Will shut the door behind Dreadlocks, shook his head, and pulled back his shoulders. ‘Right. OK. I can do this.’
He turned round to face Blossom who was gazing fearfully at Will’s hall walls, her little doggy brow furrowed, tremors racking her body. Then she cast one terrified look at Will and dived for the safety of the living room.
Will sighed so heavily he could feel it in his toes. ‘Oh God, what have I done?’
5
Margot
Twice a year, Margot enjoyed five days away in a foreign country to shoot next season’s fashions.
It was the last week of September and the night before she’d left London, she’d had to turn the central heating on. So who would say no to five days on the Peniche peninsula, with its sandy beaches, temperature in the mid twenties and Lisbon only an hour’s drive away?
Margot had trained to be a fashion designer. But it had quickly become apparent that she was not going to be the next enfant terrible of British fashion. Much as it pained her to admit it (and what a long dark night of the soul that had been) Margot was more Boden than Balenciaga. More Mango than Marc Jacobs. More Cath Kidston than Christian Dior.
She could design pretty clothes that flattered women’s figures, but her designs were never going to be feted on the Paris runways and worn by celebrities at the Met Gala.
It was a salutary lesson in managing her expectations at a formative age. Still, when Margot had graduated, she’d hoped her first job would harness what talent she did have. Unfortunately, she ended up designing tracksuits for a leading high-street sportswear chain.
Obviously people wore tracksuits and someone had to design them, but Margot was stuck in a sportswear ghetto for three years, unable to move forward because every time she applied for a new, more simpatico job, her portfolio was full of leisure wear made from synthetic fibres. Her greatest achievement was when one of her tracksuits was worn by a ne’er-do-well on Hollyoaks.
The only time that Margot felt fulfilled was when she was making clothes for herself. She was a curvy size sixteen and the more stylish end of the high street only went up to a size fourteen. And even if they did go all the way up to a size sixteen, finding that largest size before it sold out was as rare as a genuine Fabergé egg turning up on Antiques Roadshow.
Margot knew she could probably drop a dress size if she ate less and exercised more, but quite frankly, she didn’t want to. Yes, she could eat spaghetti made from spiralised courgettes, pizza which had cauliflower crusts, and ration herself to two squares of dark chocolate a day. But life was often hard, so why should Margot deprive herself of the simple pleasure that was spaghetti made from wheat, or a pizza with a proper crust? And two pieces of dark chocolate would never, ever hit the same sweet spot that a Cadbury’s Twirl did.
So, it was easier and a lot less upsetting (there had been tears once in a Topshop changing room when Margot realised that a Topshop size sixteen was like a size twelve anywhere else) to make her own clothes. Pretty dresses and tops in Liberty prints and softly draped jersey which flattered her figure. In fact, she was wearing one of her own creations – a wrap dress in a crisp black and white polka dot cotton – on the day that she met the two most important people in her life.
It had been a Tuesday lunchtime in Camden Marks & Spencer. Margot was after a BLT while Derek and Tansy Spencer-Williams had popped in to buy a Colin the Caterpillar cake for an employee’s birthday.
‘I love your dress,’ Margot heard a woman say as she reached for the last BLT. She turned to see an elegant woman in a pristine white jumpsuit, her hair cropped close to her skull, all the better to show off her incredible cheekbones, and an ageing rockabilly, his grey quiff as big as the turn-ups on his jeans, staring at her.
Margot said the only thing she could in the circumstances, ‘Thank you! It has pockets!’ And stuck her free hand into one of those pockets so they could see for themselves.
‘It’s very hard to get a cotton wrap dress to drape like that,’ the woman said, which was a tactful way of saying that it was very rare for a cotton wrap dress not to gape when its wearer was large of bust and hip. Certainly no man had ever run his eyes over Margot’s figure with such forensic intensity.
For a second, Margot wondered if this approach was some kind of proposition. Older couple seeks curvy F for discreet afternoon fun. But then the rockabilly gathered a tiny section of the skirt between his thumb and forefinger and announced, ‘The fit is great considering it’s not even lined,’ and she realised they were fellow fashion professionals.
‘I sewed in a secret button on the opposite side from the bow,’ she explained. ‘I know some people put in an inner tie, but a button is a lot more secure.’
‘So you made it yourself?’ the woman asked. ‘From a pattern?’
‘Kind of from a pattern but I adapted it,’ Margot began eagerly, because she loved talking patterns and fit and fabrications. For the next fifteen minutes, the three of them nattered happily away about how hard it was to find well-made clothes on the high street at an affordable price point, and generally obstructing a lot of hungry people from their lunchtime sandwiches.
It wasn’t until an assistant manager was despatched to ask them to move it along, please, that the rockabilly proffered his card and asked if she’d like to come and work for them. Margot had phoned in her resignation from the sportswear company five minutes later.
That had been twelve years ago, and Margot was still gainfully employed and creatively fulfilled at Ivy+Pearl (named after Derek and Tansy’s mothers.) Before Ivy+Pearl, they’d worked at Sex, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm MacClaren’s shop, which had sold fetish and bondage wear to punks before punk was even a proper thing.
Now Derek and Tansy were more about timeless style than screen-printing the word ‘fuck’ on T-shirts. Twice a year, they brought out a small capsule collection of dresses, separates and loungewear that they sold in their boutiques in affluent areas, from Primrose Hill to Cheltenham, Harrogate and all points north, south, east and west. With their web business picking up and the more expensive high street fashion chains increasing their market share, they were looking to expand and Margot had been at the forefront of that expansion.
Margot had pioneered their use of prints, overseen their new ranges of nightwear and home furnishings and had even persuaded Tansy that they should do a limited-edition scented candle each summer and winter. After all, who didn’t love cushions, throws and scented candles? But Margot liked to think that her greatest work achievement was insisting that the Ivy+Pearl sizing went up to a size twenty, instead of the very uninclusive size fourteen that it had been when she’d first started working there.
More than that though, with Derek and Tansy, and her Ivy+Pearl colleagues, she’d found what Armistead Maupin called a ‘logical family’. Not the people who were there because they shared your DNA, but the people you chose as your family because some things went deeper than DNA.
Now, Margot perched on a rock and watched as three models, diverse in size and ethnicity, frolicked in the surf on a Spanish beach while showcasing a swimsuit, a bikini and a tankini, all featuring full coverage bottoms, in Ivy+Pearl’s summer print: birds of paradise on either a black or a white background.
Derek, who was very red in the face even though Margot kept reminding him to top up his factor 50, was art directing the shoot and occasionally asking Margot for her input, but mostly she was free to soak up the sun and eat through her data allowance as she composed a text message to Will. With bullet points.