Page 4 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
And after we’d toasted each other with a second, or maybe third, glass of champagne – for a bottle in an ice bucket had appeared beside the table – I did just that.
In fact, once everything took on that champagne shimmer, I could hear myself happily babbling away in a very out-of-character fashion for me, especially with a stranger. But then, somehow, by that time Honey didn’t reallyfeellike a stranger any more. Perhaps that was because she was the first blood relative I’d ever met, other than my parents.
‘Of course, when George told me about the exhibition, I came to see it as soon as I could, though not on the opening day, because I was at work,’ I explained.
‘You work on a Saturday?’
‘Yes, in the mornings, but I get Wednesday afternoons off in lieu. Sometimes, if there’s a big rush job on, we keep goingallSaturday, but you don’t mind working long hours when you’re doing something you love, do you?’
‘No, that’s very true,’ she agreed, with that tilted grin. ‘Stephen King says writing is the most fun you can have on your own, and I agree with him. I never tire of mutilating beautiful young men … though only in print, of course.’ She grinned again. ‘But go on: why did the Rosa-May exhibition change everything for you?’
‘Well, for a start, the collection’s unique, isn’t it? I mean, just the survival of the actual early nineteenth-century costume Rosa-May wore as Titania is amazing, since they so often repurposed costumes for other plays – and, of course, frequently still do.’
‘It was made especially for her, when she reprised the Titania role in late 1814, along with new costumes for Oberon and the other fairy characters, though we’ve only got the hand-coloured prints showing those,’ Honey said. ‘I found all the details in that journal that’s in the display – part memoir, part diary.’
‘I’ve seen it, and the blown-up excerpts on the boards around the room.’
‘She began writing it in 1815, after she’d married Captain Guy Fairford and he’d left her with his brother and his wife in a remote house on the Lancashire moors while he rushed back to rejoin his regiment – just in time for the Battle of Waterloo! Rosa-May had expected to go with him to the Continent, so she wasn’t very pleased.’
‘I can imagine! Rural Lancashire must have been very boring after her life in London.’
‘She said she only started the memoir to while away the time. Then it turns into more of a diary when she hears her husband has been injured. The entries stop on the last page, on the day he arrives home, so I don’t know if she wrote any more and that book didn’t survive.’
‘It did say something in the exhibition leaflet aboutRosa-May mysteriously vanishing from the family records in 1816,’ I said.
‘That’s right. According to Uncle Hugo, where she went is a family mystery,’ Honey agreed. ‘The costume itself only survived because the owner/manager of the Cockleshell Theatre gave it to Rosa-May as a wedding gift, along with those prints of the other characters, when she left the stage to get married. I found the journal actually tucked inside the dress, in one of the chests I discovered in the attic of Uncle Hugo’s house when I was moving in.’
‘It is amazing it should survive – and even more so that the dress she had had made to the same design did, too,’ I said.
‘She wore that evening dress to Vauxhall Gardens on the fateful evening she met Guy Fairford for the first time,’ Honey told me. ‘That’sin the journal, too. He was a handsome army officer, on leave to recover from an injury, and she fell for him instantly and gave up her career for him.’
The tone of her voice clearly intimated that she didn’t think much ofthatchoice.
‘I’d love to read the whole journal,’ I said wistfully.
‘We seem to have strayed from your story to Rosa-May’s,’ Honey said with a smile.
‘They are connected, though, because once I’d seen the exhibition, I enthused about it so much to Marco that he wanted to see it too. Then, when we got back to my flat, he said it had totally inspired him and he was going to write a contemporary play, based on the theme ofA Midsummer Night’s Dream. Onlyhiswould beA Midsummer Night’s Madness, with a sort of ghost version of the Regency fairy scenes running through it. The actors will be dressed in replicas of the original costumes from the prints – Beng & Briggs are making them. All those scenes will be in black and white,which Marco says you can create using stage makeup and lighting.’
Marco liked to bounce his ideas off me, so by now I knew this all by heart. In fact, I’d had more than a little influence into getting him to create something slightly more mainstream than his usual work …
‘That sounds original,’ Honey said.
‘The fairy characters will be half-seen by the contemporary cast, but then, gradually, the past overlaps with the present … or something like that,’ I finished. I wasn’t entirely sure I’d quite grasped the whole concept, despite my involvement in it.
I didn’t think Honey looked as if she’d grasped it all either, for her straight black brows were drawn together in a frown over her dark eyes.
‘Marco’s already started auditions for the cast of the play.’
‘Sothat’swhy you keep coming back to the exhibition and were studying those dresses so intently!’
‘Partly, but not entirely,’ I confessed. ‘Because the moment I saw Rosa-May’s Titania-inspired evening dress, I fell in love with it and I’ve been making myself a copy at home. Rosa-May must have been the same height and size as me, except that her waist was a little smaller – stays, I suppose.’
‘Stay me with flagons,’ Honey said vaguely, taking a gulp from her glass. ‘The things women have put themselves through in the past to please men!’
‘Well, I wasn’t going to wear stays, even in the pursuit of historical accuracy,’ I said firmly. ‘So I just made the waist a little bigger. When it was almost finished, I put it on to show Marco and it certainly pleasedhim, even without the wasp waist, because that’s when he suggested we should think about setting a date for our wedding! He’d had no idea I was even making a copy of the dress, because he’d hardly been to the flatfor ages. First, he was writing his play and then in talks with the Cockleshell Theatre … I live miles out in Ealing Broadway, you see, while he has an apartment in the basement of his mother’s house in Mayfair.’
‘Swanky address,’ she commented. ‘So, absence had made the heart grow fonder, and seeing you in that beautiful gown knocked him all of a heap?’
