Isabel Engleheart

RUNNER UP

The Antique and Vintage Shop on Church Street

It’s a promising street. The buildings are Tudor and Jacobian and shamble close together, making it more of an alley, and there’s a cheese shop at one end. I’d do the twenty minute drive to town just to walk up and down it a few times and buy some Yarg. I don’t like to think how far I’d drive just for the shop about halfway down the street, with a purple shearling coat on the mannequin outside the door. How many mountains I’d claw over just to throw myself down in front of the bay windows.

I’m not going in this time, I think as I walk by. It’s one of those lies I tell myself, right alongside I don’t look like Saffy from Ab Fab in this jumper.

But antique and vintage shops have a certain gravity to them. I was lost in Truro once and ended up down a dead end street, in a doorway festooned with old Levis, drawn there like a mouse to a baited trap. And like a trap, once you’re in one of these shops, there’s some trouble getting out. The stairs are always warped and perilously steep, and some have basements that craze like old ceramics.

The stuffed fish in the window beckons and I go in. I can summon the exact noise the latch makes to mind as easily as the Lord’s Prayer. The smell of the shop is not the confusing boiled cabbage perfume I associate with some antique shops. There’s a faint touch of unaired curtain and dust, but mostly it smells of a church. Don Quixote in faded red leather sits plonked on a table so old it’s nearly black. Ormolu, 1960s veneer, 1890s button boots, all crowding shabbily, perfectly.

She is sitting at the desk. Don’t get me wrong, she is not the reason I come in here. I’d come in even if the shop owner were a troll who coughed grotesquely and made me answer riddles. But it just helps that she’s tall and well-dressed and makes me think of Tove Jansson mixed with Granny Weatherwax. About as cool as a human being can be. And the moment she looks up at me, I shrivel back to being fifteen and horrendously gangly with knobbly knees squeezed into skinny jeans. My wayward soul aches to be an apprentice, to study some arcane art, and she looks like she could teach me anything.

She sort of recognises me. She’s been seeing me in her shop since it was on a less promising street without a cheese shop, back when I really did wear skinny jeans.

‘I can tell you know where you’re going,’ she says as I scurry up the stairs.

I return a brief, queasy smile. I’ll say it again: she isn’t why I come in here.

Motheaten woollens, Laura Ashley, drawers made for a shoemaker’s tools, blue leather gloves, a pin-tucked Edwardian shirt with stitching so small I have to squint to see it. That’s why I come in. A linen smock made for a French gardener a hundred years ago. An old sea chest. Wodehouse and Waugh in bookcloth bleached by sunlight to a pastel hue.

BBC Radio Three plays on the first floor and it always seems to be choral music. Here I am, a novice in my monastery, considering the holy and the holey.

Other young people pop up occasionally, and that makes me bristle. What are you doing in my cloister? Can’t you see this shop already has a ghoul in Dr. Martens? And don’t you dare talk to that grey-haired woman in the butter-yellow suit downstairs. It’s not good for me, going into the shop. I try to space out my visits, like how I space out making pies. Too much of a nice thing and you spoil yourself.

‘Do you come in looking for things to buy?’ she, the abbess, once asked, eyebrows raised over red-framed glasses. Or just to pick things up, hold them to your neck, then put them back on the rail, was the unspoken part of her question.

Does she remember the incident with the green velvet jacket? Probably not. I was the one innocently trying on her clothes, left in the changing room, not the other way round. The shame is mine to bear.

Up on the second floor, the menswear lives in a room like an artist’s garret, sold by a man who looks like he uses words like ‘cribbage’ and ‘isthmus’, and textiles and homeware and oddments jostle for space. Once, I picked up a small wicker basket only to discover a tissue hiding inside it, but I supress that memory out of respect, just as I would if I met Judi Dench and her skirt hem was tucked into her tights.

I really do buy things sometimes, the aforementioned blue gloves for example, but it’s like stopping in at the gift shop after visiting a museum. I’m not expecting to walk out with the mid-century sideboard just like I’m not expecting to walk out with the diplodocus, as much as I’d like too. I just pick up a trinket, really.

I’ll try to think of some witty, or at least merely charming, comment as I go downstairs to pay, but under the pressure nothing comes to mind. I mutely place my purchase on the desk and she, my Socrates, fishes out the price label and taps the total into the card machine with neat nails.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I blurt out. She smiles at me kindly. Perhaps she was a young woman in an antique shop too, once upon a time.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ she says.

I pay and head out. The door clicks shut behind me and that’s that. Until the next time I’m walking up Church Street. I’m not going in this time, I’ll tell myself. But the stuffed fish beckons.