‘No food or drink anywhere near the dresses,’ Phoebe clarified sharply. ‘If youmusteat or drink, then you’ll have to do it in the back.’
Sophy scurried past Phoebe to get to the office at the back of the shop. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been made to feel no bigger or better than a …a …a dung beetle. It was probably the time when she’d been hauled in front of her headmistress, agedtwelve, after she’d been caught red-handed sticking a wad of discarded chewing gum under her desk in a biology lesson.
She wasn’t twelve now, she was a grown woman; but Phoebe had a way of looking at Sophy like she wasn’t fit to share the same air.
Beatrice was in the back office. She was a slightly less intimidating version of Chloe and Anita. She had the same uniform of a little black dress and heels, but at least she knew how to smile and whisper, ‘Don’t worry about Phoebe. She’s just very protective of the dresses. We have a little table and chairs outside; do you want to have your coffee there?’
Through a set of French doors there was a tiny little terrace with a wrought-iron table and chairs that overlooked the Regent’s Canal with its brightly painted moored barges. It must be lovely to sit out there when it was sunny. It was still lovely, though somewhat cold, to sit out there on a grey March morning and wolf down her croissant and gulp the coffee, even if they tasted like ashes and dishwater now.
As days went, it wasn’t as bad as her first day had been. There was no more sorting through the clothes of the recently deceased. Sophy spent most of the day in the back office with Beatrice, who explained their inventory system, which felt like slightly familiar territory.
When Beatrice took an early lunch Sophy did try to venture out onto the shop floor, just so she could start familiarising herself with the stock. Everything was arranged by colour; but where did sizing come into it? What were the price points? How was she meant to know which decade a dress was from?
As if she’d surreptitiously put a tracking device on her, as soon as Sophy approached the rails of blue dresses, Anita watching warily from the wings, Phoebe was suddenly beetling down the spiral staircase. Sophy didn’t know how anyone could negotiate a spiralstaircase so quickly and in such high heels.
‘It all right,’ Sophy assured her. ‘I washed my hands. Twice!’
‘Have you really?’ Phoebe’s voice fairly dripped with scepticism and, though she was a proper grown-up, Sophy found herself holding out her hands for the other woman’s inspection. Then she realised what she was doing and snatched them back.
‘I appreciate that whole world of vintage fashion might be new to me but I do have many years of retail experience,’ Sophy said hotly. It was her turn to stand there with her hands on her hips, to the consternation of two women who had suddenly entered the shop. Sophy turned to them with a smile that was very slightly manic. ‘Hello! Welcome to The Vintage Dress Shop. Do have a look around, and give me a yell if you need any assistance.’
Sophy wasn’t sure but she thought she heard Phoebe growl with irritation at her jaunty greeting; though the growl could also have come from Coco Chanel, who’d come lumbering down the stairs to see what all the fuss was about. Even the shop dog had some serious attitude.
‘As you said, you have absolutelynoexperience of vintage fashion.’ Phoebe sucked in an angry breath. ‘I even heard you say to Beatrice that you thought people might havediedin our dresses…’
The two women who’d entered swiftly exited at that.
‘It was a joke,’ Sophy said, but she was determined not to get sidetracked from what she wanted to say. Or rather to give Phoebe The Terrible some home truths. ‘Anyway, I worked at Belle Girl for the last ten years and for the last five I was aseniorsales associate at the Oxford Street store.’
‘Senior just means that you’d been there longer than anyone else,’ Phoebe pointed out, like that was nothing to be impressed about. It was also perilously close to the truth.
‘It was a very big store. It was the flagship store!’
‘Hasn’t Belle Girl just gone into administration?’ Phoebe arched one already perfectly arched eyebrow, as if she suspected that Sophy was personally responsible for the entire chain of two hundred shops going bust.
‘It’s a very challenging retail landscape and we were taken over by a venture capitalist who was more interested in stripping back our costs than investing in—’
‘And it was a fast fashion chain. T-shirts for a fiver, dresses for ten pounds made by workers in the developing world who toiled away in appalling conditions and barely earned enough money to feed their families. Plus, I’m sure a large percentage of your stock probably ended up as landfill,’ Phoebe continued, and she had a good point. Several very good points that Sophy herself had agonised over, especially after seeing a documentary on BBC2 shortly after they’d had to dump an entire range because the design department had plagiarised the work of an up-and-coming designer who’d put them on blast on social media.
‘We were in discussions about doing a range of sustainable clothing,’ she said weakly because none of the bad things about high street fashion were in Sophy’s control. So it wasn’t really her fault that she’d been part of the problem rather than part of the situation, whereas…
‘Vintage fashion is the ultimate sustainable clothing,’ Anita piped up from behind the desk, where she’d been all but cowering until now. ‘A lot of our stock is over seventy, eighty years old and still wearable. It blows my mind sometimes. Although, you have to be careful when you wear some vintage pieces because modern antiperspirants can rot the armholes like nobody’s business.’
‘We are getting way off-track here,’ Sophy gritted. ‘I’m here to work, not to tread on anyone’s toes, so let me work.Give me a crash course in vintage fashion. At least let me have a look at the stock.’
She moved towards the stairs, because she loved a pretty dress as much as the next person and she was dying to have a good rummage through all the wedding dresses and posh, posh frocks upstairs. Alas, she didn’t even make it up the first step, because suddenly both Phoebe and Coco Chanel were physically blocking her from heading up to the atelier.
‘I’m sorry,’ Phoebe said in a tone that suggested that she wasn’t even a little bit sorry, ‘but there are hundreds of thousands of pounds of stock in the atelier and we don’t have any appointments booked, so there’s no need for you to be up there. If you want to be helpful, you can make some coffee – as long as you don’t bring it out on the shop floor.’
Sophy retired to the tiny kitchen and tried to ignore the pinprick tingle of her eyes. She wasn’t going to let Phoebe reduce her to tears. God, two months ago she wouldn’t even have let the Belle Girl area manager, who was a terrific bully, talk to her like that. But it had been an awful two months and she was off her game, out of her depth and now making coffee like she was the Saturday girl.
For the rest of the day, Sophy kept out of Phoebe’s way. Anita let her pack away some costume jewellery, but even that simple task was explained to her like she was incapable of independent thought.
‘So, one more time, once you’ve wrapped the piece in tissue paper, then you put it in a seal-top bag, then write a description of it on a sticker, put the sticker on the bag and then if it’s a brooch you put it in the drawer marked brooches and if it’s—’
‘If it’s a bracelet, then I put it in the drawer marked bracelets. Yes, thanks Anita, if I’m not sure about anything, I’ll ask you,’ Sophy said. It was just as well that she had all those years of retail experience because it meant that she was an expert at hiding her frustration,anger and sheer, teeth-grinding irritation behind a perky smile.
Actually, it was quite nice to sit at the ocean-liner desk and get to handle some merchandise. Especially such pretty, sparkly merchandise. Sophy even tried on some of the big, gaudy cocktail rings, after first checking that no one was about to rush over and tell her off.
