Page 18 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop (Vintage Dress Shop Romance #3)
I t wasn’t until the next day that Freddy finally deigned to put in an appearance.
It was late enough that they were open (Sophy had managed to arrive only five minutes late and had also managed to work out how to turn off the alarm) but still too early to have any customers.
Everyone was very subdued, even Coco Chanel who had left half of her breakfast, which was unheard of.
The thought of spending another day toiling away in the basement filled Phoebe with despair.
The basement had never been so tidy, the stock so well organised, everything so neatly labelled.
There wasn’t much else for her to do and then Freddy walked in, looking like he didn’t have a single bloody care in the world.
‘Glad you’re all here,’ he said, even though where else would they all be?
He was also making sure that his gaze skirted over Phoebe, even though Coco scampered over to him and stood on her hind legs, front paws on his knees.
Freddy didn’t pick her up, but gave her a very perfunctory scratch under the chin.
So, as well as not having Phoebe’s back, now he was shunning her dog too.
Clearly, he was still angry with Phoebe, which was no match for how angry she was with him. He’d not listened to her side of things; he’d demoted her and threatened to sack her even though he knew that the shop, the dresses, were her whole world.
Phoebe felt her lips tighten. Her everything tighten, especially her heart.
‘I won’t be long. I need to talk to Phoebe about having some training,’ he said airily, like none of this was causing him any anguish at all.
Whereas the word ‘ training ’ caused an icy sensation to trickle down Phoebe’s spine. ‘Training?’ she echoed in a croaky voice.
Freddy looked her straight in the eye, his face impassive. ‘If you return to managerial duties then you need to have a better handle on the admin side of things. You can’t just leave it all to Sophy and Bea.’
‘Admin?’ Phoebe echoed in an even croakier voice. ‘If?’
‘But we’re happy to do the admin,’ Bea said quickly. ‘I like doing the admin. I have a system.’
It was true, Bea did have a system. While Phoebe might have a near photographic memory for every single dress that passed through the shop, or had passed, including its provenance, price, fabric and approximate age, Bea took all that knowledge and put it into some kind of stock inventory program on the computer then added it to the website.
Plus she ordered things that they needed: till roll, their stationery and bags, coffee.
She’d even recently dealt with some women who’d come round from the council to do a health and safety survey.
‘I never mind doing the cashing up. Can’t have all those years at BelleGirl going to waste,’ Sophy said of the decade she’d spent at a horrible high-street fashion chain, which had gone bust forcing Johnno to give his biological daughter a job. ‘Plus, I’m very busy with my rental dresses.’
‘I hear you, but there’s no point in having a manager if they don’t manage,’ Freddy said firmly because once his mind was made up about something, he would not be convinced otherwise.
Whether it was wearing Phoebe down until she went on a date with him or deciding that a suitable punishment for her crimes would be to spend the day on the phone to Camden Council with a query about their business rates.
‘So, Bea, I think a good plan for today is if you walk Phoebe through the website and the ecommerce side of things. Which will mean that she doesn’t have to deal directly, or indirectly, with any of the customers. ’
‘You’re being so unfair!’ Phoebe hissed because she couldn’t hold her tongue a moment longer. In fact, she was amazed that she’d managed to hold out for, oooh, at least ten minutes.
‘What if Phoebe is walking through the shop and a customer asks her something?’ Cress wanted to know, in a manner that suggested that she also thought Freddy was being completely unreasonable.
‘And what about the brides and the customers who are looking for a really high-end dress? I’m not cut out to deal with those women.
They’re very demanding. Very high maintenance and Phoebe has a magic knack for . . .’
‘I think you need to have a little faith in yourself, Cress,’ Freddy said in a much softer tone than he’d used so far.
‘I’m sure you can cope admirably.’ He surveyed the staff with a keen glance that had something of the head teacher about it.
‘No one here is irreplaceable. If a customer does approach Phoebe, then Phoebe will direct them to another member of staff and be on her way. Talking of which, I’m going to have to love you and leave you. ’
He touched the side of his head in salute, gave Coco Chanel a little pat on her head as she stood in the doorway and tried to block his passage, and then he was gone.
The shop was still empty of customers so no one moved from their slumped positions in the back office. Although Phoebe liked to think that she always had her fight face ready to go, she was the most slumped of them all. She really would end up with a dowager’s hump at this rate.
‘I can’t believe Freddy is being like this. To me,’ she muttered. ‘I thought we’d cleared everything up on Saturday night and he was fine . . .’
Then she remembered that the staff, except Cress, didn’t know about her and Freddy. How right she’d been to keep things on the down-low.
‘He really is overdoing it. I still say that you shouldn’t have reacted the way you did, but Rosie Roberts did get fake tan on that dress,’ Sophy pointed out, which was the last thing Phoebe expected her to say. She’d expected Sophy to be drunk on all her new power.
‘And she ripped it,’ Cress added indignantly.
‘I took pictures for the insurance claim,’ Bea said. ‘There’s actual photographic evidence.’
‘Anyway, she’s a terrible influencer,’ Anita said with a roll of her eyes, even though if Phoebe had expected Sophy to be on a power trip, she’d have thought Anita would be dancing a victory jig by now. ‘She couldn’t influence me to do anything.’
‘I should have done my homework a bit better, but I was wowed by her follower count,’ Sophy said as she stood up and advanced towards the kettle.
‘I’ve sourced a new influencer, who hasn’t got so many followers but she does have the right vibe.
’ She took down a couple of mugs from the cupboard in front of her.
‘And she doesn’t wear fake tan, I already checked. Now who wants a brew?’
It was one of the most boring weeks of Phoebe’s life. Toiling away in the basement like a Victorian orphan not allowed to see sunlight.
Though, to be fair, she wasn’t always in the basement.
Roughly half of her time was spent in the back office sitting next to Bea who was trying to show her how the website worked.
She kept going on about things that didn’t have proper names, just random groups of initials: CMS, SEO.
The only initials Phoebe was interested in were CC for Coco Chanel, obviously, YSL for Yves Saint Laurent or even DvF for Diane von Furstenberg.
Their social media accounts were still going haywire although Bea and Sophy advised Phoebe it was best not to look.
‘People can be very unkind when they’re hiding behind a false username and their keyboards,’ Bea said when Phoebe had a peek on Instagram and immediately found a comment that suggested they sold inferior vintage, which had given her heart palpitations.
She didn’t care that people were calling her a bully and a bitch. ‘Someone else’s opinion of you is none of your business,’ Mildred always said, but to cast doubts on Phoebe’s ability to source good vintage was another level of cruelty.
To make matters even worse, Sophy’s new influencer was coming in the very next day.
‘Not to do a shoot,’ Sophy assured Phoebe even though Phoebe wasn’t in charge of the shop and no longer had the authority to grant permission for another professional show-off to come in.
She wasn’t in charge of anything. Not even her own destiny.
‘Let’s see if she passes the vibe check. The vibes have got to be right.’
The vibes hadn’t been right for days. On Thursday, Freddy came by just after the shop opened to issue yet another diktat about boring tasks he wanted Phoebe to accomplish. Today he wanted Sophy to take Phoebe through some role-play exercises for dealing with difficult customers.
‘Because the customer is always right,’ he said, his eyes fixed on Phoebe even though, time and time again, the customer was wrong and didn’t even know their Biba from their Bus Stop.
It was hard to believe that this was the same Freddy who used to give her butterflies every time he smiled at her.
Freddy’s smiles were now in very short supply and Phoebe was getting used to the new leaden feeling when he walked through the door. ‘We’ll catch up again tomorrow.’
As soon as he left, Phoebe turned to Sophy with a pleading look. Forced to plead with Sophy! ‘Even the idea of role play makes me want to break out in hives,’ she said but it was more than that.
This whole week, having her many faults pointed out to her by Freddy, the person who claimed to have feelings for her, made Phoebe feel like the years had melted away.
She was five again. Seven again. Ten. Twelve.
Then a teenager who was never good enough to be given the things that other children took for granted.
A space to call her own. People to call her own.
The two most basic things in life. A home. A family. But Phoebe never got them because she didn’t deserve them. There was something about her that repelled rather than attracted.