Page 41 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop
‘When will the first piece of content go live?’ Sophy asked. ‘Before the weekend would be great.’
‘Well, we’re going to go home and edit it now. That’ll take the rest of the day, then I could send you something to approve tomorrow morning,’ Faisal said as Birdy went to fetch Peggy from the back office.
This social media world moved very fast. Once, back in the days when the shop had first opened, Phoebe had done a little shoot for a fashion magazine and it had been months before the piece had appeared. They hadn’t even credited her, whereas Bea was making sure that Faisal had the right social media tags ‘there’s no underscores’, then they discussed the most effective hashtags to use.
‘Phoebe!’ Birdy suddenly hissed from the back of the shop and beckoned when Phoebe looked her way. ‘You have to come and see this.’
Phoebe couldn’t imagine that there was anything that interesting to see in the back office unless, God no, Peggy had peed on something. She had the look of a dog that wasn’t properly house-trained.
So, she was unprepared for the sight that met her eyes. In one of Coco Chanel’s many dog beds, this one a very expensive Harris tweed, was Peggy Gug curled up and snoring away and lying on top of her, also snoring, was Coco.
‘So adorable.’ Birdy had her phone held aloft. ‘You don’t know what this means to me. Peggy Gug finds it very hard to be accepting of other dogs. She’s a classic only child.’
The same could be said of Coco Chanel, who wasn’t so much unaccepting of other dogs as unpleasantly surprised whenever she encountered one. As far as she was concerned, she was the only dog in existence and she hated to be reminded otherwise.
Anyway, it was clear who was top dog in this meeting of canine minds. Phoebe felt a warm glow of pride and even nodded when Birdy enthused excitedly about ‘setting up a doggy playdate’.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said as the warm glow dissipated. Birdy wasn’t so bad. To say that she was an improvement on Rosie Roberts was a huge understatement and Phoebe now had a new appreciation for how hard some influencers worked.
‘Not an influencer, Phoebe, I’m a content creator,’ Birdy said earnestly, her eyes especially wide. ‘And if you could add me back on Instagram, well, I’d love that.’
‘Oh, I hardly ever post on Instagram,’ Phoebe said, which was true. Given the current climate, she doubted she’d ever post on there again.
‘Well, you absolutely should,’ Birdy said. Then she forgot that Phoebe wasn’t a hugger and hugged her goodbye.
Finally she and Faisal and Peggy were gone and Sophy had that fixed smile back on her face. ‘You were very helpful, Phoebe,’ she said, barely able to keep the surprise out of her voice. ‘Thank you for that.’
‘I’m always helpful,’ Phoebe pointed out, but they both knew that her words lacked conviction. ‘And it’s in all our best interests, if we can create more revenue streams, right?’
‘Right?’ Sophy echoed uncertainly as if she didn’t really understand what Phoebe was getting at. How Phoebe wished that she too was still in blissful ignorance about the impending financial crisis that might befall The Vintage Dress Shop.
Still, it had been an interesting start to the week and because Phoebe wasn’t officially back on the shop floor, she spent a lot of time in the atelier. Things were still stilted between herself and Cress – Phoebe knew that she wouldn’t be able to bring up the thorny topic of Cress’s plans for her own collection of dresses without getting angry about it. And she knew that Cress certainly wouldn’t start the conversation for fear that it would make Phoebe angry, but they could still work together like the civilised, grown-up women that they both were.
In fact, Phoebe was more than capable of doing a little repair work herself, which freed up Cress to work on more major alterations. After all, she’d lived with a woman who’d been a seamstress all her working life. Mildred had taught her how to sew on buttons, to replace hooks and eyes, to take up and let down hems. Phoebe had always kept quiet about this skill, as she was worried that it would be another thing that would undermine her authority in the shop if she was being called upon to put right astray belt loops and loose stitching.
Now her authority had been well and truly undermined these past couple of weeks, what did it really matter?
Truthfully, if Phoebe could bear to admit it to herself, she didn’t mind having less to do with the customers. They could be very wearying and the shop was managing adequately without her policing the changing rooms and telling people that they were a clear spring and not a bright summer. It still pained her that women might be going home with dresses that really didn’t bring out the best in them, the dresses destined to languish, unworn, at the back of wardrobes but, right now, this wasn’t a hill that Phoebe was willing to die on.
Though give it a couple of weeks and who knew? But for now, the shop was still in business and doing a roaring trade as the party season came into full effect. The rental business also seemed to be running as planned. Despite Phoebe’s fears, all the dresses rented out had found their way back to the shop, and if there were a few late returns, they racked up penalty fees. Only one dress had suffered: an incident involving a glass of red wine and a pale blue satin sheath dress. Phoebe hadn’t been able to resist a smug ‘I told you so’ (she was trying to be on her best behaviour but she was never going to be a saint) but she’d sent it off to the specialist cleaners they used and it had come back spotless.
As promised, the first of Birdy’s videos had gone live on TikTok and Instagram the next day. She looked amazing, theshop looked amazing, they’d grown their own followers and Sophy was trying to frantically source more dresses to rent. As she lamented to Freddy when he popped in to make sure that Phoebe hadn’t run the business into the ground.
Not that Phoebe ever would. Always, but especially now, she wanted the shop to thrive, not just survive. Even if it meant assisting Sophy with her rental dresses. ‘I could ask a few of my contacts if we could buy some dresses from them wholesale?’ she offered in a very offhand way and was rewarded by Sophy and Freddy both beaming at her.
It wasn’t quite the type of bright smile that Freddy had used to gift her with, but they were friends again or whatever it was that she and Freddy were. The whole fuss with Rosie Roberts had died down now – although they still had lots of lairy young girls coming into the shop to corner Phoebe.
‘Could you be mean to me? I’m absolutely desperate for clicks,’ one of them had said and then deliberately dropped a dress on the floor, but Phoebe hadn’t risen to the bait. But for hours later, she was still thinking hard about what she would have loved to have said to the little madam if her rule was still absolute.
Chapter Seventeen
Another week went by with Phoebe’s role at the shop still unclear and her relationship with Freddy still a bit scratchy.
It was all quite unsettling but not as unsettling as the determined expression on Sophy’s face at the Monday morning meeting (Sophy was being very inflexible when it came to these new Monday morning meetings) as she announced that it was time to put up Christmas decorations.
‘Halloween is done. The clocks have gone back. It’s now November and Christmas season has officially begun. Phoebe, why are you pulling a face?’ she demanded because Phoebe might be a well-behaved shadow of her former self but it was very hard to school her features into bland acceptance of things she disapproved of.
‘I told you before that we don’t go in for Christmas decorations. Of course you were in Australia last Christmas so you don’t know how we do things,’ Phoebe reminded her, and reminded herself again that she wished Sophy had stayed there.
