Page 61 of The Vintage Dress Shop in Primrose Hill
‘That’s sixteen weeks. Sixteen weeks is no time at all.’ For someone who hardly drank, Cress took a huge gulp of wine. ‘I still don’t think you’ll really go through with it. How could you emigrate and just leave me here on my own?’
‘But you’re not on your own. You have Colin,’ Sophy reminded her gently, though Cress’s relationship with Colin wasn’t that much different to being single. ‘And you have a vocation; a job that you love that gives you interests and friends outside of work too, like your stitch ’n’ bitch group. You’ll manage just fine without me.’
‘I don’t want to be just fine.’ Cress reached across the table to clutch Sophy’s hand like she wasn’t ever going to let go. ‘I want a life that has you in it. Not thousands upon thousands of miles away in a different continent and on a different time zone.’
‘Look, I have to do this and l could well be back in a couple of years…’
Cress shook her head. ‘But what if you aren’t? Radha was only going to Australia for six months, then she met some rippling surfer dude and now she’s never coming back.’
‘You could come out too. For Radha’s wedding and then see what happens after that,’ Sophy said in what she hoped was a tempting fashion. ‘They do have a thriving fashion industry in Australia, you know. You’d be snapped up immediately.’
‘I couldn’t leave my mum and I know I haven’t worked at the shop very long, but I love my job. I’m not like you, I don’t want to have adventures. The closest I come to adventure is cutting out cloth without measuring twice.’
‘And Colin.’ Sophy rolled her eyes.
‘What about Colin?’
This time Sophy rolled her eyes so hard, she was sure that she’d detached one of her retinas. ‘You don’t want to leave Colin.’
Cress glared at her. ‘Obviously that goes without saying.’
‘Oh, that must be why you didn’t say it.’ Sophy smiled round the rim of her glass and had to admit that she deserved the kick that Cress gave her under the table.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sophy was home much quicker and much more sober than she’d intended.
Two glasses of wine was too much for Cress, used as she was to only one weak, weekly mojito in a can. By ten o’clock, she was absolutely paralytic; quite incapable of coherent speech or walking in even a vaguely straight line. It wasn’t a case of putting her in a cab, there was no way Sophy would let Cress out of her sight when she was in a state like that. So she got in the cab with Cress and, though Charles waited with them, there was no opportunity for anything other than a chaste peck on the cheek and promises to see each other soon.
‘You can kiss if you like. I won’t look,’ Cress had slurred but they’d both ignored her.
It was harder to ignore Cress once it was just the two of them in the back of an Uber, Cress crying and begging Sophy not to ‘emigrate to the back of beyond’, and, though Sophy knew it was just the alcohol and that Cress would be mortified in the morning, it was like a thousand tiny paper cuts right to the heart.
That was nothing compared to the cost of a car to Finchley, then taking that same car to Hendon just as Friday-night price surging kicked in. Maybe that was Cress’s masterplan: to make sure that Sophy declared bankruptcy and could never accumulate the funds she needed.
Still, it meant that Sophy was home at a very respectable ten forty-five. Caroline, and more importantly Mike, were tucked up in bed and so Sophy couldtake a mug of camomile tea up to the office and fire up the computer. (If Mike knew that she had liquid, hot liquid, anywhere near his precious computer, there would be hell to pay.)
He also thought that Sophy didn’t know the passcode to turn the computer on, but he was wrong. It was Caroline’s date of birth, which was both touching and also very predictable.
She sent a quick WhatsApp to check all was well on the other side and, when she got an answer back in the affirmative, she clicked on the camera icon.
Then, in a miracle of modern technology that Sophy would never take for granted, her screen was filled up with her grandfather Bob’s beaming face, as he sat on the veranda of the farmhouse. Though it wasn’t like any rustic farmhouse that Sophy had seen in her rare forays into the countryside; ramshackle houses that had been there for centuries. This was a ranch-style one-level house with its wrap-around veranda, a swimming pool and a back garden that eventually became farmland. Bob and Jean even had kangaroos venture into their garden; one of them was a local Lothario who’d bring his new family to see them every year.
‘G’day kiddo!’
Sophy still couldn’t believe that people in Australia really said, ‘G’day,’ just like onNeighbours.
‘More like goodnight,’ she said, returning Bob’s cheery wave. ‘It’s eleven o’clock here.’
‘Seven thirty in the morning round these parts,’ Bob said. It always made Sophy double-take, just how much he looked like Johnno – minus the peacock-coloured hair. Bob was ‘bald as a coot’, as he described it, his face weatherbeaten and wrinkled, but it was Johnno’s brilliant blue eyes, crinkling at the corners, the same irrepressible, slightly crooked grin. ‘Already been up for a couple of hours.’
Sophy tried hard not to pull a horrified face. ‘That sounds very early.’
‘Best part of the day,’ Bob said. ‘And Saturday’s changeover day so there’s always a lot to do.’
As well as the sheep, there were several guesthouses on the property.
‘We were late to finish the shearing this year, remember we’re an autumn shear, but we managed just over seven hundred bales of the best merino wool so can’t complain,’ Bob continued as Sophy nodded, slightly confused and slightly relieved that she wouldn’t have to learn how to shear a sheep as soon as she got there.
