Vintage Magic
- eBook
- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
Dressing to impress has a whole new meaning . . . Spirited silk, crafty crepe, lively lace, tricky taffetas and enchanting empire lines . . . How powerful is the perfect dress? Find out in Sally Anne Morris's spellbinding romance. Her love life in tatters, Rose Taylor decides its time to run away from London and open a vintage dress shop near her sister in Bath. If anyone is able to fully appreciate the life-enhancing power of finding and wearing that one very special dress, it's Rose. But it seems the tea dresses, ball-gowns and lace in Vintage Magic really do have a life of their own... As she uncovers the secret of the shop's magical powers, Rose realises that she can be transformed into a bewitching goddess, one with not only the power to get back the man she lost but to reach out and grab the life she's always wanted. Dressing to impress is about to take on a whole new meaning... What readers are saying about VINTAGE MAGIC: 'Another excellently woven tale with real touches of 'magic'. It takes you from the real world to some fantastical places, but ends up bringing you home with a very satisfying and unforeseen ending ' ' Entertaining and quirky. The believable characters draw you in to this very British story of magic, clothes and relationships ' ' Such a kooky, cute little book! There were so many funny moments throughout'
Release date: October 4, 2018
Publisher: Headline
Print pages: 320
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Author updates
Vintage Magic
Sally Anne Morris
But Rose Taylor does not live in London. Not any more. There were far too many bad associations with high rents and low-life cheating boyfriends. Well, just the one cheating husband-to-be, to be precise, and that was exactly why Rose swapped the nightlife of Soho and the native wildlife of Gorillaz, Monkeys (Arctic) and Peaches (Geldolf) for a place – to the left and down a bit on the AA map – best described as a World Heritage Site in south-west England.
This is why Rose left.
She had arrived home early, one grim, dreary February afternoon, having opted to ‘work from home’ (which everyone knows is a euphemism for turning on your computer but spending the afternoon surfing the far reaches of cable television and finding channels entirely devoted to fly-fishing) by feigning ‘women’s trouble’ (which you can only really use on a male boss whose upper lip breaks into a sweat at the mention of anything vaguely gynaecological). She had been feeling that feeling that comes on dull days, when the summer feels a long way off and she could not pretend for another single minute that ISAs, balance transfers and tracker mortgages really did excite and interest her.
Even interesting, creative people (people like Rose), people who do amazing degree courses (like Rose) that involve blowing glass, making beautiful delicate models from paper and sculpting in felt – even they end up having to pay their way by doing jobs so far removed from being either interesting or creative that they should come with a government mental-health warning.
Just as Rose had been about to sling her bag into the coat cupboard, a noise – something like a furtive rifling – drew her attention to the bedroom. Armed only with an umberella (a retractable one at that), she had advanced cautiously forward, expecting to find a young hoody burglar ransacking her dressing-table only to find her fiancé Carl, in the flat they shared, in the bed they shared, with the friend they shared.
The very friend who would have been – had the bought, paid and planned-for June wedding gone ahead – her Chief Maid of (now indescribable dis-) Honour.
‘It’s not what it looks like,’ he, the Potential Husband, had said. As if his rhythmic push-ups between the cellulite-dappled thighs of her once best, now worst friend ever, could, even in a parallel universe, be construed as anything else.
Had they somehow fallen? Tripped accidently as they were trying on their wedding outfits in the British tradition of Oh Vicar! Carry-on movie farce? Were they practising for the local am-dram version of Eyes Wide Shut – the Musical and were only going to tell her on the opening night as a big surprise? Maybe they were doing yoga or practising an obscure martial art?
Many times Rose wished that it could have been explained some other way. All the while, in fact, that she was packing away her belongings – the big-eye crying children pictures that he loathed, the collection of burlesque fliers and the dirty secret that was her entire collection of Danielle Steeles. Then began the mammoth task of clearing all of her clothes from the closet (the very one that her fiancé had obviously been hiding skeletons in for quite some time) before she then had to cancel all the wedding invitations.
‘Weren’t you just in the slightest bit tempted to join in?’ asked Mimi in her Queen’s English husky smoker’s rasp between deep drags on her ubiquitous cigarette. Not the best role model, as mothers go. Even if she did believe in Rule Britannia and the enduring quality of a Jaeger suit.
The Potential Husband had planned to tell Rose some other way, he explained. Gently, kindly, over an extravagantly prepared meal, perhaps a James Martin recipe (squeaky clean and affable, unlike that shouty, sweary Ramsay chap), and he would have set the table using the Sophie Conran dinner service that they had been collecting from John Lewis piece by piece. Though even that would have been a slightly thoughtless gesture, salt in the wound, as it were, since the remainder of it had been itemised on their wedding list.
What had made it worse for Rose was her standing there, bag still slung over her shoulder, still wearing the navy nylon trouser/patterned polyester blouse ensemble of building society uniform, gazing on her so-called friend’s self-tanned/hooker-heeled bedroom wear and realising that the contrast between their appearances – dowdy, slightly plump (in Rose’s opinion) worker attire vs up-for-it, slutty lingerie get-up – could not have been more marked.
Rose’s self-esteem, fragile at the best of times, had splintered into a million shards at that point.
And boy, it hurt, really hurt, but Rose had to admit that they – the Maid of Honour (M’o’Ho) and the Ex – did seem happy and somehow right for each other.
But it was stomach-churningly awful to bump into them on the high street walking arm-in-arm together and gazing at each other like an advert for a Sandals resort. Completely vomit-inducing when, especially when, with unwashed hair, you’ve nipped to the shop for milk and cat food wearing an old man’s tweed overcoat over your pyjamas, which are tucked into a down-at-heel pair of imitation Uggs, and driving another nail into the coffin of Ever Standing a Chance of Winning Him Back.
That was the point at which Rose, feeling she had to be mature (she – just shy of hitting thirty), had decided that enough was enough. That she would leave the City, the Big Smoke that she loved. Leave its history, its art, and its exhibitions. Leave its boutiques and markets, its global food and its Cutting Edge of everything. Leave her job, (not really a career), her friends (that included cheating, lying, man-stealing ones). And, as she countered to anyone who thought she was making An Error of Judgement, it’s not so bad when you were moving to a city celebrated for its nightlife, its sophistication and frivolity.
‘Yeah but that was in the 1700s,’ snapped older (just the other side of thirty), gorgeous sister Lily, crushed that she was losing her crash-pad in the capital when the need arose for ‘jollies’ and ‘benders’ away from the more sedate life of Bath, though secretly delighted that her sister would be on the doorstep – quite literally, as it happened, for the first six months.
Lily had been the first to leave London, heavily pregnant and following her heart (and the fashionable exodus of celebrities such as Kate Moss, Pearl Lowe and Liz Hurley) to a simpler life in the country, but with a lingering envy of her sister still living it large with the Tower, Bridge and Eye all just a Tube ride away. But, as Rose said, what was there to keep her in London, anyway, when you can get sushi in a Sainsbury’s anywhere?
Rose and Lily. Two sisters. Named – in an uncharacteristic fit of hormone-induced whimsy – for Mimi’s favourite flowers. One light and one dark. One curvy, the other willowy. At first glance it would be hard to believe they were sisters at all. Until they laugh together and their noses wrinkle identically, or their mouths set exactly the same in a grim, hard line when they are stressed. And their hands, of course. All of the Taylor women have good hands, Mimi included. Anyone of them could have had a career as a hand model advertising creams, washing-up liquids and doubling up for gnarly handed celebrities – if only they had been discovered.
Daddy had been tall and dark. Not a fleck of grey showing – even right at the end – although Grecian 2000 and Just for Men may have helped. Mimi – small and fair; hair still worn in the puffed-up bob of her prime time and the rest of her preserved by the skills of her plastic surgeon (though her daughters questioned the ethics of a man who would allow a pensioner to have breast implants).
Genetics are rather like a lottery or some sort of bad cosmic joke when it comes out in the mix. So Rose thought, anyway, since she had inherited her father’s Mediterranean colouring (and tendency to being a little hirsute), her mother’s stature and an unknown grandma’s child-bearing hips. Lily, tall and pale as her namesake, had Daddy’s height, Mimi’s hair – which she left long and untamed – and the snake-hips, even after child-bearing, of a pubescent boy.
Rose, being the younger sibling, had suffered the indignity of people’s thoughtless looking up and down and ‘Oh, you’re nothing like your sister’ comments and had taken them to be expressions of disappointment, of her failing in some way. Coupled with her exaggerated fear that without waxing or threading she would continually sport a five o’clock shadow on her upper lip, it was no wonder that she had grown up feeling somewhat in Lily’s shadow. Quite literally at times, depending on the position of the sun, what with Lily being so tall and having all that hair.
So there was Rose, with the curves of an acoustic guitar and her sleek, shiny jet-black hair hanging just past her shoulders, her love of fifties tailoring that suited her shape and her home-making tendencies; and then there was Lily as loyal, bouncy and enthusiastic as a retriever puppy with the blond, curly mane and big brown eyes to match, making her favoured jeans and sweatshirts look like a key-style statement. Each envying the good points of the other and each blind to the merits of themselves: Lily wishing she had Rose’s bust; Rose wishing she had Lily’s endless legs. Such is the way with sisters. Or best friends. Or women in general, in fact.
As for the men who passed them by, it’s not true to say that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Most men are fairly democratic when it comes to a choice between blondes and brunettes. They’ll have either if there is something in the package that pleases the eye but, in reality, would rather have both. At the same time. Preferably in the land of fantasy where all sexy grown-up sisters wear baby-doll nighties and have pillow fights before debagging the plumber.
Life was looking up. What had seemed totally unbearable only months before had now become, almost, a normality. Rose barely thought of her ex-nearly-ahusband’s bare arse bobbing away in the red-nail clutches of her ex-best friend at all. Whole half-hours passed by before the image of his back reappeared in her mind’s eye. Even with her contact lenses in, had she really been that short-sighted to have not seen it – or rather him – coming? At least he had bought her out of the shared tangled web of their finances with a generous, pre-credit crunch Guilt Money cash settlement, though he had insisted that he keep custody of the cat.
Bought Rose out and moved the M’o’Ho in.
But life with Lily in Bath was OK. There is nothing like the company of good women to mend a heart that is broken and bleeding from being jilted so close to the altar. For a start, there was her giving-Suri-Cruise-a-run-for-her-money little niece Leia (as in Princess), named for Lily’s obsession with the iconic seventies sci-fi epic. When Rose first met Leia’s father – all hair and beard – she suddenly recalled Lily’s strange pre-teen crush on Chewbacca.
Not that Lily and Matt were together any more. Not that Rose could ever understand why they had split up in the first place because they were forever in each other’s homes or taking three-year-old Leia to the park together. Always laughing. Still friends.
Just like Rose and the Ex and the M’o’Ho were trying to be. All pretending to be so terribly grown-up and civil and middle class about it all. How she wanted to scream like a (benefits-claiming) fish-wife at them on the Jeremy Kyle Show and hear the audience baying for blood!
And underneath a cloud of smoke, in a small, fashionable, iron-railing Bath town house bedecked with a single circular ball of dangly greenery, there was Mimi (‘Don’t call me Mummy, darling – it’s soooo ageing’) clutching a cigarette and inhaling from it, as if, ironically, it were the sustenance of life itself. Feigning disinterest in her grandchild, she had settled in Bath coincidentally soon after Leia’s birth, bringing to an end a lifetime of following her now-deceased diplomat husband around the globe, painting the town red in the key capitals of Cold War Europe and living the expat lifestyle of sun-downers and ‘It’s six o’clock somewhere in the Empire’.
And occasionally, when the mood took them, adding their keys to the bowl. Mimi and Daddy had not had a conventional marriage.
So, for the first time since the girls had been packed off to school in England when they turned eleven, they were all together again. A little depleted in one way – Daddy gone for two years now and how they all missed his big laugh, his extravagant suppers and his always picking up the bill. It was only in the aftermath of sorting out his estate – and his debts – that they realised they’d been blessed with all the advantages of class but none of the money.
But they were a little bigger in another way; Leia being the apple of all their eyes, even if Mimi tried to deny it. A little bruised and battered from the fall-out of break-ups – Rose, boring them senseless, talking about her Ex all the time and trying to make sense of it being Over – and Lily, fixed and firm, saying nothing and refusing all attempts to say why it was Over for her and Matt.
How many ways are there to get over broken love affairs? There are the ice cream and chick-flick DVD cures; some turn to drink and emerge months later happier but can’t remember how they got there; acting from anger can be a quick release; ties, shirts, shoes shredded; cars scratched or kippers left to rot under floorboards but lengthy court cases can follow; or prison sentences, if the urge to mow him down in a car was acted on.
There are stages which the magazine articles say are like grieving. And Mimi knew all about working through it to the Recovery stage. She’d been making whoopee as a Merry Widow ever since.
‘It’s what Daddy would have wanted,’ she told her girls when they looked at her disapprovingly. Daddy and Mimi had put the swing into the sixties quite literally.
Therapists advise on giving in to the stages of Denial, Rage and Letting go. But Mimi had her own version for her daughters.
‘You’ve got to get Dirty, Slutty and then you Re-virginise,’ she said between puffs. The vaguely rude-sounding words seeming incongruous with her tones of BBC newsreader circa 1968.
‘Dirty: the stop washing/tidying-up phase when you let yourself go. Slutty: you’re ready to get back in the saddle, as it were. Sleep with the first person who smiles at you to re-upholster your self-esteem and then when you’ve got it out of your system you can become a bit more picky and are ready to start afresh – Virginal, as it were.’
Neither Rose nor Lily tended to follow their mother’s advice.
Some people buy new clothes, reinvent or rediscover themselves. Lose a ton of weight or hit the gym sending a two-fingered see-what-you’re-missing salute back at their ex. Some flaunt a new lover who is better-looking/younger/looks slightly like they might smash the ex’s face in, just to reaffirm that yep, they’ve still got It. Or they travel the world, go on yogic retreats or get a tattoo. Or remove one, if it happens to say, ‘I love Dave’ and now Dave is gone. With Trevor.
For Rose and her Ex and for Lily and Matt it was Over. The sisters needed to do something. Something life affirming in the tradition of ‘I Will Survive’. Something that made a statement, to mark the end of an old chapter and the start of a new. Lily cut her wild, long blond hair into a sleek, needing-straighteners (rather like her mother’s but nobody dared tell her) bob. Rose Taylor opened a shop.
How had it gone so wrong when he had seemed so right?
‘So right into your friend,’ reminded Lily with a caustic honesty only a sister or exceptionally good girl-pal can deliver. And more than a little bitterness. She had never quite recovered from the thought of she and Leia sharing the bridesmaid slot with someone else. Especially someone who self-tanned to the point of basted turkey.
It was one of those nights in when the food was cholesterol-raising but comforting and the grape in the wine is counted as one of the five-a-day. Lily hadn’t yet got bored of being hostess in the flat that Matt had rented for her when she had told him that she needed to leave. Mimi was round, ignoring the food and claiming she’d already eaten. Rose was well on her way to being round as she devoured her fifth slice of pizza whilst she went over the same old ground again. The more she drank, and it only took a glass or two to loosen her tongue, the more she reminisced and the more maudlin she became.
He had been quite perfectly right for her, Rose explained. Again. And she began to list all his commendable attributes. He was tall but not freakishly so. (Her friend Penny was happily married to an Official Giant – he was six foot eight and a professional rugby player. Penny was a hobbity five foot three. Together they looked like Gandalf and Frodo.)
He was good-looking enough to make Mimi curl an eyebrow on first sight but not pretty-boy/boy-band gorgeous or shaving-ad, square-jawed alpha male attractive. Just easy on the eye. Just enough to keep your interest. And looks are important, for all Wayne Rooney’s wealth when procreation is in the picture you wouldn’t want your sweet baby daughter to inherit those looks.
He had a build best described as ‘athletic’, not ‘pumped’ or ‘ripped’ or ‘tonk’. Not Peter Andre in his Mysterious Girl days. Just normally fit obtained from normal amounts of exercise a few times a week that did not involve grunting every night in a gym, slicking all the machines in a sweaty frenzy of ‘roid rage’.
He had a job with prospects. An old-fashioned concept in these uncertain modern times but a worthy one in an age where even school careers advisers give advice about getting on reality TV or pole-dancing as a career move. So there he was with his GCSEs, his A levels, his degree and already a grasp on the slippery pole of Law. When Rose’s future fantasies pictured a nice house of a comfortable size and being at least a partial stay-at-home mum, then a man of reasonable income is a very good catch for someone who wishes to be a wife.
He had good dress sense, too. He knew when it was appropriate to ‘scrub up good’ and knew his way around a good quality suit. He knew how to look funky in a seventies shirt. He even looked good in hats – spaniel-eared fur-lined hats in winter, stylishly edgy pork pie hats for the summer. He could do Sunday morning casual and, whilst Rose would never have asked him to carry off white linen trousers and bare feet as she’d seen Daniel O’Donnell and Cliff Richard do on office calendars, Rose was quite sure he could even pull that off with aplomb.
He loved their fickle cat, scratching its chin for as long as it was required and when he’d held Leia soon after the birth, c. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...