Page 73 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
I spent the next morning happily continuing to set up my workspace.
The first thing I did was to transfer the wedding dress collection to my back room, and while it was easy enough to push the hanging rail through, since it was on castors, emptying and moving the shelves took a lot longer.
Luckily, the metal racking was in narrow, tall sections, so fairly easy to drag through, especially after I put a bit of old material underneath, to help it slide over the vinyl.
I arranged the boxes on it and, finding a marker pen and labels with the spare archive boxes, I tagged the bag containing my dress with a large number 12.
I put together my own smaller hanging rail, but that still left plenty of room, even after I’d fetched the ironing board from the cottage and set that up permanently.
It was sheer luxury to have all this space! When you live and work in a very small flat, you’re forever putting things away, or getting them out.
I contemplated the shelves of boxes and the bags on the rail from the doorway for a few minutes – that Aladdin’s cave of exciting possibilities! Then I firmly took myself back to re-arranging things in the main room, although I may have fondled the cutting table once or twice, in passing.
At lunchtime, it struck me that though Golightly had yelled a bit when I shut the door to the living room on him, he’d been quite silent ever since. I found him upstairs, fast asleep on my bed again, totally and blissfully zonked out.
I made a tuna mayo sandwich and checked my phone while I ate. There was another email from Marco, which this time had not been consigned to the junk box, where it belonged.
I dithered a bit, wondering whether to delete it unread, but in the end I opened it, which was a mistake since it appeared that my lack of response to his previous attempts to contact me had seriously got up his nose.
There was no ‘Dear Garland’ about this email – in fact, it breathed out a miasma of aggrieved exasperation from every line. It started abruptly:
Garland, where on earth are you? Your lack of response to my email, when you must know how worried I am about you, is positively cruel!
Strange – I hadn’t noticed any sign of interest in what had become of me at all!
I was so concerned that this morning I went all the way out to Ealing and found your flat not only empty, but with a For Sale sign outside – and a Sold sticker across it! Someone let me into the hall and I found a bouquet I’d sent to you, propped up dead against your door.
I went upstairs to see if your batty old neighbour, Miss McNabb, knew where you had got to, only to discover that she had vanished, too, and her flat is to let.
The estate agents refused to give me any information about your whereabouts, so I can only draw the conclusion that you have left London with Miss McNabb, though I can’t imagine why, unless for some joint business venture, perhaps?
The man was mad – and I hadn’t even left London at the same time as Miss McNabb! He’d have made a rotten private eye.
Beng & Briggs said they had no other forwarding address for you and would not have given you a reference for a new job, even if you’d asked for one. They also said that once the reason for your sacking got out, it was unlikely in the extremethat you’d find another position in London. Of course, I know how much your work meant to you and I’m sorry about that, but it was quite inevitable, given what you did.
‘Tell me something I don’t know, Sherlock,’ I muttered.
Still, after all we’ve meant to each other, I can’t comprehend how you could simply disappear without letting me know where you were!
‘Join the club, buster,’ I said, for that’s exactly how I’d felt when Thom did it to me, though with more reason, for, after all, Marco had ended our engagement and told me he never wanted to see me again! Not to mention that he’d rung up Beng & Briggs in a white-hot fury, to tell them what I’d done without, I was certain, including any of the mitigating circumstances.
But Thom, whom I had loved more than any brother, had resolutely turned his back and walked off into a future that didn’t include me – all because I’d fallen in love with the stupid, self-obsessed idiot who had emailed me this load of drivel!
I most certainly wasn’t going to tell him where I was, and sincerely hoped he would never discover it, or that Thom also lived here, because he’d jump to the obvious conclusion that I’d known his whereabouts all along. He certainly wouldn’t keep the news about where Thom was to himself, either.
I looked down at the email again and saw that he hadn’t given up his quest quite so easily as I’d thought.
I managed to get hold of the phone number for that friend of yours at the V&A, George, but he said he had no idea where you were, either.
Thank you, George, I thought, and hoped that had exhausted all the lines of enquiry Marco could think of – or for the present, at any rate – although he was bound to think of contacting Honey, eventually. I’d have to warn her.
Wherever you have gone, you have acted way too hastily. I said before that you’d entirely misunderstood the situation between myself and Mirrie. I am quite cross with her for giving you the wrong impression, as well as persuading me to let her borrow your dress, against my better judgement. However, it came to no harm – unlike the Titania costume.
That was a low blow about the costume, but clearly he was unable to grasp how I felt about my wedding dress.
He’d obviously switched to a charm offensive in the last line – offensive being the operative word, as far as I was concerned.
Darling, I miss you and we so need to talk!
