The Heart of the Ritz

by Luke Devenish

The old grudgingness covered her relief. ‘For what?’ She well knew what.

  Suzette didn’t need to tell her. ‘Just thank you.’

  Alexandrine wouldn’t let herself feel any of it. ‘He lives down here,’ she said perfunctorily.

  They made their way down the gloomy hallway, Alexandrine alive to the grimness of it; the lack of paper on the wall, the lack of carpet on the boards. ‘Guest servants were roomed up here long ago,’ she felt obliged to explain.

  ‘It’s decent,’ said Suzette, ‘don’t apologise for it. There are Jews living in much worse nowadays.’

  Alexandrine flinched at the word. ‘The boy isn’t a Jew. His Hungarian slut of a mother was Catholic.’

  ‘Not this again.’

  ‘You of all people know how it is, Suzette. Jewishness is passed down maternally.’

  ‘He was circumcised. I was there for the bris.’

  ‘It’s meaningless.’

  ‘His father considered him Jewish. That’s why you took him from school and hid him here, isn’t it? That’s good enough for me.’

  ‘And yet I’m not good enough for you?’ said Alexandrine.

  Suzette glanced at her – then glanced away. ‘Let’s not fight. You’re taking me to see the boy.’

  ‘Very convenient for you.’

  Suzette clutched at her again. The tears were there. ‘I’m sorry, Madame. I mean it. I don’t want to fight with you. I don’t have it in me these days.’

  In truth, neither did Alexandrine. She squeezed the old woman’s hand. ‘All right.’

  But Suzette wasn’t letting go, looking pleadingly up at her face, her abrasive manner fallen away. ‘You’re a Jew, too. You never faked it. God sees the Jew in you, Madame, just like He sees it in Tommy. Of course, He does.’

  The flood of emotion that came to Alexandrine was almost as much as she could bear. She had to fight to keep herself together. ‘Don’t be so silly.’

  ‘You’re the daughter I never had,’ Suzette swore to her, ‘you always have been, Madame. That’s the maternal line – from me down to you.’

  ‘Suzette, please . . .’

  The old housekeeper was kissing her hand. ‘I say terrible things, I know I do, but it’s just my way – I never mean them, you know that.’

  Alexandrine stared down in awkwardness at the frizzled grey hair. ‘You mustn’t upset yourself so.’

  ‘I’m not upset, I just want you to hear me, Madame: I never mean any of it. My life was hard before I met the Comte. Then everything changed. But I found it beyond me to let go of the bitterness of the past.’

  ‘I know you don’t mean any of it,’ Alexandrine assured her. ‘I know how good you are, how good you’ve always been to me.’

  ‘People think I can’t love. They think I’m too cold and too hard. And I’ve let them think that because it’s easier to live with a closed heart.’

  Alexandrine was thrown. Suzette could just as equally be describing Alexandrine herself. ‘They’re wrong – of course they’re wrong. I know you’re not like that at all.’

  There was pleading in Suzette’s look to her. ‘That’s why, when the boy was born, I had the chance to be different – to be a better woman – you understand, don’t you, Madame?’

  Alexandrine did understand. It was the same chance that Polly had given her; a chance she had squandered. She had let herself grow colder and harder than Suzette could ever be; she had made a life’s work out of her own past bitterness.

  She kissed the old woman on the head, forcing those memories aside. ‘Let’s find him now,’ she whispered. Suzette felt warm and soft in her arms, and she had come to realise, frail. She had no idea of Suzette’s real age, but knew it was well past seventy. The German Occupation had been cruellest of all upon the defenceless elderly.

  Alexandrine looked at the numbers on the room doors. ‘It is just down here.’

  They located the right door number together.

  ‘You knock,’ said Alexandrine. She stood back a little so that the old woman would be the first one Tommy saw.

  Suzette tapped gently.

  They heard immediate movement from inside the room; a chair scraping the floor; someone getting up from the bed.

  Tommy’s voice through the door jamb. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Little one?’ Suzette whispered. ‘It’s only me.’

  They heard the gasp of surprise from the other side of the door. ‘Grand-mère?’

  Suzette pressed her lips to the jamb. ‘Let me in, little one. Someone might see me out here.’

  There was another short silence. ‘Are you alone?’

  Suzette was heartfelt. ‘I’m here with the only one you can believe in and trust as much as you can believe in and trust me.’ She looked imploringly to Alexandrine. ‘You have nothing to fear, little one. Nothing. We have only love for you.’

  Alexandrine told herself she felt nothing.

  They heard the fumbling of a bolt being withdrawn at the other side of the door.

  The door opened onto the dark attic room. Tommy was in his underclothes.

  ‘Oh, Tommy – my boy!’

  ‘Grand-mère . . .’

  Alexandrine hung back in the shadows as the striking young man, with his shock of blond hair that came wholly from his mother, and his soft brown eyes that were so undeniably from Eduarde, took the tiny old servant in his long, lean arms.

  Suzette gripped his arms in her hands. ‘Are you safe, Tommy?’

  ‘Yes.’ He gave his first apprehensive look to Alexandrine. ‘Yes,’ he repeated, acknowledging what she had done to hide him. ‘No one suspects me here. No one ever asks for my papers. They see me without seeing me.’

  ‘Good. Good,’ said Suzette. ‘And did you go on that filthy Jew Register?’

  ‘Of course, I didn’t.’

  ‘Thank God. I prayed you’d stay smart – but I couldn’t be sure that you would.’

  ‘I don’t leave the hotel much,’ Tommy told her, ‘and those times that I do, the krauts seem to like me. They never ask to look at my papers outside either.’

  ‘Good, good – keep it that way. Don’t take any stupid risks.’

  ‘I don’t, Grand-mère.’ Tommy cupped her wizened old face in his hands. ‘Please tell me you didn’t go on the register, either.’

  Alexandrine’s heart lurched as she realised that Suzette couldn’t answer him.

  ‘Grand-mère? Tell me.’

  Suzette was resolute. ‘There was no getting out of it for me.’

  Tommy was ashen. ‘Yes, there was.’

  Suzette shook her head. ‘Not in the Marais, little one. The cops wanted every apartment occupant made accountable. I’m too visible there. I had to go along.’

  Alexandrine couldn’t bear the look of fear that washed over him. She turned her eyes away.

  Suzette was quick to reassure Tommy. ‘It means nothing. You mustn’t worry about me, little one, I always get by. And I’ve had my time anyway.’

  ‘Please don’t say that.’

  ‘It’s true, I’m old and done – the future rests with you.’ Suzette looked back to Alexandrine in the shadows. She beckoned to her. ‘Please come closer, Madame.’

  Alexandrine drew a deep breath as she did so.

  There was a moment’s quiet while she stared at the object of her hatred and resentment; this boy she’d so despised from the moment of his illegitimate birth; this boy who was so undeniably of her dead husband’s blood. His hands, his mouth, the curl of his ear at his neck; all of it she remembered and knew so intimately. He was a Jew, just as she was.

  Tommy was humble. ‘Madame Comtesse . . .’

  ‘Please, don’t –’

  He reached out to her.

  Then her own tears came as her hand found his.

  ‘Madame?’

  She found herself saying what she had believed she would never say. ‘Forgive me, Tommy. Oh God, please forgive me, for all that I’ve done to you . . .’

  ‘But there is nothing to forgive.�
��

  ‘There is – there is.’

  He refused to accept it.

  She stared into his eyes – Eduarde’s eyes. ‘Look what you have with Suzette – the love that is so unbreakable between you. I know it might have been mine, too, if only I’d let it, but I could not let it. I was stupid and wrong. Please forgive me for it, Tommy. I know how foolish I was.’

  Her flood of words stunned him into silence. Then he stepped forward and embraced her as he had embraced Suzette; warmly and wholeheartedly, wrapping her in his hug. ‘Love is all that we have, should the end come, Madame,’ he whispered to her. ‘It is the one thing that separates us from them.’

  13

  15 July 1942

  While Alexandrine waited on a little gilt chair to collect the item made especially for her at Madame Lanvin’s, she watched as Blanche Auzello entered the atelier from the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, stamping raindrops from her shoes. The two women locked eyes for a moment but neither gave any sign that they knew each other. Paying no mind at all to the ill-mannered BOFs and frowsy German officers’ wives putting the vendeuses through their paces further inside the shop, Blanche went to the counter and asked Giselle, the young assistant, whether Madame Hélène was in residence.

  ‘The public relations director, Mademoiselle. I would so like to see her. She and I are old friends.’

  ‘Of course, Madame,’ said the young girl. ‘If you will just bear with me a moment.’

  Blanche waited while she dialled, her eyes travelling casually to Alexandrine’s again, where they met a second time, before each looked away without a word.

  ‘Madame Hélène?’ said the girl to the receiver, when the connection was made at the other end. ‘There is a lady here to see you – a friend.’ The girl looked to Blanche. ‘Your name, Madame?’

  ‘Madame Biélinky,’ said Blanche, with no hint of the lie.

  Giselle repeated the name into the telephone receiver. She listened a moment, then nodded. She turned back to Blanche. ‘Madame Hélène will come down to the floor shortly.’

  Blanche smiled. ‘Thank you so much, Mademoiselle.’

  The girl indicated the little gilt chair next to Alexandrine’s. ‘Will you take a seat as you wait, Madame?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Blanche sat next to her friend from the Ritz as if they were strangers.

  They said nothing for a moment, each watching a corpulent BOF woman loudly complain in a rough country accent that the dress measurements the vendeuse had taken must surely be wrong.

  ‘Of course, Madame knows best,’ the vendeuse offered, patiently. She wrote down the woman’s preferred measurements in a column next to the correct ones.

  The BOF was smugly satisfied.

  ‘What we’d do to know good ham and cheese as well as she does, Madame,’ Alexandrine said to Blanche under her breath with a sigh.

  Blanche nodded. ‘Maybe someday these big fat imbalances will be tipped in our favour again, Madame.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Alexandrine. ‘Someday soon, God willing.’

  Madame Hélène appeared from the offices above the shop floor, searching for the face she would recognise. She clocked Blanche with Alexandrine. ‘Lily, darling,’ she called down.

  Blanche got to her feet, giving Alexandrine’s knee a squeeze so light and fast that it was all but imperceptible. ‘Hélène, my love!’ she called across the room as the director reached the bottom of the stairs. The women showily kissed each other’s cheeks in the middle of the shop floor. ‘Darling, you can still make luncheon?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Hélène, ‘but there’s something I simply must complete in the next ten minutes, or my life will be miserable.’

  Blanche looked stricken. ‘But the table at La Tour – they might give it away.’

  ‘You go ahead, darling. I’ll catch you right up.’

  ‘All right. Promise me you won’t take too long.’

  ‘You know I won’t.’

  Alexandrine now saw she had an envelope in her hand. ‘This is for Geneviève – she knows what it is. You two can have a giggle over it while you wait for me to arrive.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Blanche.

  Hélène winked. ‘Something naughty. You’ll both love it.’

  Blanche slipped the envelope into her coat pocket. ‘I’m sure we will.’ She waved goodbye. ‘Please don’t take very long – I’ll order a cocktail for you.’

  Hélène waved as she headed back up the stairs. ‘I’ll be there in a tick.’

  Blanche met Alexandrine’s eyes for the final time as she put her hand on the door. She called out to the assistant. ‘Thank you, Mademoiselle!’

  Giselle waved at her gaily.

  Alexandrine knew: there would be no luncheon, for there was no reservation at La Tour, and indeed no Geneviève. This jolly little exchange, seen by everyone on the shop floor at Jeanne Lanvin, and yet seen by no one at all because it was just like any other exchange between friends, was really about whatever was inside the envelope.

  Somehow, Blanche and Hélène had found the means to resist. They had discovered an unsuspected courage within themselves that they never would have thought possible before the Germans had come. Whatever it was that they were doing, Alexandrine would never ask them about it and neither woman would ever tell. This was, Alexandrine had come to understand, the unspoken rule when it came to the conduct of clandestine activities under the noses of the Boches. And Blanche and Hélène were not alone in being clandestine. She had done it. She had saved Eduarde’s son by hiding him.

  In recent months, Alexandrine had come to suspect that others she saw daily, friends at the Ritz, had also developed such nerve. She strongly suspected Claude Auzello of it, and Mimi as well; even Blanche’s poor sightless daughter was engaged in some secretive fight. Alexandrine had drawn these conclusions because those Ritz friends and others had acquired a certain change to how they walked into a room; to the very way in which they held up their heads – and such change spoke of a secret resurgence of pride, a return of self-worth, an emboldening through learning what was – and was not – worth fighting for.

  Alexandrine understood this change, because she had experienced it too.

  And lately, Zita had also acquired it.

  And now, Alexandrine was more than sure, Tommy had it, too.

  It was as if they all had a fire raging inside them; a shared commitment to something greater than themselves. Alexandrine’s certainty about this both terrified and re-inspired her. If she could see the change in them all so clearly, how long until it was seen by the Boches?

  For anyone who resisted, the consequences of exposure were chilling. Yet the consequences of not resisting, of staring dully down the barrel of a future life no better – and likely far worse – than life endured now seemed more chilling still.

  This was why she had set upon another means of resistance.

  The scent of Arpège reached her nostrils.

  ‘Madame Comtesse?’

  Alexandrine looked up, startled. The exquisitely dressed, elderly Madame Lanvin herself was before her, a vision of chic, wearing her signature scent. ‘Jeanne?’ She stood up from the chair and kissed the old lady.

  ‘Alexandrine – bless you.’

  Alexandrine looked about her. The ignorant BOFs hadn’t even realised it was Lanvin herself here among them. She saw the little wrapped package Jeanne had for her in her hand. Madame Lanvin stood close by her.

  ‘You look worried, darling.’ Alexandrine hoped her smiling confidence would dispel Jeanne’s doubt.

  Madame Lanvin indicated the package. ‘How else should I be, Alexandrine? If you intend to wear this?’

  Alexandrine tried to hold onto her confidence, but it wavered under the couturier’s unfailing eye. ‘Perhaps I won’t put it on every day.’

  ‘Perhaps not at all. Why bring trouble upon yourself?’

  Alexandrine held the couturier’s look. ‘Perhaps I want the trouble, Jeanne?’ She thought of a
better riposte: ‘Perhaps I deserve it?’

  Her old friend’s concern was painful. ‘No one deserves it.’

  Alexandrine had no more to say on it. ‘How much do I owe you, darling?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  But Alexandrine had already opened her purse. ‘Don’t be silly. You made it for me especially – it’s haute couture after all.’

  Jeanne clutched at her wrist. ‘Please don’t wear it. You’re too good a friend for me to knowingly place you at risk like this.’

  Alexandrine teetered then, until she thought of Blanche and Tommy – and Zita and Lana Mae, and everyone else she suspected had already gone down the path ahead of her. She held firm, kissing Jeanne on the papery skin at her cheek. ‘I’ll be all right, darling.’ Then, as she turned to go she added: ‘I’ll leave forty francs for it with Giselle at the counter.’

  ‘If you do that I’ll never speak to you again.’

  BOFs and German officers’ wives’ heads turned at the tone of her voice. There was an obvious reply that didn’t need to be spoken by Alexandrine: if she did wear the contentious item they might never speak again for wholly different reasons.

  ‘It’s complimentary, Comtesse,’ Jeanne told her, wanting them all to hear now. ‘For being a loyal client to the House of Lanvin for so long.’

  Alexandrine knew she’d have to accept this. She slipped the package into her open handbag. She would keep it in there, she decided then, until the occasion came when she would take the wrapping off and put the garment on for everyone to see.

  ‘And you’re a very loyal couturier,’ she whispered.

  She blew a kiss to Madame Lanvin as she stepped out into the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The rain shower had stopped, and the summer sun was shining.

  * * *

  ‘Hullo, puss.’

  Patently lost in her own little world, Alexandrine looked up with a start at the sound of Zita’s husky voice. ‘Darling – I didn’t see you there.’

  Zita well knew she hadn’t. She’d been watching Alexandrine from the other side of the café for some minutes, thinking upon what it was that she needed to do, before she decided on a plan of action and came over. Her beloved friend had been in total ignorance of her the whole time, which was fortunate. Alexandrine was distracted, and Zita hoped she’d stay that way, at least for a few minutes more. ‘Want some company?’