Page 40 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop (Vintage Dress Shop Romance #3)

‘ A nd now it hurts like hell,’ she admitted to Bea some twelve hours later as she sat in the back office of The Vintage Dress Shop.

‘My head hurts too. All of me hurts. Just between you and me, I now have a greater understanding of why Anita prostrates herself on one of the pink sofas when she has a hangover. I feel utterly wretched.’

‘Never mind you feeling wretched,’ Bea said rather crushingly, ‘can we rewind to the part where you got a tattoo. You got a tattoo! A tattoo of what? Let me see!’

Phoebe lifted up her arm, even that took a superhuman effort, and carefully unbuttoned her cuff and rolled back the sleeve of her dress to reveal her bandaged wrist. ‘I can’t take this off until tonight.

The thing is I wasn’t drunk when I got the tattoo, not really, but I may have had quite a lot to drink after . ’

It was somewhat hazy but the gin and tonic had quickly run out and Phoebe had made the cardinal error of mixing grape and grain (or grape and sloe berries) and had switched to red wine. The devil’s drink.

‘But what did you get tattooed on you?’

‘My favourite Chanel quote,’ Phoebe said, pressing the tips of her fingers to her aching, pounding temples.

‘Which is . . . ?’ Bea prompted.

‘Keep your heels, head and standards high,’ Phoebe recited although she couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure that those words were tattooed on her arm.

She could remember both Claude and Marianne, then Nina, questioning her decision but when Phoebe’s mind was made up about something, then it was very hard to convince her otherwise. Really, it was the story of her life.

By lunchtime, the shop was frantic and there was no way that Phoebe could leave Sophy, Bea and Anita to manage the scrum.

At least she was feeling a lot better after Anita had insisted that Phoebe try her patented hangover cure.

Bacon and fried egg on a toasted everything bagel, a can of full-fat Coke and a family-sized bag of Haribo Starmix.

‘Every time you feel yourself flagging during the afternoon, just down another handful,’ Anita had advised.

‘You’re enjoying this far too much,’ Phoebe told her but she didn’t have the energy to get annoyed about it.

‘I’m absolutely loving it.’ Anita didn’t even try to hide her delight. ‘It’s like my best day ever.’

Now, dosed up on Starmix, Phoebe was on the till – even though her usually elegant fingers were like stabby sausages – where she’d have the least amount of contact with the majority of customers but a vantage point to supervise her team.

Not that she really had the emotional bandwidth to tell Bea that emerald green and Kelly green were not the same green.

Or to signal to Anita that a customer had been in one of the changing cubicles beyond her allotted time.

Or even to tell Sophy that she was going to get a written warning if she played her ‘Christmas Choons’ playlist one more time.

‘Anita was right, this is the best day ever,’ Sophy cheerfully remarked as Phoebe slumped against the till. ‘You should drink more often.’

‘I’m never drinking again. Not a drop will pass my lips,’ Phoebe vowed, lifting her head as a customer approached the counter.

She was a young woman, not much older than twenty, with her hair in milkmaid braids and wearing an appropriately milkmaid-ish dress which wasn’t vintage Laura Ashley but was a pretty good copy of a classic Laura Ashley design. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said to Phoebe. ‘But . . .’

‘If you’re into that seventies boho, country girl chic then we’ve got a pretty Bus Stop maxi dress on the black rail.’ Phoebe gestured in the vague direction of said rail.

‘Absolute queen!’ the girl said rather confusingly, then turned around so her back was to Phoebe and leaned in. ‘Can I get a selfie?’

Phoebe didn’t have time to refuse before the selfie was taken and the girl had been swallowed up by the crowd of shoppers.

Then three customers later as a woman paid for a 1940s Bakelite bangle and necklace set, which Phoebe wrapped up in their trademark Wedgwood blue tissue paper, she took the parcel with a grateful smile and said, ‘Keep up the good work!’

There were more requests for selfies, which Phoebe graciously granted with a gritted smile and there were also a lot of approving smiles and comments, variations on ‘Good for you,’ and ‘Don’t let the haters win.’

‘Am I still recovering from last night or are people acting weird?’ she asked Sophy but Sophy was too busy on the shop floor to really notice.

Phoebe was pleased to escape to the relative calm of the atelier to attend to the one bridal party who were booked in.

Then she had a walk-in, a beautiful and beautifully turned- out young woman, dressed in genuine vintage Chanel and her much older gentleman companion.

‘Hard to tell if it’s her daddy or her sugar daddy,’ Phoebe hissed at Cress en route to the designer room to pull some dresses for her. ‘Not that I like to judge.’

‘You love to judge,’ Cress pointed out as she got up from her sewing machine to have a discreet gawp at the couple who were now canoodling in a way that suggested that they weren’t blood relatives.

It was another, very lucrative hour later before Phoebe took the spiral staircase, one hand gripping the banister very carefully, though usually she careered down it in her four-inch heels without a moment’s thought, back down to the main shop.

There was still a crowd but it had thinned out and it was only an hour until they shut. Phoebe would have given anything to have a long, soaky bath that evening but she’d have to make do with a quick shower.

Things between her and Freddy were civil enough but her days of treating his flat like her second home were long gone.

‘I can’t wait for today to be over,’ she muttered to Bea who was now on the till but mostly glued to her phone. ‘You know, Bea, I am feeling recovered enough to remind you of how I feel about staff being on their phones during work hours.’

‘Yup,’ Bea murmured, eyes still fixed to the screen. ‘It is work. Looking at our socials.’ She raised her head to stare at Phoebe as if she should be behind glass at a museum. ‘I can’t quite believe it but you’re going viral again. There’s even a hashtag.’

Phoebe racked her brains for any heated interactions she’d had recently with customers who had conducted themselves in an unacceptable manner.

‘I’ve been on my best behaviour for at least a week.

Maybe two,’ she huffed. ‘Or is it some archival footage of me being justifiably annoyed when someone has come in to ask if we sell jeans?’

‘Neither.’ Bea put down her phone as a customer approached and, right on cue, came the Saturday final push.

A sudden wave of shoppers in a panic because they had parties to go to and even if their own wardrobes were full to bursting, they still had nothing to wear.

Or they longed for the transformative powers of a new dress.

Even better if it was a new old dress with its very own particular brand of magic.

Phoebe didn’t have time to ponder the reasons for her latest internet cancellation. Instead she was caught up in the last-minute drama of a woman rushing in on a mission to buy the perfect dress because she’d had reliable intel that her boyfriend planned to propose to her that night.

Ten minutes after they should have closed, Phoebe sent her on her way with a midnight blue satin 1950s halter dress, lace overlaying the full skirt, and a matching bolero jacket. ‘Even if he hadn’t been planning to propose, he will once he sees you in that dress,’ Phoebe told her.

Then she shut the door firmly behind the grateful woman, locked it, turned the sign to closed and leaned back with a tiny exhausted sigh.

‘Surely this has been the longest day since records began,’ she enquired plaintively of the other women.

Sophy was cashing up, Bea was returning discarded dresses to the rails, Anita was doing her usual very desultory job with Henry the Hoover.

‘I long to slip my shoes off but I don’t think I’ll be able to get them back on again. ’

Then Phoebe flopped down on one of the pink sofas with such force that Anita’s mouth dropped open and she gasped. ‘Those sofas are for customer use only, young lady,’ she said in a prim voice, which if it was meant to be an impersonation of Phoebe wasn’t a very good one.

‘I’m sorry, Anita, I’m just too tired to rise to the bait,’ Phoebe said sorrowfully then she swung her legs up so she was lying full length, eyes closed, and only stirred when Coco Chanel bustled down the stairs, followed by Cress, and hoisted herself up and then onto Phoebe’s stomach. ‘CC, you weigh a ton.’

‘Now she’s daring to criticise Coco Chanel!’ And Anita was daring to poke the bear again.

Phoebe opened one eye. ‘I might have to sleep here tonight. I’m unable to move.’

‘Budge up, drama queen!’ Sophy shoved Phoebe’s legs to one side so she could sit down. ‘Did you forget that you’ve gone viral again?’

‘Don’t remind me,’ Phoebe groaned, putting her hands over her eyes.

‘Oh, it’s the good kind of viral,’ Cress said, as she put her coat on.

‘Surely there’s no such thing unless it’s a cute video of a dog on a surfboard?’ Phoebe pondered aloud as Sophy took one of the hands that she had over her eyes and put her phone in it.

‘Watch this!’ Sophy ordered and to think that people said that she, Phoebe, was bossy.

This was clearly one of the many parts of the TikTok video Rosie Roberts had posted the other day because there was Phoebe, red in the face, as she said in a very shrill voice, ‘These dresses aren’t boring.

These dresses represent so many different women’s lives.

They capture and preserve a magic moment in time.

Their hopes and dreams on the day that they wore their wedding dress. ’