Page 34 of The Vintage Dress Shop in Primrose Hill
Then she was gone and by the time Sophy had tracked down the dress, which had been packed away with the heavier winter dresses, and sold it to a grateful customer, it was almost five o’clock. No matter how busy the shop was, the last hour on a Friday afternoon always crawled by.
‘Time for the pub soon,’ Anita said, as she waited outside one of the changing cubicles for a woman who seemed hell-bent on trying on every dress in the shop. ‘Unless this one kills me first,’ she mouthed.
The browsers were thinning out by half past five when the door swung open hard enough to crash back on its hinges, which made everyone jump, and there was Johnno, almost entirely obscured by the mountain of clothes he was clutching to him.
‘Ladies! Help a fella out, will you?’
Sophy rushed to relieve Johnno of some of his burden. The clothes had been packed in slippery plastic garment bags so it was quite hard to get purchase on them.
‘I’ll take them downstairs,’ she said.
‘Just dump them on the sofas,’ Johnno insisted, though one of Phoebe’s favourite diktats was about how the sofas in the shop weren’t a dumping ground for anything other than customers’ bottoms. (‘And only if they’re actually planning on buying something.’)
‘I’ve got a vanload of these outside.’
Almost as if she could sense that skulduggery was afoot, Phoebe appeared at the top of the spiral stairs to see off a prospective bride who’d been trying on prospective wedding dresses for the last three hours. No wonder Phoebe looked very tight of lip. ‘Well, why don’t you have a think about the cream silk,’ she was saying. ‘And let me know either way tomorrow.’
‘It was a mushroom silk,’ the woman said. She had a very pugnacious look to her face, like she enjoyed having a good bit of argy-bargy just for the sake of it.
‘Definitely cream,’ Phoebe said. Her jaw was clenched so hard that it looked painful, until she glanced down and her whole face transformed into a huge, happy grin that Sophy would never get used to. ‘Dresses! New dresses!’ She managed to clasp her hands together in ecstasy as she came careering down the stairs.
‘Johnno’s gone out to get some more,’ Sophy explained. ‘Apparently, he’s got a whole van full of them.’
‘Be still, my heart!’ Phoebe plonked her bottom down on one of the sofas, though she wasn’t a customer, and began to rifle through them. ‘Oh my God! These are Biba with the labels still on them!’
‘Original Biba or Biba revival?’ Anita asked as she saw off the woman who’d tried on every dress in the shop and was now leaving with just a silk scarf that had been reduced to a tenner.
‘Original Biba,’ Phoebe said in a croaky voice like she was about to start hyperventilating.
‘Beatrice! Original Biba!’ Anita yelled in a good impersonation of a foghorn, so that Beatrice came beetling out of the back office.
‘Sixties Biba or Seventies Biba?’ she asked. To Sophy it was like they were talking in tongues. Then Cress stuck her face over the curved banister of the spiral staircase.
‘Did someone say original Biba?’ she called out.
Phoebe lifted her radiant face. ‘Cress, you have to come down and see this stock. I think I can see some black silk with beading and if it is what I think it is, I’m going to wet myself.’
It was what Phoebe thought it was. ‘A 1960s black silk shantung sequinned bell-shape evening gown,’ she said rapturously once she’d pulled it from the pile. ‘I’ve been looking for this dress for years.’
Sophy didn’t know why because it was just a very creased sleeveless silk dress with a sparkly bodice. It was verging on the sack-like.
‘This is seventies Biba, but a Barbara Hulanicki design and quite Ossie Clark, no?’ Cress asked as she held a lairy, flowery cotton maxidress to her, even though she never wore anything but jeans and a plain top outside of work. In work, her handmade smocks were as daring as she got.
Phoebe had more conniptions when she came to a sheer black lace dress, but mostly she worked steadily to divide the clothes into two piles. The door crashed back on its hinges again as Johnno, with Freddy bringing up the rear, staggered in with more clothes.
‘It’s like Christmas,’ Beatrice exclaimed, rushing forward to grab some of the garment bags.
‘Oh, Sophy, there you are!’ Johnno said in wonder like he’d forgotten once again that she was working in his shop just as he’d asked her to. ‘And who’s this vision of loveliness? Is this the famous Cress?’
‘Not famous,’ Cress muttered, eyes not on Johnno but on a tapestry coat with three-quarter-length sleeves. ‘And you’re Sophy’s dad.’
‘One and the same,’ Johnno agreed and Sophy cringed slightly from her position behind the counter where she was attempting to cash up. They were both her family – her blood family and her chosen family – but it felt horribly awkward.
Cress ducked her head the way she always did when she was embarrassed, though Johnno winked at Sophy as if to say that everything was all right, because he was truly terrible at reading a room.
Meanwhile, Freddy flung his dresses onto the sofa, which earned him a glare from Phoebe. ‘Don’t manhandle the stock, please,’ she said tartly, which made Freddy glare back and mutter something under his breath.
Then Phoebe went back to sorting through Johnno’s spoils, which he said he’d got from ‘a man who knows a man who does house clearances’, but he said it with a shifty look, which made Sophy suspect that their provenance might not be strictly kosher.
