Page 19 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop
It was the first of hundreds of lessons that Mildred would teach her, but Phoebe just scowled once she was clutching her cup and saucer and trying not to spill the tea, which she didn’t even like anyway.
‘I understand that things have been difficult for you so far, but I’m not one to make many allowances,’ Mildred said. ‘I expect you to be polite at all times. Here, please and thank you are mandatory, not optional. As are attendance at school, a high standard of personal hygiene – your nails are filthy – and you’ll have responsibility for doing chores every day.’
‘I’m not here to be a fucking skivvy,’ Phoebe snarled because she’d had placements like this before. Next to her on the sofa, Sangeet groaned but Mildred, who was sitting in an armchair, simply crossed her legs and eyed Phoebe over steepled fingers.
‘Sit up straight,’ she’d said. ‘If you keep slouching like that you’ll have a dowager’s hump before you’re twenty.’
Phoebe didn’t know what a dowager’s hump was but she also knew that she didn’t want one. She found herself straightening her spine, then wished she hadn’t when Mildred had allowed herself a small, triumphant smile.
‘Yes, I think we might rub along together quite well,’ she’d said and, strangely, they had.
Even during those first few weeks when Phoebe had pushed every button, strained against every boundary, because Mildred was going to kick her out sooner or later. Might as well be sooner. No point in delaying the inevitable.
But Mildred didn’t kick her out. She never even raised her voice. Not even the time she’d had to pick Phoebe up from the local police station after she’d been caught shoplifting.
‘Though why you’d want to steal that simply horrid piece of tat that you call a skirt is beyond me,’ she said as she marched up Kilburn High Road, her old-fashioned handbag looped over one arm. ‘Stealing from Selfridges or Harrods is one thing but from that dreadful little shop, Primark, well, really!’
‘So, Icansteal from Selfridges then?’ Phoebe had scoffed.
‘You can but you’ll probably get caught again.’ Mildred had slanted a look at Phoebe. It might have been a trick of the light but it seemed as if there was a mischievous glint in her eyes. ‘You don’t seem to be very good at it. Besides, that skirt. My dear, you shouldn’t wear pastel colours when you’re very clearly a true winter.’
Now, Phoebe smiled as she thought about that moment when something had shifted in her relationship with Mildred. When she went from being a stuck-up old bat to well, maybe more thanjusta stuck-up old bat.
Her trip down memory lane was interrupted by her phone ringing. She glanced down to see Freddy’s name flash up on the screen and her heart lifted because Freddy always had that effect on her and also she was so pleased to be back in the present and not the miserable, wretched past that she’d come from.
Then she remembered the unkind things Freddy had said to her earlier.
The phone stopped ringing. And not ten seconds later, it pinged with a message from Freddy:FFS Pheebs, pick up!
Then he rang again and with a deep sigh, Phoebe answered his summons but only so she could ask him coldly, ‘Did you want something?’
‘Phoebe,’ he said again, both exasperated and tender. ‘How long are you going to be mad at me?’
It wasn’t a FaceTime call but Phoebe justknewthat his eyes were twinkling and that his smile was verging on a grin.
‘I don’t even know why you’re calling,’ Phoebe said stiffly. ‘Surely you’ve already said everything you wanted to say. Or is this part two of hauling me over the coals?’
Mindful that only a short flight of stairs and an open door separated them from the other members of staff who had to be tidying away at the end of the working day, she tried to keep her voice down.
‘What happens at work is one thing, what happens outside work is something else,’ Freddy said. ‘Separation of Church and State and all that. You were the one who insisted on that, remember?’
Phoebe had been quite right to insist on it too. What happened in the shop stayed in the shop, and what happened in Freddy’s attic flat very much stayed in Freddy’s attic flat. Because otherwise it would undermine Phoebe’s authority . . .
Talking of which . . . ‘Forgive me for not wanting to talk to someone who humiliated me in front of my staff.’
Freddy sighed again. Even before this, it seemed to Phoebe that Freddy had been sighing a lot lately when they were together. But she was how she was. He’d always known that.
And right now she was still furious but mostly hurt and she couldn’t see that changing any time soon.
‘I called to see if you wanted to come round tonight,’ he said because that was the thing about Freddy. He neverstayed angry for long. Whereas Phoebe could stay angry for days, weeks, even whole decades. ‘It’s getting colder at night. I hate thinking of you and Coco on that boat.’
‘It’s perfectly warm on the boat if I light the wood burner,’ Phoebe whispered because she also didn’t want people, her colleagues, not even Cress, to know that she lived on a boat, rather than in a proper house.
‘I’ll come to you then.’
‘Why? So you can tell me off again?’
‘Phoebe, give me something to work with.’ Freddy was sounding really annoyed now and Phoebe hated it when Freddy was really annoyed.
