Page 33 of The Vintage Dress Shop in Primrose Hill
Sophy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Have you been talking to my mum?’
Egan immediately looked shifty. ‘Well, I did phone to find out if you were going to be home and we got talking. She did say that maybe we were being hasty throwing away eight years like theydidn’t even mean anything. That it couldn’t do any harm to, you know, chat things out.’
‘Right, I see.’ Sophy removed Egan’s hand so she could stand up. ‘I’ll just be a minute.’
‘I’d love a coffee if you’re going anywhere near a cafetière…’
Sophy wasn’t. When she opened the living room door she saw Caroline beetling back to the kitchen, almost as if she’d been earwigging.
‘Mum!’
‘What?’ Caroline asked, making a great show of turning round from her shelf of cookery books, which she’d been pretending to peruse. ‘Everything all right in there?’
This wasn’t easy either. ‘Do you want me to move out?’ Sophy asked, the threat of tears making her voice throb a little. ‘Is that why Egan’s here? Is that why I’m still on the sofa even though you said that you didn’t even use the sunbed and you’d put it on Gumtree although that was weeks ago.’
‘Of course not, we love having you here,’ Caroline insisted, a flush edging up from her neck to her hairline, in the exact same way that Sophy got when she was feeling flustered.
‘You and Mike are used to having your own space, I know that, but I won’t be here for long. I’ll be going to Australia soon. Soonish, anyway.’
‘You don’thaveto go to Australia.’ Caroline caught Sophy’s hand so she could tug her closer and envelop her in the sort of hug that would always make Sophy feel safe. ‘We all do strange things when relationships end. When me and Johnno split up, I had a fringe cut in and it took two years to grow it out, so I just thought there was no harm in you talking to Egan, seeing if you couldn’t work things out.’
‘I don’t want to work things out,’ Sophy mumbled. ‘Is that OK?’
‘Of course it’s OK.’
‘And I really am going to Australia. I want to go to Australia. I’mexcitedabout going to Australia.’
‘Well, don’t blame me if you get bitten by a tarantula.’
Sophy decided that she might as well go for broke. ‘I’m grateful to be here but that sofa is giving me backache and some nights I wake up with Lollipop sitting on my head.’
‘Fine!’ Caroline pushed her daughter away so she could snatch up her phone, which was on the worktop in front of her. ‘I’m putting that bloody sunbed on Facebook Marketplace right now!’
Chapter Twelve
The sunbed was still in situ when Sophy left for work on Friday morning, though Caroline swore that someone was coming to pick it up that lunchtime.
‘Me and my lower spine thank you,’ Sophy said, although she wasn’t convinced that the sunbed’s days were numbered. But she was preoccupied by the thick cream envelope that had arrived in the morning post.
Radha Bhati and Patrick Hall
request the pleasure of the company of
Ms Sophy Stevens
On the occasion of their wedding…
All morning Sophy couldn’t help but think of Radha. How different her friend’s life would have been if she’d decided to stay behind in England when Sophy had moved in with Egan rather than go travelling.
Radha didn’t have to torment herself over her ‘what if’ moments because she’d chosen adventure rather than stagnation.
Thankfully the shop was busy that afternoon, so Sophy couldn’t spend much time wallowing in ‘what if’. Especially as the busyness was something that Phoebe got quite cross about when she came down from the atelier to find the shop full of browsers.
‘Who are these people?’ she demanded when she tracked Sophy down to the basement storeroom. ‘Don’t they have jobs? I wish they’d stop touching my dresses with their sticky hands.’
Sophy was trying to find a dress that had been put up on the website but wasn’t on the rails or listed in the shop inventory on the computer. ‘Maybe you should have a little table by the front door with bottles of hand sanitiser on it for when people come in,’ she suggested facetiously, as Beatrice, who was helping her look for the stray dress, buried her face in a leopard faux fur coat to hide her giggles.
Phoebe gave Sophy a long hard look that would have had Paddington Bear suing for copyright. ‘You know what? That’s not actually a bad idea,’ she said slowly. ‘I bet you can get quite fancy hand sanitiser. I wonder if Diptyque do a range.’
