Page 55 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
Viv nodded.
‘Good, because I want another session on the book before dinner and Rory will be too tired to want more than an amble round the market square later.’
We drank our coffee and ate a muffin apiece in the kitchen with Viv, while telling her what we’d been doing and about the Bloody Bride.
‘I hadn’t got round to telling you about her yet, Viv,’ Honey said. Before adding to me, ‘Viv’s interested in all the stories connected with the dresses.’
‘Yes … so fascinating,’ whispered Viv.
‘I’m hoping they’ll inspire you to write a whole new poetry collection, Viv, just as your cooking will inspire me to write my novels even faster, which will make my agent a very happy woman.’
‘I just might,’ she said in a thread of a voice, as if she was confiding a secret.
Honey bit into her second muffin. ‘Great! I’d like you to get so inspired you move in here permanently – make a fresh start, like Garland.’
Viv went pink. ‘You’re always so kind … but you can’t really mean it!’
‘Of course I do,’ said Honey, looking astonished. ‘When did I ever say anything I didn’t mean? I told you when I brought you back here that you could stay as long as you wanted and, goodness knows, this house is big enough for us both to have our own separate spaces to live and work in, whenever we want to get away from each other. You think about it.’
Honey got up. ‘Come on, Garland, let’s go to my office and sort out the important stuff, like your salary. The workwoman is worthy of her hire.’
*
A little while later, I headed back through the museum carrying a box of muffins that Viv had left in the kitchen for me with a note.
I was thinking about the first list of purchases that I was to email over to Honey later – the cutting table at the head of it – and stiffening my resolve not to unpack any of the dresses until it arrived. Besides, I had received the catalogue of gowns Honey had compiled, so I ought to read through that first.
In the foyer I skirted around a porcelain loo, which stood in the middle of the floor like a piece of bizarre sculpture. The inner glass doors were now open and pinned back, and two workmen were unloading a lot of pipes and what looked like a packaged washbasin from a white van, so presumably the new convenience was getting to the finishing stages.
I actually turned my head away from the tempting archive boxes in the staff room and locked the door of my workroom behind me, as if I’d just passed a very difficult test.
There was no sound from the cottage now; it was almost ominously quiet. Nor was there any sign of Golightly … but then I noticed that the door to the hall was open a crack andeventually I discovered him luxuriously stretched out across my bed, fast asleep, making that leaky-bellows noise.
I tiptoed out. If I went now, I’d just have time to slip across to this pet shop Honey had told me about and see if they had a suitable cat flap … and buy more expensive treats to propitiate the Household God with.
I collected a shopping bag and then, after a moment’s thought, put half the muffins Viv had left for me in a sandwich box of my own and took it with me.
Rosa-May
The whole experience of my visit to the theatre only increased my belief that I was destined to become an actress and made me even more determined, if that were possible, to achieve my goal, an ambition that Letty found both exciting and to be applauded.
We spent many happy hours walking about the gardens, discussing how this might best be accomplished. I also shared with her Sara’s occasional letters from London, where, as well as helping in her sister’s lodging house, she was sometimes employed at the Cockleshell Theatre, so had much of interest to impart.
The theatre had been newly refurbished and reopened and was, she said, set to rival both those of Drury Lane and Covent Garden.
My secret plans made it possible for me to tolerate the tedious hours I spent reading to Lady Bugle, or dispensing tea for her very unexciting circle of friends.
*
With the turning of the New Year and my seventeenth birthday, I resolved to put off my plans no longer.
I would run away to London and go to stay with Sara at her sister’s house and they, with their connections to the Cockleshell Theatre, would endeavour to interest the actor-manager Aurelius Blake in my earnest desire to enter his company.
Sara warned me of the difficulties I would face in obtaining this end and also, should I be successful, the pitfalls and privations of the life, for actors, it seemed, would find themselves travelling the length and breadth of the country for weeks on end and all but the most renowned of the company earned little more than a pittance.
Then, too, there was the general poor opinion of the morals of actors and, most especially actresses, which might lead to attempts upon my virtue …
But she also told me that Mr Blake and his wife, together with his brother, were of a strict Methodist persuasion and their company was most respectable.
