Page 12 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop (Vintage Dress Shop Romance #3)
W hen Phoebe returned to the shop floor, everything seemed to be under control.
Then she saw a woman eyeing up a mustard-coloured dress, which did absolutely nothing for her (no judgement, mustard was a very hard colour to wear) and Phoebe decided that maybe she shouldn’t have to deal with the general public when she was feeling so out of sorts.
The general public could be so trying. Thank goodness there was only an hour to go now until closing.
With Coco Chanel in her arms, she navigated the small but perilous flight of stairs that led down to the basement.
There was a stockroom and beyond that a small anteroom where Bea shot all the dresses when they came in, so she could upload them to the website.
Phoebe was never exactly sure how things got on the website, but Bea seemed to know what she was doing so Phoebe left her to it.
Though the same couldn’t be said for the stockroom. At the end of August, as they did every year, they’d changed over the shop’s stock. Swapping out the summer frocks in their light and gauzy fabrics and bright colours for a more seasonally appropriate selection of winter dresses and party looks.
The summer dresses had been consigned to the basement and someone, probably Sophy, had done a very poor job of arranging them on the rails. Just hanging them any which way so that the hangers weren’t even facing in the same direction.
After switching on the space heater and settling Coco in one of her many baskets, Phoebe got to work.
As she rearranged dresses, righted hangers and checked each frock to make sure that buttons, zips, and fastenings were in working order and there were no loose seams or drooping hems, Phoebe could feel her blood pressure returning to more normal levels.
‘One has to take care of one’s clothes, Phoebe.
What we wear is how we present ourselves to the world and you won’t want people to judge you because of a run in your tights or a stain on your cuff.
Believe me, there are plenty of other ways in which they’ll find you wanting, so let’s not make it easy for them. ’
Phoebe could hear Mildred’s voice as if it were yesterday. Suddenly she wasn’t in the basement of The Vintage Dress Shop but in her tiny bedroom in Mildred’s little flat on a rundown council estate in Kilburn.
The flat might have been small but everything in it, including Mildred herself, was of the best quality.
Her furniture was old but gleamed because Mildred polished it every day.
She drank her tea and coffee from the finest delicate bone china, then as soon as she’d taken the last sip, she’d get up, go to the sink and wash and dry it.
She took the same care with her clothes. Back in the day, Mildred had worked for the British couturier Marvells of Mayfair. Starting in their Hanover Square atelier as a trainee straight from school and working her way up to head seamstress by the time she retired at sixty.
‘The pay wasn’t great but it was the prestige, and every season, we were allowed to make a dress from one of Mr Jack’s patterns using cast-off fabric.
’ Mildred would draw herself up and say proudly, ‘That’s why I’m the same size now as I was when I was twenty.
It’s inexcusable to say that the dress is too small when really it’s because you’ve become too large. ’
It was just one of the many, many life lessons Mildred had bestowed on Phoebe after she’d first turned up at her front door, aged fifteen, with her caseworker, Sangeet.
‘She’s not for everyone,’ Sangeet had said before he rang the bell.
‘But if you can get along with her, it would mean a long-term placement, maybe even until you’re ready to leave the care system.
I think we’re out of all other options unless .
. . there might be a bed in a group home in Kettering. ’
Phoebe did not want a bed in a group home in Kettering. She just wanted a bed that she could call her own. That’s all she’d ever wanted, but things, her life, hadn’t worked out like that.
She was obviously too young to remember but according to her case file, her first foster placement had been at three days old. Her mother, Annabel, wasn’t in a position where she was able or willing to take responsibility for her newborn daughter.
Phoebe’s memories of Annabel were as faded as the one photograph she had of the woman who’d given birth to her.
It would have been easier if Annabel and the authorities, who’d overseen every aspect of Phoebe’s life from before she’d even drawn breath, had agreed to give her up for adoption.
That would have been better. Maybe she’d have some lingering feelings of rejection but that would have been preferable to what had happened.
Which were temporary foster placements until Annabel was able to look after Phoebe herself.
Which had never lasted long. Then Phoebe was placed in yet another foster home.
By the time she was four, Phoebe had lived with six different families and more often than not, her relationship with Annabel took place at a contact centre.
Until Annabel decided that she didn’t even want that; one measly hour a week under supervision.
Phoebe couldn’t remember Annabel much, but she remembered waiting and waiting in that council-run centre – which like so many of the council-run places she’d visited in her formative years smelt of industrial disinfectant and despair – for someone who didn’t want to see her.
Who didn’t want her.
There was still the hope of an adoption. But the long-term foster carers she’d been placed with, with a view to adopting, were suddenly expecting their own baby after years of infertility and didn’t feel as if they could give Phoebe the attention she needed.
Then yet more foster homes and foster families after that, though there was nothing that homely about turning up at a new house lived in by strangers with everything you owned in cardboard boxes and black bin bags and expecting to become part of the family.
‘So unlucky,’ Phoebe’s caseworker would say – she’d had as many different caseworkers as she’d had different places to live.
Sometimes they were only ever meant to be short-term placements.
Sometimes they were meant to last longer, but Phoebe always had a sense of being an interloper in someone else’s home.
An unwelcome guest who would eventually be asked to leave because she was turning into a sad, sour-faced little girl who never fit.
One time she was even kicked out of a foster place because she’d accidentally dropped and broken a milk jug.
Yes, there were always reasons why Phoebe was constantly packing her things and being shuffled from pillar to post.
By the time she landed on Mildred’s doormat, she was a truculent, difficult teenager. She was going to be rejected and removed soon enough from this flat too, so what was the point of making an effort?
From the curdled-milk look on Mildred’s face when she opened the door to see Phoebe standing there in a grubby grey tracksuit that was a couple of sizes too big, her stay here wasn’t going to last long either.
‘This is the latest girl?’ Mildred said, pursing her lips like a cat’s bum. ‘I suppose you’d better come in. Make sure you wipe your feet.’
Sangeet made a whole performance of wiping his feet but Phoebe had stepped over the threshold in her cheap trainers and followed Mildred’s ramrod-straight back into what Phoebe would call the living room and Mildred called ‘the drawing room’.
It was neat as a pin. White, lace-trimmed cloths over the arms and backs of the sofa and armchairs.
Later Phoebe would be told that they were called ‘antimacassars’.
‘Because in Victorian times, gentlemen wore antimacassar oil in their hair and it tended to leave grease stains on the furniture,’ Mildred had explained, because she was full of fascinating facts like that.
But on that first day, she gestured that Phoebe should sit down and frowned when Phoebe slumped onto the sofa and gave the older women her most unimpressed, most belligerent face.
Mildred was tall and thin and old. Phoebe was amazed when she later found out that she was almost eighty, because that seemed so much older than just old and Mildred was so vital, so full of life.
She was wearing a light purple (Phoebe hadn’t even known what lilac or lavender were back then) old-fashioned dress with an apron over it.
Her iron-grey hair was set in tight curls and her stern face was properly made up: powder, mascara, lipstick.
Her lipstick didn’t even bleed into the corners like a lot of old ladies’ lipstick did.
‘I’ll make tea,’ Mildred said once Sangeet had decided his shoes were clean enough for admission. Phoebe didn’t even have a chance to say that she didn’t drink tea; Mildred was out of the door and a moment later, Phoebe could hear her filling up a kettle.
The walls were covered in a chintzy paper and on the mantelpiece was a framed black-and-white photograph of a much younger Mildred (but still with the same tight curls and tight smile) with a much younger HM the Queen.
‘Her bark’s worse than her bite,’ Sangeet whispered though Phoebe wasn’t going to put up with some old witch barking at her, never mind biting.
Mildred had returned with a laden tray, which she placed on the coffee table. Delicate cups and saucers, instead of mugs. A plate, lined with a lacy doily, and biscuits arranged in a pattern. Not even nice biscuits, but rich tea and lady’s fingers.
‘I’ll be mother,’ Mildred said. ‘And remember, Phoebe, we always put the milk in last.’
It was the first of hundreds of lessons that Mildred would teach her, but Phoebe just scowled once she was clutching her cup and saucer and trying not to spill the tea, which she didn’t even like anyway.