SIDE BENEFITS
517
He stared, stiffened, and went white - all this from the dresser,
because as Mary said, she was damned if she was going to open her
eyes and spoil the performance. He then bowed, and went silently
out, taking his dismissal like a gentleman.
The dress became a star piece in the designer's next collection,
but by then he and Mary were no longer together. Discussing it in
the friendly matter-of-fact way imposed on them by their style, or
mode, they agreed there was something quite unassimilable about
that wedding dress. Either she should put the bloody thing on and
go to a registry office and be done with it, or they should call the
thing off, with no hard feelings.
The dress then,
pret
a
porter,
ready-to-wear, boutiqued, inter–
nationalised, led a thousand brides to the altar and the registrar's
table.
Still quite straight-forward, or at least, understandable. But now
enters the dark - or at least, the tale turns slightly to the moonlit
side.
Mary had the dress hanging up in her cupboard for some
months. She could not wear it, it was not her style, but she did not
want, for some reason, to part with it. At last she wore it for a fancy
dress party, and became for one night, a fifteenth-century court lady.
At the party were stage and film directors, as well as the chefs,
dress designers, hair-dressers and pop stars who are the lions of our
current fashionable scene. A director who had seen Mary a dozen
times in her usual kind of role on stage or on television, saw her
now in a new light. A man with a fine nose for what was next, he
wanted to make a large full-blooded film of a nineteenth-century
novel whose heroine was a head-strong aristocrati c daughter in love
with a revolutionary plebeian. He was dubious about Mary's voice,
but it turned out her own voice did very well- he was the first
person to have heard it for years. She got the part. She had to learn
to ride. The film was shot in Somerset, where gentleman John had
his country house.
For weeks she was riding across fields and woods where his
grandmother, whose incarnation he had said she was, had won the
admiration of a county. But gentleman John had gone abroad with
his broken heart, taking the coffin and the manservant with him.
Mary did not enquire, for to tell the truth, she hardly thought of
