The Dress Thief (12 page)

On Saturday, 3
^rd
April, carrying his worldly goods in a wooden vegetable box, Verrian Haviland rode the funicular up to the basilica of Sacré-Coeur on the Butte de Montmartre. Reading the directions supplied by the accommodation agency, he wandered into a square brimming with artists, tourists and those who must be locals, from the way they slouched
on café chairs. He made an unhurried scan of the area: cobbles, peeling shutters, trees bouncing into leaf. Yes, Place du Tertre would do fine for now.

His prospective landlady was called Mme Konstantiva, and the girl at the agency had told him that ‘long ago’ she’d danced with the Ballets Russes. So when a majestic woman opened the door to him, he addressed her in his best Russian, a language
he’d picked up during an unpaid apprenticeship on a Moscow newspaper. The woman stepped back with a graceful gesture and invited him in.

Verrian thanked her in Russian.

‘English or French, ducks, else find an interpreter. I’m as
Russian as cod and chips. You can call me Rosa.’ She eyed the crate Verrian carried on his shoulder, with its label declaring ‘Quality Savoy cabbages’. ‘What are you
then, the Archduke of Austria? Where’s your retinue?’

She spoke English, so he answered the same. ‘Some way behind, carrying my robes of state.’ Because she kept staring at the crate, he added, ‘I’m not as poor as I look. Will a month’s rent in advance be acceptable?’

‘Whatever suits, ducks. Come on in. Watch the carpet – bit of a death trap.
C’
était la guerre. You’re a good-looking boy, ain’t
you? Dark for an Englishman. What is it, Welsh?’

‘Cornish, on my mother’s side.’

She took him upstairs and opened a door, saying, ‘You can have the double, since you’ll fall off the end of a single. I only let two rooms, and this is the biggest.’ The bedroom smelled faintly of cat and the last occupant’s hair cream. ‘View of the square at no extra charge and you can see Sacré-Coeur from the
bathroom. You’ll be staying long, Mr … um … ?’

‘Haviland. A month, probably.’

‘Writer, are you?’

‘Of a kind.’

‘Thought so. Illegal for writers to shave properly, ain’t it?’

He grinned. ‘No – merely discouraged.’

‘I’ll give you a gander at the facilities. Usual terms – you get your own key, you tiptoe inside after ten, twenty francs for a
bath, no girls upstairs unless you can give me the
names of all four grandparents. Fancy a cuppa?’

‘I could murder one.’

*

At home in St-Sulpice, Alix sat on her bed, sliding silk stockings over her knees. What to wear though? She’d screwed up every ounce of courage to telephone the Comte de Charembourg the previous day, and he’d been so kind, inviting her to lunch today, but he hadn’t said what style of place he was taking her to. Alix pushed
open her window, testing the air. Warm, but not sunny. How very unhelpful.

She reviewed her choices. One could not call her clothes a ‘wardrobe’; though this was supposed to be a furnished flat, the wardrobes had never arrived. Alix’s garments hung from a broom handle balanced on ratchets.

She wished she had something in white linen, to be worn with a little cashmere cardigan, but reality was
that same pink cotton dress, forever blighted by the memory of fish and Mlle Lilliane. Her amethyst? No, the amethyst dress was too sexy for a man who’d known her as a small girl.

She took down a shift dress of parchment-coloured crêpe and held it against herself. She’d sewn this in her last year at school, adapting it from a cover of
Vogue
. Miss Maguire, the needlework mistress, had doubted
Alix could work without a pattern and was sniffy about French fashion, which she considered rather indecent. Alix had taken an entire term over the
project, partly because Miss Maguire insisted, at a late stage, that sleeves be added. ‘One never goes bare-armed except in the evening, Alice.’ They called her Alice at school, finding ‘Alix’ too foreign.

‘Sleeves will spoil the line, Miss Maguire.’

‘Then make something else. I shall find you a Butterick pattern.’

So Alix had added short sleeves. The dress, based on a design by the couturier Madeleine Vionnet, had suffered a final insult when, ahead of the fashion show the needlework class traditionally gave at the end of summer term, the headmistress had insisted Alix iron it.

‘It’s
crêpe marocain
, Miss Peachman,’ Alix protested, open-mouthed
in the face of such philistine stupidity. ‘It’s meant to be crinkled. If I could show you Vionnet’s original, you’d understand.’

‘Press it, or it will be confiscated.’

Poor dress, but it was the safest choice. Alix slipped it over her head, buckled on ankle-strap sandals. Her hair had long grown out of its school bob, and her current style was to brush it straight across the left side of her
head and pin it so that curls fell over her right ear. Since seeing the American woman in Hermès, she’d begun to pluck her brows thinner. Checking herself in her dressing mirror she decided she no longer looked twenty-going-on-fifteen – thanks to Paris, she was growing into her true age.
A dab of perfume, a straw hat, and just enough time to get clear of the flat before Mémé came back from the
market.

In the hall, Alix hesitated by a console table dotted with family pictures. Among the framed portraits of Mémé’s long-dead parents and brother was the one Alix treasured most: her parents’ wedding photograph. She picked it up, smiling at the bride’s arrow-straight dress, thinking,
That’s not so different from what I’m wearing
. She kissed the cold glass.
Wish me luck, mother
.

*

Picking
her up outside the Deux Magots café on Boulevard St-Germain, the comte handed her a posy of creamy narcissi tied with a blue ribbon.

‘Lavin blue!’ she exclaimed.

‘The only blue that perfectly complements yellow.’ As the comte opened the passenger door for her, Alix had a moment to appreciate the elegant cut of his grey suit. Studying him more closely as he got behind the wheel, she saw that
his woven silk tie was charcoal flecked with yellow. She took that as a compliment; he’d once told her, ‘A gentleman should always wear grey, you know, because then he will never upstage the lady he is with.’

‘Unless she’s a nun,’ she’d retorted at the time, and he’d laughed and added, ‘In which case, she’ll forgive him.’

The comte drove fast, even faster in Paris than he had in London. They
zipped across the Seine by the Pont de l’Alma, took Avenue Kléber and rocketed into the traffic swirling round
Place de l’Etoile, lane-hopping to the sound of klaxons. Alix felt she was holding her breath all the way to Boulevard Haussmann!

‘My chauffeur Pépin used to drive a taxi,’ the comte explained, mistaking her excitement for fear. ‘He got me into bad habits, but I detest crawling in Paris
traffic. Other motorists don’t respect you if you look at all apologetic.’

She didn’t feel remotely unsafe with this man, even when he went up on the pavements. ‘Where’s the Morgan?’ she asked. ‘I adored that car.’

‘Ah, alas, we had to split up. She stayed in London.’

Their journey ended in Boulevard de Courcelles, a long road that divided the 8
^th
and 17
^th
arrondissements, flattening the top
of Parc Monceau. Tossing his key to a porter, the comte led Alix into a small hotel where he was obviously well known. The dining room overlooked the park and Alix fancied she saw the sheen of water and the ruined columns of the
Naumachie
beyond. M. Javier had told her he lived on Courcelles in a hotel suite. It might even be this hotel.

‘So …’ her host smiled as they took their seats at a beautifully
laid table, ‘let’s get this confession out of the way. What have you done, Alix?’

She told him about the telephone exchange, glossing over Mlle Boussac’s contempt, embellishing her own noble act in putting through an unauthorised call. ‘Booted out on the spot. I hope you aren’t angry.’

‘Did you enjoy working there?’

‘I hated it.’

‘Then all’s well that ends well.’

‘But you got me the job.’

‘No, I suggested you to somebody I know, asked them to see you. You got yourself the job. What now?’

She told him about the offer from Javier, and meeting the great man himself.

The comte immediately invited the wine waiter to fill her glass, saying, ‘Let us toast your future. Now, this is a Riesling grand cru that they keep in the cellar for me. You approve? We have a duty to drink the wines
of … of Alsace, you know.’

At ‘Alsace’ he had checked. So faintly she could easily have missed it. Why did the name worry him? Or was it that he’d forgotten she was grown up and felt he shouldn’t be encouraging her to drink? The Riesling was so fragrant, so perfectly chilled, she’d like to drink as much wine as Alsace could produce, and told him so.

‘Leave some for me,’ he laughed. ‘To M. Javier,
a toast to his excellent good sense.’ After they’d clinked glasses, he flipped open a leather-bound menu. ‘May I choose for you? If you’d rather I didn’t, please say. But I know the chef and can find something that will please you. Is there anything you don’t like?’

‘No – well, I don’t eat boiled hockey boots because at school they tasted like pig’s liver and onion. I don’t eat turnip unless
I have to. Oh, and bright-yellow custard. Everything else I love. I’m greedy.’

He laughed with real pleasure. ‘What perfection! A greedy girl with a hand-span waist. Well, Arnaud does the best Coquilles St-Jacques in Paris, so we’ll start with that. How is your grandmother? No more nightmares about Herr Hitler, I trust?’

This time Alix gasped out loud. How could the comte know about Mémé’s fears?
Her grandmother was back to her scalpel-sharp self, but it had been a frightening episode, shared with nobody.

Alix was aware that the man now discussing the merits of duck breast over salt-marsh lamb with the head waiter was the only uninterrupted male presence in her life. He had educated her. His care, his notice, was the cornerstone of her self-belief. The visit he’d made to her school during
her last term was a seminal moment of her existence – prior to her meetings with Bonnet and Javier, anyway. He’d come to watch her perform in a concert for which she had designed the costumes. As she made her bow at the end, his smile had told her that she was a credit. A success. That smile had made years of humiliation seem unimportant.

But did he also keep an eye on her and her grandmother
here in Paris? Hire spies? She told herself not to be ridiculous. Why would he? If he kept an eye on Mémé, it was out of kindness.

Turning to her, the comte clearly realised he’d said something wrong. ‘Alix?’

‘You asked about my grandmother … you mentioned Hitler.’

He groaned. ‘A name that falls off the tongue too readily
these days. I agree with you, one shouldn’t speak lightly about such
things. I simply want to know if Mme Lutzman is well.’

‘She’s well, thank you.’

And that was that. During their first course they talked fashion, and the comte told her what he knew about Javier. A lot, it seemed, and perhaps not gleaned just from his wife, but also from other women of his acquaintance.

‘Javier began his career at the House of Worth, but was too radical. Then he went to Paul
Poiret – clash of temperament. When he left there, the feeling was that he would fade. But he proved a sticker. Spanish and Jewish, he had to fight to be allowed to join the
Syndicat
.’

‘You like him, Monsieur?’

‘He makes women look adorable and he’s one of the best tailors in the world.’

Alix recalled the tape measure over the shoulder and smiled. The ‘best tailor in the world’ had praised
her skill. As they waited for their lamb, she asked, ‘Monsieur, why have you been so kind to me all my life?’

The comte answered lightly. ‘You know the story, how your father and I fought together. One day he walked into enemy fire to pull me away from certain death. One does not forget that. When he died leaving an orphaned child, I offered help. I paid for the sort of schooling I hoped would
give you a chance in life. Your grandmother accepted very reluctantly – but she believed your parents would have wanted it.’

Alix nodded, lifting the glass that had refilled by magic. ‘My mother would have chosen that sort of school for me, I know she would. “Mathilda was always halfway out of the door,” people said. She wouldn’t stick at her books, or be told what to do. But parents always want
children to make up for their mistakes. Did you know, the moment war was declared, she enrolled as a nurse? Badgered the authorities until they took her.’

The comte smiled, but said nothing.

‘She met my father feeding ducks in a London park … I’m not sure which one. She was in her nurse’s uniform. He was in uniform too because he was waiting to be shipped off to fight. They fell in love instantly.’
Unlike Mathilda, who was a creature of Alix’s imagination, John Gower inhabited her real memory. Tall as a giant to her infant self, he’d smelled of engine oil, because after the war he worked for the railways. Alix remembered him coming home from work, his collar blackened, his face creased with exhaustion but always with a little present in his pocket for her.

She could still sing ‘Guide me,
O Thou Great Redeemer’, which he’d taught her, and she had a clear picture of him singing it at the kitchen sink. No, not singing. Huffing it between coughing fits, the wheezing tap joining in so he sounded like one of the trains pulling out of Clapham Junction station. He’d tap his chest and say, ‘Feathers in my lungs.’

What else … ? She remembered his watch on the draining
board next to a bar
of green soap, and his braces hanging by his side as he washed. She remembered the excitement of him swinging her in the air, high as the lampshade. Once he’d accidentally cracked her head on the door frame. She could still hear her own squalling distress, his desperate soothing and Mémé’s reproaches. Guilt marbled that memory. John Gower had come back from war whole and had died in 1921, when
Alix was five, from a lung disease caught in a military hospital.

His early death had robbed them of a thousand conversations. He’d left nothing about himself – no letters, no diaries, just a few fuzzy photographs. Mémé said he was a Londoner, with roots elsewhere, maybe Ireland or Wales, and her tone was never warm when she spoke about him. She seemed to consider him more like her lodger than
her son-in-law. And he was not Jewish; categorically not. He and Mathilda had married in the winter of 1915 at the Methodist chapel in South Norwood … or was it Streatham? Whichever, it was a gloomy place. End of story.