Читать книгу Christmas at the Little Wedding Shop - Jane Linfoot - Страница 10

A lot later that evening, hours after everyone else left, I’m up in the studio. Perching on a stool, in a pool of light, at the high cutting table. Sorting through swatches of lace, fingering pieces of silk. Staring out of the blackness of the windows, to see the distant lights of boats on the sea. Starting a drawing, then tossing it aside and beginning another. Even if I’m making no progress at all on the designs, at least I feel like I’m putting the time in.

I love my long workshop, three floors above the mews, with its stacks of magazines and the inspiration clippings pinned to a huge board. After the snowy neatness of the shop, the studio is a complete contrast, with its creative chaos of dressmakers’ mannequins, ironing boards and giant scissors. Up here the tulle and silk are on rolls, and the rails are full of fragments of dresses. Bodices with ragged edges, half-finished petticoats.

Each of the beautiful dresses hanging in the shop downstairs began as a sketch. Those few first lines on paper capture the whole essence. You can’t imagine the work that goes in to get from one to the other. But without those first sketches there’s no guide to create the pattern. And without the pattern, the dress can’t come to life.

I can’t blame it all on Johnny. It wasn’t as if the work was going well before he turned up. But since he did, somehow my brain can’t get beyond those words.

‘Wedding… Christmas… best man…’

I can’t stop thinking how awful it’ll be if he turns up at Alice’s wedding. And how gutted I’ll be if he doesn’t.

But right now I have to forget that Johnny is in Cornwall. I have to block out that on a windy day we might almost be breathing the same air. And I’ve got to come up with some startling new sketch designs. Because if I don’t, instead of bursting with an astonishing new collection, next Autumn the Seraphina East rails are going to be empty.