Page 10 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
I wasn’t going to wear a veil, just a simple band of white silk flowers – and ‘simple’, ‘small’ and ‘private’ were going to be the key words when it came to my wedding, whatever Marco wanted.
I might not be able to stop him mentioning our engagement and my relationship to Rosa-May in his pre-opening publicity, but I was damned if he was going to turn our special day into a publicity stunt.
I had no family to support me on the day – I didn’t really think Honey would go to the wedding – and few real friends, now Ivo had vanished from my life. I somehow seemed to have lost the knack of making close friends after my parents’ death.
I did have people I was on friendly terms with, mostly from work, and one or two from my college days, but they were all busy getting on with their own lives.
Still, there was always George, who would lend distinction to my side of the wedding guest list. I might even ask him to give me away!
I expected Marco would want to fill the church up with his friends and any celebrities and journalists he could persuade to attend … and then, of course, there would be Mummy and her coven, too. She’d probably wear black!
With a familiar wrenching pain of loss, I thought how much it would have meant to me to have Ivo at the wedding. But then, he had so disliked Marco that, even though time had proved him wrong about his changed character, and even if we had made up our quarrel, he might not have wanted to be there.
It was pointless to speculate, for Ivo was gone.
I’d thought our friendship was unbreakable, so precious to both of us that we’d never lose each other again …
I had been so wrong.
4
Three-Act Tragedy
Perhaps it was the lingering, undermining effect of the champagne, but I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering back to that wonderful, magical moment when, after more than a decade apart, Thom and I had found each other again …
After we’d bumped into each other and started talking, I’d suddenly really looked at him and seen that the reserved, quiet boy I’d known had morphed into the adult man before me.
When he’d told me that some of his happiest memories had been doing woodwork with my dad, and that he still loved working with wood, I’d said on impulse, knowing how much it would mean to him, that I’d give him Dad’s woodworking tools. I’d known Dad would have loved Thom to have them, just as Mum would have been so happy to know that I was using her old sewing machine and dressmaking equipment.
Then he’d taken my hand and said he’d show me his work-shop.
And as I’d followed him down to the basement, I’d realized that in showing me his private sanctuary, he was acknowledgingthat our old close friendship had resumed, even if the years between had left a few invisible scars and a secret or two.
We were still so young then, in our early twenties …
*
The sound of an email pinging into my phone pulled me back from the past and, when I checked, I saw it was from Honey.
Great to meet you, Cousin Garland – and don’t even think of calling me Aunt, because it’s too ageing!
We must keep in touch now and I’ll be picking your brains about the museum project once I get home.
Honey xx
I replied:
Lovely to meet you, too – Cousin Honey! And I’ll really enjoy helping you with the project, so ask me anything you like.
Garland xx
I sent that off, then I thought for a moment and pinged off another one.
PS. I told Marco I’d met you – actually, his mother had spotted us in Claridge’s – and I’m afraid he might contact you via your agent re involving you in publicity for his new play, the angle being the whole coincidence of him being engaged to a descendant of Rosa-May, who inspired hisnew play, after seeing an exhibition about her, loaned by his fiancée’s long-lost cousin, the famous novelist Honey Fairford … or something like that! I told him I wasn’t keen on having my personal affairs dragged into thePRand that he should certainly contact you before mentioning your name, so I thought I had better warn you.
She replied almost instantly, and I grinned, hearing her deep, husky, sardonic voice in my head as I read.
Forewarned is forearmed! But I’m a total media tart when it comes to publicizing my books, so will see what is in it for me!
