The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  An avalanche of memory almost made her stumble, those summer days when Jasper would be gone cycling for hours and she’d have the whole apartment to herself and she would, as he’d said, just draw and sew and forget to eat and feel a contentment like nothing she’d felt for a long time since. She’d wear the clothes and people would remark on them and she’d shrug and say it was just a hobby. There was nothing to lose if it was just a hobby. But then she’d worked harder, in jobs like Charlotte’s, writing about others’ beautiful clothes, or commissioning display cases for exhibitions, or putting together funding proposals and she’d stopped designing, had let the daily grind slowly wear away the thing she most enjoyed.

  She leaned in to kiss Jasper’s cheek. “You’re a good man. Thank you.”

  “But Will is better?” he asked quietly, eyes fixed on her face.

  “For me, he is.”

  “Then be happy.” He smiled. “Go home. I’ll tell them you’re not feeling well. And I’ll flirt hard enough with Unity so she forgets about it and doesn’t hold it against you.”

  Fabienne laughed. “Have fun.”

  “I think I will.” He grinned at her and walked away.

  The minute she stepped outside the restaurant, Fabienne felt as if she’d taken off a dress she no longer needed, as if her skin—her self that she’d hidden for so long—had finally been revealed.

  She took out her phone and telephoned the administrator she’d put in charge of Stella Designs. “I’m coming to New York,” she said firmly. “I’m going to design the next collection.”

  Part Seven

  Estella

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  August 1941

  I was worried about you.” Sam hugged Estella when she turned up at his apartment the night she arrived back in New York.

  Janie, who’d hurried over after Sam had telephoned, sparked a smile too but Estella thought it wasn’t quite the Janie-dazzler she was used to.

  “You look sad,” Sam said to Estella before she could ask Janie anything. “What happened?”

  She told them about Lena. About her mother vanishing. But not that Alex had disappeared.

  Her friends held her while she cried. They tried to soothe her, to say that her mother would be okay, that Lena would never have been happy on this earth. But if only I’d been kinder, I could have made her last months so much happier, Estella thought as she wept.

  Eventually, she wiped her eyes and walked over to the window. “What have you two been doing?” she asked in a shaky voice. “I feel like I’ve been away for months.”

  Janie looked at Sam and he nodded. “You should tell her,” he said.

  “Tell me what?” Estella asked.

  “I got married,” Janie said, waggling her hand, now adorned with two well-sized rings.

  “Married!” Estella cried. “But you only just got engaged.”

  Janie shrugged. “No point waiting around.”

  “I missed it,” Estella said, hugging her friend. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You should be. I had to make Sam my bridesmaid; there was nobody else.”

  That made Estella laugh a little. “Did he wear a fabulous gown?”

  “I wore a fabulous gown,” Janie said. “I borrowed one of yours.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Estella said.

  “What are you going to do now that you’re back?” Sam asked.

  Estella shrugged. It was the one thing she hadn’t been able to think about on the long journey home from France.

  “I’m going to sleep,” she said. “I’ll think about it tomorrow.”

  “That’s a good plan,” Janie said. “You have the whole room at the Barbizon to yourself now that I’m living with my husband.”

  Estella fingered the keys to Lena’s house that she’d brought with her from France. “I might stay at Lena’s for a while.”

  “You won’t want to rattle around in that big house all by yourself,” Janie said. “Big houses are lonely.”

  The way she said it made Estella ask, “Is everything all right?”

  Janie’s face crumpled a little, like threads loosening and letting down a pleat of fabric. “I never thought marriage was like living with a stranger,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Estella asked gently.

  “Just that…” Janie bit her lip. “You meet someone, you date them for a bit and then you’re supposed to marry them. But all I know about Nate is that he does something in a bank, that he likes his coffee black, that he prefers his brandy poured for him before he arrives home, that chicken is his least favorite meat and that he’s an efficient lover, rather than a languorous one.”

  “I imagine efficiency has its advantages sometimes,” Estella said but there was no smile in response.

  “I had food poisoning the day after the wedding,” Janie said. “I was so sick I couldn’t get out of bed. Nate put his head in the door and told me to rest, then he went off to work. If we’d been at the Barbizon, you’d have looked after me. Or my bridesmaid would have.” She raised a smile at last in Sam’s direction. “It made me miss my mum. When you’re sick, you want someone around who makes you feel better. Someone who loves you the way that only happens when you know a person really well.”

  Estella thought of Alex lying in the bed, how he’d let her run a cloth over his face, how he’d talked to her, how he’d fallen asleep beside her. And she knew, with absolute certainty, that what Peter had said was true. Because Janie was right. Even though she’d been the only person available at the time for Alex, she also understood that if he hadn’t known her in the way Janie had said, then the awkwardness would have made the kind of conversation they’d shared impossible.

  “Maybe it takes time,” Sam said.

  “Do you really think that in a year’s time I’ll be more comfortable vomiting into a basin in front of him?” Janie asked. “Or does he just want the smiles and the brandy and the roast beef?” She sighed. “It’s not his fault; it’s just the way the world works. The man goes out to work, the wife stays home, they spend a couple of hours at night together if they’re lucky and they have sex when he wants it.”

  Estella hugged Janie, mourning the wise-cracking, vivacious, head-turning woman of a few weeks before. In her place was someone uncertain, someone stuck making coffee, someone bound for life to a man she knew less well than a foreign country.

  “Go back to modeling,” Sam said.

  “Married women don’t work,” Janie said firmly. She straightened her shoulders, more like the Janie of old, the one who gatecrashed parties. “You haven’t told Estella what you’ve been up to, Sam.”

  “I’ve been cutting mediocre clothes,” Sam said. “We saved this for you.” He passed Estella a clipping from Vogue.

  Estella scanned the words. Babe Paley had written an article about Estella’s designs. It said she was one to watch, that readers should do whatever they could to get their hands on one of her samples. The article was accompanied by a picture of Leo Richier, the cosmetics queen who’d come to the showing, wearing the black velvet gown out at a party.

  “She telephoned the Barbizon looking for you,” Janie said excitedly, pointing to Leo Richier. “She wanted to order the dress. So I boxed it up—I know you’d worn it once but nobody would ever know and you can just make yourself another one—and I took it around there and she paid one hundred dollars for it. She told me that she was friends with Babe Paley and then voilà!” Janie finished in the worst French accent Estella had ever heard, “this was published.”

  “Really?” Estella asked.

  “And she gave me her husband’s business card. Apparently he owns Forsyths department stores. He wants to place an order.”

  “Do you think he means it?”

  “Of course!” Sam said. “Question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  “As soon as I’ve worked that out,” Estella said slowly. “I’ll let you know.”

  Estella drifted around the house in Gramercy Park for
weeks, hoping to find something that might tell her more about Lena. There was so much of Lena there, and yet there wasn’t. Lena’s clothes, her makeup, her jewelry sat unworn in her bedroom and, on the walls, an eclectic and arresting collection of artwork attested to her taste—the Frida Kahlo, a beautiful Tamara de Lempicka nude, a Dora Maar photograph called Double Portrait where one negative of a woman had been overlaid on the other. But there was nothing personal. No letters, no photographs, no keepsakes.

  Mrs. Pardy had vanished somewhere too so the house was silent. Most days, Estella spent hours sitting in what had been, for those few months earlier in the year, the workroom. In the house in the Marais it had been Alex’s room. The cathedral window was there, overlooking the park, the piano waited to be played; the only thing missing was the bed he’d lain in. Her workbench stood in that spot and she stared at its surface, then at the spot in front of the mirror where Janie should be, ready to be draped in ideas, ready to have sketches transformed into dresses just by the act of swathing her body in fabric. But of course Janie wasn’t coming back; she was waking up every morning beside a man she’d married, was falling asleep beside him, was able to roll over and curl herself into his arms any time she chose. Even though love wasn’t something she’d found there.

  Whereas Estella was alone with no idea of who or what she was. No idea how she felt about anything. Not even sure if she had any feelings left. Unable to think about Lena, who was gone forever. Unable to think about her mother or Alex because they were gone too and she didn’t know which of them she might see again. Unwilling to think about why her mother had kept only one baby, or who Estella and Lena’s father was; he certainly wasn’t the dead French soldier her mother had made him out to be.

  Instead she concentrated on selling bolts of fabric because she wasn’t able to draw anything worth making and she needed money to eat, to live. She sat in the workroom and watched her fledgling business being sold off, piece by piece. Occasionally she stared at the article from Vogue, wondering how it could be true when now, the design ideas that used to cascade over her, had entirely dried up. She prevaricated with contacting the Forsyths’ buyer as she had nothing new to show him.

  One day in late November, as she sat in the workroom, the clouds floated in a layer of gauze across the sun creating a half-light, a smoky, steely, blackout-blue that reminded her of the night she’d sat at the piano with Alex and he’d sung one perfect song. The night when Alex had kissed her hand and she’d seen something in his eyes, a hunger so potent that she hadn’t been able to look away and so, for a few seconds, it had just been her and Alex and the gunmetal light and she’d never felt paradoxically quite so free, yet so tethered. As if there were no sky. As if everything had dissolved and they were enough, in that moment, for one another.

  “Damn you, Alex,” she said. “Where are you?” And Maman? Where was she?

  In response, the clouds won, swallowing the sun completely. Despite that, the feeling of the night in Montmartre remained with Estella, the curious sensation of being both unleashed and grounded, and her hand reached out for her pencil and sketchpad. She flicked through the pages until she came to the sketches she’d drawn on the flying boat, dresses in all colors of the sky: dresses that floated, dresses that rained down hard upon a body, dresses that might make the wearer look as if they’d just stepped down from the stars. They were good, she realized. More than good. They were the best things she’d ever drawn.

  She pressed the lead of her pencil onto a new page and began to draw. She stayed there for hours, drawing into dusk, not turning on the lights; it was hard to see but she almost didn’t need to see, just needed her hand to keep moving over the paper, transferring everything in her mind to the sketchpad. Dresses emerged quickly, needing almost no erasures, proportions correct, details traced in precisely: belts that emphasized waists in exactly the right way, sleeves that fell just as they ought, peonies blossoming against shoulders, or tied out of sashes, or blooming audaciously up from a collar.

  She took out her watercolors and daubed paint on to her designs, watching skirts swirl to life, seeing shadow and light play upon the fabric so that it became animate, as if one’s hand—were it to reach out—would stroke silk jersey rather than paper.

  She thought she heard the door open; she at least felt a cool rush of air behind her and she shivered a little but neither sensation made her turn around, nor at first did the voice that said, so low as to be almost inaudible, “Estella.”

  She lifted her head from the page for just a second then returned to her sketch. She was imagining things, so caught up in the feeling of that night in Paris that she’d heard Alex’s voice in the room.

  But she heard it again, louder this time. “Estella?”

  This time, she turned around and saw Alex silhouetted in the doorway, watching her, the look on his face so tender and yearning that she felt her legs push her upright, her feet propel her across the floor. Before she had time to think about it, she ran to him. He moved toward her at the same time and, when she reached him, she felt him lift her up so that her legs wrapped around his waist. Her mouth pressed against his, harder and harder but still not hard enough, desperate to take in everything of him that she could before he vanished again.

  For a few minutes they stayed like that, one of his hands under her hips, holding her up, the other on her back, clenching the thin fabric of her dress, her whole body aching, mouth unwilling to move away from his. Kissing, just kissing, trying to tell him what a fool she’d been, how wrong she was, how much she wanted him, how she hadn’t stopped thinking about him and it almost felt like he understood because he didn’t let go, but responded in kind, drinking her in. Then he walked a few steps forward and sat her on her workbench, still keeping her legs around him, now able to move both his hands up to her face, to draw away just a little, staring so far into her that she felt turned inside out.

  “God, I missed you,” he said.

  “I thought you might be dead.”

  “And you cared about that?” he asked.

  “I was terrified,” she said.

  He leaned his forehead against hers and she could hear his breath, as unsteady as hers, could feel his heart and her own beating too fast but in perfect accord. “I shouldn’t do this,” he said, pulling away. “There are so many better men out there for you.”

  Estella loved him all the more for his uncertainty, his unwillingness to taint her with what he saw as his checkered past, and his bizarre and incongruous present. “Alex, if you stop now I swear I’ll be more annoying and prickly and irritating than you can even imagine.” She smiled at him but he didn’t smile in response to her jest.

  “I’ve done some terrible things, Estella. My father was the world’s worst man. You should be with someone who knows more about light than dark, more about love than hate. One day you’ll look at me and you’ll wish I hadn’t let you kiss me. That’s why I should stop now and walk away.”

  She could hear the effort it took to keep his tone even, heard the tiniest tremor as he said the words: walk away. “I don’t care about any of that. I know who you are.” She caught his eyes with hers as she spoke.

  “If you hadn’t run across the room to me there’s no way I would have kissed you. Not because I didn’t want to but because I don’t want to drag you into the mess of my life. I should leave.” He stepped backward.

  Estella caught his hand. Instead of replying, she drew his mouth back to hers and kissed him even more deeply and at last she felt the subtle shift in his body as he let go of his doubts about himself. He stroked her cheeks with his thumbs then, after a time, his hands dropped to the hem of her dress, found their way beneath the fabric and slid along her thighs until they reached her hips. His hands slipped inside her knickers, caressed the skin of her buttocks as he drew her closer toward him and she could feel how much he wanted her.

  “Alex…” She murmured his name against his mouth, before his lips traveled a path down to her neck and her fi
ngers twisted in the fabric of his shirt.

  Then his hands moved to the buttons on her chest and fumbled with them before he said, “How do you take this damn thing off.”

  She laughed. “Those ones are just decorative.”

  She undid the button at the back of her neck, lifted her dress over her head and sat before him, naked besides her knickers and he drew in a long, sharp breath.

  “My God,” he said. “You’re so beautiful I almost can’t look at you.” He raised one hand to stroke, so gently, the skin of her breast, making her whole body shiver, making her hands tighten their grip on the front of his shirt.

  “And I almost can’t bear you doing that,” she murmured.

  He did it again and this time she gasped before he kissed her, hard but too fast.

  “Wait there,” he said.

  She was about to ask him where the hell he was going at such a time when he unrolled a bolt of midnight blue velvet onto the floor in the corner by the fire, struck a match to the wood and paper waiting there, then returned to her, picked her up, carried her over to the fire and laid her carefully on top of the velvet.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Not standing at a worktable, but here where I can lie beside you.”

  “You know that’s one of my most expensive rolls of fabric,” she said.

  “Shall I stop?” he teased.

  In response, Estella kissed him, unbuttoning his shirt, allowing her palms to run over his chest, to feel every scar, every perfectly defined muscle, every inch of his glorious upper body. She bent her head to him and kissed the skin of his chest, feeling his heart throb against her lips, and then she moved her mouth down over his stomach, past his navel, hands never once stopping her exploration of his skin. She reached his waistband and undid the buttons of his trousers.