He Sent Me Overseas to Marry Her, I'm Staying Overseas to Never See Him Again novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: The Arch After Dark

Garland's men came for the sign on Friday morning.

Two of them, with a ladder and a white van, at eight o'clock sharp.

They unscrewed the brass plate over the arch, HADDON & SONS, EST. 1884, and wrapped it in a moving blanket.

The whole crew stood in the lane and watched.

Nobody tried to stop them.

The sign was Garland's.

The name on it was Garland's, until somebody proved otherwise.

When the van had gone, there were four pale screw holes in the brick and a clean rectangle where the brass had been for a hundred and forty years.

Zoe went inside.

She came back with a flattened cardboard box and a black marker.

She wrote on it in big crooked capitals and taped it to the green doors.

HADDONS. STILL HERE.

The old cutter looked at it for a long time.

"Spelling's right," he said, and went in to work.

Peggy came home that afternoon.

She was meant to be in bed.

She walked the three doors from her house to the arch on Zoe's arm instead, in her green cardigan with the needle back on the collar.

Oliver carried her armchair down the lane behind them, the one Pierce had sat in, and put it by the stove.

"That's the deal," he told her. "You sit. You don't stitch. You shout."

"I've always shouted."

"Now it's your job."

At four o'clock she called everyone to the cutting table.

She had a sheaf of papers on her knee from a solicitor on Tower Bridge Road.

"I've started a firm," she said. "This morning. It's called P. Haddon and Company. P for Peggy, in case anyone's slow."

The bench workers looked at each other.

"It makes trunks," Peggy said. "It's got a hotel order for sixty of them, at eight thousand pounds a go, and a lease on this arch. It's got no money till the first of December, so nobody gets paid till then. After that, the money's shared out fair, and I'll decide what's fair."

"Who works for it?" the girl apprentice asked.

"Anyone who got sacked on Monday and wants a job. Hands up."

Nine hands went up at once.

The old cutter put his up last, slowly, and kept it up.

"And her," Peggy said, and pointed her thimble at me.

"Peggy, I'm not..."

"The lease is yours. You're the one who went up Piccadilly in the rain. You're a partner, or I'm going back to hospital out of spite."

"You can't make someone a partner by threatening them."

"Watch me," Peggy said. "Hands up for Laura."

Every hand in the arch went up.

Zoe put up both of hers.

Oliver put his up from the other end of the table, and he didn't smile, and he didn't look away from me.

I put my own hand up.

The arch cheered loud enough to drown out a train.

By seven the cutting table was covered in foil trays of curry from the place on the corner.

Somebody had bought four crates of beer.

The apprentices plugged a speaker into the office socket and played something terrible and loud.

Zoe taught the six bench workers a line dance from a New Jersey wedding.

The old cutter refused, and then danced anyway, very stiffly, with his beer held over his head.

Peggy sat in her armchair by the stove with a blanket on her knees and conducted the whole thing with a fork.

Across the river, the last of the week's fireworks went up over the rooftops and popped.

I danced with the girl apprentice.

I danced with Zoe.

I danced, badly, with the old cutter, who said I had patient hands and terrible feet.

Then the music went slow, and Oliver was standing in front of me.

He'd washed and put on a clean flannel shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow.

His hair was still damp at the ends.

"I don't dance," he said.

"You were told you danced."

"I was told."

He held out his hand anyway.

I took it.

We didn't really dance.

We stood between two racks of trunk frames and swayed, with his hand spread on the small of my back and my cheek against his shirt.

He smelled of soap and leather.

I could feel his heart going hard under my ear.

"Everyone's watching," I said.

"Everyone's drunk."

"Peggy's not drunk."

"Peggy's been watching since September." His mouth was by my ear. "Laura. I'm not asking for anything."

"I know you're not."

"I meant it. On Monday. You can say no to me every day for a year and I'll still be at that table."

I leaned back and looked at him.

At the gray eyes, and the beard, and the scar on his knuckle that went white when he gripped something.

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