Page 45 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop
‘You might as well go home too,’ she said to Bea sharply. ‘This will be quicker if I do it myself.’
‘Well, if you’re sure . . .’ Bea tailed off but she didn’t need to be told twice and she left the shop very quickly after that.
Then it was Cress’s turn to go, without words but with a reproachful, recriminatory look in Phoebe’s direction.
‘Honestly, CC, what I have to put up with,’ Phoebe muttered. Coco Chanel, who was perched on one of the sofas, tilted her head in a sympathetic fashion.
Phoebe’s hands were still a bit shaky but now that the shop was empty and she was alone with the dresses, matching allthe colours, stroking her hands over jersey crêpe and soft lawn cotton, floaty chiffon and slippery satin, she could feel herself calming down. Her blood pressure lowering. It was cathartic. Mesmerising.
Phoebe loved to imagine all the women who had worn these dresses. What their lives were like. How they felt when they got dressed and looked at themselves in the mirror.
When she saw herself in a mirror, the person she’d created, she always felt not just a sense of satisfaction but also a sense of achievement.
She imagined that these other women, the dresses’ former owners, felt the same. No matter how much life threw at you, the disappointments and the failures, when you put on the perfect dress, then you were back in control.
Phoebe felt in control too once she’d put the last dress back on the right rail. Then came a sharp, peremptory rap on the door and she looked up to see Freddy standing there. It was dark outside so she couldn’t see the expression on his face but she didn’t feel quite so in control anymore as she walked to the door to let him in.
Once he was in the shop, he said nothing, just looked around slowly, then his gaze settled on Phoebe and she could feel her blood pressure beginning to climb again.
He was looking at Phoebe as if he were seeing her for the first time. And not liking what he saw either.
‘Sophy came to see me,’ he said at last. His lips twisted, so far from his usual ready smile, when Phoebe shrugged at the mention of her arch-nemesis’s name. ‘Then I called Cress and she said that you’d be working late. Among other things.’
Phoebe could only imagine. ‘Cress is hardly an impartial third party. She’s always going to take Sophy’s side on account of them being sisterfriends or whatever it is that they call it.’
‘That’s hardly fair,’ Freddy said mildly, but his voice sounded tight. ‘Cress isn’t like that.’
‘Well, I know why you’d stick up for Cress what with the two of you having a secret side project,’ Phoebe reminded him bitterly.
Freddy shook his head and took a step back. ‘No, I’m not getting drawn into an argument about that all over again.’
‘Then why are you here?’ Phoebe asked and she felt just as weary as Freddy. It was clear that he wasn’t here to take her side or even try to understand where she was coming from. ‘To tell me off, I suppose. Go on, then!’
She sat down on one of the sofas and picked up Coco so she could wrap her arms around her comforting, chunky little body.
‘You called her an imbecile,’ Freddy said, which admittedly hadn’t been Phoebe’s finest moment.
‘Not specifically. And anyway, did she tell you why I called her that?’ she demanded.
‘She screwed up, she admitted that but your reaction was . . .’ Freddy sighed and shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Once again, it was a complete over-reaction and in a shop full of customers too.’
‘There were maybe two or three customers and you didn’t see what it looked like, Freddy. There were dresses everywhere, not just shoved onto hangers in a random fashion . . .’
‘Sophy said that she arranged them by size . . .’
‘Oh my God, will you just let me finish a sentence!’ Phoebe exclaimed, flexing her fingers in frustration. ‘Sophy had no business arranging everything. The shop has a system. I have a system, which has worked perfectly well since long before Sophy so-called Stevens turned up to show us all the error of our ways.’
‘I don’t understand why you’re always so hard on Sophy,’ Freddy said, running a hand through his hair so that it was in more disarray than usual.
‘Of course you’d take her side even though she made a complete mess of the shop during our busiest period ofthe year and it’s taken mehoursto put it back.’ The sheer injustice of it all, of Freddy, made Phoebe want to contort her body into odd shapes. She couldn’t stay seated for a moment longer and slid Coco off her lap so she could jump to her feet.
‘This isn’t about taking sides,’ Freddy insisted, his words sounding as if they were being forced out of him. ‘The way you spoke to her was inexcusable . . .’
‘Yes, I admit I shouldn’t have called her an imbecile but she called me a ridiculous woman,’ Phoebe recalled in an angry rush. ‘I bet she didn’t tell you that.’
‘I know what she called you because the whole exchange, once again, has been posted online,’ Freddy said, a muscle now pounding away in his cheek. He dug his phone out of the inner pocket of his Harrington jacket and swiped the screen a couple of times before handing it to Phoebe, who had to relive the whole unpleasant scene all over again. It had been shot from a very unflattering angle so she was all nostrils.
‘Who took this?’ She clicked on the username but their avatar was just a greyed-out silhouette and their name a random collection of letters and numbers. ‘I hope it wasn’t the woman with the nice coat and scarf. I’d expect better from someone so well dressed.’
