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‘So what did you think?’ Emma asked me over the phone the morning after her party.
I fiddled with my Rotadex. ‘What did I think of what?’
‘Of Guy, of course! Don’t you think he’s gorgeous?’
‘Oh … yes. He is … gorgeous.’
‘Beautiful blue eyes – especially with his dark hair. It’s a devastating combination.’
I glanced out of the window into New Bond Street. ‘Devastating.’
‘And he’s a good conversationalist. Don’t you agree?’
I could hear the hum of the traffic. ‘I … do.’
‘Plus he’s got such a nice sense of humour.’
‘Hmm.’
‘He’s so nice and normal compared to the other men I’ve dated.’
‘That’s certainly true.’
‘He’s a good person. Best of all,’ she concluded, ‘he’s keen!’
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that Guy had phoned me an hour earlier to ask me out to dinner.
I hadn’t known what to do. Guy had tracked me down easily enough through Sotheby’s switchboard. I was elated, then horrified. I’d thanked him but said that I wouldn’t be able to come. He’d phoned me another three times just that day but I’d been unable to speak to him as I was frantically preparing for an auction of Twentieth-Century Fashion and Accessories. The fourth time Guy had phoned I’d spoken to him briefly, being careful to lower my voice in the open-plan office. ‘You’re very persistent, Guy.’
‘I am, but that’s because I … like you, Phoebe, and I think – if I don’t flatter myself – that you like me.’ I’d tied the lot number to a Pierre Cardin flecked green wool trouser suit from the mid seventies. ‘Why don’t you say yes?’ he pleaded.
‘Well … because … it’s a bit tricky, isn’t it?’
There was an awkward silence. ‘Look, Phoebe … Emma and I are just friends.’
‘Really?’ I inspected what looked suspiciously like a moth-hole on one leg. ‘You seem to have seen quite a bit of her.’
‘Well … that’s largely because Emma rings me and gets tickets for things, like the Goya opening. We’ve hung out together and had a few laughs, but I’ve never given her the impression that I’m …’ His voice trailed away.
‘But it was clear that you’d been to her flat before. You knew exactly where she kept her dustpan and brush,’ I whispered accusingly.
‘Yes – because last week she asked me to mend a leak under her sink and I had to take everything out of the cupboard.’
‘Oh.’ Relief swept through me. ‘I see. But …’
Guy emitted a sigh. ‘Look, Phoebe, I like Emma – she’s very talented and she’s fun.’
‘Oh, she is – she’s lovely.’
‘I find her a bit intense, though,’ he went on. ‘If not slightly bonkers,’ he confided with a nervous laugh. ‘But she and I aren’t … dating. She can’t really think that.’ I didn’t reply. ‘So will you please have dinner with me?’ I felt my resolve weaken. ‘How about next Tuesday?’ I heard him say. ‘At the Wolseley? I’ll book a table for seven thirty. Will you come, Phoebe?’
If I’d had any idea then where it would lead, I’d have said, ‘No. I won’t. Absolutely not. Never.’
‘Yes,’ I heard myself say …
I considered not telling Emma, but couldn’t bring myself to keep it from her, not least because it would be awful if she somehow found out. So I told her on the Saturday when we met at Amici’s, our favourite coffee shop in Marylebone High Street.
‘Guy’s asked you out?’ she repeated faintly. Her pupils seemed to retract with disappointment. ‘Oh.’ Her hand had trembled as she lowered her cup.
‘I haven’t … encouraged him,’ I explained gently. ‘I didn’t … flirt with him at your dinner party, and if you’d rather I didn’t go, then I won’t, but I couldn’t not tell you. Em?’ I reached for her hand, noticing how red her fingertips were from all the stitching and gluing and straw-stretching that she did. ‘Emma – are you okay?’ She stirred her cappuccino then stared out of the window. ‘Because I wouldn’t see him, even once, if you didn’t want me to.’
Emma didn’t reply at first. Her large green eyes strayed to a young couple walking hand in hand on the other side of the street. ‘It’s okay,’ she said after a moment. ‘After all … I hadn’t known him that long, as you pointed out – although he didn’t discourage me from thinking …’ Her eyes suddenly filled. ‘And those roses he brought me. I thought …’ She pressed a paper napkin to her eyes. It had ‘Amici’s’ printed on it. ‘Well,’ she croaked. ‘It doesn’t look as though I’ll be going to Tosca with him after all. Maybe you could take him, Phoebe. He said he was looking forward to it …’
I sighed with frustration. ‘Look, Em, I’m going to say no. If it’s going to make you miserable, then I’m not interested.’
‘No,’ Emma murmured after a moment. She shook her head. ‘You should go – if you like him, which I assume you do, otherwise we’d hardly be having this conversation. Anyway …’ She picked up her bag. ‘I’d better be off. I’ve got a bonnet to be getting on with – for Princess Eugenie, no less.’ She gave me a cheery wave. ‘I’ll speak to you soon.’
But she didn’t return my calls for six weeks …
‘I wish you’d ring Guy,’ I heard Mum say. ‘I think you meant a lot to him. In fact, Phoebe, there’s something I need to tell you …’
I looked at her. ‘What?’
‘Well … Guy phoned me last week.’ I felt a falling sensation, as though I were sliding down a steep incline. ‘He said he’d like to see you, just to talk to you – now don’t shake your head, darling. He feels you’ve been “unfair” – that was the word he used, though he wouldn’t say why. But I suspect you have been unfair, darling – unfair and, quite frankly, idiotic.’ Mum took a comb out of her bag. ‘It’s not as though it’s easy, finding a nice man. I think you’re lucky that he still holds a candle for you after the way you threw him over.’
‘I want nothing to do with him,’ I insisted. ‘I just don’t … feel the same about him.’ Guy knew why.
Mum ran the comb through her wavy blonde hair. ‘I just hope you won’t come to regret it. And I hope you won’t also come to regret leaving Sotheby’s. I still think it’s a shame. You had prestige there, and stability – the excitement of conducting auctions.’
‘The stress of it, you mean.’
‘You had the company of your colleagues,’ she added, ignoring me.
‘And now I’ll have the company of my customers – and of my part-time assistant, when I can find myself one.’ This was something I needed to pursue – there was a fashion auction coming up at Christie’s that I wanted to go to.
‘You had a regular income,’ Mum went on, swapping her comb for a powder compact. ‘And now here you are, opening this … shop.’ She managed to make the word sound like ‘bordello’. ‘What if it doesn’t work out? You’ve borrowed a small fortune, darling …’
‘Thanks for reminding me.’
She dabbed powder on her nose. ‘And it’s going to be such hard work.’
‘Hard work will suit me just fine,’ I said evenly. Because then I’d have less time to think.
‘Anyway, I’ve said my piece,’ she concluded unctuously. She snapped shut her compact and returned it to her bag.
‘And how’s work going?’
Mum grimaced. ‘Not well. There’ve been problems with that huge house on Ladbroke Grove – John’s going insane, which makes it hard for me.’ Mum works as PA to a successful architect, John Cranfield, a job she’s been doing for twenty-two years. ‘It’s not easy,’ she said, ‘but then I’m very lucky to have a job at my age.’ She peered at herself in the mirror. ‘Just look at my face,’ she moaned.
‘It’s a lovely face, Mum.’
She sighed. ‘More furrows than Gordon Ramsay in a fury. None of those new creams seem to have made the slightest difference.’
I thought of Mum’s dressing table. It used to have a single bottle of Oil of Olay on it – now it resembles the unguents counter of a department store with its tubes of Retin A and Vitamin C, its pots of Derma Genesis and Moisture Boost, its pseudo-scientific capsules of slow-release Ceramides and Hyaluronic Acid with Cellular-Nurturing, Epoxy-Restoring this, that and the other.
‘Just dreams in a jar, Mum.’
She prodded her cheeks. ‘Perhaps a little Botox might help … I’ve been toying with the idea.’ She stretched up her brow with the index and middle fingers of her left hand. ‘Sod’s law, it would go wrong and I’d end up with my eyelids round my nostrils. But I do so loathe all these lines.’
‘Then learn to love them. It’s normal to have lines when you’re fifty-nine.’
Mum flinched, as though I’d slapped her. ‘Don’t. I’m dreading getting the bus pass. Why can’t they give us a “taxi pass” when we hit sixty? Then I wouldn’t mind so much.’
‘Anyway, lines don’t make beautiful women less beautiful,’ I went on as I put a stack of Village Vintage carriers behind the till. ‘Just more interesting.’
‘Not to your father.’ I didn’t reply. ‘Mind you, I thought he liked old ruins,’ Mum added dryly. ‘He is an archaeologist, after all. But now here he is with a girl barely older than you are. It’s grotesque,’ she muttered bitterly.
‘It was certainly surprising.’
Mum brushed an imaginary speck off her skirt. ‘You didn’t invite him tonight? Did you?’ In her hazel eyes I saw a heart-rending combination of panic and hope.
‘No I didn’t,’ I replied softly. Not least because she might have come. I wouldn’t have put it past Ruth. Or rather Ruthless.
‘Thirty-six,’ Mum said bitterly, as though it was the ‘six’ that offended her.
‘She must be thirty-eight now,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes – and he’s sixty-two! I wish he’d never done that wretched TV series,’ she wailed.
I took a forest green Hermès Kelly out of its dust bag and put it in a glass display case. ‘You couldn’t have known what would happen, Mum.’
‘And to think I persuaded him – at her behest!’ She picked up a glass of champagne and her wedding ring, which she continues to wear in defiance of my father’s desertion, gleamed in a beam of sunlight. ‘I thought it would help his career,’ she went on miserably. She sipped her fizz. ‘I thought that it would lift his profile and that he’d make more money which would come in handy in our retirement. Then off he goes to film The Big Dig – but the main thing he seems to have been digging’ – Mum grimaced – ‘was her.’ She sipped her champagne again. ‘It was just … ghastly.’
I had to agree. It was one thing for my father to have his first affair in thirty-eight years of marriage; it was quite another for my mother to find out about it in the diary section of the Daily Express. I shuddered as I remembered reading the caption beneath the photo of my father, looking uncharacteristically shifty, with Ruth, outside her Notting Hill flat:
TELLY PROF DUMPS WIFE AMIDST BABY RUMOURS.
‘Do you see much of him, darling?’ I heard Mum ask with forced casualness. ‘Of course, I can’t stop you,’ she went on. ‘And I wouldn’t want to – he’s your father; but, to be honest, the thought of you spending time with him, and her … and … and …’ Mum can’t bring herself to mention the baby.
‘I haven’t seen Dad for ages,’ I said truthfully.
Mum knocked back her champagne then carried the glass out to the kitchen. ‘I’d better not drink any more. It’ll only make me cry. Right,’ she said briskly as she came back, ‘let’s change the subject.’
‘Okay – tell me what you think of the shop. You haven’t seen it for weeks.’
Mum walked round, her elegant little heels tapping over the wooden floor. ‘I like it. It’s not remotely like being in a second-hand shop – it’s more like being somewhere nice, like Phase Eight.’
‘That’s good to hear.’ I lined up the flutes of champagne gently fizzing on the counter.
‘I like the stylish silver mannequins, and there’s a pleasantly uncluttered feel.’
‘That’s because vintage shops can be chaotic – the rails so crammed that you give yourself an upper-body workout just going through them. Here there’s enough light and air between the garments so that browsing will be a pleasure. If an item doesn’t sell, I’ll simply bring out something else. But aren’t the clothes lovely?’
‘Ye-es,’ Mum replied. ‘In a way.’ She nodded at the cupcake dresses. ‘Those are fun.’
‘I know – I adore them.’ I idly wondered who would buy them. ‘And look at this kimono. It’s from 1912. Have you seen the embroidery?’
‘Very pretty …’
‘Pretty? It’s a work of art. And this Balenciaga opera coat. Look at the cut – it’s made in just two pieces, including the sleeves. The construction is amazing.’
‘Hmm …’
‘And this coatdress – it’s by Jacques Fath. Look at the brocade with its pattern of little palm trees. Where could you find something like that today?’
‘That’s all very well, but –’
‘And this Givenchy suit: now this would look great on you, Mum. You can wear a knee-length skirt because you’ve got great legs.’
She shook her head. ‘I’d never wear vintage clothes.’
‘Why not?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve always preferred new things.’
‘I don’t know why.’
‘I’ve told you before, darling – it’s because I grew up in the era of rationing. I had nothing but hideous hand-me-downs – scratchy Shetland jumpers and grey serge skirts and coarse woollen pinafores that smelled like a damp dog when it rained. I used to long for things that no one else had owned, Phoebe. I still do – I can’t help it. Added to which I have a distaste for wearing things that other people have worn.’
‘But everything’s been washed and dry-cleaned. This isn’t a charity shop, Mum,’ I added as I gave the counter a quick wipe. ‘These clothes are in pristine condition.’
‘I know. And it all smells delightfully fresh – I detect no mustiness whatsoever.’ She sniffed the air. ‘Not the faintest whiff of a mothball.’
I plumped up the cushions on the sofa where Dan had been sitting. ‘Then what’s the problem?’
‘It’s the thought of wearing something that belonged to someone who’s probably …’ – she gave a little shudder – ‘died. I have a thing about it,’ she added. ‘I always have had. You and I are different in that way. You’re like your father. You both like old things … piecing them together. I suppose what you’re doing is a kind of archaeology, too,’ she went on. ‘Sartorial archaeology. Ooh, look, someone’s arriving.’
I picked up two glasses of champagne, then, with adrenaline coursing through my veins and a welcoming smile on my face, I stepped forward to greet the people walking through the door. Village Vintage was open for business …
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