Page 48 of The Vintage Dress Shop in Primrose Hill
‘I don’t believe you,’ she told him as they walked over to the large paddock where they more often sold livestock rather than antiques, bric-a-brac and all manner of assorted tat.
There was a lot of tat. Sophy even recognised the Next duvet set she’d had as a kid on one stall, which claimed to sell vintage home furnishings. It was fascinating to see what was for sale and what people would buy. Old suitcases. An ancient petrol pump. An antique commode chair. So much heavy, dark furniture; wardrobes looming round every corner.
Charles made a beeline for any stall selling jewellery. He’d pore over the contents of display cabinets and brooches and rings laid out on pieces of cloth. He even rifled through the ‘£1 per item’ baskets but, though he bought a couple of watches and a fistful of beaded necklaces, he didn’t seem that excited about any of it.
Not that Charles would be the type to show excitement even if he happened across the Crown Jewels. Sophy watched his face as a stallholder, a wonderfully imperious older woman with masses of white hair scooped up in a precarious bun, harangued him at length over a pair of earrings, which she said had belonged to a famous suffragette.
‘Solid gold, fourteen carats, and of course the stonesin the suffragette colours of purple for loyalty, white for purity and green for hope. They belonged to Mary Richardson, who was famous for slashing theRokeby Venus.’ She folded her arms with a smug smile. ‘So, I couldn’t let them go for any less than a grand.’
A thousand pounds! Sophy wanted to scream at the top of her voice about daylight robbery. It was a car boot sale. She’d never get away with that kind of price onBargain Hunt.
‘Oh, do you have the provenance to link it to Mary Richardson?’ Charles asked politely.
‘She was a friend of my grandmother. Lovely woman.’
‘It’s a pity that she was such an active member of the British Union of Fascists after she left the suffrage movement.’ Charles pulled out a jeweller’s loupe from the inner breast pocket of his suit. ‘May I?’
The woman didn’t look too happy about it; she pursed her lips and muttered to herself as Charles inspected the earrings more closely. Then he straightened up. ‘Far too rich for my tastes, I’m afraid, and I’m sure you know as well as I do that the majority of so-called suffragette jewellery is tribute pieces rather than pieces owned and worn by suffragettes.’
From the sour look on the woman’s face, she had known that but was hoping that Charles didn’t.
‘I bet you’re a good poker player,’ Sophy said as they walked away with the woman shooting daggers into Charles’s back. ‘Even I could tell that she was trying to play you, but you didn’t so much as twitch one eyelash.’
The market had filled up by now with people who’d paid extra for an early bird ticket, so it was perfectly natural for Charles to take Sophy’s arm so that they didn’t get separated by the crowd.
‘If I had a pound for every time someone had tried to sell me a piece of suffragette jewellery that had been worn by one of the Pankhursts,I’d have an offshore bank account in the Cayman Islands by now,’ Charles said a little mournfully. ‘Oh, there’s a stall that looks promising. Shall we?’
An hour later, they’d done two laps of the market and Charles had only bought a few more pieces. Sophy, on the other hand, was laden down with her purchases. She’d bought a hideous Royal Doulton figurine of Anne Boleyn for her gran, who collected them and had the five other wives of Henry VIII, but his second wife had eluded her. ‘For a fiver,’ Sophy marvelled. ‘Though I read somewhere that she had an extra finger, so it’s not anatomically correct.’
She’d also bought three lengths of vintage fabric for Cress, who had repurposed her mother’s box room as a sewing workshop. What she didn’t keep herself, she sold in her Etsy store. For Caroline, Sophy had found what Google insisted was a genuine Mulberry handbag for a not completely ridiculous price. Then, on a stall hiding behind all the garish eighties and nineties clothes that the stallholder described as genuine vintage pieces (though Phoebe insisted that anything made after 1975 was just second-hand), she’d unearthed three 1950s dresses.
By the time Charles came to find her, she’d haggled the stallholder down from thirty pounds for each dress to fifty quid for all three.
‘You’d make quite a good poker player yourself,’ he said as he stashed their spoils in the boot of the car. ‘Even I thought that you were absolutely taking the piss with that lowball offer but you stayed strong. Nerves of steel.’
‘Wait until I sell them to Phoebe for three times what I paid for them,’ Sophy said with a swagger, though she thought it unlikely that Phoebe would want anything for the shop that Sophy had sourced. Also, if it came down to a battle of wills between the two of them, Phoebe would win every time.
‘I think you should keep them.’ Charles opened the passenger door for Sophy, though she was quite capable of opening it herself. But he was like that. When they were in town, he always walked on the road side of the pavement to protect Sophy from any car that might suddenly veer out of control. He held doors open for her. Took her elbow to steer her through busy crowds.
Not because he thought she was a little woman who couldn’t fend for herself but because he was unfailingly polite, with manners and a innate courtesy, which sadly was as old-fashioned as his pocket squares and French cuffs.
‘I couldn’t wear them myself,’ Sophy said once Charles was sitting next to her. ‘Maybe the blue one with the white polka dots but the other two. I mean, when would I ever wear a black velvet dress?’
‘Whenever you wanted to,’ Charles said, but it was different for him. He had a way of carrying himself, of being comfortable in his own skin, that meant he could wear his beautiful peacock clothes. Whereas although Sophy knew that, objectively, she looked all right (though she could never really love her own hair when men, always men, felt the need to shout ‘Ginger pubes’ at her from the windows of their cars and vans), she only felt truly comfortable in a sack dress or a jumpsuit. Maybe it was because her hair drew so much focus?
‘We’ll see. But also, Lollipop moults white fluff everywhere, so black velvet, not really practical.’
Charles took the bait. ‘Who’s Lollipop?’
‘Lollipop is my mother’s Maine Coon cat and, although she denies it, her favourite child,’ Sophy said, and as they drove back to Bath she kept Charles entertained with tales of Lollipop tarting around the neighbourhood and terrorising the local cat population.
It was only eleven, but felt much later. Once they got inside, Sophy put the kettle on as Charles arranged his spoils on the kitchen table. There were no tiaras but his best buy was a Victorian mourning necklace of jet beads that he’d bought from a man who’d thought they were glass.
After coffee and brownies that they’d bought from a stallholder who had a sideline in baked goods, it was time for the next item on Charles’s mysterious itinerary.
‘Do you need lunch or could you hold out for an early dinner?’ he asked Sophy as she loaded their mugs into the dishwasher. ‘I was going to make reservations at a little place I know halfway between here and Bristol?’
‘I could last, but it depends what you’ve got planned for the afternoon. Like, are we going paintballing?’
