Page 24 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
‘Whatisthat strange sort of wheezy rumbling noise in the background?’ Honey suddenly demanded.
‘Oh, that’s Golightly, my upstairs neighbour’s cat. He often visits, but when I got home I found him here with all his food, bed and litter tray. Miss McNabb was urgently called away because her sister in Edinburgh has had a stroke. I don’t know when she’ll be back.’
I looked at Golightly, who was asleep on his favourite armchair.
‘I think you did mention the cat and I expect he’ll be a bit of company for you till she gets back,’ Honey said, then went back to the original topic.
‘So, what about it? Do you want the job? I think you’d enjoy the work. Once the museum is open, it will just be part-time, so you’ll be able to do your own work, too.’
‘If I have any work,’ I said.
‘You will – those lovely little costume mannequins you make for the V&A, for a start.’
‘George will hear what happened on the grapevine eventually, even if I don’t tell him myself.’
‘Yes, but I’m certain he wouldn’t tell the shop to stop stocking them. He’s your friend.’
I thought about it and decided she was right. George might be a big gossip, but even though he would be shocked by what I’d done, he would understand.
‘You can sell them in the museum shop here, too: not just copies of the wedding dresses, but perhaps replicas of Rosa-May’s costume and evening dress.’
‘Maybe,’ I agreed, although I wasn’t sure I’d ever want to look at Rosa-May’s costume and dress again.
I thought about leaving my tiny flat, a safe haven in the area where I had lived as a child, so that it had felt like coming home, but there was nothing else to keep me in London now.
I could run away, just as Ivo had done, for there was nothing and no one to hold me here. I’d miss George, but perhaps he’d come and visit.
‘If you really mean it, I would love the job,’ I said. ‘It would not only be a fresh start in a new place, but also exciting to be closely involved with the new museum from the beginning.’
‘Salary to be negotiated, cottage rent-free – you can pay the utilities,’ Honey said briskly. ‘Is your flat rented or your own?’
‘Mine – or rather, it belongs to the mortgage lender.’
‘You could let it, then?’
‘I think I’ll burn my bridges totally and sell it, no going back. And all my furniture will fit easily into a small cottage.’
‘There we are, then. You’ll have a busy few days, putting the flat on the market and packing up, and then you can move in whenever you want to – the sooner the better! It will be great to have a fellow enthusiast on the spot. We’re going to have so much fun with the museum, just you wait and see!’
Rosa-May
Papa said he hoped such shallow admiration as I had received for my play-acting would not go to my head.
‘Especially the attentions of the young gentlemen, who are so far above you in station and can mean nothing by it,’ said Betsy with a jealous titter.
‘No, indeed,’ said Papa gravely, and added that he had not realized before that I had now grown up and it was high time I was sent out into the world to earn my living, instead of indulging in frivolity.
He was quite wrong to think that the admiration of the young gentlemen – however surprising to me – might have gone to my head, for I had neither encouraged it nor taken much heed of it, as I assured him.
And this was true, for even then, having overheard some of Mama’s descriptions of childbirth, I had been filled with a huge dread of it and a resolution that I would rather die than marry and expose myself to this fate.
My small and slight stature, so like Mama’s, would surely mean I would undergo the same agonies.
I assured Papa that I was very eager to make my own way in theworld … which I was, although not at all in the way he meant me to!
*
After the play, our usefulness to the house party at an end, Kitty and I returned to the schoolroom under the careful eye of the governess.
