Page 43 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop
‘How do you fancy mending a dropped hem?’ Cress asked, ever the peacemaker.
Phoebe would rather mend a hundred dropped hems than have to listen to Sophy for a second longer.
It was another quiet Monday without anyone booked in for an appointment in the atelier. It was just Phoebe andCress – things still awkward between them – so they were both pleased not to talk but to listen to a podcast about Peggy Guggenheim because Phoebe was keen to learn more about the fabulously dressed heiress. She turned out to be such an icon that, as Cress said, ‘I’m surprised that Taylor Swift has never written a song about her.’
Phoebe didn’t have any need to go back downstairs until later that afternoon. In an uncharacteristic display of kindness, Anita had offered to give Coco her lunchtime walk and fetch Phoebe a salad.
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that Phoebe had to answer the call of nature but found her way barred by Bea who stood on the bottom step of the spiral staircase.
‘Did you need anything?’ she asked, her voice quite shrill and her face quite red. ‘Why don’t you go back upstairs and I’ll fetch it for you?’
‘I need to powder my nose,’ Phoebe said delicately but forcefully. One of Mildred’s most stringent rules was that ladies (and gentlemen for that matter) didn’t discuss their bodily functions in public.
‘Oh! Your nose looks fine.’ Bea peered at Phoebe’s face. ‘Do you want your make-up bag? I’ll get it for you and take it up to the atelier.’
‘Oh for goodness’ sakes,’ Phoebe exclaimed, continuing down the stairs so Bea had no choice but to give way or be mown down. ‘I need a wee, not that it’s any business of yours.’
‘Well, let’s get you to the bathroom,’ Bea said holding out her arms to usher Phoebe’s progress, though she was quite capable of visiting the tiny little bathroom tucked into an alcove by herself.
‘Whatareyou doing?’ Phoebe asked suspiciously and although she was careful not to manhandle, she did push Bea out of the way so she could do a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn to see what was happening in the shop.
Then really wished she hadn’t.
She went hot.
She went cold.
She could feel rage and her blood pressure rising in that way that always mottled her hands and throat. Phoebe began to count to ten in an effort to calm down before she blew her top.
She managed to get as far as seven.
‘What thehellhave you done?’ she demanded of Sophy, who had tried to obscure a rail of dresses by standing in front of it with her arms outstretched, but judging from the cringing look on her face, she now realised that it was futile. ‘What the hell have you done to my shop?’
Chapter Eighteen
It was too awful to contemplate.
Phoebe shut her eyes for a long moment and she prayed that when she opened them again, it had just been a minor hallucination brought on by the wasabi dressing she’d had on her salad.
Or maybe this was all a dream, or rather a horrible nightmare, and she’d wake up in bed and discover that the day was yet to begin.
But when Phoebe opened her eyes, she wasn’t hallucinating or dreaming. Sophy – this had to have been Sophy’s idea – had finally let the power go to her head and decided to rearrange the dress rails.
Instead of a painstakingly curated, beautifully graduated rainbow of colours – starting with black, then purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, pink and finally white – the dresses were now arranged willy-nilly, with no thought or reason.
An egg-yolk yellow 1970s maxi dress was nestled next to a deep red velvet cocktail dress, which was next to a purple and black chequerboard mini. All the colours clashing, so that Phoebe’s eyes actually hurt.
She put a hand to her heart, which was racing, and her other hand on the till counter to steady herself.
‘I just thought . . .’ Sophy began but Phoebe couldn’t bear to listen to her garbled explanation.
Also, she still needed to . . . powder her nose very urgently.
She spent long moments running her wrists under the cold tap, something Mildred had always sworn by when she felt herself getting upset, but it had no calming effect on Phoebe.
Quivering with emotions that were too strong to be contained, Phoebe left the bathroom and walked back onto the shop floor where Sophy, Anita and Bea were now taking the dresses off the rails anddumpingthem on the pink sofas.
‘I didn’t think that it would do any harm to maybe arrange the dresses by size,’ Sophy said. ‘You must admit that it’s very confusing and quite hard to find things.’
