Page 35 of The Vintage Dress Shop in Primrose Hill
Phoebe and Cress, who was granted permission to rifle by Phoebe with the same graciousness as if she were being handed the freedom of the city, soon had a pile of dresses for the shop and a much larger pile of dresses and assorted other garments that they wanted nothing to do with.
‘What do you want me to do with them then?’ Johnno protested. ‘Can’t you do a bargain bin and sell them for a fiver a pop?’
‘A bargain bin?’ Phoebe echoed like Lady Bracknell having an attack of the vapours over a handbag. ‘We don’t do bargain bins. This is a quality establishment and I don’t care if that purple velvet jacket is Biba, it’s just not the right aesthetic.’
Johnno dropped to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer. ‘But, Pheebs…’
The lady in question tossed her head like a horse refusing to jump. ‘But, Pheebs, nothing.’
With much grumbling, Johnno and Freddy took Phoebe’s rejected items back to the van and promised to meet them in the pub. As Sophy went back to her cashing up, one of her few responsibilities as all the other women hated doing it, she couldn’t help but marvel at the way Phoebe had handled Johnno.
Apart from a little passive-aggressive moaning via text message when Johnno proved himself to be completely unreliable, Sophy never dared to confront him head on about anything. Their relationship was so infrequent, so casual, that she never wanted to do anything that might fracture it completely.
Later, when they were in The Hat and Fan and Sophy found herself sitting next to Johnno, whose hair still bore the faint traces of the vibrant orange he’d sported a few weeks before, she also marvelled at the fact that she’d seen more of her dad in the last few weeks than she had in the last few years.
‘And how is my beautiful daughter?’ he asked, as if reading her mind. Sophy noticed now that when they were together he treated her quite carefully, not with the same backchat that he gave Phoebe.
‘Which beautiful daughter is that?’ Sophy asked and pretended to look around.
‘Uh-uh, no doing yourself down.’ Johnno wagged a finger at her. ‘Everything all right? You settled in now?’
‘I think so.’ Selling vintage fashion might not be the one true calling that Sophy was looking for but she felt as if she had some purpose at the shop now, whether it was cashing up or treating the customers as valued guests rather than as annoying distractions who only came in to put their grubby hands on the clothes. ‘Charles is giving me a crash course in fashion.’
Even saying his name out loud felt very daring, but Johnno didn’t seem to realise that his beautiful daughter had a stupid, ridiculous crush on the man who supplied his costume jewellery.
‘You’re in good hands with Charlie,’ he said.
‘He lets you call him Charlie?’ Charlie didn’t really go with the bespoke suits in fantastic colours and those elegant, patrician features.
‘Not to his face.’ Johnno grinned. ‘Said he’d never darken my doorstep again if I did. So it will have to be our little secret.’
‘How did you two meet anyway?’ Sophy was curious to know how Johnno and Charles, who were as different as chalk and cheese, oil and water, polka dots and stripes, had ever met, let alone forged a close working relationship.
‘You probably don’t remember my old shop. I had this place on Holloway Road…’
‘Oh my God! Are you kidding? Johnno’s Junk, of course I remember it!’ Sophy giggled over the rim of her glass. ‘When you offered me a job, I thought that was where I was going to be working.’
‘No!’ Johnno rolled his eyes.
‘Yes! I even asked Freddy if we were going to walk up to Camden and catch the 29 to get there.’
‘But, Soph, I closed down Johnno’s Junk… oooh, well over twenty years ago now.’ Johnno wasn’t grinning any more and looked quite pensive as he took a sip of his lager.
‘You never mentioned it. I just assumed it was because the last time I went there – first and last time – I had a screaming fit about this mangy stuffed fox in a glass case. I’ve had nightmares about it ever since,’ Sophy said with a theatrical shudder, but even that didn’t make Johnno find his grin again.
‘But the shop, the new shop, it’s been a huge part of my life for a couple of decades…’ Johnno shook his head but didn’t have to finish the rest of the sentence;didn’t have to say that Sophy hadn’t been a huge part of his life during that time.
But Sophy didn’t want to start picking at old wounds and she was pretty sure, from the discomfited look on his face, that Johnno didn’t want to either. It was Friday afternoon, Sophy was nursing a large gin and tonic, and Charles might put in an appearance at any moment. She felt pretty content.
‘You still haven’t told me how you went from selling mangy fox taxidermy to a swank vintage dress shop in the nice part of town,’ she reminded him with a little nudge. Johnno shot her a small, hesitant smile, which was very unlike him.
However, his long, convoluted story about how The Vintage Dress Shop came into being was pure Johnno. Apparently, once a month a rich, elderly woman dripping in jewellery and wearing a fur coat, no matter what the weather, would swoop into Johnno’s Junk and buy pretty much everything on his vintage dress rail.
‘I had a Saturday girl who’d do the rounds of the chazzas for me and buy up old dresses – that was when you could still find decent vintage in the chazzas – then I’d sell them for a fiver.’ He shrugged expansively and raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘I didn’t know how much they were worth. Talk about where there’s muck, there’s brass.
‘Turns out this old dear, she had a place in bloody Mayfair, was putting a two hundred per cent mark-up on some of these frocks and I thought to myself, mate, you need to get in on the action and the rest is history.’
Johnno had then hired fashion students to go round the charity shops, car boot sales and church fetes because they had a better eye, got rid of the more junky bits of his inventory and, within a couple of years, gave up the lease in N7 to move to the more rarefied climes of NW1. ‘It was during Britpop. You couldn’t move round Primrose Hill without falling over a member of Oasis orBlur and they all had girlfriends and wives who’d spend a few hundred quid on a boho seventies dress without blinking an eye.’
