Page 29 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop (Vintage Dress Shop Romance #3)
I t 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 and dumping them 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.’
‘No, you really didn’t think at all, did you?’ Phoebe’s voice sounded as if it had been coated in ice. ‘I don’t find it confusing or hard to find things, because all my brain cells are fully operational.’
Bea winced, Sophy’s chin tilted up and Anita put her hands on her hips. ‘There’s no need to get personal,’ Anita said chippily.
‘I wasn’t getting personal. I was talking about my brain cells.’ Phoebe took a deep gathering breath, which was as much use as running cold water over her wrists had been. ‘I couldn’t possibly comment on your brain cells.’
‘This way, at least, a customer can come in and won’t need to ask if we have a dress in a size ten, because the size-ten dresses will have their own rail,’ Sophy said in a stilted fashion like she was grinding her teeth.
‘But this isn’t the sort of shop where someone just wanders in for a random size-ten dress and then wanders out again.
Coming to The Vintage Dress Shop is an experience.
It’s an adventure. It’s about not knowing what you’ll find but letting the dresses speak to you.
Finding a dress that you’re drawn to, that you didn’t even know you’d need until you see it on the rail,’ Phoebe said.
‘Yes, but it’s not much use being drawn to a dress in a size eight if you’re a size twelve,’ Bea pointed out, but she did it very quietly as if her heart wasn’t really in it.
‘So, then you put the dress back and look for another one or, and this is just a wild suggestion,’ Phoebe said in the most condescending tone she could manage, which was actually very, very condescending, ‘you could ask a member of staff to help you.’
‘But it’s very hard to remember the size or the provenance of every dress in the shop,’ Anita protested.
‘It’s not at all hard. I manage it without any trouble at all,’ Phoebe said. She turned around slowly to once again see the havoc that had been wrought while she’d been hemming upstairs and listening to podcasts about flighty heiresses, without a care in the world. ‘This looks terrible. ’
‘It’s not that bad,’ Sophy said but her face said something else entirely.
‘And if I had a pound for every time that a customer told me how beautiful our rails look on Instagram I’d be a wealthy woman and wouldn’t have to work with .
. . with . . . bloody imbeciles,’ Phoebe snapped.
Ok, that was quite a personal remark. ‘Our rainbow rails are one of our USPs, like our pink sofas or the one black dress that we have in the window. In the space of a couple of hours, you’ve destroyed our brand.
’ She clapped her hands in a mocking manner. ‘Well done! Good job, everybody!’
‘We were going to put things back before you even saw it,’ Bea said placatingly.
Phoebe could feel her eyebrows shooting up. ‘Oh, and why was that then, Bea?’
Bea muttered something that Phoebe couldn’t quite catch.
‘What was that?’ she demanded.
Sophy sighed. ‘We quickly realised that it looked much better the way it was before.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘Even if it is really hard to find specific sizes and it’s all very well asking for a member of staff to help, but if that member of staff is you then I pity that poor customer.’
‘Rude!’ Phoebe hissed.
‘I don’t know how you have the nerve to call me rude when you’re the rudest person I’ve ever met,’ Sophy said, stepping nearer to Phoebe and clenching her fists.
Even Anita, who lived for the drama, all kinds of drama, looked alarmed at how quickly the situation had escalated. ‘Oh my God, everyone, calm down! We’re going to put it back the way it was.’
Phoebe snatched up the nearest dress, a black and gold striped taffeta 1950s shirtwaister, and held it in front of her. ‘You’ll do no such thing. You’ve already made a complete mess of the shop. You can’t be trusted to know your teals from your turquoises or your carmines from your crimsons.’
‘You are a ridiculous woman,’ Sophy said and as if she couldn’t bear to be in Phoebe’s presence a moment longer, she stalked out of the shop without even a coat on and slammed the door so hard that the bell nearly had a nervous breakdown.
Phoebe felt like joining it. Instead she gathered up more dresses. Her poor dresses, shoved about without any respect. ‘Bea, you can help me. Anita, I don’t even want to look at you right now.’
‘It was Sophy’s idea,’ Anita said quickly because there was no loyalty among thieves or between completely incompetent shop assistants. ‘Can I go home early then?’
‘You can but I’m docking it out of your wages,’ Phoebe said although she didn’t have any idea how to do that.
All this time there had been customers in the shop. Goodness knows what they must think? Probably they pitied Phoebe for what she had to put up with.
She turned to the nearest one, a woman in an adorable navy blue princess coat, a silk scarf with a navy and pea green graphic pattern, tied just so around the collar.
Clearly a woman of discerning taste. ‘I’m so sorry that you had to witness that,’ Phoebe allowed herself a careless laugh though the effort almost choked her.
‘You just can’t get the staff. Now is there anything in particular that I can help you with? ’
The woman backed away slowly. ‘I was just looking but I think I’ll come back when things are a little less . . . chaotic,’ she said, keeping eye contact with Phoebe as she sidled towards the door.
Although a very chastened Bea stuck around to help and Phoebe knew exactly where every single dress in the shop belonged, it still took a surprisingly long time to restore order.
By closing time, they were still only half done.
Phoebe was just turning the shop sign to closed when Sophy returned.
She was tight-lipped with two blazing patches of red on her cheeks and stuck around only long enough to grab her bag and coat, have a hissed conversation with Cress who’d just come downstairs, then flounce out again.
Good riddance, Phoebe thought as she slotted a lemon yellow chiffon fit-and-flare dress next to a sherbet yellow maxi with appliqué flowers trailing over the skirt and bodice.
‘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 all the 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.