A RANDOM ACT OF KINDNESS
Sophie Jenkins

Copyright

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2019

Copyright © Sophie Jenkins 2019

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com

Sophie Jenkins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008281830

Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008281854

Version: 2019-05-20

Dedication

Dedicated to Rowena Jenkins

19.10.1931–3.12.2018

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Lot 1

Lot 2

Lot 3

Lot 4

Kim

Lot 5

Lot 6

Kim

Lot 7

Kim

Lot 8

Lot 9

Kim

Lot 10

Lot 11

Lot 12

Lot 13

Lot 14

Kim

Lot 15

Lot 16

Kim

Lot 17

Lot 18

Kim

Lot 19

Lot 20

Lot 21

Lot 22

Lot 23

Kim

Lot 24

Lot 25

Kim

Lot 26

Lot 27

Lot 28

Lot 29

Kim

Cato Hamilton Auctioneers & Fern Banks Vintage Auction Catalogue

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

Also by Sophie Jenkins

About the Publisher

LOT 1
A Chanel-style black-and-white cotton tweed suit with bracelet-length sleeves, double ‘C’ gilt buttons, chain-weighted hem and matching skirt.

Most stories start with action. This isn’t one of them. Mine starts with indecision. It’s a warm Sunday evening and I’m dragging my wheelie case over the cobbled stones of Camden Market, pondering the big issues of my life. Can I really make a living selling vintage dresses from one small stand? Should I call in at Cotton’s Rhum Shack to cheer myself up before going home?

The din of the case rattling on the cobbles is attracting some negative attention from passers-by in an annoyed ‘What the hell is that noise?’ kind of way. It’s a cheap black suitcase, with nothing going for it except that it’s big enough to carry my stock of frocks.

I come out through the imposing arch of Stables Market onto the busy Chalk Farm Road and I stand on the kerb, still undecided. Quick drink? Across the way, the lights in Cotton’s Rhum Shack are gleaming. It’s snug and inviting, located between a music shop and one selling white crockery. Right now, there’s a gap in the traffic and I’ve got the chance to dash across. Still, something makes me hesitate. It’s been a long day and I haven’t sold much so the case is heavy. If I turn right past the Lock and trundle my case along the towpath, I’ll be home. I can hang up the dresses, kick off my shoes, undo my fitted jacket and relax. Simple choice. Drink, or home?

Before I reach a decision, a woman coming along the pavement catches my eye. I see her now exactly as I did the first time we met, in a series of close-ups – the scarlet lips, the little Chanel suit, the black silk turban covering her dark hair, her sharp little face, faux pearls, a black patent handbag with intertwined Cs hanging from the crook of her elbow. She wears the outfit as naturally as if it’s her skin. It is the perfect fit. With the tick-tick-tick of her heels, she’s a combination of sound and vision – that confident, moneyed walk; chin tilted upwards, completely self-contained except for the way her eyes flick slyly towards me to gauge the effect she’s having.

I’ve imagined this moment for a long time.

I feel a surge of happiness and forget about the Rhum Shack. This is my chance to thank her, I decide, for the way she changed my life one day a few years ago.

I was very down at the time; stuck in a dark place. What turned me around was that she noticed me, a total stranger, when I thought I was invisible; she saw through my misery to the person I wanted to be; she told me in a few kind, well-chosen words how to be the person I could be.

I want her to see my transformation.

Transformation!

What a word.

It’s the best word in the English language.

She made me realise that we’re not fixed, rooted firmly in our inadequacies, but that we can change who we are whenever we choose; we can pick up the kaleidoscope, shake it and transform ourselves again and again. We can choose the way we face the world. We can choose the way the world sees us.

I’m smiling; I can’t help it. I wish I’d been the one who’d dressed her all up in black and white with those bright red lips.

As she gets closer she, in turn, is studying my outfit with equally blatant curiosity, from my shoes to my confidence-boosting slightly masculine Prince of Wales check jacket with shoulder pads and the nipped-in waist.

I lower my white sunglasses and my eyes meet hers.

She briefly raises one fine eyebrow and smiles at me approvingly.

I love that smile. It makes my day.

‘Darling, you startled me, you know!’ she says warmly. Dahlink, you stertled me! … Her accent is German or Austrian, strong and precise. ‘That suit! So chic! Suddenly, it’s 1949 again – I thought I was dead all of a sudden, bof! God knows, I’ve practised, but here?’ A train thunders over the bridge and she looks around, then winces and covers her ears at the trailing noise until it fades.

She folds her arms and looks at me again intently from head to foot, then works her way up once more – shoes, knees, skirt, jacket – and she nods her approval. ‘Perfect.’ She adds in a whisper from behind her slender hand, ‘Except for that suitcase, of course.’

This time around, she’s not looking at me with gentle compassion but with humour.

I look at my scruffy case and laugh. ‘Grim, isn’t it? But it’s practical.’

‘Oh, prektikel! Well then!’

Does she remember me? If she doesn’t, I’ll take that as a compliment because it’s a sign of how much I’ve changed.

Suddenly, her expression changes to one of alarm.

‘Oh! My bus is coming!’ she says. ‘Excuse me! Goodbye!’

The number twenty-four is coming up under the bridge and she spins around and hurries in her heels towards the bus stop, pearls jingling, her handbag swinging from the crook of her elbow. Waving at the driver, she reaches in her bag for her travel card. In her rush, she’s dropping her money. Coins are rolling over the pavement, spinning in all directions.

I crouch to gather them up for her. The number twenty-four bus comes alongside us, gusting warm fumes, and she hurries onto it.

‘Wait!’ I call, picking up as much of her cash as I can, but she doesn’t hear me, so I grab my case and step onto the bus just as the doors are closing. I’ve forgotten just how heavy my wheelie bag is. Before I can hoist it on board, the doors momentarily close on my arm.

As I yelp and let go, the driver opens the door again and a dark-haired, broad-shouldered guy in a pink floral shirt and jeans grabs the case by the handle before it falls to the ground. ‘It’s okay! I’ve got it!’ he says.

I sum him up at a glance. Not the fact that he’s good-looking and his eyes are deep blue; that’s just a quirk of nature and not a good indicator of character. What I notice is that his pink shirt is crisply ironed and he’s wearing tan leather shoes polished to a shine. For that reason, I immediately trust him.

‘Thank you!’ I say gratefully, then I hurry up the aisle to the woman in the Chanel suit and hand back her money.

She looks from me to her empty bag with great astonishment – what? Her cash has been trickling out of it? And I’ve been picking it up as it rolled away? ‘Ach, you are kindness itself!’ she says, kissing her fingers and scattering goodwill my way.

Good deed done, I go to get off the bus, when I suddenly realise that the man in the pink shirt hasn’t got on behind me. I wonder where he is and what he’s done with my suitcase.

And then I realise he’s taken it.

Not straight away – I’m a trusting sort of person and I have to double-check before it sinks in. First of all, I think wryly, ha ha, wouldn’t it be ironic if he’s run off with it when I’m here doing a good turn? And then I turn to the driver: ‘That man who had my bag, what did he do with it?’

The driver shrugs and puffs out his cheeks sympathetically then closes the doors.

‘Stop, I’m getting off,’ I say in a panic.

He opens the doors again, so I jump off the bus and look up and down the road with insane optimism as the bus pulls away.

The opportunistic thief has gone and stolen my case.

I lean against the high stone wall of Stables Market, taking deep breaths and pressing my heart back under my ribs.

This great, indescribable sense of loss comes over me, closing my throat with grief.

Gone. Stolen – my beautiful clothes; the clothes that are my livelihood and my dreams.

LOT 2
A Paul Smith gentleman’s pink slim-fit floral shirt, size medium.

Once the initial wave of shock passes, I straighten up and force myself to think about things rationally. I mean, that suitcase is so hideously noisy that no thief in his right mind would want to drag it for any distance. And who wants a load of old clothes, anyway? (Apart from me, obviously.)

First, because of the noise of my rickety case, I’m guessing the man wouldn’t have gone far. He’d probably nip down one of the residential side streets, out of sight, and find a quiet place to rummage through the contents of the bag, to see if there was anything in there worth keeping. And when he found that there wasn’t, I reassure myself, he’d dump it and walk away.

Guided by instinct and a bit of local knowledge, I head to Castlehaven Road, where there’s a large triangle of overgrown grass surrounded by wooden benches, known optimistically as The Gardens, which is usually deserted.

Today it’s busy. Circling each other on skateboards are three boys – for a hopeful but disappointing moment it sounds just like the wheels on my case. On one of the benches, two tanned and amiable drunks are making philosophical conversation through the medium of Carlsberg Special Brew lager.

The kids watch me suspiciously as I walk around the perimeter of the garden, eyes alert, holding firmly on to my handbag and visualising my scattered clothing fluttering in the long grass like injured birds (this is how sure I am I’ll find them).

But I don’t find them. On the path, the boys circle like sharks. I leave the gardens and walk slowly back to Chalk Farm Road, knowing I should keep on looking but also knowing in my heart how pointless it could be. The guy with my case could have headed straight for the towpath, or for the car park in the superstore, or down any of the other side streets, or he could have gone straight home. I think about my pathetic gratitude as he’d held my case for me while I triumphantly dashed onto the bus to hand the old lady her money back. That’s what you get for helping someone out, I reflect bitterly.

Back on Chalk Farm Road I look across towards the market. Miraculously, I suddenly see that pink shirt as he reappears right at the entrance to the Stables with my suitcase. ‘Hey!’ I yell. ‘Excuse me!’

‘Hey!’

We’re shouting across the traffic and waving our arms at each other.

‘Wait there!’ I’m dashing across in my pencil skirt, dodging cars – this is the way to cross a road in London: assertively. ‘My bag!’ I say warmly and with happy relief until I see he’s holding a small shaggy brown dog on a lead. I feel a familiar rush of fear and I keep a distance between us. I’ve got a thing about dogs.

‘Sorry,’ he explains. ‘I let go of the lead when I saw you struggling and my dog went back into the Stables to investigate the remains of someone’s burger. When I came back and I couldn’t see you, I kind of thought I’d better wait here, you know, as it was the last place we saw each other.’

I don’t know what it is about that sentence that melts my heart. It’s as if we’re old friends and that’s what we do, we come back to the last place we saw each other.

‘Thanks. Really. You don’t know what it means, to get my case back. It contains all of my best stock.’ My voice is wobbling with relief. He’s got a beautiful face. His nose is big and noble. He looks trustworthy and somehow sensitive, and his deep blue eyes never leave mine. The pink shirt sets off his tan. And he’s clearly kind. I grab the case, using it as a shield between the dog and me. ‘Thank you,’ I say to him again, because I’m still so relieved at getting it back.

‘My pleasure.’ He holds out his hand. ‘David Westwood.’

‘Really? Any relation to Vivienne?’ I ask, studying him with interest.

His blue eyes narrow as if he’s shortsighted and trying to focus. ‘Vivienne?’

‘She’s a fashion designer. Same surname.’

He laughs and shakes his head. ‘No, sorry. No relation.’

‘I’m Fern Banks.’ I jerk my head towards the entrance. ‘I work here.’

‘I guessed that when you talked about your stock.’ He looks interested. ‘So, how’s it working out for you?’

‘It’s early days,’ I reply; this is the reassuring fact that I hold on to in the quiet times.

‘I’ve got my name down for a stall.’

I give a shiver of serendipity. ‘Really? What are you selling?’

‘Light boxes.’ His gaze leaves mine for a moment. ‘I’m having a career change,’ he adds.

There’s something defensive about the way he says it that makes me glance up at him curiously, but I’m just happy that he’s not selling clothes; I’ve got enough competition as it is. And I’m still buzzing from getting my case back, so I say, ‘There’s a stall going next to mine. It’s small, though.’

‘Where exactly is it?’

‘It’s right next to the entrance to the covered market.’

He looks down at my case thoughtfully. ‘But there’s no storage, right?’

I shrug. ‘True.’ I feel a bit disappointed, even though it makes no difference to me whether he’s interested in the stall or not; I don’t know the guy and I’m just trying to be helpful. All the same, I really want him to take it. Nothing to do with his looks; anyway, I’m in a relationship. ‘My boyfriend thinks it’s a good spot because there’s plenty of through traffic,’ I hear myself say, just so we’re clear that my motives are entirely innocent. Then I inwardly cringe – first, because I sound like the kind of woman who needs reassurance from a man about her decisions and secondly, calling him ‘my boyfriend’ makes me sound adolescent.

Ideally, David Westwood would look devastated at the news I’m not single, but instead he nods and says seriously, ‘Through traffic is very important. Actually, I’m trying to get a place indoors, in the Market Hall.’

‘Oh, lovely!’ I say with deep insincerity.

‘My girlfriend, Gigi, says the atmosphere is really friendly in there. And of course it’s under cover.’

My girlfriend, Gigi. So here we are, two strangers making it absolutely clear that we’re all coupled up so that there can never be any misunderstanding about our motives.

I knew a Gigi at school and I’m just about to mention it, when I notice that the shaggy brown dog is getting restless. It gets to its feet and stretches before sniffing with great deliberation around his owner’s shoes. As if he can sense my gaze on him, he suddenly lifts his head and looks directly at me, his eyes alert under two blond eyebrows.

I look away quickly, feeling my heart rate rise. I try never to make eye contact with a dog, in case it sees it as a challenge and goes for me, so I wrap things up quickly, while I’ve still got the chance. ‘Well, David, thanks again for your good deed, minding my case,’ I say briskly. ‘I appreciate it.’

He looks bemused. ‘You’re welcome.’

The dog is tugging him towards Chalk Farm Tube, in the general direction of Cotton’s Rhum Shack. So that settles it. I’ll go the other way: straight home.

David Westwood raises his hand to wave goodbye; he walks away with his pink shirt flapping in the breeze.

I’m still looking at him, when he unexpectedly turns around.

‘Hey, Fern?’

‘What?’

‘I’d better watch myself, hadn’t I?’ he says, laughing. ‘You know what they say, right? No good deed ever goes unpunished.’

LOT 3
Black one-sleeved asymmetrical dress, rough stitching feature, labelled Comme des Garçons, Post Nuclear collection, 1980.

Home is along the Regent’s Canal towpath; a one-bedroom basement flat in Primrose Hill. The flat isn’t actually mine – my parents own it. It’s easy to get to, situated between the two Northern line stations of Camden Town and Chalk Farm. It’s a ten-minute walk along the canal from Camden Lock. It used to be my father’s pied-à-terre during the week and when he retired I moved in as a sort of tenant, to ‘look after the property’, as they put it, on a temporary basis until I save enough for a deposit for my own place. The emphasis is on the word temporary. However, I haven’t yet told them I’ve been fired from my dream job as personal stylist in a large department store, and that getting my own place has become an ever more distant and unlikely prospect.

In the meantime, I’m very grateful to live here.

The walk is beautiful in the early mornings; cyclists say hello, walkers smile, the air is fresh and the shadows of the bridges cast cool stripes across the towpath. The sky is filled with gulls shrieking like the sound of the harbour when the fishing boats come in. At night, though, it’s a different place – the smell of dope hangs in the air, empty lager tins bob on the glossy canal and the bridges are lit up with violet lights.

The decor in the flat is early 21st-century modern; this is my father’s taste: Barcelona chairs, glass console tables, a built-in glass wine rack and a flatscreen TV. The flat isn’t very big, but it has a brick-lined utility room that stretches under the pavement on the street, which I use as my walk-in wardrobe. The living area is divided between the kitchen at one end and the lounge at the other, with a hallway leading to the bathroom and bedroom. The bedroom is in an extension and looks out on a small L-shaped garden with raised decking and palm trees, which my father created in the new millennium when he heard on Gardeners’ Question Time that summer droughts would turn all gardens into deserts.

Since then it seems to have created its own microclimate. The hardy banana plants bear fruit, stubby little bananas that I’ve never been tempted to eat, then having thrown their energy into fruiting and fulfilling their mission, they give up and die and a new plant grows. All this happens without any help from me apart from a quick swaddle in the winter with gardening fleece.

The foliage is pretty to look out on and it’s fairly low maintenance. My father rings me up now and then to remind me to do the ‘brown-bitting’, as he calls it, which means cutting off the dead bits so that the palms look respectably green – it’s something I generally put off until just before my parents visit.

What else? I’ve got good neighbours. Above me lives Lucy Mills, an actor. The top floor is occasionally inhabited by a retired Welsh couple who travel a lot.

As well as my pitch in Camden Market, I sell clothes online. As a hobby it was fun, but as an actual source of income it’s not going that well, to be honest. The main problem is, I don’t like sending dresses out into a void. I like to know the person they’re going to; their shape, their colouring, their temperament.

The returns are a problem. Basically, women are now a different shape from what they used to be. And even though I write down the measurements of each garment along with a ‘will this fit you’ exact measurement guide, people really can’t be bothered to use a tape measure – does anyone even have a tape measure these days? I give the approximate equivalent dress size (this will roughly fit a size 10 or 12), but even if it does fit, that doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily suit a person. If shoppers like the look of something onscreen, they’ll give it a try and then send it back if it’s not suitable. This means that my income is worryingly unstable from day to day. It’s not a good feeling to be solvent at the beginning of the week and then over the next few days have to return the money and go back to square one.

And people aren’t always honest. Sometimes the clothes come back worn, or splashed with red wine, or smelling of cigarette smoke. And if I point this out in a phone call they’ll argue that I’ve ‘sold them as preowned so obviously … blah blah blah’. And that’s the reason for the one-star stroppy reviews that say if it had been possible to give less than one star they would have, because I was rude or reluctant to refund the money.

One of the main selling points of wearing vintage is that the piece is a one-off. It’s also one of the main drawbacks; the popular dresses are snapped up quickly and that’s another reason my ratings are low – it’s often down to disgruntled shoppers.

It’s hard work being self-employed, but since I lost my dream job as a personal stylist, this is my plan B. And that’s where I’m at now; trying to make it work. My long-term aim is to have a solid customer base of people to shop for. I love that feeling you get when you see a garment that brings to mind a person, when you find a dress that’s totally them, and all you want to do is reunite them.

In Camden Market at the weekends, it’s crazy. One month into my new venture, I’ve had a couple of really good days, which keep me going. A lot of gorgeous girls come through looking for something original to wear – model agency scouts find a lot of new faces in Camden – but the customers I like best are the ones who are shy and uncertain and who dress for comfort in safe colours: grey, beige, brown. They look warily at my stall as they hurry past, and then come back and try not to catch my eye. What keeps me going is when they find something and suddenly see themselves through new eyes. They are my dream customers.

Unfortunately, I don’t come across them very often.

I trundle the case up the horse ramp from the towpath and halfway along my street, I bump it down the steps to the basement.

The first thing I do is hang the dresses up in the utility room under the pavement. There’s no storage at my stall, which means I have to pack and unpack my stock every day.

While I’m getting on with this, vaguely thinking of my encounter with David Westwood, I hear myself saying ‘Any relation to Vivienne?’ in that cringy way and David Westwood laughing, ‘No. Sorry.’

And then my thoughts switch to the old woman wearing Chanel and red lipstick, model slim in her black-and-white Chanel suit, perfect in it, and that approving expression in her eyes when she saw me.

Unpacking a Comme des Garçons dress that still hasn’t sold on the stall after a month, I shake the creases out and put it on my mannequin, Dolly. With her moulded black hair and rosebud lips, Dolly seems particularly supercilious and unhelpful today. I bought her from Blustons in Kentish Town when it closed down. Blustons was famous for the Fifties-style showstopping red-and-white polka-dot halterneck dress in the window that Dolly modelled wonderfully for many years.

I move Dolly into the light and photograph her for the website. My phone rings and I pick up to my father, who tells me they are having dinner with the Bennetts and that they’ll be staying at the flat overnight. Oh joy!

First, this means I’ll be sleeping on the sofa. Secondly, I’ll have to tell them that I’ve lost my job – I’ve so far managed to put this off for a month by keeping our phone calls short.

There’s nothing wrong with my father; he’s a decent enough guy and he’d probably understand if I told him the whole story. But my mother’s a different matter. I’m always uncomfortable with her, never able to relax. She modelled in the Seventies, at the time when models dictated the popularity of women’s fashion, and my love of clothes has totally come from her. She never reached the worldwide popularity of models Jerry Hall and Christie Brinkley, but for a while she moved in the right circles, and the glitter and glamour of those times has never faded for her – she still has every copy of Elle, Cosmopolitan and Vogue magazines in which she featured.

When it became obvious in my teens that I was too short to be a fashion model – I overheard her tell a friend, regretfully, that I’d inherited my father’s looks and her brains – I thought it would please her if I studied fashion design. But at St Martin’s, the more I found out about the great designers, the more certain I was that I could never equal them. As a daughter, I’m an all-round disappointment and losing my job doesn’t help.

To take my mind off my worries, I call my boyfriend, Mick, who’s in Amsterdam with his band, just to say hello. It goes to voicemail, so I leave him a message to say hi.

Mick and I have been dating for nine months in a friends-with-benefits kind of way. We met at Bestival on the Isle of Wight. He’s got red hair and a beard that covers most of his very beautiful face. He’s a sound engineer and spends a lot of time travelling. Sometimes I meet up with him somewhere like Hamburg or Paris, and when he’s in London he stays over and we have fun together, but other than that, I don’t know where the relationship is heading, if anywhere. We both like it the way it is. He’s keen on the idea of free spirits; figuratively and literally – no commitment and drinks on the house. His job means that he’s not home a lot, but I don’t mind. Honestly, it suits me, too.

In a flurry of activity, I make up my bed for my parents with fresh linen, do a bit of desultory tidying, spray the place with Febreze, and then I go shopping for vodka, Worcestershire sauce, tomato juice and celery so I can make some Bloody Marys to welcome my parents with. It’s ‘their tipple’, as they put it, and because of the tomato juice element they knock it back as if it’s a health food, which is fine with me.

As a family we like each other a lot better after a drink.

I start watching television and around ten thirty, I give up on my welcoming committee duties and fall asleep.

I wake up as I hear them coming down the steps sometime later and listen to the key rattling in the lock. In my lowest moods I decide I’ll ask for that key back, ‘for a friend’, an excuse I’ve used before, but they seem to have a little stash of them in reserve in case I absentmindedly forget who owns the place.

With a wide smile of welcome, I jump to my feet and there’s my father in a Burberry trench coat, carrying an overnight bag and holding the door for my mother, who comes in with her cream hair blending with her fur-trimmed cream cape, fluttering, elegant and distant.

‘Hi! Hi! Come in!’ I say, even though they’re already very much inside.

I don’t recognise my mother at first. Without a shadow of a doubt, even despite my habit of scrutinising everyone, I would have passed her in the street.

My father has mentioned my mother’s ‘tweaks’, as he calls them, and I realise that one of them has involved filling the dimple in her chin. I have the very same dimple and now she’s got rid of hers … What does that mean? We both have the same wide mouth too, only hers is now poutier, even though she’d pouted perfectly adequately with the old one. And her eyes, which had been large and round, are smaller, as if her real face is sitting some distance behind the one she’s currently wearing. She has the eyeholes of Melania Trump.

She looks me up and down without a word, taking in my pencil skirt and white silk blouse. If she could have frowned, she would have. She recoils with a gasp when she sees Dolly. Overreacting is an affectation she’s developed.

‘You’ve still got that ugly old thing,’ she says.

I cover up Dolly’s ears. ‘Don’t offend her, she’ll come and get you in the night.’

My mother pretends not to hear.

‘Bloody Marys,’ I say cheerfully, sweeping my hand in the direction of the kitchen island as if I’m introducing them to each other.

‘Thank you, darling,’ my father says, putting his hands on my shoulders briefly in what passes as a hug.

‘It’s warm in here,’ my mother remarks in a troubled way. She looks around with the restlessness of discontent, fanning her strange and unfamiliar face. ‘Isn’t it warm?’

It isn’t, actually, because the heating went off at ten, but my mother’s menopausal, so I agree with her. ‘It’s been very sunny today and hot air sinks, doesn’t it?’

‘It rises,’ my father says.

‘It must be affecting us on its way up again,’ I say brightly. Honestly, I’ve no idea who I am when I’m with my parents. They seem to bring out my inner inanity. When I’m with them, they’re the grown-ups and I regress to some attitude of despicable girlishness that isn’t really me at all.

I stir my drink with my celery stick, mixing in the spices and turning it dark brown. Wow, it’s strong.

They sit on the sofa with a sigh and I perch on the footstool opposite them with an eagerness I don’t feel. ‘How are the Bennetts?’ These are the old friends they’ve had dinner with.

‘Oh, you know,’ my mother says dismissively. ‘Ruth drinks too much.’ She pulls her cape around her and gulps hers down. ‘How’s work?’ she asks with an emphasis on work. Her voice is hoarse and it catches in her throat. ‘Still dressing people? However would they manage to go out in public without you?’

That’s sarcasm, that is, but it gives me the chance to look at her properly without appearing to stare. ‘How would they go out in public without me? Naked, I suppose,’ I reply, also with sarcasm.

‘Have people got no taste of their own?’ my mother asks.

I take a large gulp of my drink and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand in a show of reckless bravado. ‘Well, you don’t have to worry about people’s taste anymore, because I’ve been fired.’ I’d been dreading breaking this bit of news to them but now, ta-da! It’s done!

I brace myself for some yelling, because being with them is as nerve-racking as living on the edge of a volcano, but unusually for my parents they seem at a loss for words.

‘Fern, Fern.’ My father closes his eyes and shakes his head in despair. He looks more resigned than surprised. ‘You were fired? Why?’

I give them the short version of the story.

‘When did this happen?’

‘A month ago.’

‘And you’re only telling us now?’

They glance at each other over their drinks. I’ve confirmed their deepest fears about me.

‘What are you going to do?’ my father asks. ‘Are you getting Jobseeker’s Allowance?’

‘No.’ I wipe the condensation off my glass with my thumb. ‘I’m concentrating on my vintage clothing company. I’m a fashion curator.’

‘Really?’ My mother looks at me with a flicker of animation and for a moment we connect briefly with a small spark of mutual passion that makes my spirits lift.

My father, too, looks hopeful. ‘You’ve got business premises?’

‘I’ve got a stall in Camden Market,’ I tell them.

They freeze. It’s as if we’ve got some kind of satellite time-lapse going on; it takes them a few seconds for the horrible implications to sink in.

All empathy wiped clean once more, my mother says suspiciously, ‘You’re telling us you’re a market trader?’ as if it’s some elaborate story I’ve made up to make a fool of her.

I take a business card out of my wallet, which depicts me standing against a wall of flowers in a Sixties minidress. ‘Look!’ I say. ‘That dress is Pucci. You had one like that, didn’t you?’

She knows I’m trying to get around her and she doesn’t reply.

Some vague desperation for that old connection makes me persevere. ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it? Marilyn Munro was buried in Pucci, you know.’

‘I’m assuming not in this specific dress.’

Ha ha, she’s hilarious, my mother.

She reads the business card slowly, at arm’s-length, too proud for reading glasses. ‘Fern Banks Vintage.’ She hands it back to me and sighs, summing up my enterprise with her own brand of snobbery. ‘In other words, you’re selling people’s cast-offs.’

That hurts.

I reply lightly, forcing a smile. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘And you hope to make a living this way?’ my father asks.

‘Yes, I do. I never pay over the odds. I look for styles and buy diffusion lines, nothing too out there, just clothes for women to look good in.’

‘As opposed to?’

‘Look …’ I’m talking too fast and too defensively, I know, but I want them to understand that this is something I can make a go of. ‘This is something I’m actually good at. And I’m building a decent client list.’ I’m stretching the truth a bit here, obviously. But it’s early days.

A deep weariness has come over them.

See? I think bitterly. Dressing people up in a department store doesn’t seem such a bad job now, does it?

My mother expresses her disapproval by emanating a dense and disappointed silence.

I play with a button on the Barcelona footstool. The silence is just starting to get uncomfortable, when: ‘How’s Mick?’ my father asks casually, breaking it.

That didn’t take long, did it? ‘He’s fine! He sends his love.’ I say that to annoy them. It’s not the kind of thing that Mick would do, send his love to my parents. They’ve only met once, briefly, on my birthday, and he wasn’t what they wanted for me. What he thought of them, he didn’t say. He never gives them a second thought.

They digest my comment for a moment.

‘Your mother and I have been talking about the flat,’ my father says, crossing one leg over the other.

‘Oh, really?’ I feel nervous, as if I’m no longer on solid ground, and I stare at his feet. For a moment I think that what I’m seeing is his pale bare ankle, but no, he’s wearing beige socks.

‘The reason we’re keeping it in our name, apart from the issue of capital gains tax, is because we feel it’s financially safer. For you, you understand,’ he adds.

‘How so?’

He and my mother exchange a look.

‘Have you thought,’ my mother says, ‘that Mick might simply be out for what he can get?’

This is a brand-new put-down out of a whole array of criticisms. I mean, Mick couldn’t possibly like me for my company, my looks and the fact the sex is good, could he? No. He’s after my flat. Correction: their flat. I take another mouthful of my drink. My eyes water. It hits the back of my nose like mustard powder. It’s more like a punishment than a cocktail.

‘He’s got his own house,’ I point out. ‘In Harpenden.’

That shakes them.

‘Actually his own?’ my father asks dubiously.

‘Yes. Actually his own.’ I’ve got a decent imagination, but even I couldn’t invent a house in Harpenden.

My mother gives me the look she uses when she suspects me of lying. I think of getting up to show her photographs of it on my phone, but I change my mind and sink back down again because honestly, it’s not worth the effort.

I crunch on my celery stick and look at her face with those new, strange eyes and wonder what my father thinks about it. The work she’s had done ages her. Only people afraid of losing their looks have that kind of extreme appearance, the kind that makes them look stretched and plumped and filled and tightened. When you see a face like that you immediately put them in the category of the middle-aged. When I was a personal stylist I saw the same shiny foreheads and immobile mouths on a daily basis. It rarely made women look young. It made them look as if the humanity had been taken out of them.

My parents are leaning towards each other on the red sofa, still recovering from the Harpenden house revelation, forcing them to come up with some new reason for protecting me from Mick or protecting the flat from me. Time to change the subject.

‘I saw an interesting woman today. You’d have liked her,’ I say to my mother. ‘She was wearing Chanel.’

‘You sold her Chanel?’ My mother brightens, visibly impressed. ‘Is she anyone we’d know?’

She’s got the wrong end of the stick, but I don’t want to ruin it, so I smile brightly. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say. Client confidentiality. Can I refresh your glass?’

Vodka, tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, celery salt, fresh celery. Glasses refreshed, I sit down again on the red footstool and the hit of my drink is so strong that for a moment I have the horrible feeling I’m going to topple off it.

‘Is she a television personality?’ my mother persists eagerly, hankering after the days when she, too, was a name and hung out with the stars.

I smile enigmatically, not wanting to ruin it for her.

‘I can guess who it is,’ she says smugly, mollified by her own imagination.

The doorbell rings. In my semi-drunk state it doesn’t sound like the doorbell. It sounds like an alarm, harsh and urgent and motivating, and the three of us are galvanised out of our alcohol-numbed torpor into action, struggling to our feet in uncomprehending panic.

‘Who is it?’ my mother asks, keeping her voice low as if we’re in hiding.

I open the door and it’s my upstairs neighbour, Lucy. She comes in full of drunken merriment. ‘Hey! I saw your light on and I—’ She suddenly notices my parents. ‘Oh, hello!’

I can guess what my mother is thinking behind her frozen face. She hates people who drop in unexpectedly. She thinks it’s the height of rudeness.

‘Bloody Mary?’ I ask Lucy.

‘Ooh, yes. Is this a party?’

Lucy’s got curly blonde hair and the kind of cheerful superficiality that actors are good at during those times when they’re not talking about a new role. They take acting seriously, but they treat life with a very light touch, which is a welcome relief if you belong to my family. Lucy’s wearing a black unstructured asymmetric dress with a lot of zips. Comme des Garçons. I know because I sold it to her. She’s playing Lady Macbeth at The Gatehouse and she still has her stage make-up on. She’s electrified with post-performance adrenaline.

Lucy’s ambition is to direct. She’s been in all the best crime dramas: Scott & Bailey, Silent Witness, Endeavour, Shetland. Whenever she’s in something, she invites me upstairs so we can watch it together on her flatscreen TV and she points out the flaws in the acting, things that I’d never have noticed – like when someone fluffs a line, or winces before the knife’s been raised, or fails to respond to the scene.

And that’s the way she’s looking at me now, slightly critically, as if I’m not playing the part of host very well, so I introduce her to my parents and while I mix another jug of Bloody Marys she fills us in on how the night has gone. The theatre was packed. There had been a heckler. The audience was so caught up that at the end there was a long, thick silence after Malcolm’s closing lines.

‘Malcolm McDowell?’ my mother asks hopefully, ready to claim acquaintance because he bought her a drink once.

‘Malcolm. Duncan’s son,’ Lucy says. ‘“This dead butcher and his fiend-like queen”.’

My mother’s disappointed. ‘A dead butcher?’ she echoes, confused.

‘He’s talking about Macbeth! The fiend-like queen – that’s me. And they’re holding up Macbeth’s head and this orange light comes over them – it’s like an Isis video. Cheers!’

Lucy brings a whole new element to the night. There are some things that my parents will only say to me, which shows some kind of loyalty, I suppose, so the conversation stops being personal. Lucy sits on the footstool and I sit on the Barcelona chair while my parents loll on the sofa. We’ve reached the hazy stage of drunkenness where words become particularly meaningful.

Lucy’s still talking about the play and her excitement about the concept of the ‘Pahr off sgestion’.

We’re momentarily perplexed but rooting for the concept anyway. ‘Par? Path?’ I prompt helpfully.

She takes a couple of shots at it.

‘Parf – parf –.’ She takes another sip of the drink to clear her head and leans forward. ‘Power of suggestion,’ she says, exaggerating the words at us as if we’re deaf. ‘The three Weird Sisters, psychics as we call them, I play second psychic as well … anyway, the thing is, they put the idea into Macbeth’s head. They plant it there. Hadn’t occurred to him to become the Thane of Cawdor before then but he thought, you know what? I can do that. See what I mean? It’s dark, right?’

‘Aha! Brainwashing,’ my father says.

‘Not brainwashing.’

‘Visualisation,’ I say.

‘You see?’ Lucy asks happily.

‘They didn’t read the future, they just gave him a goal to aim for,’ my father says.

‘Yes!’

My mother’s face turns my way. ‘What are your goals, Fern?’

‘To make a success of my business.’

She remains unimpressed. ‘That’s it?’

‘Well,’ I shrug, ‘the Thane of Cawdor thing’s already gone.’

My mother hates flippancy. ‘She had so much promise,’ she says, turning to Lucy for support. ‘She’s thrown it all away. She needs to do more with her life.’

‘Why does she?’ Lucy asks. ‘She’s got a nice life. You’ve got a nice life, Fern, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’ I want to hug her.

My mother says icily, ‘She’s got a market stall.’

Cheerfully unaware, Lucy replies, ‘I know. Great, isn’t it? There was a waiting list and everything! She was really lucky to get it, weren’t you, Fern?’

My mother’s not used to people disagreeing with her. She glares at Lucy from the depths of her narrow eye sockets. When Lucy remains oblivious to the silent death stare, my mother stands up and announces coldly, ‘I’m going to bed.’

Retires: hurt.

‘Goodnight,’ we say in unison.

As she stands, the fur on her cape quivers as if it’s alive – and about to throttle her.

The thought comes into my head with no particular emotion or malice.

My mother goes through the door that leads to the bathroom and bedroom and closes it quite firmly.

‘Was it something I said?’ Lucy asks, surprised.

My father looks at his watch. ‘My word! It is getting awfully late. It’s almost midnight.’ He puts his glass down and stands up.

I stand up, too, and he gives me a hug, a proper hug, and for a moment I feel his soft, shaved cheek against mine.

He says goodnight to Lucy and follows my mother to bed.

‘Insane!’ Lucy whispers thrillingly, widening her eyes at me after he’s gone. ‘Are they always like this?’

I think about it. ‘Actually, yeah.’

‘What has she got against market stalls?’

I shrug and try to laugh it off. ‘She was hoping I’d be a model, like her. And then, as I’m only five foot five, she was happy to settle for me being a fashion designer.’

‘Oh, I get it. You’re not living up to her motherly expectations. “What are your goals, Fern?”’ Lucy says, in an accurate imitation, and adds in her ordinary voice, ‘And that whole Malcolm McDowell thing – what was that all about?’

‘She met him when he was in Caligula,’ I say gloomily. ‘But nothing came of it. That’s my mother. Always hoping for the best and always disappointed.’

We stare at each other for a moment and then for no reason at all, we suddenly start to laugh, muffling it with our fists on our mouths.

‘And the dead butcher bit. Did she think Macbeth actually was a butcher?’

The tears are rolling down my face. ‘Don’t!’

‘“She had so much promise and she’s thrown it all away …”’

‘Stop it!’

‘You know what?’ Lucy says, giggling weakly. ‘You should do stand-up. You’ve got enough material.’

‘I could do stand-up.’

‘That’ll teach her. This could be your Thane of Cawdor moment.’ She wipes her eyes and raises her glass. ‘Happy to help.’ She looks at the time and finishes her drink. ‘I’d better go too, I suppose. Time to take my Night Nurse medicine. I’m incubating a cold.’ To prove it, she sneezes into the elbow of her black dress. Her zips jingle.

‘Bless you,’ I say, dodging out of the way as she checks for damage – I don’t move far enough to be rude but I do try to get far enough away to avoid the germs that might have escaped around her slim arm, because what could be worse than catching a cold at this crucial time in my business career?

(Plenty, as it turns out.)

I see Lucy out into the cool night and she totters up the wooden steps, waving all the way, then curses softly for a few moments outside her front door while she finds her keys.

I lock the door and stand in the now spinning centre of the flat that I live in, with my parents tucked up in the bedroom, my friend safely upstairs.

I wonder if the night will have repercussions. My mother’s very good at keeping a grudge going, but she can only keep it going as long as we’re together and they’re going back in the morning.

I brush my teeth in the kitchen sink then make up the sofa, switch the lights off and wrap myself up in my duvet.

Surprisingly, I sleep well.

LOT 4
A sky-blue silk satin Sixties-style A-line dress with bracelet-length sleeves and feather trim to neckline and cuffs, scalloped knee-length hem, unlabelled.

I wake up next morning wound up tightly in my duvet and all the events of the previous night come tumbling back into my head, starting with the alarming fact that my parents are asleep in my bedroom.

The sun is flickering in my eyes, the light filtered by the lacy green leaves of the tree fern in the garden. The sky is a clear blue and it was a frock of that same pure, uplifting colour that lost me my dream job.

At least I’ve told my parents now, so that’s one problem out of the way.

I’d been dreading telling them – it’s true, my mother’s had many disappointments in her life, not just the fact she ended up marrying my father instead of Malcolm McDowell because she failed to become as famous as Jerry Hall. I’ve disappointed her too, and I’m not sure it’s anything I can put right.

I studied fashion at St Martin’s, but not just to please my mother – I genuinely had ambitions of becoming a fashion designer. Like her, because of her, I’ve always loved clothes. I’ve been buying vintage clothing since my early teens. I enjoyed studying the construction of the pieces as much as wearing them.

But in my final year, compared with my fellow students, I knew that I didn’t have the imagination or the vision to design clothes that were often avant-garde and unwearable for the average person. I lacked the sheer sense of performance that it takes to bring a collection to the catwalk. To be honest, I’d been winging it anyway, because my passion is for clothes that make a person look good. Otherwise, what’s the point? Me, I always choose style over innovation.

After graduating, I spent a few years in fashion sales and I was thrilled when I landed the job as personal stylist in a large department store in Oxford Street.

One of the first things we needed to know about a client was their budget and then we were encouraged to stretch it – although, not all our clients were rich.

There are many reasons why people need help shopping for clothes. These days, people are less confident about their appearance than ever. Sometimes they don’t have the confidence to try something new. Sure, they can choose the labels that also have a line of accessories like beaded bags and matching hats, but although it makes shopping easier, it’s self-defeating in a way. There’s always the risk that someone else is going to show up wearing exactly the same thing and that they’ll both have to spend the whole occasion keeping as far away from each other as possible to avoid looking like middle-aged twins.

Fashions change. Partners aren’t always helpful enough – or patient enough – to give an honest second opinion. After two outfits, a man will say that anything looks great, just so that he can be done with the whole boring business and go home. Friends aren’t always tactful and those who follow trends are the worst. There’s nothing more demoralising than shopping with a fashionista who pushes into the dressing room, tries on the stuff that her friend has just turned down and looks fabulous in everything.

As a personal stylist, my job was to make my clients look in the mirror and see themselves differently. I was supportive, admiring and knowledgeable. For a period of two hours, I was the perfect friend; bringing coffee or prosecco, zipping and unzipping, encouraging them to own the clothes – can you sit in it? Eat in it? Dance in it? And then I’d get them thinking about accessories: bags, shoes, scarves, pendants, fur cuffs, sunglasses – the beautiful final touches that make a look. It was a brilliant feeling to see a woman admiring herself in the mirror with happy disbelief – and keep on looking. For me, that was the ultimate job satisfaction. I discovered I, too, had the ability to see women through their own eyes and boost their confidence by transforming them into someone new.

The client who got me fired was an elderly man shopping for his wife. His name was Kim Aston. He arrived for the two-hour appointment, a neat, slightly built man about my own height, wearing a suit and a bright, multicoloured silk tie. His greying hair was short and swept back from his forehead.

He looked nervously at the glittering chandeliers and the ornate chairs and faced me with a frown. ‘I was just about to leave,’ he said as soon as I introduced myself.

‘Are you in a hurry?’ I asked.

‘No. It’s just that—’ He looked up at the enormous chandelier again as if its blatant, lavish extravagance was putting him off. ‘I didn’t think it was going to be so—’ He shrugged and tailed off.

I smiled understandingly, because I knew what he meant. Our department was ostentatiously luxurious. Cream carpets, mirrors, drapes. We were selling the experience: this is what it’s like to be rich and have a personal shopper, a valet, an attendant, someone to admire you and to make you look the best you can be while you sit back and enjoy it then hand over a credit card at the end. We were selling the promise that all this could be theirs. And for two hours it was theirs to enjoy. But Kim Aston found it intimidating and I could understand that, too.

I said, ‘Would you prefer coffee or tea with your glass of champagne?’

That’s how we did it. We took it for granted that the client would have coffee or tea and a glass of champagne, to relax.

‘Tea, please.’

I tapped in the order on my iPad and led him through to the dressing room where the clothes I’d chosen for his sick wife were hanging.

On the telephone he’d been quite sure of what he wanted. Loose-fitting dresses, elasticated waists, silky fabrics and bright colours – size 14, he thought, or maybe a little bigger. I’d chosen six for his wife that I thought she might like, based on the image I’d built of her, but in the dressing room I realised I’d got it wrong because he looked at my selection anxiously, as if he’d already bought them all on impulse and realised he’d made a terrible mistake.

My colleague Mario carried the tray of drinks in and put it on a gilt, glass-topped table next to the cream velvet and gilt chair.

I handed Mr Aston his glass. There was nothing like a glass of fizz to boost the confidence of a wary shopper.

He held it at eye level and stared through the bubbles as if he were in a dream.

‘You said your wife likes bright colours,’ I said, ‘but if you’d prefer a more muted palette, I do have some things in mind that fulfil your criteria. What do you think of this? It’s silk jersey, very comfortable to wear and not restrictive,’ I said, showing him a red-and-blue Diane von Furstenberg wrap-around dress.

He smiled faintly as if amused. ‘We’ve been married forty-five years,’ he said. ‘It goes by very quickly.’ He looked at me closely. ‘You’re too young to know that yet. It’s all ahead of you, all that potential. For my wife, she’s reached the finish line and she’s having her bottle of water and her banana.’

I laughed, because it was a nice way of putting it.

‘She’s still interested in fashion,’ I said, ‘which is lovely.’

He sighed. ‘I’m not sure that she is interested in fashion. She’s not fashionable,’ he said thoughtfully, sipping his champagne, ‘she wouldn’t enjoy being called that at all. She’s a very practical woman. She’s always had short hair.’ He looked at me as if expecting me to comment favourably on this example of her practicality.

‘It’s often best to stick with a hairstyle that you know suits you,’ I pointed out. ‘Some women have the face for it.’

‘And it dries quickly,’ he said. ‘She has it trimmed every six weeks.’

‘Good! So it keeps its shape.’

He put his drink down and took the dress from me. His face softened. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I like this one,’ he said, worried he’d offended me, holding it up high as if his wife were a tall woman, a woman he was used to looking up to. ‘But no. This isn’t it. It’s rather plain, you see.’

I smiled. I wasn’t done yet. ‘I’ll put it over here,’ I said and then I showed him a shocking-pink shift dress with fluted sleeves that was very pretty.

He studied it for a long time, his face expressionless, and finally he gazed at me doubtfully. ‘Do you try these on yourself?’

‘No. I mean, not unless I’m looking for something personally.’ I let the dress hang. ‘This fabric is very flattering.’

‘You have to wear black, I suppose. All the staff seem to be wearing black. That’s the uniform, is it? Black?’

‘It is, yes.’

He nodded. ‘I’ve noticed that. The trouble with this is the sleeves. See? These sleeves, they don’t seem very practical. They dangle.’ Again, he looked at me quickly. ‘I was thinking in terms of housework, loading the dishwasher, cooking.’

Once again, I adjusted my image of his wife. She obviously wasn’t too ill to do housework. ‘This is more of a going-out dress,’ I said. ‘Does she get to go out much, your wife?’

‘She does when she can. She’s got two friends about the same age as herself, Mercia and Betty, and they like their classes. University of the Third Age, have you heard of that? No? A lifetime of knowledge and a wealth of experience. Tai chi, watercolours. They had an exhibition in the library.’

‘This floral dress is by Chloé. It’s a bit looser in style; it’s a relaxed fit. It’s great that she gets out. Do you paint, too?’

Mr Aston laughed appreciatively. ‘No, I don’t. I haven’t got an artist’s eye. The women don’t want us hanging around with them; although Betty plays golf sometimes when the weather’s fine. Golf is my hobby; although I haven’t much of a golfer’s eye, either. They’ve been good friends to Enid. What other frocks have you got there?’

‘This is a beautiful silk jersey by DKNY.’

‘Animal print,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I don’t know how Enid would feel about animal print. She might find it a little common.’ He sat on the cream velvet chair, looked at the dresses and took a deep breath. ‘Have you got something a bit more special, with some kind of embellishment? Feathers, ostrich feathers?’ he asked hopefully.

He’d taken me by surprise. ‘You mean a cocktail dress?’ He hadn’t mentioned it in his brief, but this is how it was sometimes, clients had to find out first of all what they didn’t want before they decided what they did want. ‘You don’t think that any of these are suitable for your wife?’

He shook his head. ‘I keep thinking of a frock that feels special,’ he said, his face creased with the difficulty of trying to explain. ‘The kind of frock that’ll give a person a lift. A dress to make the eyes sparkle.’

I liked him. ‘I know exactly what you mean. I’ll put these away for now and bring something more suitable for evening. More champagne?’

Mr Aston held up his glass. He was beginning to relax at last, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether the practical, short-haired Mrs Aston would appreciate a feathery cocktail dress as much as he seemed to think. It was difficult to judge without meeting her personally. I’d never had anyone shop by proxy before.

I carried the dresses out and asked Mario to refresh Mr Aston’s drink while I searched our stock for cocktail dresses and feathers. We had a black feather cape and an ivory ostrich feather bolero and I chose a couple of little chiffon dresses to go with them then headed back to the dressing room.

Mr Aston looked up hopefully, but his face immediately fell.

‘They’re not quite what I had in mind,’ he said, stroking the ostrich feathers wistfully. ‘But they are beautiful, there’s no denying it.’ He sighed deeply.

I felt I’d let him down. ‘From all the things you’ve seen, Mr Aston, is there anything you’d like to look at again?’

‘No … I don’t think so,’ he said wistfully, ‘but I’m very pleased that I came.’

‘Your wife will be disappointed,’ I said. She wasn’t the only one. I was disappointed myself.

‘I’ll relate the experience to her in detail,’ he said, finishing his wine and cold tea and looking around him as though he was memorising it for her.

I didn’t want him to leave yet. I wasn’t used to failing with a client. I always had a sense of what they wanted but, more importantly, under normal circumstances I usually knew fairly quickly what would suit them. And, suddenly, it came to me. And after one hundred minutes together, I suddenly felt in tune with Mr Aston’s wife’s taste.

Don’t get me wrong; I was scrupulously fair about it. It was only when I’d absolutely exhausted all other in-store possibilities that I’d suggested the under-the-counter deal.

I’d recently bought a satin sky-blue dress with a feather trim and a scalloped hem from a charity shop and it was his wife’s size, a 14. It was a playful dress and as I’d passed the window, the beautiful blue had made me smile. I guessed it was from the Sixties and I wondered if Mr Aston was nostalgic for the days of his youth, and whether the dress was a message, a compliment to his wife, Enid. The dress was to say to her: this is how I see you.

I showed him a photograph of it on my phone.

‘Oh, that’s more like it.’ He brightened immediately. ‘I’d like to see that,’ he said.

‘The thing is, it’s from my personal collection,’ I explained, ‘but we could meet up somewhere for you to have a look at it if you’re interested.’

‘When?’

‘This evening, if you’re free?’

‘Here?’

‘Not here but – where would suit you?’

‘St John’s Wood.’

‘Carluccio’s, then?’

And that’s what we did. We met in Carluccio’s.

He did love the dress, as I knew he would. He loved the frothy abundance of delicate feathers, the innocent blue, the rich gleam of the satin. He thought it was perfect. We did an under-the-counter deal.

He was so pleased that he wrote a lovely letter to the store to commend me on my kindness, thoughtfulness and total dedication to my work. And as a result, I was dismissed for gross misconduct. It was ironic that after that moment of triumph, I lost my job.

Anyway – where that memory came from is the fact the sky, from the sofabed where I’m lying, perfectly matches the colour of that feathery cocktail dress.

I get up reluctantly and put the kettle on, swaddling it with tea cloths to muffle the sound of boiling because the longer my parents sleep in, the better, as far as I’m concerned.

I start thinking about the woman in Chanel and that look in her eye that said, aren’t we wonderful!

I’ve seen her twice, so I think she’s local. It’s possible I’ll see her again. She’s hard to miss.

Consoled by the idea, I quietly make myself a mug of instant coffee, black, and retreat to the sofa.

I can hear whispering and the creak of the bedroom floor, and slippered feet padding to the bathroom. I hear the bathroom door closing. After a few moments, the lavatory flushes.

I stare warily at the slowly opening door.

It’s my father.

‘Morning,’ he says, rubbing the bags under his eyes. ‘Your mother would like to know whether you’ve got Alka-Seltzer.’

‘Ah. I have.’ I’ve got a whole kitchen drawer dedicated to ailments of all descriptions. I’m very susceptible to the power of the placebo effect. Once I’ve bought something from the pharmacist, I miraculously find I’m cured of whatever it was that was bothering me. As a result, the Alka-Seltzer has passed its sell-by date, but I drop the tablets into a glass and add water.

‘Aren’t you working today?’

‘I have Mondays and Tuesdays off. They’re the quietest days.’ The tablets fizz and tumble merrily up and down in the glass, and my father takes them back to the bedroom.

I get dressed, put the duvet and pillows away, and rearrange the fruit bowl on the table, ready for breakfast.

I’ve taken the croissants out of the freezer, so I heat up the oven and make real coffee in the KRUPS coffee machine, because they both detest instant.

I can hear Lucy walking around in the flat above me. I’ve always liked the sound of neighbours – it’s friendly.

Next thing I hear is my shower switching on, and twenty minutes later my mother emerges and sits by the table. She stares out at the garden without looking at me to make it clear she hasn’t forgiven me for working on a market stall.

I feel the old sense of dread at her disapproval coming over me. But I can make it work, I know I can. I’ll prove it to her that I’ve made the right choices in life.

I make her a coffee and put the croissants on a baking tray while she continues to pretend I’m invisible. It’s quite nice, actually, not having to talk. Like breakfast in a silent order at a monastery.

My father comes in and drinks his coffee in silence, smiling at me a couple of times to show who’s side he’s secretly on while publicly showing his alliance to her. Not that I blame him; he has to live with her, after all.

They leave about ten and I hug my father and kiss my mother on her plumped-up, wrinkle-free cheek, then I wave them off feeling suddenly light-hearted at being free.

Once they’ve gone, I turn on my laptop and see that I’ve had some new orders in. A couple of the clients are names I recognise from my database and one is new. I wheel my clothing rails out of the utility room and into the lounge because the utility room is too small to stand up straight in.

I’m looping a price tag from a wooden hanger, when my contact lenses start to bother me. I blink. Everything seems hazy and my eyes begin to itch. I squeeze them shut and wonder if I’ve caught Lucy’s cold already. Is that possible? I go to the bathroom and drip Thealoz eye drops into my reddened eyes and feel much better. Back in the lounge, though, they get worse again. I look around. The room is strangely misty.

There’s a loud thudding overhead from Lucy’s flat. I hear her front door open and slam, and down the outside steps she comes, boom-boom-boom! And she’s thumping on my door with her fists. ‘Fern!’ she cries dramatically. ‘Fern, are you in there?’

I open it, standing well back in case she sneezes on me again. ‘What’s up?’

‘My flat’s on fire,’ she says breathlessly, eyes wide, damp hair clinging to her forehead. She’s wearing a black towel. That’s it. Just the towel.

‘Really?’

To confirm it, my smoke alarm goes off, so I grab my phone, trench coat and my red lipstick. After shutting the door to muffle the noise, we dash outside and up the steps into the street. We stand together on the pavement, hanging onto the black railings and staring at the house nervously, looking for flames.

A middle-aged man comes towards us with a black Labrador on a blue retractable lead. His eyes settle on Lucy, barefoot and clad in the black towel. Then his gaze rests on me for a moment and swiftly returns to Lucy before he politely passes us without a word.

‘Lucy, here, take my coat.’

‘No, thanks, Fern. It’s a better look to be standing outside a burning house wearing a black towel, dramatically speaking.’ She looks up at her window again and nudges me with her elbow. ‘Have you called the fire service yet?’

I put my hand in my coat pocket, feeling for my phone, and hesitate. Out here in the fresh air, the house looks perfectly normal and I happen to know that Lucy just loves a drama. Well, she would, being an actor. I can’t see any smoke or flames and I wonder if it’s burnt itself out already.

‘Lucy, how big is the fire, exactly?’ I ask her sceptically.

She stares at me through the damp blonde strands of her fringe. ‘What do you mean, how big is it? Fires spread, you know! They spread like wildfire. Hence the saying.’

‘Mmm. Mmm. What’s the difference between a fire and wildfire?’

‘Give me that.’ She grabs my phone from me and phones the emergency services.

Staring up at her sash window, I can now see grey smoke opaquing the glass and leaking out around the edges, fraying the sky above our heads. Down in the basement beneath it, I can see clearly into my lounge and my heart jumps a beat. ‘Hey! My clothes are in there!’

‘Don’t do it, Fern!’ she said, holding me back ineffectually with her free hand. ‘It’s not worth it!’

‘My stock! It’s all I’ve got,’ I say as I dash back down the stairs and let myself back into the smoke-alarm-screaming din of the house.

I’m just going in for the clothing rails, but once inside the flat, the noise sends my adrenaline up a notch. The atmosphere has turned from a haze into a smog. I look at the ceiling and see smoke rings coming out of the spotlights. I struggle to push the clothing rail through the door. The wheels brace themselves against the doorframe, reluctant to leave.

Above the scream of the smoke alarm I hear the duetting wail of the fire engine and the squeal of an ambulance, and above them both, I hear Lucy frantically calling my name with varying emphasis and increasing volume as if this is her last chance for a BAFTA.

Still grappling frantically with the clothing rail, which not long ago had come through that same gap without any problem, I start to cough. In the end I give up and unhook my most expensive pieces then hurry into the hall just as an axe splinters a panel of my front door.

‘Oi!’ I open it, coughing, full of indignation because I’m going to have to pay for that. ‘What did you do that for? I was just about to open it!’

‘You could get yourself killed,’ he says. ‘Get out, now!’

So I do.

I find Lucy sitting in the back of an ambulance having her oxygen levels tested. I look at her bitterly. She’s clutching her black towel around her and sobbing beautifully; it’s heartfelt but not overdone. The paramedic tests my oxygen levels too, and we’re both declared fine with the slight disapproval that the medical profession reserves for malingerers. We get out of the ambulance again and I nurse and juggle my dresses like heavy babies.

It’s weird – when you’re wearing them the clothes are so light you never notice the weight. But carry a few of them in your arms or in a suitcase and they take on a surprising mass density.

A car pulls up and a Camden New Journal photographer gets out with a reporter. And of course when they see Lucy, their jaded expressions totally disappear, because this is a story that writes itself: Lucy in her towel and me in my Lauren Bacall trench coat, scarlet lipstick freshly applied, trying to save my livelihood.

Lucy tells them breathlessly how I dashed into the burning building to save my frocks and in return, appalled by my own recklessness, I tell them how grateful I am that Lucy came to alert me. Then we pose against the backdrop of the fire engine and then against the railings. The photographer vapes so as to get the full smoke effect in the shot and then they reluctantly drive away again in a hurry as a traffic warden approaches.

The paramedics leave and after a while the fire officers take Lucy to one side to talk to her. I can’t hear the conversation, but the end result is that Lucy and I can go back into our flats, so I head back down the steps, breathing in the damp and smoky air.

Lucy comes after me and taps my shoulder. ‘Fern, it’s all my fault, you know,’ she says in a small voice.

I look up at her over my armful of clothes. ‘Is it? What do you mean?’

She says miserably, ‘You know I’ve got this cold?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘I was just trying to ease my nasal congestion,’ she says as if that explains everything.

I mull it over. ‘And?’

‘And – the thing is, when I poured eucalyptus oil on the coals of the sauna it ignited in a ball of flame. Apparently, that’s what happens.’ She shrugs in amazement. ‘Who knew?’

‘Who knew?’ I stare up at her in disbelief. ‘Oil’s a fuel, isn’t it?’ I fleetingly marvel at the fact she has a sauna in her flat.

Back inside, my lounge is ruined, dark with soot, the floor is wet, and it smells of damp and wood smoke.

I rush my rescued clothes through to my bedroom, because that room is still mercifully fresh, then I go back into the lounge, open the windows. With my heart breaking, I inspect the clothing rails for damage. It’s not good.

Tears fill my eyes.

The gorgeous clothes that I’ve so carefully collected are ruined.

The gelatine sequins on my 1920s flapper dresses have dissolved. The colours on my tea dresses have run; my silk dresses are watermarked. Hundreds of pounds worth of stock, ruined. Even worse, I haven’t got around to renewing the contents insurance. I come to the sickening realisation that my parents are right. I can’t be trusted.

Ironically, my rejects on the rails under the pavement are untouched by smoke and water; these are the clothes with perspiration stains under the arms, torn hems, missing beadwork. The wear and tear that makes the difference between vintage and jumble.

I go back into the lounge and stare around me, devastated.

Wood smoke is a smell you can’t get enough of in the autumn. It’s the smell of freedom. It’s so romantic that you feel you should bottle it.

When it’s your home, the novelty quickly wears off. It’s so acrid that it clogs my throat. I get out the Febreze and spray it liberally, then I light a Jo Malone candle and call Mick for sympathy.

Mick is concerned and also intensely practical, and that’s one of the things I like about him. He listens to my tale of woe and then he asks, in his warm, deep voice, ‘Is the electricity still on?’

I switch on the light cautiously with my elbow. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. You want to hire a dehumidifier to dry the place out,’ he suggests. ‘Make sure you wipe down the walls to get rid of the soot and take the clothes to the dry cleaners so that you can decide afterwards what’s salvageable.’

I hold the phone tight against my face and look around at the ruined room, which has become a travesty of itself. ‘Okay,’ I say with a wobble in my voice.

‘Fern,’ he says gently, ‘you’re all right. That’s the main thing.’

I nod, even though he can’t see me.

‘Do you want to stay at my place? My neighbour has a key.’

For a moment, escaping to his house in Harpenden seems a wonderful option. But I need to be here to get things sorted. ‘When are you coming home?’ I ask.

His voice moves away from the mouthpiece. ‘When are we back, mate? The tenth?’ He says in my ear, ‘The tenth. Not long.’

‘It’s two weeks too long for me. I miss you,’ I say, desperately hoping he’ll tell me he’ll come back earlier.

He hasn’t seen this needy side of me before. ‘Yeah,’ is his hesitant reply.

After the call I go into the bathroom and lock myself away to cry in private, devastated about my ruined dresses. I’m feeling lost and totally alone.

As I sit on the loo, absorbing my tears with tissues, I hear an apologetic cough above my head and glance up. Argh! I pat my heart.

‘Fern?’ Lucy’s looking down at me through the hole that has burnt through her floor and my ceiling.

‘What?’ I say tearfully.

‘About this hole,’ she says. ‘Look, I’m going to put a sheepskin rug over it, okay?’

That’s the problem with actors. It’s all about the illusion. ‘Okay. Now, could you just please leave me be,’ I plead bleakly.

‘Sorry,’ she says and drags the rug into place. The dust captures the light as it floats lazily down.

KIM

Meeting Fern Banks on our secret assignation in Carluccio’s was the riskiest, most exciting thing that I’ve done in years. Life was thrilling again! The secrecy! The lies I had to tell Enid!

And the shame of telling them!

My married life is comfortable and to a lot of people that would be an enviable state of affairs, because who doesn’t long for comfort, the comfort of the familiar? The older I get, the more the sharp edges rub off my emotions. I’ve got used to love and a kiss before bedtime, a shorthand for intimacy, a desultory declaration of attachment. I know how to deal with the embarrassment of slicing a shot in a round of golf, of believing the World Wide Web traps people like flies, of watching crime dramas that show people having sex.

Enid used to spare us that by turning the TV off at that sort of thing. She held the remote at the ready, like a gunslinger in the Wild West, permanently prepared to shoot, but I’m in charge of the remote now. If Enid’s eyes are closed, I mute the sound and I watch it with my emotions removed. In old age, I’ve become used to most things.

Enid used to wear stockings once, but now she wears knee-highs. She calls them popsocks, but if you ask for a popsock in Marks & Spencer, they don’t know what you mean. They’re knee-highs these days. Same thing, different name. I used to be in the flow of things once, but now I feel as if I’m standing still and life is rushing past me and I’ll never catch up with it, I’m too old.

I’ve never had to shop for clothes for Enid; she’s not the kind of woman who needs a second opinion. Enid’s taste in clothes is conservative but feminine. One thing we both agree on is that trousers on a woman over seventy are invariably unflattering and unnecessary – unless, of course, one is a farmer; we’re not unreasonable people.

She knows what she likes. Her clothes are well-made. They’ll ‘see her out’. I listened to her saying that phrase in dismay. I wanted to buy her something worth living for, but it’s a tall order, to buy something to raise the spirits of a woman who’s unwell.

When I arranged the appointment with Fern Banks, I began by looking at everything through Enid’s eyes, by getting into Enid’s head. I can’t say I started out with a vision of what I wanted; it just gradually formed in my mind by a process of the elimination of what wasn’t suitable. It had to be special! Exciting! Evocative of a time when life was full of expectation. Oh, that frock was elusive!

Meeting Fern Banks in Carluccio’s meant leaving Enid for a second time and telling her more lies. I said I was going to the golf club and although I don’t go there much since Stan died, Enid didn’t question it.

When Fern showed me that blue dress, I knew immediately that it was the one! I felt alive again. I was tingling with excitement that I hadn’t felt in a long time! It turned the clock back!

After I bought it, I took it home and as I went through the door, Enid was calling me.

I felt so guilty that I hid it in my golf bag.

LOT 5
A pale pink crêpe dress, fit-and-flare style, circa 1975, with plunging neckline and tie waist.

Taking Mick’s advice, I hire a sixteen-litre dehumidifier to dry out the flat. I mop the floors and wash the soot from the walls.

When I go to buy milk, Mr Khan, the newsagent, reassures me that it’s a well-known fact that it’s only possible for a human to detect a smell for a short amount of time before the nose gets used to it, but sadly that isn’t true at all.

I put my front door panel together using outdoor wood filler and my Monsoon loyalty card, which is perfect for smoothing. Despite my efforts, it doesn’t look exactly as good as new, but at a cursory glance it doesn’t look as if it’s been hacked in, either; and it’ll look better once it’s dry and I’ve painted it. This isn’t something I want to bother my parents with if I don’t have to. They’re sure to make a crisis out of a drama.

That’s where the good news ends.

When I pick up the clothes from the cleaners, the woman is apologetic. They’ve done their best, but now that it’s dry, the gorgeous little fuchsia pink wool suit has shrunk a few sizes. Interestingly, the lining hasn’t shrunk at all and it billows like parachute silk out of the sleeves and below the hemline. The Twenties cocktail dresses are drab and insubstantial without their sequins. Their seams have frayed and come undone. I feel a wave of panic coming over me. A few hundred pounds worth of clothes and now they’re worthless, unsaleable, and I’ve just spent a large part of my savings having them cleaned.

When I get to the market at nine o’clock on Wednesday, my suitcase is noticeably lighter. To boost my confidence, I’m wearing a black-and-white check Fifties shirtwaister with padded shoulders and a wide black patent belt. My hair has a side parting, with a heavy wave falling loose over my right eye. It’s a look I’ve taken from Lauren Bacall in the film To Have and Have Not with Humphrey Bogart, 1944; ballsy, feminine, utilitarian. My lipstick is MAC: Lady Danger; my favourite bright, true red. My outfit makes me feel able to face the day ahead.

In our shady alley, a light breeze is snapping the canvas walls, carrying with it the mellow sweetness of the breakfast waffle stand.

As I pass it, I notice that the stall next to mine is in the process of being set up for the ten o’clock opening time. It’s lined with black fabric, and wooden and Perspex boxes are stacked up neatly inside. There’s no sign of the new occupant, though.

I unpack my suitcase, store it under the counter and hang up my surviving dresses, grouping them out so they don’t look so sparse. Humming to myself, I fix my banner, Fern Banks Vintage, on the skirt of the stall.

As I’m working, someone comes up behind me.

‘Morning, neighbour!’ he says.

I turn to greet him and to my surprise, it’s David Westwood. Oh, he’s gorgeous! I’m struck dumb by his ridiculous good looks. His hair is short at the sides, longer on top, thick and wavy, springing up from his clear brow. His eyebrows are straight and stern. He’s wearing black, which makes him look edgy, and I like edginess in a man. His eyes are the deepest blue. Probably contact lenses, I tell myself.

‘Hello! What are you doing here?’ I ask, feeling flustered and breathless and entirely losing my Lauren Bacall calm.

‘I thought about what you said about through traffic,’ he replies seriously.

‘Did you? Well! Good. Welcome to the neighbourhood.’ I’m feeling uncharacteristically buoyant at having a friendly stallholder next to me. We can look out for each other, watch each other’s stalls as we’re having a quick break …

‘Have you got a minute?’ he asks.

‘Sure.’

He beckons me over to his stall. ‘Take a look at this.’

With the flick of a switch, the rows of boxes, the source of his illusions, disappear and a constellation of stars shines brightly – the stand has been transformed into the night sky and suddenly we’re staring into the universe.

‘What do you think?’

‘Wow.’

‘Yeah.’ He looks pleased and he hands me a light box to look at.

I take a neighbourly interest. It’s five-sided, wooden, with the light fitting inside.

‘See the way the sides fit together?’ he says, smoothing it with his thumb. ‘These are dovetail joints.’

‘Nice!’

‘And then …’ He slots into the front grooves two removable dark blue acrylic panels with a pattern of holes drilled through them. Switching it on, the light shines out to create two constellations side by side.

‘Neat. I suppose the idea is to sell the whole set of boxes, so that a person could have a whole night sky for themselves, is that it?’

‘No, this is just the display. They’re star signs. Like, for instance, you’re Virgo and if you happened to know a Sagittarian, I’d slot this one in. See? They make a great engagement present. I can also personalise it with lettering underneath and the date.’

‘Romantic,’ I say dryly. ‘I’m not a Virgo.’

He shrugged. ‘Yes, well, you get the idea.’

Putting my face closer to the light box, it is like looking at the night sky, if you imagine you’re looking at it through a very tiny window or maybe a skylight in an attic. Or through two windows, because what we’ve got here are two bits of the night sky that aren’t necessarily next to each other. I’m not sure how I feel about him meddling with the universe. It doesn’t seem ethical. I tuck my hands into the pockets of my dress. ‘What star sign am I?’ I ask him brightly.

He looks up, frowning. ‘What?’

‘My star sign. Have a guess,’ I encourage him. I scoop up and shake my Lauren Bacall hair then let it fall over one eye. ‘The hair is a clue.’

‘Virgo.’

‘You’ve already said that! Virgo? Why would a Virgo have hair like mine? It’s a mane! I’m nothing like a Virgo. I’m a Leo!’ I nudge his foot. Charlatan.

‘Good for you,’ he says cheerfully.

I look at him doubtfully. He seems a down-to-earth kind of person and not the kind of guy who’d be selling myths about horoscopes.

‘Can I ask, do you believe in this kind of thing, star signs and stuff?’

‘No,’ he says.

‘Eh? Oh.’

‘You?’ he asks.

‘No! Per-lease. Of course not.’ That would make Mick and me completely incompatible, because he’s a Scorpio, like my mother. ‘I mean, obviously I read my horoscope, who doesn’t? But I don’t believe in it as such. It’s just for fun, isn’t it?’ I’m expecting him to argue the case for the defence, but he looks at me impassively and doesn’t reply, and I worry I’ve offended him. ‘Obviously, I don’t know the science behind the constellations,’ I add. ‘I mean, what’s the point of knowing about the stars?’

‘Navigation?’

‘Oh, navigation,’ I reply as if it goes without saying.

He takes a cloth out of his pocket and as he wipes my fingerprints off the wood, he says, ‘Luckily, Fern Banks, not everyone is cynical like us.’

Cynical? I don’t know where he’s got the idea I’m cynical.

As he polishes the Perspex, which is as blue as his eyes, he says, ‘It’s nice to believe in something, though, isn’t it? Everyone likes a guarantee; the belief that things are meant to be and they’re not just random occurrences. It’s good to believe that you’re destined to meet that person for a reason – the reason being true love, right? Otherwise …’

‘Otherwise what?’

He looks at me from under those dark, straight eyebrows. ‘It could be any man, couldn’t it? Any man with a decent income.’

Now that is cynical. Despite the stops and starts, I feel I’ve been keeping up with the conversation up until right now, when suddenly he seems to be talking about something else entirely.

I decide to go along with it. ‘In other words, these light boxes symbolically convince people they’re destined to stay together,’ I say, grinning to show I get the joke. It seems artistic but at the same time, cheesy.

‘You’re romantic, right?’ he says.

‘No.’ I’m not the slightest bit romantic, honestly. You only have to see Mick and me together to know that. And I’d absolutely never buy him a light box with two constellations in it, not even ironically. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘I suppose it’s because of your clothes. They’re romantic, from a different era. You look like that Bogey woman.’

‘Thanks.’ The words that no woman wants to hear.

‘Hang on …’ he’s clicking his fingers ‘… it’s on the tip of my tongue. That Hollywood actress. Humphrey Bogart’s wife. Bacall! Lauren Bacall!’

‘Oh, that Bogey woman, Bacall. She had wonderful style, didn’t she? Shoulder pads give such a great figure!’

For a moment his gaze skims over me and he looks away again quickly.

There’s a sudden awkwardness between us and I go back to my stall. I’m easing a dress over Dolly’s head, when I realise that David’s still watching me.

‘That’s vintage, is it? What’s the difference between vintage and second-hand?’

Dolly looks slightly indecent with her dress around her waist, as if she’s been caught drunk in a public place, and I tug it down quickly to spare her feelings.

‘The price.’

‘So how much is this one?’

‘One fifty.’

He laughs out loud – against his tan, his teeth are white and slightly crooked, giving him a roguish appeal.

‘What’s so funny?’ I ask. ‘This could be a wedding dress – see this colour?’

‘Pink, isn’t it?’

‘Pink! It’s not pink,’ I tell him. ‘It’s blush. It’s a great shade for a bride.’ I lift the hem. ‘Look at the quality. It’s hand-stitched – look at that! Where else could you get a hand-stitched wedding dress for a hundred and fifty pounds?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ he says. ‘Good luck,’ he adds, as if I need it, then he unfolds a chair, picks up a book and looks for new ideas for his light boxes.

Good luck? What’s that supposed to mean? I could think of plenty of sarcastic comments to make about light boxes, if I was that sort of person. You can’t use them as a light and you can’t use them as a box, so good luck to him, too.

A young Japanese couple wearing matching outfits come up to his stand and I retreat into my dresses and unfold my stool.

The couple’s interest in the light boxes seem to have a knock-on effect, because a woman wearing a multicoloured floor-sweeping skirt stops to see what they’re looking at, and then another couple nudge in, and I sit and watch while David Westwood starts on his astrological patter, which involves words like ‘air signs’ and ‘moon in Taurus’.

I hadn’t expected him to have a patter but there he is, pointing out the constellations and how these had looked to the ancients like twins, and here, the fish. And he throws in a few more facts as well about light years – and here is the large light box in which they can see the individual stars more brightly. Yes, he can pack it safely, he says, and lo! he produces some cardboard which, with an origami flourish, he makes into a box. Meanwhile, the woman in the long skirt is texting her niece to find out her fiancé’s star sign and the other couple are wanting a set for their bedroom. (Aquarius, I’m going to say, but I think I’m on the cusp …)

I mull over what David said about the right man having a decent income, disagreeing with him in my mind. A decent income doesn’t figure in things at all. I have no idea how much Mick makes, and I’d never in a million years ask him. It’s just about the least important thing in our relationship. I like him because I get him and he gets me; generosity of spirit is vital, the same sense of fun is a must and mutual lust a priority. It’s not a lot to ask, is it? Who’d go for a man just because he has a decent income? A brief vision of Melania Trump flashes through my brain, but that’s just cynicism, because who am I to judge? For all I know she and Donald might have an amazing connection.

I watch the people go past.

There’s not a lot of space in this alley. It’s narrow; it acts like a funnel. But occasionally in the flow of the crowd a woman will catch my eye and in a flash I’ll know exactly how they feel inside the things they’re wearing. I know as surely as if I am them. I know when a baggy top hides a good figure and when dark colours are worn to blend in. I recognise the elasticated waist that’s snug around the belly. I understand the apologetic walk, the wistful glance, because I’ve been there myself. These are the women who I hope will linger at my stand – but, regretfully, they hardly ever do because it’s impossible to wander around and browse. You just have to stand there in full view of me and look; and I know they’re afraid the clothes won’t fit them. They don’t think my lovely dresses, even when they catch the eye, are meant for them. And worst of all, they worry that I might be pushy. We both have our roles, the seller and the buyer.

I generally pretend I haven’t seen them, because the first thing I learnt on this market stall was not to scare people off.

Which is why I don’t look up when a shadow falls over me and I hear a shriek. ‘Fern Banks!’

‘Gigi!’ I squeal back. I recognise her at once – Gigi Martin, who I was at college with until she left mid-term and got a job as a junior in a hairdressing salon in Camden.

‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ she says.

I seriously hope she’s just being polite.

‘You neither!’ I say. In my case, I’m being truthful. She’s model-slim in a polka-dot top and green skinny jeans. She’s got a mass of frizzy pink hair.

‘How’s it going? Man, you’re absolutely rushed off your feet,’ she says, laughing.

‘I know, riiight?’ I reply ruefully.

‘Dave looks as if he’s doing all right, though.’ Dayve, not David. ‘So this is what you do now?’ she asks, looking up at my diminished stock. ‘Have you sold everything?’

Looking at the stall through her eyes I feel a shiver of panic. I don’t want to think about it. When I’d been saving my clothes from the fire, I’d obviously saved the most expensive, but maybe that hadn’t been my best idea. I should have kept some of the cheaper things, the kind of thing that a person would buy on impulse, just because she liked it, without having to think about it and come back later. ‘My upstairs neighbour had a fire in her flat.’

‘Fern! You’re kidding!’ Gigi covers her mouth with her hand. ‘And all your clothes got burnt?’

‘No, they got wet. This is the stuff I rescued.’

‘Oh, Fern! You’re insured though, right?’ She unhooks a flowing pink fit-and-flare dress and holds it against herself, looking down. ‘What waist is this?’ she asks.

‘Sixty-six centimetres.’

‘It’s beautiful. Seventies?’

‘Yes, mid-Seventies, I’d say.’

‘Hey, Dave?’ she calls. ‘What do you think?’

My neighbour in black emerges from his parallel universe. He grins at Gigi and glances at the dress. ‘Very nice.’

‘“Very nice.”’ She laughs and holds the pink dress up to look at it. ‘That’s all he ever says, Fern – very nice.’

He looks from Gigi to me. ‘Do you two know each other?’

‘We were at Camden School for Girls together, briefly. You were a shy little thing, weren’t you, Fern? Always drawing stuff in this little black book of hers. He’s the same.’ She jerks her thumb at my neighbour. ‘You’re always drawing, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘Always.’

The way Gigi is talking implies it’s some weird quirk that we share, but David doesn’t seem bothered.

She’s still holding the pink dress.

‘Do you want to try it on?’ I ask hopefully. I’ve devised a way of closing the stall off with a muslin drape and crocodile clips.

She gives David a quick look. ‘Yes, why not. But I’ll have to be quick, though; I’ve got Pilates.’

I’m glad she’s said yes. I want to see it on her. This is one of those dresses where the genius lies in the cut of the fabric and the way it hangs. It counterbalanced the androgyny of the styles of the Sixties.

Gigi pulls the dress on over her jeans, but it looks lovely on her with its plunging neckline and the fluid curve of the skirt. The pink is the same shade as her hair. She undoes a couple of the little covered buttons down the front to show her cleavage and she poses for us both with a hand on her hip. It was made for her.

‘Gigi, you look gorgeous,’ I say sincerely, my hand on my heart.

‘Dave? What do you think?’

‘You look like a stick of candyfloss.’ His face softens. ‘Yeah. Gorgeous.’

She turns the label over to look at the price. ‘You take cards?’

‘I do.’

As I reach for the machine, she touches some other dresses and looks at them briefly but puts them back. She pouts at him, ducks back under the curtain and takes the dress off. She’s satisfied.

Once she’s paid, she bundles the dress into her bag. ‘Guys, I’ve got to go; I’ll be late for class,’ she says, kissing David enthusiastically on the mouth. ‘I’ll see you later.’

We watch her leave – I can see her pink hair bobbing above the crowds.

When she’s lost from view, David turns to me. ‘How many light boxes has that just cost me?’

‘Ha ha!’ Hopefully, he means it as a joke.

He gazes down the alley for a moment as if he thinks she might come back. Then he asks, ‘What was she like at school?’

I smile. ‘The same! She was such a laugh. She put my new jacket on a friend’s dog once and it ran off and …’ I cut the story short, because he doesn’t need to know I was too scared to go after it and I never saw the jacket again. ‘I never wanted to sit by her in class, though.’

‘Why not?’

‘She never stopped talking. I couldn’t concentrate. I used to get yelled at on account of her.’

‘Fern – you were a geek!’

‘I know.’ I grin at the thought and add truthfully, ‘She was way too cool to hang out with me.’

‘Small world,’ he says.

‘Yeah.’ I give him a sideways glance. ‘You’re the astrologer, you’d know.’

The flow of people through the market has ebbed suddenly. Times like this, I wonder what the hell happens, where they all go. The place is like a huge maze, with certain crucial landmarks like giant sculpted horses, blacksmiths, ATMs. Even so, I still get lost. So do they.

‘Is it always this quiet?’ David asks.

He sounds anxious and I try to reassure him. ‘In the week it’s mostly tourists. And the kind of tourists who come to Camden Lock … well, let’s just say you can’t get a lot in a backpack. But at weekends, it’s brilliant. The place is absolutely heaving. You’ll be amazed.’

‘Yeah.’ He shifts restlessly, looking at the empty stalls on either side of us.

His mood has changed since he saw Gigi and I don’t really know why. Maybe he, like me, is suddenly seeing his stall through her eyes; not as a dream but in cold reality.

As though he’s read my mind, he says, ‘I’m not sure about this alley, Fern. If somebody wants to come back to buy something, they might never find me again. I need a bigger unit. Somewhere with storage.’

I nod. As I’d been the one to tell him about the stall going free, I feel a certain amount of responsibility for the location. ‘Maybe it suits my needs better than yours,’ I tell him apologetically. I don’t add the main reason that it suits my needs is that it’s cheap.

He looks at my feeble display of dresses and gives me a quick smile. ‘I guess it does. Gigi’s been away for the weekend with more stuff than that.’

The smile softens it and he doesn’t say it in a mean way, but my doubts come flooding back. As my parents pointed out, I’m not a businesswoman, I’m a market trader. I’ve got little stock and even fewer customers and I’m running out of funds.

Feeling a bit sick about it, I say, ‘David, you know that day that we first met? And you said no good deed ever goes unpunished? Is that something you really believe?’

He looks amused. ‘Touch wood, I’ve been all right so far.’

I haven’t, though.

David goes back to his side of the canvas and sits down, stretches his legs and opens the book on astrology.

Without him, I’m at a loose end. I sit down, too, and write a list in my client book to distract me from my self-doubts:

Cato Hamilton

Church sale

Car boot sale

Tabletop sale

This list will be the foundation of my new strategy to get more stock.

It’s dead here now and the time is dragging. I need an energy boost, a sugar hit. ‘David, please could you watch my stall while I get myself something to eat?’

He looks up from his book. ‘Sure.’

‘Do you want anything?’

‘That’s okay, thanks, I’ve got a flask.’

‘Oh, fine.’ Obviously, he’s a practical guy with his dovetail joints and stuff. Of course he’s going to have a flask. ‘Won’t be long,’ I tell him and I make my way along the maze of cobbled lanes past the vaults, winding through the steamy stalls selling sizzling street food. It’s exciting, like being transplanted to another continent. Here, with the profusion of smells and multitude of languages, it feels like anywhere but England.

I cross Camden Lock Place and call in at Chin Chin Labs for a liquid nitrogen ice cream. I like the process, watching the chilly vapour freeze the cream, choosing the flavours and sprinkles.

Cutting through the West Yard, I lean on the humped black-and-white Roving Bridge to eat the ice cream. It’s a sunny day and the place is busy. Beneath me, clumps of green weed undulate gently on the surface of the sluggish canal.

By the time I finish off my cone I start to feel more optimistic. I’ll get new stock. I’ll message everyone on my mailing list. I’ll begin a new push for sales. I’ll make a name for myself.

David has started to pack up when I get back. It’s early, just gone five, and the market doesn’t close until seven.

‘How did you get on today?’ I ask him.

He looks at me blankly, as if he’s distracted. ‘It’s all relative, isn’t it?’ he says after a moment. His eyes are tired, but he smiles. ‘There’s no pressure, that’s the main thing. You can’t put a price on that, right?’

The way he says it makes me wonder what’s been going on in his life, because he doesn’t sound that convincing. I want to ask him, but before I can he’s gone back to packing away his stall.

The following evening I pick up the Camden New Journal from the doormat, where it lies surrounded by Pizza flyers and taxis offering trips to airports, to find Lucy and me on the front page, standing outside our house. She with her black towel wrapped around her looking amazing in a cloud of the photographer’s apple-scented billowing smoke and me looking shocked and enigmatic in my trench coat, my hair falling over my right eye, holding my beautiful dresses like a wartime heroine.

Compared with me, Lucy looks terribly underdressed. Compared with her, I look ridiculously overdressed. I’m not sure what prompted me to grab my raincoat, apart from it being Burberry. I had some vague notion of it being appropriate for an emergency, I think.

The important thing is, we look good and neither of us looks particularly traumatised, despite the headline: ‘Actress and Fashion Curator in Sauna Trauma’. I like my low chin-tilt. I don’t remember adopting it at all, but then I realise I was trying to keep the clothes from falling.

I go back outside, hurry up the steps and ring Lucy’s doorbell.

Lucy flings her door open. ‘Hey, Fern! Come in,’ she says cheerfully, picking up her copy of the Journal from the mat. The word ‘Welcome’ is really faded. It’s literally outworn its welcome.

‘We’re on the front page,’ I say, unfurling my paper to show her.

‘Oh, great!’ She looks at the photograph critically for a moment or two and reads the headline. ‘Actress? Actress?’

I try to look sympathetic that the paper didn’t call her an actor, but I’m secretly thrilled at being called a fashion curator in print. I read it aloud for Lucy’s benefit:

‘Actress Lucy Mills escaped from a blaze in her sauna on Saturday afternoon. Lucy, who’s currently starring as Lady Macbeth at The Gatehouse theatre, Highgate, said, “It’s a miracle we got out of there alive.” Fellow resident, Fern Banks, curator of wearable vintage fashion at Fern Banks Vintage in Camden Market, lost a sizeable amount of irreplaceable stock in the blaze. “I hope my company will survive this. I intend to be like a phoenix rising from the ashes.”’

I glance at Lucy. ‘Uh-oh. It sounded good when I said I’d lost a sizeable amount of stock, but now people are going to think I’ve got nothing left to sell,’ I comment gloomily. ‘And they’d be right.’

‘Don’t worry about it. What you have to do is give it a couple of weeks and call the Camden Journal to tell them you actually are a phoenix rising from the ashes. Get your name out there before everyone forgets it. They always like a good story for the inside pages. You can do an advertorial, with local people rallying around you.’

I like her optimism. ‘Good idea! Sounds expensive, though. But I’ll think about it, because as we’re on the front page,’ I point out, ‘they might put me rising from the ashes on the front page, too.’

‘Aw, Fern. Trust me, they won’t. Because a fire’s bad news. Rising like a phoenix is good news. They never put good news on the front page – who’d buy it?’

Which is a sad indictment of life today.

We study the article once more in silence.

‘Have you forgiven me yet?’ Lucy asks in a small voice when she comes to the end of the column. ‘I feel really bad about it.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I reply, giving her a hug. ‘After all, it was an accident. The fire officers made more mess than the fire did, what with chopping bits out of my door and the water damage,’ I point out ruefully. I don’t believe in bearing a grudge – I don’t want to be like my mother.

But it is a big problem, all the same, and it’s adding to my worries.

So far, the loss adjusters are reluctant to pay out for the hole between our flats, because they see the fire as an act of negligence on Lucy’s part, and the estate management isn’t happy with the fact she’s got a sauna at all.

I haven’t told my parents about the fire yet, because one way or another, going by past experience, they’re going to blame me for it. Ideally, if I have my own way, they’ll never find out.

But if the worst comes to the worst and we have to pay for it ourselves, I can’t afford to go halves with Lucy to mend the hole. My priority is to get more stock to sell. The whole ‘rising from the ashes’ bit is all very well, but without stock I’m not going to have a business left.

‘I’ve arranged for the flats to be thermo-fogged,’ she says after a moment.

Apparently, thermal fogging is a kind of deodorising method of blasting out the smoke smell, replacing it with something citrusy and nasally acceptable, despite being toxic to aquatic life.

‘Great! No more smoke smell!’ I’m very happy about that. Obviously not the toxic bit, but I love the idea of the flat smelling citrusy for a change.

Back at mine, determined to do as much as I can to put things right, I make a coffee, get my paintbrush and go outside to paint the front door. I’m kneeling on the doormat, when my phone rings in my back pocket. I balance my paintbrush on the pot. It’s a number that I don’t recognise. Spam, at a guess, but I answer it just to be sure.

It’s a woman. ‘Fern Banks Vintage?’

‘Yes, that’s me,’ I say warily. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Chalk Farm Library. Just a moment, I have a call for you. Here you are.’

I’m perplexed. I have no idea why Chalk Farm Library is calling me. I’m not even a member. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello?’ The voice is high-pitched and accented, vaguely familiar. ‘Is this Fern Banks who’s in the paper today?’

‘Yes,’ I say again, getting to my feet because I’ve been kneeling for ages on the bristles of the doormat and they’re prickling my knees.

‘Good! You’re the woman who stopped the bus to give me my money back. You see, I recognised you from your picture. You have a very distinctive style. My name’s Dinah Moss. M-O-S-S,’ she repeats with emphasis. ‘And you’re Fern Banks. B-A-N-K-S. You see how it is? Moss, Fern, Banks.’

I laugh – I can’t believe it. Something good is happening at last!

‘Now, I see from the paper that you have a business as a curator of fashion, I understand?’

‘Yes, that’s right!’ I reply brightly.

‘I’m ringing to invite you to tea to thank you and I’d also very much like to show you my collection of haute couture. It’s evident to me that you’re a woman who’ll singularly appreciate it.’

The words thrill me. Haute couture is dressmaking perfection, with garments made from the most extravagant fabrics, in the most intricate designs, with meticulous detailing and the finest needlework. And she thinks I’ll appreciate it! (That’s understating it slightly.) Haute couture is stratospherically out of my price range so it’s my equivalent of treasure. ‘I’d love to come to tea.’

‘Ah! We’re agreed! And also, I have a business proposition for you that I believe will interest you. But I won’t talk now; I’m in the library. So, now I have your number. And you take my number, too,’ she says imperiously.

‘I’ll get a pen.’ I go into the shadowed, smoke-scented flat to find one and she gives me her home number. I read it back to her and write it down on my wall calendar with her name next to it, smiling to myself: Dinah Moss. Moss, Fern, Banks. We agree to meet on Monday afternoon, my day off.

‘Excellent! Goodbye. I’ll look forward to it.’ Her voice fades as she says to the woman on the desk, ‘Here you are, I’ve finished now.’

The call ends and I put the phone back in my pocket. I have to say, I’m excited about the phone call, because Dinah Moss who wears Chanel says I have a very distinctive style and a compliment always means more coming from an expert.

I try not to speculate about the business proposition.

I have a good feeling about it, all the same.

From time to time over the past few days I’ve been mulling over David Westwood’s comment that no good deed ever goes unpunished. Not that I’m superstitious or anything, but the fire did come shortly after my good deed.

More than anything, I’d like to prove him wrong.

LOT 6
A blue cotton day dress with five bowling-pin-shaped wooden buttons, fitted waist, patch pockets, size 12, labelled with Controlled Commodity symbol (CC41) to comply with government rationing controls, 1941

Sunday is a sunny day and the market is busy. However, sadly for me, I’m not busy at all. I was hoping to sell the last of my stock on my practically bare stall so that I’d have the funds to resupply, but the lack of choice is putting people off.

Gratifyingly, a few people recognise me from the article in the Camden New Journal and sympathise about the fire, but not enough to buy anything. I get them to write their contact details in my client book before they go.

I lean on the counter and watch the constant shifting tide of people flow past as I listen enviously to David Westwood’s sales patter above the noise, lifting my face to the warm sun, whiling away the time thinking up a patter of my own.

And then, suddenly, the mysterious lull occurs and the market is quiet again.

Mick has a theory that any lulls in conversation in a pub or restaurant occur at ten to or ten past the hour, so I check the time. Sure enough, it’s ten minutes past five and I feel a sudden fond urge to ring him and tell him. I’m just getting out my phone, when David casts his shadow over me.

‘That was crazy,’ he says, pushing up the sleeves of his black T-shirt, his mood buoyant. He’s grinning, high on success, and looks up at my rails. ‘How did you get on?’

‘Fine,’ I tell him, grinning back. I don’t want to ruin his mood.

Most people would take this statement at face value and I assume he has, too, because he strolls back around to his side. Then he returns with a single blue acrylic panel and holds it up to the light for me to look through.

‘This is what the constellation of Leo looks like,’ he says.

As I lean over the counter to look, chin in hand, I can feel his warmth radiating through his black T-shirt.

‘Yeah?’ I squint at it, trying hard to make something of the random holes. How the ancients got a lion out of that, I’ll never know. David’s tanned thumb is holding the Perspex, and I look at the pale crescent of his nail. ‘Nice!’

‘This is the tail, see?’ he says, slowly tracing the shape of a lion to the rump, down a leg, along the back and up the neck to the mane and the muzzle and the chest.

Our faces are so close that I can smell him, clean and fresh, even on this hot day in the dusty city. I swallow so hard my throat squeaks. ‘So that’s Leo,’ I say hoarsely, the holes leaking sunbeams along my finger.

‘This particular lion has golden fur. It makes it fearless and indestructible.’ He shifts his face a little to look at me and he’s still holding up the Perspex, its blue colour deepening his eyes and shading his face. ‘You’ll be okay,’ he says seriously.

Without warning, I feel as if I’m going to cry. I’m nodding agreement, pressing my lips together to stop the trembling. ‘Yeah, I know.’

He straightens before I do. ‘Anyway,’ he says. ‘That’s Leo.’

When he goes back to his stall I feel as if the earth has shifted underneath me. To ground myself, I do what I was intending to do a few minutes before. I call Mick.

‘Hey, Doll,’ he says in his rich, soft voice.

I can hear music in the background and I know he’s home.

‘When did you get back?’

‘This morning. I got a lift with Roscoe.’

Roscoe’s a member of the band. ‘That’s good,’ I say wistfully, staring at the glow of the sun through the canvas roof.

‘I was going to call you. What are you doing tomorrow?’ he asks.

I smile. ‘Nothing.’

He chuckles softly. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Let’s make a day of it and go—’

‘Oh!’ I interrupt him quickly, suddenly remembering about Dinah. ‘Actually, I am doing something! I’m meeting a woman about a business proposition. But that’s not until the afternoon, anyway.’

‘Ah, hell, Fern. Can’t you do it another time?’

Through the corner of my eye I can see David’s legs outstretched on the cobbles, his polished shoes gleaming, and I lower my voice. ‘Well – not really, no, Mick. It’s business. How about we make it Tuesday?’

The volume of the music increases. What time is this to be partying?

‘I’ll get back to you, Doll,’ he said and hangs up.

I laugh merrily once he’s gone, in case David’s listening and thinks my love life is as much of a failure as my business. ‘Bye!’ Damn. I’m a Leo. I’m fearless and indestructible, I tell myself firmly, putting my phone away.

Utilitarian glamour – that’s the look I’m going for as I head to Dinah’s for tea. Dinah’s house is in Netherhall Gardens, a quiet, residential part of Hampstead with large, impressive red-brick houses, architectural plants and electronic gates. I’m thinking of reminding her about the first time we met. The way I look at it, the first time was chance, the second time was a coincidence, but I feel in my optimistic heart that this third meeting is meant to be.

Dinah’s house has a brown wooden gate and a crazy-paving path leading to the front door. I ring the bell and she opens the door immediately as if she’s been standing behind it waiting for me to arrive. She greets me graciously, posing with one arm on the doorframe and looking very Coco Chanel in a little cream silk shift dress accessorised with a cascade of faux pearls. Her dyed black hair is curling slightly around her sharp jawline; her lipstick is bright scarlet.

She, of course, is scrutinising me in turn. I’ve dressed very carefully for this business meeting in a navy shirtwaister with square shoulders and a narrow belt. I’m posing, too. I’ve rolled back my fringe from my face, very Forties, and with my peach blusher and red lipstick I look as healthy as a land girl. Dinah beckons me in and we bond immediately over a familiar subject.

‘I like your look,’ she says approvingly. ‘Although you gave me a start when I first saw you with that suitcase. There was all that dreadful rattling noise and it unsettled me. I’m a person who’s very susceptible to noise.’

‘Sorry. It’s a cheap case and one of the wheels is coming off.’

‘Oh,’ she says, spreading her hands, ‘and there’s a hole in my handbag; it’s come unstitched!’

There’s something in the way that we’ve just swapped stories of our shoddy goods that makes us both laugh.

‘It’s being repaired now,’ she adds gravely, ‘at the Handbag Clinic.’

‘Good. I’m afraid there’s no hope for my suitcase. I’m going to have it put down.’

She nods seriously. ‘Put out of its misery; yes. I think that’s best – it looked a sorry thing.’ Her mood brightens. ‘First of all, before we have tea I want to show you something that you’ll appreciate as a curator of fashion. Come. Always one must put pleasure before business.’

We climb an oak spiral staircase, which leads up to the first floor.

Dinah takes me into a windowless dressing room with mirrored wardrobes on all three walls. She invites me to sit on a large ivory velvet ottoman. The chandelier throws pools of rainbow light on the polished floor. With a flourish, she touch-opens each of the wardrobe doors in turn. Our reflections disappear and the interiors of the wardrobes glow with lights.

Dinah’s smiling, more to herself than to me. ‘This is my collection,’ she says shyly.

‘Wow.’

It’s like falling into my favourite dream. Her clothes are hanging in muslin garment bags that shroud the dresses inside them. Each garment bag has a vinyl pocket with a Polaroid of the garment tucked into it. I’m seriously excited by these wrapped-up delights, impressed by the care she’s taken to look after them, and I’m filled with a rush of anticipation.

She laughs gleefully at my expression. ‘It’s taken you by surprise, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes!’ I’m looking at the Polaroids and through the muslin bags I can see the vague but enticing outline of her clothes.

She sweeps her hand along them carelessly but possessively, like a lover, and looks at me coquettishly over her shoulder. ‘I have a question for you. How would you catalogue a lifetime’s collection of couture like this?’ she asks.

Is this something she wants me to do? My heart is beating fast with anticipation. Oh please, yes, I’d do it in a heartbeat. ‘I guess I’d do it by designer and by era,’ I say, wondering if this is the actual interview.

‘That’s exactly what I do,’ she says approvingly. ‘I keep them all in chronological order, in the order I was given them by my dahlink husband.’

I’d like a husband like that. ‘Really? Going back to when?’

Again, she turns her head to look at me, her hands on her hips, raising her eyebrows briefly, enjoying my surprise.

‘Let’s see how clever you are, shall we? Tell me, what was the style in post-war nineteen forties?’

I laugh. ‘Come on, that’s too easy. I’m wearing it. Utilitarian, flannel, no more than five buttons due to clothes rationing, two pockets—’

She wags her finger at me. ‘Shame on you, Fern Banks! I’m talking about couture! Here! Look!’ She pulls out a bag, unzips it and takes out the garment to show me.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing. It’s a wasp-waisted jacket over a corseted black silk dress with a midi-length full pleated skirt, so boned and perfectly structured that even on the hanger it holds the shape of the wearer – it could probably stand up by itself.

Christian Dior. I’m stunned, lost for words. My skin prickles with adrenaline. I’ve only ever seen this ensemble in books and, unexpectedly, here it is, a museum piece hanging in a wardrobe.

Dinah thrusts it into my arms and chuckles. ‘Go on! Take it! Feel!’ she says. ‘Don’t we always have to feel?’

Seeing my hesitation, her smile fades and suddenly her mood changes. She says sharply, ‘The cat got your tongue? Tell me about this!’

She’s testing me. I might, after all, be a fake. ‘Well, it’s obviously …’ I hardly dare to say it. ‘It looks like – it’s in the style of Christian Dior’s New Look collection. Spring nineteen-forty-seven, right? La Ligne Corolle. After the war he wanted to move on from the relaxed, practical frocks that women were used to and he chose the corseted, exaggerated cinch-waist styles.’ I’m looking under the skirt at the seams, at the finish of it. I glance uncertainly at her, trying to read her expression, wondering what this is all about, what exactly my role is.

She relaxes again. ‘Of course, you’re quite correct,’ she says languidly, swatting away my words with her hand as if they’re not important anyway. ‘It also has a hat with it. I have it in a box.’

Fascinated, I hold the Dior at arm’s-length. It’s like looking at something incredible, like a sunset, and trying to put a price on it. I’ve got an idea how much this outfit is worth. Probably six figures. Does she?

My speechless admiration amuses her. She laughs and takes it from me – she has other things to show me and she shares in my delight. I get a glimpse of the most beautiful fabrics: chiffon, crêpe romaine, crêpe marocaine, crêpe de chine, gossamer, moiré, organzine, shantung, brocade, velvets in jewel colours – emerald, amethyst, turquoise, lapis lazuli, ruby, sapphire, ivory; dresses so beautiful that I groan in pleasure.

‘They’re all here,’ she says with great pride, spreading her arms wide. ‘The best of the best. Dior, Givenchy, Balenciaga, Laroche, Schiaparelli.’

The names are poetry to me.

Dinah pauses and glances at me conspiratorially. ‘And Chanel.’ She raises her hand. ‘No, don’t say it! I know you’re wondering, Chanel? How could she? Well, I forgave her in the Fifties.’

‘You did? For what?’

Dinah frowns and her expression hardens. ‘What do you think? For cosying up to the Germans during the occupation, of course. Everyone knows she had an affair with that diplomat, the Baron.’ She shrugs. ‘But she was cleared of being a collaborator, so what can you do? Maybe, after all, it was just sex. I chose to forgive,’ she says haughtily, sliding the hangers along the rails. ‘Look! Here’s a Grès that might interest you.’

‘Madame Alix Grès,’ I say, showing off my knowledge, and Dinah pats my cheek sharply but approvingly.

‘Of course, dahlink. Madame Alix,’ she says fondly. ‘Who else but us remembers her anymore?’

She pulls out the gown, in Grecian draped and pleated ivory. It’s breathtaking, a miracle of construction, the pinnacle of elegance. As she holds up the hanger, her arm trembles with the weight; it’s heavy, lavish with fabric. I want to hold it. Hell, I’d kill to wear it.

‘You like it, huh?’ Dinah shakes the hanger so that the dress shimmies gracefully. ‘See how it hangs? Magnificent, isn’t it?’

It takes my breath away. ‘I’ve seen one in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I never thought I’d get to hold one.’

Dinah smiles. ‘How about you try it on? Would you like to?’

‘Really? Yes, please!’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t look,’ she says, turning her back to me, but as soon as I step out of my dress she turns around and issues a series of stern orders.

‘Here, slip that arm out of your bra strap, see, it’s one-shouldered. Undo the side zip – no, not there, it’s on the right. Don’t step into it, pull it over your head. Okay, wait. There.’ Dinah’s tugging it into place, her cold fingers rough against my skin.

The gown slides down my body as cool and silky as a waterfall.

‘This hooks onto this – stand still, will you!’ She jerks me almost off my feet. ‘That shoulder isn’t straight – pull it up. There. Okay. Look at me.’

I turn to face her.

Her face softens and she clasps her knuckles to her mouth, her chin crumpling, tears shimmering in her eyes. ‘So beautiful,’ she says softly. She shuts a wardrobe door with the toe of her shoe. ‘Look at yourself in it.’

I stand tall, shoulders back. My reflection shows me as my very best self – the person I dream of being. The gown is a masterpiece of design, the definition of elegance. The fabric knots in the front and falls from my hips, Grecian and feminine. I step forward in it, and the chandelier’s reflection sparkles beneath my feet, the folds caressing my legs and ankles. It’s the sexiest dress I’ve ever worn. It elevates me to a new state of being. No one could possibly feel ugly or inferior in this gown. If it were mine, I’d keep it and it would give me permanent confidence and I’d never take it off.

I turn to look over my shoulder, seeing myself from the back. ‘Oh, Dinah.’ It’s the most surreal experience of my life. ‘And you’ve worn all of these,’ I say to my reflection, trying to comprehend what it must be like to own these clothes.

‘Yes, of course. They exist to be worn,’ Dinah says airily. ‘Well, you know, in those days, my husband and I, we socialised.’

I shake my head in disbelief. ‘It’s amazing to imagine. It’s like another world to me.’ But the thing is, I can imagine it. ‘Do you ever wear them now?’

She shrugs nonchalantly. ‘Now and then, if there’s an occasion. Weddings; dinners; we attend wearing our best and doing nothing more energetic than picking up a fork.’

She gestures for me to turn and, reluctantly, I stand still and raise my right arm for her to unfasten the gown. She helps me out of it then I put my navy blue day dress back on and become myself again, trying to ignore the anticlimax.

Dinah tucks the clothes away, taking time to put them back in the right order. Then she straightens them and briskly closes all the wardrobe doors, and the two of us stand side by side with our sunray of multiplied reflections in the mirrors.

She looks at herself critically in her knee-length cream Chanel, one hand on her hip, and tilts her head. ‘How do I look?’

‘Fabulous,’ I reply.

She grips my hand. ‘You think I’m beautiful?’

I almost say yes just out of politeness but she asks the question so intently that I consider it seriously. She’s not beautiful, actually, although on first impression I thought she was. Her eyes are large and close together, like a lion’s eyes. Her dyed hair is neat and wavy, her nose is narrow and her mouth well shaped in that bright red lipstick so similar to my own. She’s not beautiful, that’s not the word at all, but she is striking.

‘Come! It’s not difficult! It’s a yes or no question,’ she says brusquely.

What kind of question is that to ask someone who’s practically a stranger, anyway? ‘You give the general impression that you are.’

This makes her smile.

‘Good! The impression is what counts! And now, let’s have tea.’

Once again, I find myself wondering about the nature of the business deal. I’m eager to find out what it is and return to the fantasyland of haute couture.

She leads the way back downstairs and we go into the far end of the dining room. Facing the lush green garden is a seating area with two worn sage green velvet armchairs and an occasional table piled with Sunday supplements. On the mahogany sideboard stands a seven-branched candelabra, a Jewish menorah.

She’s laid a butler’s tray with china cups and saucers, milk and sugar cubes, and she goes into the kitchen then comes back with a teapot with a felt tea-cosy.

She pauses before pouring and looks at me steadily. ‘In Chalk Farm, you stopped the bus for me so that I could be reunited with my money. I’m grateful for that. So now it’s time for me to do something for you.’ She has a sharp and lively gleam in her eyes. ‘Let’s talk business,’ she says, pouring the tea. ‘It’s what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?’

‘Obviously, I’m curious,’ I reply, my heart thumping with excitement.

‘Do you know of a place called Morland Street?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, good. There is a post office there, do you know it?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Next to the post office is my husband’s tailor shop. It’s a big shop; you can’t miss it. You know the one I mean?’

I shake my head.

‘Well, it’s there, anyhow. He also offers dry-cleaning but,’ she pulls a face, ‘that’s something that he farms out to another company and there’s no money in it. Dressmaking is what he does best.’

She’s lost me. I have absolutely no idea where this conversation is going, but I nod.

The tea is dark and very strong; I can taste the tannin on my tongue. I take the sugar tongs and put in a couple of sugar lumps just for the novelty value. Now it’s very sweet, too.

‘Tell me, who do you use for your alterations?’

‘What?’ Yikes. She’s got the entirely wrong idea about me. I don’t need a tailor. My thoughts keep returning longingly to those rows of garment bags lined up in the wardrobes. Dior, Chanel, Grès … ‘I don’t offer that kind of service. My clients get it done themselves if they need to.’

She sucks her breath in sharply and tuts. ‘But you’re a curator of fashion. You need a good tailor for couture. My husband was in the atelier for a French fashion house. You know the word atelier?’

I nod. ‘It’s the workshop where the dressmakers stitch the garments.’

‘Exactly, yes. You know how important that job is, the dressmaking?’

‘Sure, of course.’

‘Well then. Before the war he was with Chanel and after coming here as a refugee, he worked for Norman Hartnell, so you see, he has credentials. He’s been in the rag trade all his life and between you and me,’ she says, lowering her voice, ‘his life has been a long one. Listen to me. He’s the best. I can recommend him to you.’ She grips my wrist, pulling me towards her. ‘You helped me out and now I’m helping you out, as a friend.’

This is what happens when I big myself up; it’s very misleading. ‘Dinah, I’m so sorry, I’ve given you the wrong impression,’ I confess. ‘I don’t sell couture. I sell vintage, retro, ready-to-wear.’

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