Roz still wasn’t in command of her words and her whole body seemed to be shaking, her eyes searching his face, roaming down to his hands where he worked to pull at the twine around the dented packages. Wayward wasn’t helping one bit in all this, wagging and nudging at him. At least someone wasn’t mad at him. Even Maddie had given him a mouthful as he loaded the boxes into his van, calling him ‘a right pain’.
‘I was having this fixed,’ he said as he pulled his gift free from the first box and straightened up, a rush of creamy fabric flowing from his hands, a great poof of chiffon and diaphanous lace falling around him.
Roz jumped back, her face a picture of dismay. ‘My May Day dress!’
‘Aye,’ he sighed. ‘I found Maddie online. Said she did alterations, but, my God, she was slow! I was forever chivvying her along. There’s nobody does mending like you, Roz, but there’d have been no surprise if I hadn’t asked someone else to do it. You see?’
‘Surprise?’ The word left her lips, barely audible.
‘Aye.’ It was too soon to laugh, though he wished he could. It was dawning on him what terrible things his wife must have been thinking about him, and it was all his fault too.
‘You do so much for everybody else around the town, and for me, and the twins. I was determined to do something good for you, for a change.’
He put the dress into her hands for her to examine and she gripped it by its freshly re-padded shoulders where the ruching had been re-sewn and the little loops of seed pearls hung in half-moon strands over the puffy cap sleeves. Even McIntyre knew it was beautiful, and it was so clean now.
That had been another bother, having it all dry cleaned out at Stranruie when the drycleaner’s only opened two hours a day for collections. This whole venture had been a bigger undertaking than he’d known.
Still, his wife held the dress to her body in stunned silence and she looked down to where the rips around the hem – the product of years and years of past Beltane nights when she’d manned stalls and helped out while he’d overseen the bonfire lighting – had been invisibly mended and the missing glass bar-beads replaced. That’s what had delayed its finishing in the first place; vintage beads being harder to source these days, or so Maddie had informed him in one of their many sneaked phone calls.
These bothersome details were all things he hadn’t factored in when his bright idea struck him a month ago and he’d stolen the dress out of the shed under cloak of night.
He had hated all of it, truly. Clandestine drop-offs and running here and there, and sweating over delays, and Roz growing less and less inclined to forgive his absences.
‘And there’s this an’ all,’ he said, remembering himself, stooping to the second box and removing a crown.
‘I fixed this myself, in the shed,’ he told her, presenting her with the papier-mâché coronet in gilded paint with its paste jewels, only he’d taken it to the florist at Nithyburn, a half hour’s drive from here, and the florist had enwreathed the whole thing with fresh ivy, baby’s breath and clusters of blaeberries.
‘I know it’s not quite the same as it was that first night you wore it, but the whole thing was fit to fall apart and needed a deal of patching and fortification. It ought to last another twenty-eight years now.’ He smiled at this, a glow of pride at a job well done refusing to be dampened within him. ‘And the wummin promised me those leaves and flowers will dry and stay in place, if you store it properly.’
‘Oh…’ Roz took the crown too, holding it in a frozen posture against the dress. ‘Mac!’
He smiled to see her coming round.
‘Charlie,’ she said, her eyes misting.
‘And these…’ he said, not finished yet, kneeling again at her feet and reaching for the other, smaller box ‘…needed new soles after years of traipsing about after the twins down the Knowe.’ He pulled a lid from the shoebox to reveal two shot-silk court shoes of the nineties’ bridal variety. The shoes she’d worn as she walked down the aisle to him, and which had become part of her Beltane costume ever since. She’d waltzed their children to Beltane songs a hundred times wearing those shoes, while the twins took it in turns to stand on top of her feet.
His eyes welled at this memory, making it harder to see her reaction, but he could feel that she was smiling.
‘Come on,’ he said, wiping his tears and shifting aside the lengths of the dress so he could tap at her foot, which she immediately lifted. He discarded the fleecy slipper-boot there and replaced it gently with her white May Queen shoe, newly cleaned, resoled, re-heeled and lined with a new inner.
‘It fits,’ she said, sheepish and laughing, still clinging to his gifts.
‘You shall go to the ball!’ he said, smiling up at her, all his fondness for his wife making his insides glow warm and fuzzy, the way they always did when she was smiling at him, though maybe he’d forgotten to show it.
‘One last thing,’ he said.
‘Another restoration?’ she asked, wonder in her voice, and not far behind it the familiar look of a woman not used to getting much in the way of gifts lavished upon her and not quite knowing what to do with herself when it happened.
Stuck to the fridge doors a little way off were displayed the kind of gifts she’d been used to receiving over the years. Painted handprints, scribbly family drawings, crayon hearts and Mother’s Day paper flowers. On the kitchen shelves rested the cookbooks and pocket money knick-knacks and the framed photos of children growing taller and a couple growing older together. Imaginative, lavish gifts, she was not used to, and she hadn’t expected or wished for them either, at least not until tonight as her husband knelt at her feet holding a very tiny box in his hands.
‘I met you twenty-nine years ago this night,’ he said. ‘And you were wearing that very dress. I thought my heart would stop at the sight of you, and yet you talked to me, you danced with me! I couldn’t believe my luck. Then the elders picked us out as King and Queen and gave you your crown, and me my cloak.’
He reached a hand aside to lift the lid on the same large box that had contained her dress to reveal that cloak now, alongside his Green Man mask, another of his restorations, in fresh moss and ivy, just as she must have remembered seeing it that first night.
‘When we jumped the flames of the blessing bonfires,’ he went on, ‘I knew then I’d be holding your hand and taking great leaps with you for the rest of my life.’
He switched his gaze to the box in his hands and lifted up the lid to reveal a gleaming ring.
