Page 46 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
‘I don’t know why you’ve always had such a downer on Marco, because he wasn’t any worse than the rest of Leo’s London friends and he convinced me he’d totally changed before I started going out with him. I thought you’d see that eventually and we’d make our quarrel up.’
‘I didn’t believe the leopard had changed his spots that much, and I really didn’t want to see you with him.’ He sighed. ‘I just hoped for your sake he really loved you and you’d behappy … but it doesn’t seem to have turned out that way, or you wouldn’t be here.’
‘No, it all went resoundingly pear-shaped, and he showed himself to be a total love rat,’ I said bitterly. ‘So now you can say, “I told you so.”’
I had left my hand under his warm one and he squeezed it now.
‘I’m not going to, because I’m really, really sorry, Garland,’ he repeated. ‘I suppose that’s why you broke the engagement off?’
I took a long swig from my hot, strong coffee, which put a bit of heart into me.
‘There’s a bit more to it than that, and I suppose I’d better tell you because you’ll only hear about it from the Mortlakes.’
‘They’re mostly based on Grand Cayman now, but their friends keep them in touch with the theatre gossip,’ he agreed. ‘They don’t pass most of that on to me, because they know I’ve left that world behind, but they always tell me when they’ve seen you, so I knew the party they saw you at was for the cast of Marco’s new play, which was going to open at the Cockleshell Theatre.’
‘Yes, that’s all part of the story. And Honey loaning the Rosa-May Garland material to the V&A is tangled up with it, too.’
I began to describe how the V&A exhibition had inspired Marco to write a new, and more commercial, play, and how I’d fallen in love with Rosa-May’s lovely evening gown, which had been based on her Titania costume, and I’d made a replica, which was to be my wedding dress.
I paused uncertainly after that. ‘I’m sorry, this probably isn’t making a lot of sense.’
‘No, it’s fine! Don’t forget Honey told us all about the connection you’d discovered between you, so I know the background.’
‘OK then. Well, Marco’s play is a supernatural thriller calledA Midsummer Night’s Madnessand it opened yesterday, with Mirrie Malkin in the role of Titania.’
‘Demelza mentioned she’d been at the party, so I assumed she was in it.’
‘Marco told Mirrie at the party about my copy of the Regency dress, which she’d seen at the exhibition, and she was really keen on seeing it. I told her no one was doing that until my wedding day, and I didn’t think any more about it …’
‘But she did?’
‘Yes. I discovered she’d persuaded Marco to “borrow” my wedding dress for her to wear at a photo shoot.’
I told him how I’d been delivering the Titania costume to the theatre and overheard her talking to Wilfric Wolfram about what she and Marco had done.
‘Marco had just put Mirrie’s dresser into a taxi with the dress, so she could return it to the flat before I got home and realize it wasn’t there. She seemed to think it was amusing, but to me it felt like Marco had betrayed my trust.’
‘He had,’ Thom said grimly.
‘Then, as if that wasn’t enough, she revealed that she and Marco had been having an affair and he was only waiting for the play to open before telling me our engagement was over.’
He pressed my hand warmly again and said sympathetically, ‘The shock of hearing that, right after you learned they’d taken the dress, must have been devastating.’
‘It was. I was literally frozen to the spot until they suddenly spotted me in the makeup mirror. Then I ran back to Mirrie’s dressing room, where I’d just hung the Titania costume on therail, and locked the door. I … sort of needed a breathing space. And then—’
I broke off, swallowing hard and then looked away from him. ‘The next thing I knew, the Titania costume was slashed to ribbons and I was standing there with my dressmaking shears in my hand.’
I did glance at him then and saw him looking so understandingly at me that I managed to rattle off the rest of it in one quick burst: the final scene with Mirrie hysterical and Marco livid with rage.
‘It was horrible. Will – Wilfric Wolfram – was just an onlooker, but he wassokind. He got me out of there and put me in a taxi home. But, of course, Beng & Briggs fired me first thing next morning and I knew no one else in the theatrical costumier business was likely to take me on, so it felt as if I’d fallen off a cliff.’
‘Poor Garland,’ Thom said, shifting his chair round the table so he could give me a hug.
I leaned my head against the comforting warmth of his chest, feeling his heart beating steadily under my cheek. All the anger, hurt and resentment I’d felt towards him seemed to be draining right out of me … or almost all.
He rested his chin on top of my head and there was just the hint of laughter in his voice when he said: ‘You alwaysdidhave a temper – up like a rocket and down with the stick – but this time you totally lost it for a few minutes and that’s not surprising, given what happened.’
‘A few minutes was all it took to end a career and an engagement, although I’d have broken off with Marco anyway once I’d found out about them borrowing my dress. There was another thing, too: from something Mirrie said, it sounded like she and Marco might already have had an affair atsome time in the past, and were just picking up where they left off.’
