The Dress Thief (23 page)

‘I stand by every word,’ Chelsey thundered.

‘Good for you,’ Verrian answered. ‘See you here tomorrow.’

Beryl Theakston tapped his arm as he flagged down a taxi. ‘Mr Haviland, a letter came for you earlier. Somebody left it at reception.’

Verrian shoved it into his pocket without looking at it. His father was getting into the taxi with him.

‘Chelsey can stand by
every word,’ Lord Calford roared, having instructed the driver to ignore whatever direction he’d just been given and go to Place Vendôme, to the Hôtel Polonaise. ‘I came to Paris to raise a hurrah for Britain’s exhibitors and I find the man sneering in my name. Damn swine.’ Lord Calford pulled out a cigar box and extracted a fat Havana, which he jabbed at Verrian. ‘What the hell were you doing in
Hun country? Who said you could go? When did you last have your hair cut? Why must you look like a Spanish anarchist?’

Verrian ignored the questions. ‘Chelsey wasn’t “sneering in your name”,’ he told his father. ‘You own half the paper’s shares but it isn’t yours. The minute it becomes so, it’s dead. That’s why you have men like Chelsey.’

‘I haven’t got Chelsey, have I?’ Lord Calford wrenched
a gold
cutter from his pocket and docked his cigar. He pierced the end with inquisitorial relish. ‘You’re Paris editor now.’

‘I won’t regurgitate your opinions either, so you’re no better off.’ Verrian laid his head against the back of the seat as his father ignited the Havana. ‘Drop me off at the next Métro station. I’ve had a long day.’

‘Your mother wants to see you – she’s at the Polonaise.
I promised to bring you.’

‘Mother’s here? What’s she doing back so soon?’

‘Wasn’t happy with the outfit she got the other week, needs something distinct and only Paris will do.’

‘Something to wear to Jack and Moira’s wedding, perhaps?’

Lord Calford narrowed his eyes at his son. ‘Glad you know about that. Damn Chelsey and his Aspirin bottle – frankly unpatriotic.’

Somebody had once observed
that, physically, the Havilands were ‘split down party lines’. Lord Calford, Jack and Lucy had seaside colouring, grey eyes and freckles. The sandy Havilands went pink when they drank or grew angry, and scorched at the first ray. Verrian shared his mother’s dark hair, Aegean eyes and skin that tanned. He’d often wondered if his failure to win his father’s love came down to pigmentation.

At the
Hôtel Polonaise, where Lord Calford kept two suites, Verrian’s mother pressed him to stay for dinner. He declined on the grounds that he had nothing to wear … only to discover that his mother had brought a trunk of his clothes with her.

‘Including your evening wear, dear.’

‘So that’s why you came back.’ He hugged her. ‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’

‘Until you have a wife, I shall bother.’

By eight that evening he’d rediscovered the glory of a huge bath and inexhaustible hot water. He was in evening dress, in a lounge under pearly light, listening to a pianist play Chopin. The person he’d most like to share it with was not there.

His mother came in and he stood to greet her. He knew her evening dress by heart – one of the designer Molyneux’s, green satin with a layer of beaded gauze.
About seven years old. Since their last meeting, however, her hair had been brought up to date, cut and set in finger waves. He complimented her and she complimented him back.

‘Very handsome, dear. I’m sure you’ll get your hair cut soon.’

‘I’m sure I will, Mother.’

‘Yes, well. Lucy sends her love and says “apologies for her ghastly gob”. Where she gets such phrases …’

Verrian ordered cocktails
and let his mother talk. She told him of the Women’s Institute summer pageant, currently in rehearsal, the cook’s lumbago and a late frost that had nipped the buds on the apricots. He raised a hand.

‘Do not tell me about the Mother’s Union bring-and-buy sale. I don’t care and I don’t think you do.’

‘I shall when I’m back at Heronhurst. Your father tells me he appointed you Paris editor.’ She
watched his face.

‘By tomorrow I won’t be.’

‘I wish you had more ambition,’ she said. ‘You, not Jack, are the true heir of Quentin Thomas Verrian.’ She always referred to her father by his full name, enunciating each syllable. ‘He founded the
Monitor
as a voice for liberal opinion, and only you grasp that. Even Jack says you’re one of the few writers who can explain socialism to Middle England
without scaring the pants off them. I still own half my father’s shares and as I intend to leave them to you—’

‘Jack and I won’t work in harness,’ he interrupted. ‘He thinks I’m wrong about the right things, and I think the same of him. Nor will I work alongside the brother who swiped my fiancée while I was out of the country.’

‘I can see that. I’m afraid I was rather poisonous to Moira when
they told me. But there … you’re not heartbroken?’

‘My heart is like a jobbing violinist’s tailcoat, worn to a thread and badly mended, but it’ll see me out.’

‘And your lodgings? Are you still on Montmartre, with that …’ Lady Calford cleared her throat, ‘Russian dancer?’

‘Who’s as gorblimey as a pearly queen.’ He explained, ‘Dancers adopt Russian names. It’s a creative tradition. She’s Connie
Marshall from Bethnal Green, east London. Her mother did the laundry for a dancing establishment and took her into work one day. Mme Batavsky, a real Russian, took one look at her and cried, “Mary Mother of God, angel’s arms and legs like pipe cleaners!” and enrolled her in the baby class.’

‘Heavens. Does she still dance, this – er – Connie?’

‘She’s fifty-eight, Mother. These days she lives
on her annuity and lets a couple of rooms.’

Lady Calford looked profoundly relieved. Then, spotting Lord Calford coming through the entrance arch, she leaped to her feet. ‘Clarence, dear, where will you sit? Verrian, move up a little, your father doesn’t like sitting with his back to the door.’

Nor should he
, thought Verrian, since there were at least six former
News Monitor
editors who’d like
to stab Lord Calford between the shoulder blades. Drawing on patience he hoped would sustain him through three courses, Verrian rose.

*

His mother retired after they had finished eating. Verrian also tried to make his excuses, but Lord Calford told him that he could jolly well spare his father an hour of his precious time, and ordered cognac. They recessed to the gentlemen’s lounge, his father
smoking as he talked – about politics, the forthcoming World’s Fair, now ruined for Britain by bloody Chelsey; about the imminent marriage in France of the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII; about editors, weasels all, with the exception of Jack, of course. Jack had the Haviland mettle.

Verrian resigned himself to a very late night. Conversation with his father was like being rolled
up in heavy carpet and left out in the sun. Struggling only made things worse.

‘Now – how much scandal did the
Monitor
print concerning
that American adventuress Mrs Simpson and her appropriation of our king?’ Lord Calford demanded.

When Verrian replied, ‘None that I know of,’ his father grunted triumphantly.

‘Exactly! And we handled the abdication crisis with unequalled discretion. Did your
mother say – I received a letter from the prime minister, commending my patriotic restraint?’ Lord Calford sucked on his cigar. ‘We’re the Absolute Ticket, we Havilands, trustable with privy information. I wouldn’t rule out a viscountcy. Viscount Calford. Sound all right?’

‘As a younger son, I can hardly get excited.’ At some point in his life, Verrian had discovered a way of beating Lord Calford
in a quarrel. Not sarcasm, not humour. A caressing brutality. ‘Here’s one for you, Father,’ he said. ‘Should I go to my usual café for breakfast tomorrow or make an early show in the editorial office with mop and bucket? It’ll be carnage without Derek Chelsey.’

His father boiled up on cue. ‘Why can you never ask a damn simple question?’ He relit his cigar, having growled at it for going out.
‘I don’t understand you, never did. I offer you a suite here at the Polonaise and you trot back to some dormitory with bedbugs.’

‘There are no bugs chez Rosa and there were none at my last place. The patron there used to take a blowtorch to the bedsprings once a month. I only moved to get a quieter night’s sleep. Montmartre suits me.’

‘Crawling with artists and lefties,’ Lord Calford grunted.
‘I suppose you would feel at home. When you were twenty-two I offered you a prime job at the
Monitor
and you went off to Russia to scribble for a Bolshevist rag. People said you were a communist then and they say you’re one now.’

Verrian picked up his glass, and cognac fumes warned of throbbing temples and persistent memories. ‘If we’re to understand the communist world, we have to see it from
the inside, otherwise we’re just guessing.’

His father swallowed smoke, blew it out. ‘Well, you’ve lost your chance of ever editing a decent British newspaper. Just as you lost your chance with Moira. Warned you not to neglect her.’

Verrian shrugged. ‘She could have waited or joined me.’

‘Sir Chester Durslop’s daughter, hacking about Spain under fire?’

‘She’d have been in brave company. But
it’s as well she didn’t because I fell in love with someone else. Enduring love, not the English drawing-room variety.’ Verrian gave his father a frank gaze and, when nothing came back, downed the rest of the fiery brandy. ‘I’ll send them a pair of china poodles and stay away from the wedding so they don’t have to blush. Now, excuse me, Father, I’m going home.’

Lord Calford followed him into
the hotel foyer. ‘I won’t stand for family rifts, d’you hear? And I won’t stand for you bringing a foreign tart home. Lucy saw you with some Jewess shop girl.
Foist a gold-jangling Jezebel on us, I’ll bar every door against you.’ A cloud of smoke brought Lord Calford’s outrage straight into Verrian’s face.

Verrian walked out.

*

Back at his lodging, throwing off his outdoor clothes, he saw a
white corner protruding from the pocket of the jacket he’d slung over the shoulders of his evening wear. It was the letter Beryl had given him.

‘Oh, Alix,’ he groaned. Tonight was the twenty-ninth. He shouldn’t go. One, he was in his customary post-Calford mood. Two – he’d resolved to break off the friendship for both their sakes. And three, four, five and six. On the other hand –

It was only midnight. His watch told him he had time to find the Rose Noire, and since he’d just spent an afternoon learning
about her grandfather, seeing Alix was arguably duty, not pleasure.

The jazzmen swung their instruments, slicing through sound and light. Frazer Hoskins and his Smooth Envoys. Alix stroked her bare arm and thought,
I want to dance
. She looked at her three companions, all absorbed in the music.
Won’t somebody ask me to dance?

She’d thought getting here was all that mattered and was discovering it wasn’t. Having
got Paul, she’d got Una too. And Gregory Kilpin, who hadn’t smiled once.

Paul, what a transformation! The labourer had disappeared beneath a white tuxedo and black tie that Una had borrowed from her husband’s wardrobe, and Paul’s straw-coloured mop was greased to a dark honey. He’d been friendly to Alix in the taxi coming here, but that sense of being special, of being the single object of his
gaze had gone.

Please
, Alix silently begged as she saw Paul lean over to light Una’s cigarette,
somebody ask me to dance
.

‘Frazer Hoskins should run an iron over his Smooth Envoys.’ Una’s hair rippled in the light as she blew smoke across the table.
A silk-jersey Lucien Lelong dress was poured over her contours. Alix had assumed it was a Lelong original, until Una disabused her: ‘A copy, and
so good even I forget it’s not the real thing.’ Una said now, her eyes on Paul, ‘I never heard swing played with violin and guitar.’

‘This is Paris.’ Paul touched Una’s wrist and Alix flinched at the intimacy. Had they forgotten Gregory Kilpin, sitting inches away? ‘In America they play the music of the soul.’ He pitched his voice over ‘Limehouse Blues’. ‘Here we have hot jazz played by gypsies.
Every city finds its pulse.’

‘The bandleader’s from New Orleans, I’ll buy that.’ Una slanted her cigarette holder towards a sweating black trumpet player. ‘Maybe the horn section too, but the rest jumped ship at Toulouse, bet you a hundred.’

‘I hope that’s a joke, Una, or I’ll be reviewing your allowance.’

Alix checked to see if Gregory Kilpin was joking. His mouth suggested not. Una’s husband
had small darting eyes and rather unformed features, as if he’d melted a little. According to Una, he’d been born in a Glasgow slum – ‘A year ago he had a brick taken from that very slum and plated with gold,’ she’d confided.