Page 57 of The Vintage Dress Shop in Primrose Hill
Cress was another thing that Sophy was going to miss desperately.
She wasn’t going to miss The Vintage Dress Shop, not one little bit. Despite Charles’s expert tutelage, she still missed the fast world of high street fashion. Of new lines dropping every day and a steady stream of customers so the hours just flew by.
The fashion and the pace were much slower in Primrose Hill. Plus, Phoebe. Plus, brides, mothers of brides and bridal parties, each lot worse than the last. But now that it was April, business had really picked up and, to Sophy’s delight, after four on weekdays and all day on Saturday, the shop was full of teenagers shopping for prom dresses and students looking for the perfect Leavers’ Ball frocks.
They lounged about on the sofas, phones glued to their hands, waiting for one of the changing rooms to become available. Or, much to Phoebe’s annoyance, sometimes they’d cram into one cubicle all together or wriggle into dresses over their cut-off jeans and crop tops on the shop floor.
They were loud and excitable and some of them definitely hadn’t washed their hands before handling the merchandise, but Sophy loved their energyand enthusiasm. Now that she knew the stock as well as she knew the contents of her own wardrobe, she was happy to keep suggesting other dresses to try on when the first or second choice wouldn’t do.
Maybe that was where vintage fashion had the advantage over the high street. It would be very rare or very unlucky to buy a prom look from The Vintage Dress Shop and then come face to face with someone wearing an identical outfit. Besides, buying that special-occasion dress should be a fun experience and if they wanted to take selfies in the shop then post them on Instagram, Sophy wasn’t going to stop them. She just asked them to tag the shop in the post too. She didn’t even mind when four girls did a synchronised dance in their new prom dresses so they could post it on TikTok later.
It was a point of honour with Sophy (even though she wasn’t on commission – but she did wonder if that was something to discuss with Freddy) that she wasn’t going to let any girl, or the devastatingly handsome boy from one of the local schools who was determined to do a Harry Styles on the cover ofVogueand turn up for prom in a ballgown, leave the shop with anything less than their soul dress.
Even if it took an extra hour, Sophy loved seeing customers walk out a little taller, their shoulders a little straighter, and a lot, lot happier than when they walked in.
On Friday afternoon, with the promise of the pub beckoning, Sophy was still smiling valiantly as Persephone, a limpid-eyed seventeen-year-old, dithered over two dresses; a classic seafoam 1950s prom dress with a poufy skirt consisting of layer upon layer of tulle and an almost identical dress but in a more sophisticated black.
‘I just don’t know,’ she sighed for the tenth time while her three friends, who were collapsed on the sofas, groaned.
‘Come on, Seph. Losing the will to live here!’
‘In your heart of hearts, do you feel like you’re more seafoam or more black?’ Sophy asked.
Persephone shrugged. ‘It’s hard to say.’
She really was one of the drippiest girls that Sophy had ever encountered, so the seafoam would have been the perfect choice. But she could hardly tell Persephone that. She changed tack.
‘OK, would you say that you’re more the Little Mermaid or more, um, Wednesday Addams?’
Another shrug. ‘It depends. Maybe I should try them on again?’ Persephone suggested, while behind her Beatrice, who was waiting to cash up, put her hands round her neck and pretended that she was dying.
Sophy looked at Persephone, who was wilting on the spot. Then she looked at Persephone’s schoolbag, which was actually new season Louis Vuitton, which went perfectly with her Gucci trainers, a steal at four hundred and sixty quid, and, she’d need Charles to verify but she was pretty sure those were real diamonds on the watch that circled Persephone’s delicate wrist.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t make a decision,’ Sophy said. ‘You obviously love both dresses so, you know, why not buy both of them?’
Persephone blinked slowly. Over the sound of her friends moaning at her to get a move on and Chloe ramming discarded dresses back on the rails in a very noisy, very passive-aggressive manner, Sophy was convinced she could hear the cogs of the girl’s brain slowly turning.
‘Why not both?’ she murmured. Sophy held up the dresses and shook them tantalisingly. ‘OK, yeah, I’ll get both. Yeah! Do you take Amex?’
‘Absolutely!’ Sophy gestured at Beatrice, who was now smiling encouragingly. ‘My lovely colleague here will pack those dresses up for you. You’re going to look amazing.’There was a collective hiss from the sofas. Sophy turned to Persephone’s long-suffering friends. ‘You’reallgoing to look amazing. Don’t forget to tag us when you post your prom pics online.’
She jumped when an arm suddenly slung itself round her shoulders. ‘Bloody hell, kiddo!’ said an unmistakeable Australian-accented voice. ‘You could sell ice to an Eskimo. What a chip off the old block.’
‘You’re not meant to say Eskimo, you’re meant to say Inuit now,’ Sophy said, but she couldn’t help but feel pleased that Johnno had been there to see her mad selling skills. She even allowed herself to rest her head on his shoulder for one brief moment, until she remembered that she and Johnno didn’t do moments like that. ‘But I think I get half my sales skills from Mum. She’s an absolute menace on Facebook Marketplace.’
Johnno looked at Sophy thoughtfully. ‘You know, I’ve got a whole load of stock that Phoebe won’t have in here because she says it won’t sell, but I reckon you could shift it if—’
‘Over my dead body, Johnno,’ snapped Phoebe as she came down the stairs with her last bridal party of the day, Coco Chanel tucked under one arm. ‘That job lot ofcrushed velvetfrom the seventies that reeked of patchouli oil. What were you thinking?’
He held up his hands in defeat. ‘What I’m thinking is pub. You’re all coming to the pub, right?’
Minus Persephone and friends and the bridal party, they were all coming to the pub, including Cress, which was a rare occurrence; usually she saw Colin on Friday nights, but this week Colin had actually stirred himself out of his usual, unyielding routine to attend a pop quiz in Streatham. ‘All the questions are on B-sides,’ Cress had told her.
‘What’s a B-side?’ Sophy asked, though if it was something that Colin was into, then it was bound to be quite boring.
‘So, like, vinyl singles have an A-side, which is the song they’re releasing to get into the charts, and then it has a B-side, which is a song that isn’t going to make it into the charts and didn’t make it onto an album either.’ Cress must have realised that she wasn’t really selling the quiz night – or Colin. He was an obsessive music nerd who only listened to music on vinyl, and most of the music he listened to was recorded during the previous millennium. Sophy was sure that one of the reasons why he and Cress still weren’t cohabiting was because Colin couldn’t bear (or couldn’t afford to) move his massive, massive record collection. ‘Anyway,’ Cress soldiered on, ‘there are quite a lot of good B-sides. Like, did you know that Queen’s “We Will Rock You” was originally a B-side?’
‘No, I did not know that.’ Sophy had never been so pleased to step inside a pub. If she’d needed a drink before, after all this chat of B-sides she was now gasping for a gin and tonic. Light on the tonic, heavy on the gin.
