Page 39 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop
Phoebe drew the line at writing Charles a letter, a WhatsApp would do, and she’d see Sophy at work on Monday, so she quickly slipped out of the door and hurried down all those flights of stairs, until she was out on the street.
She took grateful gulps of the cold night air, although there was a fine mist of rain so Coco Chanel refused to put paws on the ground.
With an anticipatory sigh, Phoebe reached down to pick her up. She only had herself to blame for creating this monster.
‘But you’re such a beautiful monster, I can’t refuse you anything,’ Phoebe murmured as she made her way to the bus stop in her party heels, which unlike her work heels pinched her toes and made the balls of her feet feel like they were on fire.
It wasn’t surprising then that her progress was so slow that it was easy for Freddy to catch up with her.
One moment she was trudging painfully to the bus stop, which didn’t seem to be getting any closer, the next there was a gentle hand on her arm.
‘You are, Pheebs, you are a lot,’ he said and before Phoebe could ready herself for this next part of their row, which had lasted almost a week, he ran the back of his hand over her cheek. ‘But you’re not too much.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Phoebe wasn’t even being tart, she just wanting to know exactly where she stood.
‘Quite sure.’ Like Coco, when Freddy was looking at Phoebe like that, earnestly, maybe even a little bit adoringly, it was very hard to stay angry with him. ‘I’m sorry.’
He didn’t say exactly what he was sorry for; whether it was all of it or only some of it or none of it, but he took Coco’s dead weight from Phoebe and with his other hand, he hailed a passing black cab.
‘My treat,’ he insisted when Phoebe opened her mouth to protest. ‘I can tell that your shoes are killing you and if you come back to mine, I’ll even throw in a foot rub.’
Chapter Sixteen
As Monday mornings went – even grey, cold October Monday mornings – Phoebe had a spring in her step as she walked to work. A metaphorical spring because her feet were still quite sore from Saturday night and she had a painful blister on her little toe. It almost made her envious of Sophy and Cress in their comfy white trainers, when usually she thought they looked like orthopaedic shoes.
She’d spent Saturday night and most of Sunday with Freddy, both of them keen to assure the other one that they were sorry. However, they didn’t go into details of where the sorriness should be distributed. Phoebe, because she couldn’t bear to go through the whole sorry saga again. And Freddy, probably because he knew how to quit when he was ahead.
Also, the thought of the shop being in financial difficulties gave Phoebe the same panicked feeling she got when she thought about what would happen ifThe Sheilahad sprung a leak and which dresses she’d have time to save if such a disaster happened.
It was true that the shop was very quiet but again, it was a cold late October Monday morning and they were always quiet on Mondays. Even when it was glorious sunshine.
‘So, it makes perfect sense for Birdy to shoot her pictures and whatnot,’ Sophy said with an airy wave of her hands as she led the team through their Monday morning meeting.
Not that Phoebe had ever insisted on a Monday morning meeting when she was manager. Her team meetings hadoccurred on a random ad hoc basis as the need arose. The last one had been when she’d caught Anita snogging her then sometimes on/mostly off boyfriend in one of the changing rooms and had had no choice but to make an example of her.
Freddy hadn’t mentioned if Phoebe’s normal duties were to resume and Phoebe hadn’t wanted to cause an argument by asking. (If nothing else, that showed how much she’d grown as a person over the last week.) So if Sophy wanted to waste everyone’s time by banging on about her rental dresses and filling in the forms correctly, then Phoebe was happy for her.
She was less happy about having to see Birdy again. ‘You mean your mini-me,’ Bea said as they restocked the costume jewellery display unit with some dead-stock Scottie dog brooches. Charles had found them an almost inexhaustible supply of dead-stock Bakelite brooches in various animal shapes and Phoebe dreaded the day that they finally ran out.
‘She wishes she was like me,’ Phoebe said just as the bell tinkled and the mini-me herself walked in.
Phoebe waited for the inevitable entourage to follow her but it was just a slightly built man, buckling under the weight of a couple of vanity cases, a sizeable ring light on a tripod and a . . .
‘What is that?’ Phoebe asked, pointing a quivering finger at the podgy black pug in a bright yellow rain mac.
‘Hi, Phoebe!’ Birdy trilled brightly. She was obviously a Monday morning sort of person. ‘Sophy said I could bring Peggy Gug. I’m going to use her in some of my pics and she doesn’t like being left alone.’
‘Yeah, she’s been banned from doggy day care,’ said the man, who on closer inspection was as pretty as Birdy, with a luxurious mane of Byronic dark hair, delicate features and the kind of thick eyelashes that Phoebe could never hope to replicate unless she wore two sets of false lashes.
‘This is Faisal,’ Birdy said, bringing a huge leopard-print wheeled suitcase to a halt. ‘Is Sophy around?’
Sophy had popped to the big supermarket in Chalk Farm to buy teabags, coffee and biscuits. A managerial responsibility that Phoebe had been only too happy to relinquish.
‘Why is your dog called Peggy Fug?’ Anita asked from where she was lounging on one of the pink sofas. She wasn’t meant to be lounging on the pink sofas at all but Phoebe’s new reduced role didn’t require her to reprimand Anita any longer. No matter how much she wanted to.
If Sophy were here, she’d have rushed to gush all over Birdy, but neither Phoebe nor Bea nor Anita had made any such move and Birdy’s smile started to slip a little. ‘It’s Peggy Gug, not Peggy Fug,’ she said in a voice that trembled slightly. ‘After Peggy Guggenheim, the American heiress and art collector who lived in a Venetian palazzo and was never not fabulously dressed. Also, her father perished on theTitanicand . . .’
To be fair, Peggy Guggenheim sounded fascinating but whatever other facts about her Birdy was about to impart were drowned out by the most awful sound known to man.
