The Shop Girls

‘You’d better start with this one,’ Miss Drake instructed the hairstylist, Monsieur Paul. ‘She’ll need the most attention!’

Thanks, thought Lily, sitting down at Monsieur Paul’s gesture. He was small and whippet-thin, his skinny legs emerging from what looked like an artist’s smock. He ran his fingers through Lily’s hair, making it more unruly than ever. He pulled it this way and that, examined the roots, then the ends, and not so much shook his head as gave a little shudder. Was it her imagination or, as he covered her with a slithery pink cape, did he actually say under his breath ‘Quelle horreur’?

He began by yanking her head this way and that, smothering her hair in some pungent lotion and twirling it about with the end of a vicious-looking comb. Then he inserted rollers, blasted it with hot air, tugged the rollers out and doused the whole thing in hairspray. At the end he offered her a mirror, but before Lily could take it, Miss Drake reappeared and shooed her into another cubicle for ‘make-up’.

Having her hair pulled had been bad enough, but it was nothing to the agony of having her eyebrows ‘tidied’, which Elizabeth Arden’s top salesgirl, a lady of mature years, said was necessary to ‘bring out those lovely eyes’. Having brought them out, she made Lily open them even wider while she applied mascara, then caked her face with powder – ‘“Dawn Blush” is the shade for you, dear. Remember that when you get your next pay packet!’ After that, Lily hardly noticed the lipstick and rouge go on.

Thrilled with her work (and a possible sale – though she’d be lucky) the saleswoman stepped back and handed her a mirror.

‘Quite a transformation!’ she crowed.

Lily was speechless. She’d never used more than a slick of pale lipstick and the tiniest bit of boot-black on her eyelashes. Now she looked like a panda with a high fever. A panda in a blonde wig.

Giving up the chair to Sally, she staggered off, trying not to look at her reflection in the long fitting-room mirrors. She found that Miss Naylor, the Schoolwear buyer, had arrived to chaperone the models while the Fashion buyers took a break and changed into their finery for the evening.

Miss Naylor and Miss Wagstaff were friends, but Lily was wary of her. She and Miss Frobisher had had something of a set-to before Christmas; Miss Frobisher had won and Miss Naylor had not been best pleased.

She nodded coolly at Lily, whom she saw as a Frobisher ally, and then towards some sandwiches and lemon barley water on a trolley.

‘Have something to eat,’ she ordered. ‘You’ll need it.’

Lily nodded – you didn’t say no to Miss Naylor lightly – but her stomach rolled at the thought. She poured herself a glass of lemon barley to show willing, and thankfully Miss Naylor spotted a couple of juniors giggling together and rushed off to deliver a lecture. Lily went in search of Gloria and found her in a quiet corner.

As a Cosmetics salesgirl, Gloria was considered competent to do her own make-up, so was already painted and preened. She was sipping from a hip flask which, she said, her boyfriend, Derek, had managed to smuggle in.

‘Have a nip,’ she said. ‘Better than lemon barley! Calm your nerves.’

Lily shook her head.

‘Not for me, thanks,’ she said. ‘But you’re not nervous, surely?’

‘Only that seeing me as the bride might give Derek ideas,’ scoffed Gloria. ‘As if I’m going to settle for a salesman off Shirts and Ties!’

In Number Three – ‘a go-anywhere day dress in a pretty powder blue – note the contrast trim and neat self-belt – just 60/- and 11 coupons’ (‘just!’) – Lily peered out from behind the fitting room curtain. It was ten to seven.

She’d managed to blot off the worst of the make-up, making rather a mess of the cloakroom roller towel, but it couldn’t be helped. The lipstick had worn off anyway, with all the nervous lip-licking, and she’d tried to loosen the concrete hairdo by waggling her fingers through it.

Out in front, the audience were arriving and the string quartet was tuning up. Beryl, wearing a sash with ‘Beryl’s Brides’ on it, was handing out programmes. Gladys, who’d sneaked round earlier to tell Lily she’d begged to stay on and watch the show, was standing to one side with Miss Frobisher. Jim was beside a pillar, deep in conversation with Evelyn Brimble.

Might have known she’d be there, thought Lily: she was, after all, engaged to Mr Marlow’s son, Robert. Presumably he was somewhere about too … yes, there he was, talking to a burly, florid man in a chalk-stripe suit with a carnation in his buttonhole. New money, as some of the older assistants at Marlow’s, used to serving the district’s gentry, would have sniffed.

As Lily wondered if she dared try to wave to Jim, Mr Simmonds came up to his little dais and took the microphone.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please. On behalf of Mr Cedric Marlow and his staff, may I welcome you to this very special event for the store. We look forward to an evening of dazzling fashions, modelled for you tonight by some of our very own staff members, who have been practising all afternoon to give you a truly memorable evening. Without further ado, could I ask you to kindly take your seats so that the show can begin!’

There was a buzz of chatter as staff shepherded the most important guests – including Robert, Evelyn and her parents, Sir Douglas and Lady Brimble, to seats in the front row beside Mr Marlow himself, who was smiling benignly.

Cedric Marlow was nearly seventy, very much of the old school of shopkeeping, and it showed. He was semi-retired now, leaving the floor supervisors in charge of day-to-day operations, but he liked to keep a guiding hand on the tiller (or stick his oar in, as Jim had been heard to mutter) – as with the London models’ expenses. But the staff respected him; Mr Marlow had built up the store from the small draper’s shop that his father had started, and Jim wasn’t alone in giving him credit for that.

‘That was decent of Simmonds, wasn’t it?’ Sally, in Number Two – ‘a light woollen dress by Atrima – note the clever use of colour for the placket and mock pockets’ – appeared behind her. ‘He must have written that himself – Wagstaff would never have given us a mention!’

Lily was still hoping to catch Jim’s eye. At that moment he looked up and gave her a huge grin and a thumbs-up.

‘Good luck!’ he mouthed.

At least he still recognised her. Perhaps the evening wouldn’t be too bad after all.

Chapter 3

And it wasn’t. To Lily’s amazement, it went surprisingly smoothly. Any shyness she’d felt about cavorting around in her bra and knickers in front of the others had long gone and the juniors helped, holding dresses open so that Lily could step into them, untangling Gloria when she got her hair snagged on a button. And instead of criticising, the buyers were so keen that their own departments’ offerings would shine that they were positively encouraging.

‘Head up, shoulders back!’ Miss McIver urged. ‘You’re doing really well!’

‘Don’t forget the bias-cut yoke when you hear Mr Simmonds mention it! Just point to it – and a nice smooth turn at the end like last time!’ added Miss Drake.

The bridal finale was Number Seventy, and by the time the girls reached the high sixties, evening wear, Lily was almost enjoying herself. Then Gloria, coming off and ceding place to Sally, suddenly clutched at a curtain and went pale.

‘I don’t feel so good,’ she said. ‘Gone all light-headed.’

Miss Naylor was there like a shot with a velvet-buttoned stool.

‘Sit down, head between your knees!’ she commanded, shoving Gloria onto it.

Lily, half in and half out of a dress and with a junior holding Number Sixty-Nine ready, didn’t like the look of it. None of them had touched the sandwiches, and what Gloria had been taking sips of all night wasn’t lemon barley water, she knew. Despite her position facing the floor, Gloria remained a greenish white.

‘I can’t do it,’ she moaned. ‘I feel sick! And dizzy! You’ll have to find someone else to do the bridal.’

‘What’s going on?’ Miss Wagstaff bore down on them.

It was too much for Gloria. She clapped her hand over her mouth and pushed past her. Miss Wagstaff whirled around and went in pursuit.

‘Gloria! Don’t you dare get anything on my Hardy Amies!’

Miss McIver was gasping like a landed fish, but Miss Drake rounded on Lily.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to improvise. Lily – I need your help.’

The next five minutes passed in a blur. Sally had looked perplexed when frantic hand signals from Miss Drake had kept her twirling at the end of the catwalk three times, and then had been made to twirl again when she made it back to the fitting room end. The quartet’s playing had become somewhat manic, but Mr Simmonds had manfully burbled on about the dress Sally was showing being ‘perfect for cocktail wear or, er, going on somewhere afterwards, um, Mr Hitler and his activities permitting,’ which had even raised a laugh.

Now, the quartet starting scraping away at the Wedding March and Lily stepped onto the stage, just a few paces behind the bride. Miss Frobisher, the epitome, as always, of class and sophistication, preceded her in the Brussels lace, the tiara and the veil, with Lily in Number Sixty-Nine.

One of the juniors had rushed out to whisper to Miss Frobisher that she was needed urgently, and another to tell the musicians, but there’d been no way of warning Mr Simmonds about the change of model without alerting the audience. And as she and Miss Frobisher glided past, Lily couldn’t help but notice his expression. Shock, of course, but also something she couldn’t quite put a name to, then a frantic scrabbling for his script.

His blurb about the wedding dress was the same, but Lily’s delicate ice-blue dress, ‘a charming little number with a sweetheart neckline, perfect for any young girl’s debut’ became, thanks to his quick thinking, ‘and also, of course, suitable for any momentous occasion.’

If there was a slight hiatus, the audience didn’t notice: they’d broken into spontaneous applause. As they made their way down the catwalk, Lily looked to left and right as much as she wanted – Miss Wagstaff could take a running jump. She could see several mothers and daughters squinting at their programmes – hopefully intending a visit to Beryl’s Brides.

As Lily and Miss Frobisher executed a complex turn at the end of the catwalk, her boss gave Lily a conspiratorial smile. And as they swished past Mr Simmonds again, Lily was able to study his expression more closely. It was something like awe.

The show was over, the audience was gone, and, backstage, the buyers were supervising the re-hanging of the clothes. Gloria, pale and wan, had been poured into the arms of Derek from Shirts and Ties, and Sally was getting stuck into the curled-up sandwiches.

Lily had been walking on air when she’d stepped off stage, and her head was still buzzing with the applause.

‘Well!’ Miss Frobisher was back to normal, in her navy worsted suit. ‘Not quite what I expected from the evening!’

Even so, she’d taken it all in her stride – or rather glide, which seemed to come naturally to her.

‘I hope you didn’t mind, Miss Frobisher.’ Lily was also back in her own clothes. ‘But when Gloria came over all funny—’

She couldn’t say what she really thought, which was that she’d always thought Miss Frobisher would be perfect. She looked like a model anyway, tall and slim, with her honey blonde hair in its perfect French pleat, and she’d been a bride – it was only Marlow’s tradition that stipulated that all female staff were addressed as ‘Miss’, married or not.

‘I didn’t mind in the least,’ Miss Frobisher said now with a smile. ‘I rather enjoyed it. And you did very well yourself, Lily. But you should get home. It’s late.’

‘And we’ve got work in the morning.’

‘I didn’t mean that. Take a couple of hours off tomorrow morning in lieu of tonight and come in for eleven. You can tell the timekeeper to check with me if he makes a fuss.’

‘Thank you!’

Miss Frobisher was the best of bosses – firm but fair. She’d seen early on that Lily had potential, and she encouraged it – pushed her, even, sending her off to do sickness and holiday cover on other departments to widen her experience.

Lily said her goodnights and went out on to the sales floor, where the activity of the afternoon was happening in reverse, the purple felting being taken up and the catwalk dismantled. Jim, in shirtsleeves, was stacking chairs. Lily went over to him.

‘Let me help.’

Jim stopped what he was doing and grinned.

‘A bit beneath you, isn’t it? Now you’re a top model.’

Lily swiped at him and caught him on the arm.

‘You’re right. I’ll help but I can’t stay long. My mink-lined chauffeur-driven limousine’s waiting.’

There was no limousine, just the usual walk through the blackout for the two of them to the street of terraced houses where Jim lodged with Lily and her mum. Lily wanted to hear how he felt the show had gone – it was important for him that it had gone well.

‘Big thumbs-up,’ said Jim. ‘A lot of the audience were marking their programmes as you all tripped on and off, and Beryl was almost mobbed at the end.’

‘Really? That’s wonderful!’

‘And she was thrilled it wasn’t Gloria in her dress.’

‘I bet she was! And did Mr Marlow congratulate you? Or Robert? Or Evelyn Brimble?’

‘I didn’t see them afterwards. Evelyn buttonholed me beforehand, though, full of her and Robert’s wedding plans. Don’t know why she thought I’d be interested, but that’s one order Beryl won’t be getting. Evelyn’s got her dress already – well, it’s being made by some posh place in London.’

Lily wrinkled her nose.

‘No loss. I shouldn’t think Beryl’d want to deal with that spoilt madam!’

A car passed them with dipped and slitted headlights, but in the brief moment of illumination, Lily looked at Jim and saw him grimace. Lily knew he felt that in marrying the pampered and demanding Evelyn, Robert Marlow might be getting his just desserts. They both did.

Jim’s connection with the Marlows, father and son, was complex. Cedric Marlow had been married to Jim’s mother’s sister – a fairy-tale story of the shop girl who’d married the boss. Both women were dead now, Elsie Marlow soon after giving birth to Robert, and Jim’s mother a few months ago, but all her life she’d been resentful of her sister’s higher status and there’d been no contact between the two families. Jim’s mum and his dad, a farmworker, had been very much the poor relations, the country cousins, but his father had been badly gassed in the Great War and the family had fallen on even leaner times. Jim had only come to work at the store after his mother had swallowed her pride and appealed to Cedric to give her boy a helping hand.

Jim and his cousin Robert were both only children, but they couldn’t have been more different. Jim had started at the bottom, quite happily, and never mentioned, let alone traded on, the family connection – he’d got where he had by his own efforts. Robert had also been working at the store when Lily first started. Cedric had hoped that one day he’d take over the business, but Robert had repaid his trust with a delivery racket for favoured customers, Evelyn’s father Sir Douglas included. When the mucky business had been uncovered, thanks to Jim and Lily, Robert had still managed to come out of it smelling of roses: Sir Douglas had offered him a job in his Birmingham stockbroking firm, and the next thing anyone knew, Robert and Evelyn Brimble were engaged.

That reminded Lily of the man she’d seen Robert talking to.

‘Did you see Robert with a bloke who looked a bit – well, almost spivvy?’

‘Chalk-stripe suit and a carnation?’

‘Do you know him? Who is he?’

‘Yes … well, no, but I’ve seen him somewhere, I can’t think where. Maybe he was just out of context. Most men are, at a fashion show.’

‘I suppose he came with his wife. Oh, well. None of our business.’

They were nearly home and Lily suddenly felt exhausted. The evening was still playing out in her head, but it was going all blurry, one outfit merging into another. She yawned, loudly.

Jim unhooked his arm from hers and put it round her shoulders.

‘Missing your limousine? Or your glass coach? Come on, Cinders, not far to go.’

Thanks to Miss Frobisher, Lily had a lie-in next morning – she’d told her mum not to wake her – and by the time she came downstairs Dora was assembling her purse and string bag ready for the daily trip to the shops to see what, if anything, was on offer.

‘I hope what was left of that make-up hasn’t wiped itself all over your pillowslip!’ was her mother’s opening remark. ‘Clean on Monday, that was!’

Dora Collins’s mouth had practically fallen open the previous evening when she’d seen Lily all primped and made-up and heard how it had come about. But, good mother that she was, she’d seen that Lily was exhausted, and instead of pressing her for details, had spared some of her precious Pond’s cream to get the worst of Lily’s war paint off before shooing her into bed.

Now, over tea and toast, Lily relayed the whole story with relish, and Dora lapped it up. Small and trim, a thrifty housekeeper and a devoted mum, she lived for the children she’d brought up alone since their father had died.

‘Honestly!’ Dora exclaimed. ‘If I’d have thought when you started at Marlow’s you’d be getting up to that kind of caper – wait till you tell Sid and Reg!’

Lily’s handsome, happy-go-lucky brother Sid was in London ‘with the Admiralty’ as Dora liked to say, though in reality it was a lowly clerking role after an injury in training had ruled him out of active service in the Navy. The elder one, Reg, on the other hand, was out in North Africa, a mechanic with the Eighth Army. He wasn’t the best letter-writer, which could mean weeks of worry. Letters were rare, and uninformative when they came, which wasn’t his fault – they were censored anyway. The family could only go on what they heard when they gathered every night round the crackly wireless. Reg, they assumed, was advancing steadily westwards with the so-called Desert Rats, set on driving Rommel and his Afrika Korps into the sea.

Her mum was right, thought Lily – it’d be a nice change to have something to tell her brothers apart from a bit of feather-pecking in the hens they kept in the back yard, or that Gladys’s gran’s latest (imaginary) ailment was a ‘funny pain’ in her big toe.

Dora suddenly noticed the hands of the mantelpiece clock.

‘The butcher’s making sausages!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’d better get a wriggle on!’

Lily stood up to take her plate and cup to the scullery.

‘Me too,’ she replied. ‘Back to reality!’

Lily left her mum at the shops – the queue at the butcher’s was already curling round the corner – and made it onto the sales floor just in time to let Miss Temple, the older ‘salesgirl’ on Childrenswear, go off to her morning break.

‘Did you sleep well?’ asked Miss Frobisher.

‘Like a forest of logs!’

Miss Frobisher smiled and nodded towards a customer hovering by the boys’ shirts. Lily knew what a nod from Miss Frobisher meant: enough of the small talk. She sped off to assist.

When the customer had gone – she’d come out with the wrong book of coupons – Jim sidled over, looking mysterious.

‘I’ve had a message from upstairs,’ he began. He didn’t mean God, he meant the management floor, but it came to much the same thing. Lily’s eyebrows asked the question, and he went on: ‘No, not the old man – from Robert. He wants me to meet him. For lunch. Today.’

Lily’s head poked forward in surprise.

‘What about?’

Jim shrugged.

‘I’ll have to go to find out. One o’clock. At the White Lion, no less.’

Chapter 4

Lily had a lunch date herself as it happened, with Gladys and Beryl – not at the White Lion, but at Lyons. They usually favoured a small café called Peg’s Pantry but they were treating themselves so they could chew over the fashion show in a bit more luxury with their cheese on toast. Lily and Gladys had to get passes out to leave the store at dinnertime, and Beryl had decided she could probably risk shutting up shop for half an hour without losing any business.

‘It was a dream come true, Miss Frobisher in that frock,’ she said as they settled themselves at a table. ‘She carried it off beautiful. I wouldn’t have had half the enquiries I’ve had if it had been Gloria.’

‘It’s done you some good, then?’ asked Lily. Jim would be keen to know.

‘I’ll say! That dress alone’s been booked out six times before the end of the summer! And quite a few of my others! I can never thank Jim enough for getting me in that show. And I’ll tell you something else. If Peter Simmonds isn’t sweet on Eileen Frobisher, then I’m a monkey’s auntie.’

‘No! Do you think so?’ This was Gladys.

Lily smiled. Up on the catwalk, she’d easily picked out Gladys in the audience, eyes fixed, mouth slightly open, seeing nothing but her own wedding. Her fiancé, Bill, was in the Navy and his ship was on convoy duty – as far as they knew. But he was getting leave in the summer when his ship, the HMS Jamaica, was due for a refit, and he’d promised Gladys they’d be walking down the aisle.

‘Course he is!’ exclaimed Beryl. ‘His hands were shaking so much fumbling for his script he nearly knocked the microphone off his lectern. Couldn’t see what he was doing with his goo-goo eyes. Didn’t you notice, Lily?’

‘I did think he looked a bit odd.’ Lily had graced his look with a bit more dignity than ‘goo-goo eyes’ but it had certainly been something more than shock at the departure from the expected running order.

‘Ahhh, wouldn’t that be perfect?’ sighed Gladys. ‘He’s on his own, isn’t he, a broken engagement in his past, they say, and, well, if what we think is right – her husband’s not in the picture any more – it’d be lovely for her little boy to have a daddy.’

Gladys wanted nothing more than happy endings for everyone. She’d even fantasised about a double wedding with Jim and Lily, who’d quickly put her right. She and Jim were very clear-sighted about their relationship, and their careers. They were far too young and they both wanted to go as far as they could at Marlow’s before any of that sort of stuff got in the way.

The waitress approached, doing that clever waitress thing of balancing one of the plates on the heel of her hand. Lily looked at the thin skin of cheese and the thick slice of National Loaf – National Load, Jim called it, it was so heavy – and tried not to think of what lunch at the White Lion might be.

‘There’s no brown sauce.’ Gladys looked around but the waitress had gone.

‘You’ll have to pinch some off another table. If there is any.’ Beryl was already cutting into her food. ‘’Scuse me starting, but I’ve got to get back.’

Gladys went off on the hunt for sauce. Lily sawed at her toast. Now she could ask what she’d been dying to know.

‘Did you see Robert Marlow there, Beryl? Did he see you?’

It would have been their first encounter since Jim and Lily had caught him trying it on with Beryl in her shop, expecting her to sleep with him in exchange for waiving her rent.

‘He saw me all right!’ sniffed Beryl. ‘Looked away pronto, I can tell you, went and glued himself to Evelyn. As if I wanted to talk to him! I could have done, made things right awkward, but I didn’t want a scene, did I?’ She swallowed a large mouthful. ‘Did you see her suit though? Got to be Chanel.’

‘Chanel? French? Not very patriotic, is it?’

‘It’s a copy, more like. But a good copy.’ Beryl sighed. ‘I’d have had that off her back, no messing. But she’s welcome to him.’ She forked in another mouthful.

‘And vice versa,’ said Lily firmly. ‘She’s a proper little madam, as far as I can tell.’