Page 50 of The Vintage Dress Shop in Primrose Hill
Lucien Lelong. Pierre Balmain. Balenciaga. Digby Morton. Marcelle Chaumont. Jeanne Lafaurie. Jacques Heim. Jacques Griffe. Lachasse. Michael Donnellan. Victor Stiebel. Ronald Paterson. Michael Sherard.
There were even a couple of dresses that he said he was going to bid on for the shop, but with a very strict budget in mind that he wasn’t allowed to go over by even a penny or ‘Freddy will have my guts for garters.’
‘Phoebe, more like,’ Sophy scoffed.
‘If Phoebe really set her heart on a dress then she’d be quite happy to bankrupt us all,’ Charles scoffed right back. ‘Besides, haven’t you figured it out yet?’
‘Figured out what?’
‘That Freddy is the real power behind the throne,’ Charles said, very wrongly because it was clear to anyone with half a brain and a pair of eyes that Phoebe was at the very top of the shop hierarchy, Coco Chanel was second and everyone else, including Freddy and Johnno, languished at the bottom.
‘I don’t think so—’ Sophy started to say, but she stopped when Charles gripped her arm.
‘Oh my goodness, I think we’ve died and gone to heaven,’ he said. Sophy followed his gaze to a royal purple dress, the one dress that had been put on a mannequin. Probably because its impeccably constructed, heart-stoppingly beautiful draping wouldn’t have been done justice if it had been left in its box or wherever it had been hiding for the last few decades.
‘Is that… Charles, is that a Madame Grès?’ Sophy asked because they’d seen a couple of similar dresses by the French designer in the V&A and that painstaking pleated draping really couldn’t be anything else.
‘Sophy, I could kiss you for that.’ Sophy really wished that Charles wouldn’t say things like that; it gave a girl ideas that she had no right to be having. ‘Itisa Madame Grès. Mid-1940s…’ Charles glanced down at the catalogue. ‘Silk jersey. The V&A have a lot of Madame Grès dresses, but I don’t think they have anything earlier than the 1950s and one of them is a replica.’
Sophy drifted closer. It seemed to be made from just one piece of material, but surely that couldn’t be possible? The tiny, infinitesimal pleats of fabric, gathered at the bust, cascaded down the form like an elegant waterfall. She couldn’t stop looking, marvelling, probably because she knew that not many people got to see this sort of dress, this sort of craftsmanship, so up close and personal and not behind glass at a museum.
‘There’s no way that you could wear a dress like that and not feel beautiful,’ she said to Charles, who seemed similarly starstruck. ‘I’m guessing this is a bankruptcy dress.’
Charles blinked and seemed to come out of his trance. ‘Afraid so. Come on, let’s move on.’
The dresses petered out and they came to an assortment of clothes that hadn’t been lovingly stored away for future generations. There were five open suitcases with clothes spilling out of them, each onewith a low starting bid of fifteen pounds.
‘Nowthiswe can work with.’ Charles sifted through the first suitcase with ruthless efficiency. ‘Most of this is from the thirties. Look! M&S beach pyjamas! And these cotton frocks. We can never get enough summer dresses. These slips aren’t silk but they are good-quality rayon…’
‘Lovely,’ Sophy said flatly with a backwards longing glance at the purple silk jersey Madame Grès dress of dreams.
Charles laughed and nudged her with his elbow. ‘You’re repulsed by them, I can tell.’
‘I’m not,’ Sophy said even though she absolutely was. No way would she ever want to wear some other woman’s (a long-dead other woman’s) underwear. Slips totally counted as underwear. ‘Except they are kind of whiffy. I can smell them from here.’
‘Nothing your stepsister can’t sort out,’ Charles said undaunted and they moved on to accessories, which was much less controversial as they agreed to bid on some evening bags, before Charles’s attention was taken by the jewellery laid out in its cases and overseen by a burly security guard.
When it came to the actual auction, it was equal parts thrilling and terrifying. Exactly like it was on telly, there was a posh man in a blazer on a podium with a gavel, describing the lots, while when possible, a uniformed flunky held them up for view. The bidders were arranged in rows on hardback chairs and Sophy sat on her hands and tried to hold her face very still so that she didn’t accidentally end up buying a dreary painting of a horse for hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Charles, on the other hand, was excellent at auctioneering. He bid and won several pieces of jewellery by raising one authoritative finger and got a couple of evening bags and three of the job lots of whiffy clothes, though he was going to have to stash them in the boot.
The real excitement wasn’t even the Madame Grès dress (which, along with several of the other dresses and a landscape, were withdrawn from the sale. Probably to be sold by one of the big auction houses like Sotheby’s or Christie’s, Charles said), but a small, insignificant Chinese vase made of celadon jade, though it wasn’t green but a greyish-white colour.
It was in the catalogue with a list price of between £800 and £1,200, though Sophy wouldn’t have paid more than a tenner for it, but ended up being the target of a ferocious bidding war between someone on a mobile phone and an impassive-looking woman sitting at the back.
The atmosphere in the room became so tense and charged that Sophy didn’t even care that she might accidentally put a bid in herself as her head whipped from one bidder to the other. Even Charles was shamelessly rubbernecking.
‘Sold to the lady at the back for one point three million pounds,’ the auctioneer finally announced with great relish, banging his gavel so hard that it was a wonder it didn’t smash into smithereens as the spectators burst into wild applause.
As they waited to pay and to collect their items, Sophy fell into conversation with a middle-aged woman in twinset and pearls, her greying hair held back by an Alice band.
‘All that fuss over that fugly vase,’ Sophy exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t have paid more than five quid and a fish supper for it.’
‘That’s what I said to hubby but luckily he didn’t listen to me and had it listed in the auction anyway,’ she said in a voice so posh it sounded like she had several plums in her mouth.
‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’ Sophy pulled a suitably contrite face. ‘I had no idea that you lived here…’
‘My dear, one doesn’t live in a house like this,’ the woman – some Hon or Lady or Marchioness, according to the details in the catalogue – sighed. ‘Oneis merely a custodian, looking after it on behalf of future generations. To be quite frank with you, I’d much rather live in a nice centrally heated flat with wall-to-wall carpets so we wouldn’t have just sold the family silver to pay for a new roof and windows.’
