big contribution…but she liked the little bit of lawlessness in herself. She had always liked it. And now she could wear it, an outlaw in her so-called sunset years, in her stolen dress. That’s what her virtual venture – alliterative, and the route of venture was the Latin Adventurus, to come upon, to reach, or arrive at – had brought her. She had come upon the dress just as she reached the end, arrived at the conclusion of her postings on line. What would she do now? She didn’t know, but she knew what she would wear.