Page 7 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop
Freddy wasn’t a loomer, which was one of his many good qualities. It was funny but Phoebe had never really had a type. She’d always supposed that if she could tolerate a man, a romantic partner, for any length of time, he’d share a similar aesthetic to Phoebe. A vintage king. With a nice line in retro suits, his hair quiffed, his shirts and ties always immaculate.
Freddy sat somewhere between Charles and Miles when it came to style. He liked a suit, but an Italian, slim-cut sixties sort of suit like the dark grey one he was wearing tonight, accessorised with a black Fred Perry with yellow accents and a pair of very retro Adidas shell-toe trainers. His curly brown hair was always tousled, very much like when Harry Styles had had really good hair. Also like Harry Styles, Freddy had a friendly ready smile while his blue eyes seemed to come with a twinkle as a permanent feature.
There was more to Freddy than the cheeky-chappy persona that he presented to the world. He was an enigma. That’s what Johnno had called him once. And it was true. Just when Phoebe thought that she had Freddy worked out, he always managed to surprise her.
Just as she’d been surprised at the butterflies that had taken up residence in her stomach when they’d met some eight years earlier. She’d only recently been made manageress of The Vintage Dress Shop, though she’d worked with Johnno ever since the days of the Holloway junk shop, where she’d quickly moved up through the ranks. Even though Phoebe had only been interested in their small stock of vintage fashion and would have nothing to do with the other quite unsavoury things they’d also sold. Johnno had never met a piece of manky taxidermy that he didn’t love.
In her spare time, Phoebe had trawled the charity shops buying up vintage dresses for a song, then selling them on to Johnno for quite the mark-up. Even now, many years later, Phoebe still felt quite guilty about all those vintage dresses that she’d treated as commodities. Plus, there’d been one 1950s dress, a ballerina-length black lace ball gown that she wished she’d kept for herself. She occasionally still dreamed about it.
Eventually the vintage dresses had taken over most of the floorspace of Johnno’s Junk and when Johnno had sold up and moved to the rarified climes of Primrose Hill some ten years earlier, Phoebe had gone with him. She was twenty-two by then. With three GCSEs and an attitude. That was what she brought to her job.
But Johnno had a kind heart and he was only one of two people in the entire world that Phoebe trusted. So, despite what everyone else called her unfortunate manner, Johnno gave Phoebe a job in his fancy new shop. Besides, even then, she still knew more about vintage fashion than the rest of the staff put together. Including Lucie, the very snooty manageress who had a degree in fine art and a trust fund so she didn’t even need the job.
Phoebe had picked off each subsequent manager. Until finally Johnno had given in and handed over the reins of power. From a girl who came from nothing, absolutely nothing, to being in charge of your own high-end vintage boutique by the time she was twenty-five was quite the leap.
It was around that time that Freddy had come into their lives. He’d taken over from Johnno’s old solicitor, a starchy man called Mr Bird. Mr Bird’s remit was to deal with anything particularly troublesome like communicating with the shop’s landlord or the heart-lurching occasion when they’d taken delivery of some costume jewellery, which had turned out to be stolen (this was also before Charles had come into their lives.)
Phoebe hadn’t thought much of it when Johnno had breezed into the shop one morning, left a dog-eared envelope next to the till and then breezed out again. ‘I’ve got to go and see a man about a dog, Pheebs, but my solicitor’s popping in to pick up some papers. Be a love and make sure he gets them, will you?’
But the stooped, suited and always harried-looking Mr Bird had never turned up. She’d put the papers away in the office for safekeeping and when she came back from lunch there was a young man in jeans, a vintage 1960s Gabicci navy knitted shirt with white top-stitching, and Adidas trainers sitting on one of the pink sofas.
Which wasn’t unprecedented. Men did come into The Vintage Dress Shop, mostly to sit on the pink sofas with a long-suffering look as the women they’d come in with shopped, but this man didn’t look long-suffering at all. His posture was relaxed and his grin was wide as the two girls and the very handsome Hans who worked in the shop back then, fluttered around him like moths to his cheeky-chappy flame.
‘Good to see that you’re all hard at work,’ Phoebe had said to announce her presence, which had gone unnoticed.
Hans, who could have given Anita a run for her money when it came to attitude and backchat, barely turned to look at her. ‘We are working, Pheebs. We’re looking after Freddy.’
‘Freddy?’ Phoebe had queried and the adoring crowd parted and the young man stood up.
‘Hi,’ he said with the same easy grin. ‘Johnno said to meet him here to pick up his lease agreement.’
‘I have a very grubby envelope in the back office, which Johnno left. But you’re not Mr Bird,’ she pointed out, eyes narrowed because this Freddy might be easy on the eye, very easy, but she’d always been warned off good-looking men who were too used to getting their own way. ‘I can’t be handing over important papers to just anyone.’
‘I’m not Mr Bird,’ this Freddy had agreed, his smile not dimming, even his blue eyes seeming to twinkle with good humour. ‘And you’re definitely not Johnno who told me to meet him here.’
‘I’m Phoebe.’ She drew herself up to her full height, which was one hundred and seventy centimetres when she was wearing her heels. ‘I’m the manageress of The Vintage Dress Shop,’ she added with a faint note of pride because she still couldn’t quite believe that it was true.
‘Well, it’s lovely to meet you, Phoebe,’ Freddy had said, holding out his hand for Phoebe to shake.
That first touch, the slide of skin against skin, Freddy’s warm (but not unpleasantly so) hand clasping hers, had given Phoebe tingles. Proper tingles. As if her nerve endings were singing and a whole host of butterflies were gearing up for take-off. Just from a brief handshake.
‘And you are?’ she’d asked, snatching her hand back, certain her face was red because her cheeks had felt heated.
‘I’m Johnno’s new solicitor,’ Freddy had said, his expression now thoughtful as he looked at Phoebe. ‘Mr Bird has taken early retirement. Apparently Johnno has taken years off him.’
‘Well, I can certainly believe that,’ Phoebe had said with a smile and Freddy had taken a step back, still with that same considered look on his face. ‘I’ll get the papers for you, although I suppose I should check with Johnno first . . .’
‘The same Johnno who’s not answering his phone?’
This time they’d both smiled. Clearly Freddy had Johnno’s measure and if Johnno trusted him, though he looked far too young to be a fully qualified legal professional, then Phoebe had no reason to doubt him.
He was definitely an improvement on Mr Bird who always used a hundred words when ten would have done. Although Mr Bird had never once made her heart skip a beat the wayit had when Freddy had joined them a few days later in The Hat and Fan for their Friday evening drinks.
And her heart had positively thundered when Freddy caught up with Phoebe as she left after a couple of drinks because even then, especially then, she hadn’t wanted to undermine her new-found authority by having too much to drink with her colleagues and embarrassing herself.
His touch on her arm had set the tingles off again. Then he’d said, casually but with a look that seemed anything but, ‘I don’t suppose you fancy going out for a drink sometime. Maybe even dinner?’
‘Like a business drink?’ Phoebe asked, trying to ignore her racing heart and her tingling skin. ‘Because you’re Johnno’s solicitor and I run his shop?’
