Page 82 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
I might as well have saved my breath, because he started wolfing it down as if he hadn’t eaten for a week.
I left him to it and locked the cat flap, because I didn’t want him roaming about while I was out. I intended locking it every night, anyway, so he might as well get used to it.
As I left, I heard the unmistakable sound of his bowl hittingthe unit as he polished it shiny in the hope of a last morsel of dinner.
I caught up with the others at Honey’s garden gate. She’d told us to come in by way of the kitchen door.
‘We look as if we ought to be using the tradesmen’s entrance anyway, since we’re all wearing old clothes we don’t mind getting filthy,’ said Simon. ‘Except Pearl. She only needs a Lambretta and she could be cast for a remake ofLa Dolce Vita.’
I could see where he was coming from, because Pearl was wearing pedal-pushers and a blue and white spotted scarf tied peasant-style over her hair.
‘Oh, these old things,’ Pearl said, though she smiled at Simon. ‘And I’m only wearing the scarf because I’ve got a fear of spiders getting into my hair.’
‘I’d never even thought of that one,’ I said with a shudder. ‘They’re bad enough running about where you can see them!’
‘We’ll protect you!’ said Simon, striking a heroic pose.
But it seemed Honey had already thought of that one, because when we followed her up to the attics we found a collection of long-handled feather dusters and brooms. Viv had brought up the rear, dressed practically in jeans and a checked lumberjack shirt that might have belonged to her husband: Charlotte Brontë trying to blend into the twenty-first century.
‘Viv’s got a notebook and she’s going to list what we want to get rid of and anything that might be valuable that we need to check out first. I’ve cleared this room and put anything I want to keep in the old servants’ rooms through that door,’ Honey said, gesturing. ‘The junk shop man, Arthur, has taken the rest, and my plan is that as we work through the older attics, we move anything I don’t want to keep into here. Then he can come back and have a look at all that, too.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Thom. ‘I see the electric lights extend up here.’
‘It’s all old and needs rewiring when we’ve cleared enough space,’ Honey said. ‘As there’s just one light bulb in the middle of each of the other rooms, I’ve brought some torches up for the dark corners.’
I told Honey I thought I’d seen some of her old brass bedsteads at Arthur’s shop the day before, and about the stable door and the sofa.
‘We might find you a couple more bits of furniture, you never know,’ she said. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the scale of the task before we get on with it!’
She led the way into the first of what proved to be three long gabled rooms, crowded with the dark shapes of furniture and lit only by single bulbs on loops of flex across the ceilings. A narrow passage had been left through each one, so you could squeeze through, but the final, much smaller room, was accessed by three steps down and a dog-leg corridor, in the inconvenient manner of old houses.
We only looked into that one from the doorway, because it was so tightly packed with what looked like luggage and small tea chests.
‘I don’t think that one’s going to be very exciting, somehow,’ Simon said, as we retraced our steps to the first attic.
‘I don’t suppose any of them will be,’ Honey said. ‘But you never know – and we’d better make a start!’
27
Table Talk
‘So far as I can see,’ said Honey, ‘they filled up the attics in no particular order when they moved here from Up-Heythram Hall, so furnishings from different time periods are all jumbled up. Then the later generations have shoved all kinds of unwanted junk up here, wherever it would fit.’
‘It does look like the bargain basement version of King Tut’s tomb,’ said Thom.
‘Only not so much of the “wonderful things”,’ agreed Pearl, peering distastefully at a nearby bundle. ‘That rolled-up rug has to be a moth feast!’
‘I should think they’ll have had a go at any soft furnishings,’ I said. ‘That rug only looks fit for the tip.’
‘Let’s drag it into the other room and just check it isn’t the remnant of some fabulous Persian heirloom,’ suggested Simon.
It wasn’t, but it was certainly dusty.
‘You know, I think I’ll see if I can persuade Arthur to takeeverythingaway that I don’t want, even the rubbish like this, on the understanding that I let him have some decent stuff at a reasonable price,’ Honey said. ‘I think he’ll go for that and it’ll save me a lot of trouble.’
We began slowly to clear one corner of the first room, moving monstrous mahogany wardrobes and Edwardian bedroom suites by pushing them across the wooden floor into the outer room, where Viv listed them all in her notebook, while Pearl dusted everything off.
‘I think Uncle Hugo had a lot of the more monumental pieces brought up here,’ said Honey. ‘He liked a mix of comfortable modern and seventeenth-century furniture.’
