Vera Atkins from SOE comes to see her once, to confirm that she is alive, to ask her to testify against the Nazis. Margaux refuses and begs her to tell no one of her existence – she can’t bear the thought of people she once knew turning from her in horror. Even Vera hadn’t been able to hide her distress.
But one day in 1946, when her hair has reached shoulder length and her external wounds have scabbed and healed and the bruises faded, Caro’s brother Christian says to Margaux, ‘See this.’
He passes her a drawing: a woman wearing a skirt as closely pleated as a clam shell, a jacket budding into efflorescence from the très rapetisser waist. The features of the woman’s face are not drawn in, but she does not need eyes, a nose and a mouth to be arresting. The suit takes care of that.
Tian takes out his pencil, leans across and sketches a hat on her head, its brim so wide that it obscures the woman’s face. Then he darkens the skirt. ‘Black can be violent or it can be elegant – more so than any other colour.’
Beyond them, the Chausey archipelago stirs, the water darkens from sapphire to midnight, bypassing grey entirely.
‘Will you be one of my mannequins?’ Tian asks Margaux. ‘You have healed here, among the flowers. And I want you to be happy. As you made Catherine – not happy, but resolute – at Ravensbrück.’
Margaux shakes her head. She is still the creature who stepped off the train at the Gare de l’Est in Paris in July 1945; a creature from whom children cowered, adults too.
But Christian brings her a looking glass. ‘See,’ he says.
Margaux looks at herself. Behind her, in the glass, she can see the house, pink and glossy as a boiled sweet. The flowers, enveloping her in perfume. Her face, thinner than it used to be. Her eyes, larger than they used to be. And Margaux sees for the first time that she is not the monster she had imagined. The violence is gone. What remains? Surely not elegance?
Margaux imagines herself wearing the suit Christian has drawn. Its vast skirt would hide the scars on her legs, erase all imperfections.
A little girl toddles unsteadily across the lawn, hand held by the nurse Tian has employed. She doesn’t walk as well as she should, not yet. But it is incredible that a child given the worst possible start in life can walk at all. And Margaux realises that she never sees, as others do, a strange waddle. She sees a certain grace. A certain beauty.
Neither she nor her daughter are perfect. But they are, somehow, still alive. It is a gift that she once hoped for above anything. Why is she so determined now to leave the wrapping on? Why not reach out her hand and touch this life she is, despite everything, living?
Her daughter, Nicolette, smiles at her, an action that always makes Margaux’s eyes flood, and all she can do is blink at the tear-blurred outline of this tiny miracle. She pats the lawn beside her and her daughter sits, then lies down on her back, eyes closed.
Caro tiptoes over and scatters a handful of rose petals and jasmine flowers over the little girl and Nicolette’s laugh is the most exquisite sound of all. Margaux’s hand tightens over her daughter’s as Nicolette passes her a handful of jasmine – a handful of hope.
Margaux’s eyes meet Caro’s.
Several weeks later, Margaux stands completely still in Christian’s couture house while fabric is draped around her. Christian decides that the cream silk tussore is best for the jacket, and the black wool is ideal for the skirt. The Bar Suit is created on Margaux’s body, made especially to suit her measurements. She had never imagined there would be such affinity between a dress and a mannequin, had never realised that Christian’s ideas require not just pen and paper and needle and thread, but a figure to inspirit them.
Christian watches as the suit comes alive. He alters the size of the collar; is unhappy with the flare of the jacket over her hips until Pierre Cardin, the young tailor responsible for the ensemble, has the idea of using surgical cotton wool in the lining, folded in such a way to achieve the required volume and shape.
Then it is done and it is, Margaux sees, eloquent. The colours: violent black and unwary white. The sloping brim of the hat that shadows her face. The winged contours of the jacket’s peplum. The constriction of the waist, so tight that it is difficult to speak when wearing it.
Christian has seen what is inside her.
His show is, of course, an enormous success. When he tells her that some of his gowns will be shown in Australia, Margaux asks to travel there as one of the mannequins. She isn’t sure why; just that, perhaps, in a country far away she might drink less champagne and allow fewer men to seduce her and not suffer from headaches in the morning.
It takes four days to fly to Australia on a private plane. Four days! It is extraordinary. They stop in Tripoli, Cairo, Karachi, Calcutta, Singapore and Darwin – so many strange and faraway places – before finally reaching Sydney.
As soon as she steps off the aeroplane, Margaux knows she has done the right thing. The light in Australia is scouring, abrading; it burns everything away. The seas are ferocious and can stop anything evil from coming too close. The people are happy; they have never heard of Ravensbrück.
She asks to return to Australia in 1948 when the David Jones stores present an entire show of Dior designs. She is much feted in the press. Upon seeing the photographs, Margaux does not recognise the woman depicted there. She has truly become someone else. It has been her goal, ever since leaving Ravensbrück.
So she decides to stay on in Australia, returning to France only once to pack up her things. There, Caro tells her, ‘Christian has made an arrangement to send you each year a gown he thinks will best suit you.’
They are in Margaux’s room in Christian’s Paris apartment, where the gold-flocked wallpaper and Kentian palms are an elegant offset to the debris of packing for a long journey, which covers every Belle Epoque surface.
‘The couture house will continue the arrangement forever, no matter what happens to Christian,’ Caro continues. ‘It’s set down on paper. I hope you don’t forget us all the way over there.’
‘You know I never could,’ Margaux says as she places her daughter’s doll in a valise and looks at her friend. ‘Do you think it’s ever possible to stop running from something like …’ Margaux cannot bring herself to say the word: Ravensbrück.
‘But now I am Miss Dior,’ Caro says, referring to the perfume Christian has named after her, a perfume whose scent saturates the air throughout the apartment, but that still doesn’t block out the other odours Margaux wishes would stop following her.
‘And I am a Dior mannequin,’ Margaux says.
The women reach out their hands to one another and the unspoken words echo between them: Is that really who we are?
‘I have something for you,’ Caro says, breaking the silence. She gestures to the valise she has brought to Margaux’s room.
It sits on the bed, innocuous, but Margaux can feel something inside it, something that yearns to be let out. She walks slowly over to the bed and opens the lid of the case.
Its contents are so brilliant that she steps backwards, a startled ‘Oh’ rushing from her mouth. For Caro has packed the sky into that valise, a Cornwall sky: the kind of sky that Skye Penrose grew up beneath, the kind of sky that blazed all around her and Nicholas Crawford as they first became friends, and then became lovers. The kind of sky that makes her break down utterly, in a way she hadn’t known she was still capable of.
‘Christian made one for me too,’ Caro says.
Margaux slides to the floor, one arm wrapped around herself, one hand covering her mouth, and she weeps.
Caro sits beside her and holds her, crying too. It is a long time before either woman can move.
‘Will you put it on?’ Caro whispers and Margaux nods.
She slides off the skirt of the Bar Suit she is wearing, and unbuttons the jacket. Caro holds up the dress and Margaux steps into it, not looking in the mirror until Caro has done up the many fastenings, and the silk and tulle have moulded around her bones like another skin.<
br />
But this is not the skin of grief. It is the skin of memory, and it is a violent thing. She can see her hands shaking as she confronts herself. She isn’t Margaux Jourdan any more. She is the other woman still trapped in her soul.
‘Do not forget her,’ Caro whispers, unfastening the top of the dress and pointing in the mirror to the name she has written on a label inside. ‘Take out this dress, as I will do, and think of her occasionally: of all the good she did, all the love she had. It was not nothing.’
No, Nicholas, it was not nothing, the woman now known as Margaux Jourdan thinks. How could he have treated it as though it were?
PART SIXTEEN
Kat
Thirty-Eight
CORNWALL, 2012
It took a month for Kat to get her grandmother onto a plane. Margaux didn’t have a passport and she didn’t want to go, and in the end Kat used outright lies and blackmail. She pretended the Dior archives had to meet with her grandmother, who was the current owner of Catherine Dior’s blue dress before Kat’s fellowship could begin, before any papers could be written, before the dress’s provenance could be properly verified. She made sure Lisbet and Daisy moped around their grandmother’s house, asking why they weren’t going to France any more until Margaux, exasperated, agreed to go.
Kat expected her to complain the whole way there. But her grandmother mostly stared out the window, as if fascinated by everything outside: the sunlight, the clouds, the unrelenting blue, even the deep black of night.
They stayed at a hotel near the airport when they landed. The following day, Kat drove them to Cornwall.
Her grandmother began to fidget as they drew closer to Porthleven. ‘I’m sure the old house doesn’t need me to look at it,’ she said.
‘I’m not changing my mind,’ was Kat’s only reply.
Unexpectedly, her grandmother smiled. A youthful smile; it caught Kat’s breath and made her blink, hard, because for how long would Margaux still be smiling like that?
‘Maybe it’s time,’ her grandmother said. Then, ‘Maybe this is the future she never told.’
‘Now you’re just being cryptic.’ Kat tossed her grandmother a smile.
Margaux returned it, beautiful suddenly, her face patterned with her life in the same way a hundred-year-old gown still held the shape of its wearer.
They diverted from the road at Porthleven and Kat turned in at the Lost Gardens of Lysander.
Her grandmother frowned. ‘I don’t know this place.’
‘Perhaps it doesn’t look the same as it used to,’ Kat said.
Elliott sat on the bench seat on the porch, looking as good as ever in navy shorts and a black T-shirt almost the same colour as his hair. Kat smiled at him and resisted everything inside her that made her want to run over to him and feel his arms wrap around her. There would be time for that later. This moment was for her grandmother, and for the other Margaux too.
Her grandmother stepped out of the car, her eyes fixed on the female figure beside Elliott: the other Margaux Jourdan, who was, of course, smoking a Gitane.
Kat’s grandmother didn’t look shocked or surprised but rather resigned as she said to the woman, ‘You want my forgiveness. You want to sleep dreamlessly, untroubled by nightmares. But I can’t. So why should you?’
Silence. Two women, eyes locked, poised as if to throw a punch. Or perhaps to defend themselves.
Kat frowned. She didn’t know what she’d imagined but it wasn’t this.
Suddenly the woman on the porch smiled, and it reminded Kat so exactly of the smile her grandmother had given her in the car that she froze.
‘Your forgiveness isn’t something I ever doubted, Skye,’ the woman said. ‘You always forgive. Your understanding, however, is something quite different.’
Skye.
Kat’s eyes met Elliott’s and she saw that they were as watery as her own. Her grandmother was the cartwheeling girl who had turned Elliott’s grandfather’s life upside down. Which meant that the woman on the porch …
Her grandmother turned to Kat. ‘This is my sister, Liberty,’ she said quietly. ‘Margaux Jourdan …’ Her voice withered and Kat barely heard the final words. ‘… is dead.’
The words hit Kat painfully. Skye and Liberty Penrose. Sisters. And Margaux Jourdan … a life ended so terribly young.
‘I knew the Red Cross was coming,’ Liberty said to her sister.
Kat shook her head, uncomprehending. ‘Can we go inside?’ she said. The tension between the two women was suffocating.
As Liberty led the way into the house, Kat’s grandmother – Skye – caught sight of Elliott for the first time.
‘Who’s that?’ she demanded.
‘Elliott Beaufort,’ Kat said. ‘He’s Nicholas Crawford’s grandson. Well, in a way he is.’
‘Nicholas Crawford’s grandson,’ Skye repeated slowly. ‘Well, today is full of surprises, isn’t it?’
Inside, the first thing Kat’s grandmother did was to approach the mantelpiece and the gold pocket watch. She stroked the case, then enveloped the watch in her hand and closed her eyes. ‘You did pick it up from the folly,’ she said to her sister.
Then she opened her eyes and sat down suddenly, gazing at Liberty. ‘You want me to understand. Does it matter, after all this time?’
‘You talked about nightmares, about not sleeping,’ Liberty said. ‘Which means you haven’t left the past in the past. Until you set the ghost free, it will continue to haunt you.’
‘You sound like our mother.’
Liberty laughed. ‘Yes, that is the kind of thing she would say. Perhaps I did inherit some of the good after all.’
‘Don’t,’ Skye said. ‘Don’t let’s go back so far … to everything else. Just tell me what you need to, and then Kat and I can leave you …’
In peace. Alone. Kat waited for one of the standard endings to the phrase but none came. She subsided into a chair too, and Elliott perched on its arm. They threaded their hands together.
Liberty began to speak. ‘Those guards everyone thought I was too friendly with,’ she said, ‘one of them told me about the Red Cross. They’d been given permission to come into the camp and take away some of the French women, on buses bound for Switzerland and then France. Catherine would be one of them, but not you or Margaux, as Commandant Suhren had doubts about you both. You were too ill to understand, and I knew that if I told Margaux or Catherine they wouldn’t believe me. We all knew what the buses in the forest had been used for up until then. But I believed the guard – that these buses were different, not death buses; she told me in exchange for – well, we needn’t go into that.’
Liberty paused and Kat watched her grandmother’s eyes fill with tears, as if Skye knew exactly what Liberty had done in return for the information, and that it was horrific.
‘The guard also said,’ Liberty continued, staring at the window as if it had opened onto the past, to a time sixty-seven years ago when barbarity and shame were all these women knew, ‘that the Red Cross would take some extra women from the Revier. You wouldn’t go there, but I knew it was the only way to get you and the baby – that tiny baby – out. So I told you …’ Liberty blinked, as if she were trying to stop the press of the past into the present. ‘I told you that Nicholas had married. That he had a baby. It was the only way to make you go,’ she repeated. ‘But it was part-truth and part-lie.’
Skye shook her head. ‘It was all truth. I read about his child in one of the War Ministry’s post-war, chin-up, good news bulletins when I was in Granville. Much decorated pilot Group Captain Nicholas Crawford has returned to London with his child,’ she quoted robotically. Her voice fell to a whisper. ‘I’m not sure I need to hear any more.’
‘You do,’ Liberty said forcefully. ‘The mother of the child had fallen pregnant before Nicholas arrived in France. The baby wasn’t his. Taking the child to England was one of those desperate actions people undertake in wartime to save someone else.’ Liberty looked down into her lap, as if she w
ished to undo everything, but also as if she knew how futile and foolish the wish was.
Skye stared at her sister through an ocean of tears. Her face was so pale that Kat moved to stand up, to stop the flow of confessions and shocks. But Liberty spoke again.
‘After the war,’ she said, ‘it was easy to become Margaux. As you know, nobody coming back from the camp had any papers. Nobody had registered with Margaux’s name and birthdate here in England. I gather you got your papers in France?’
Skye nodded. ‘Vera didn’t come to see you? She visited me.’
‘When was that?’
‘July, forty-five.’
‘It took me a little longer to get back. I expect she thought it was simply a double-up when she saw the name again, an accident of paperwork.’
Skye nodded again, mutely.
There was a long silence.
Liberty busied herself with lighting a cigarette, but Kat could feel – and she thought everyone else could too – the pressure of more words filling Liberty’s mouth, needing at last to be spoken.
When they came, they were halting. ‘I was … I was too afraid to look for you at first. I didn’t want to hear that you had died anyway … hating me … and that your child had died too. Then I made some discreet enquiries and was told that Skye Penrose was one of the women who did not come back.’
Skye drew herself slowly up from her chair and walked over to stand in front of her sister, hands on hips. Kat could see them both as children, eighty years before, doing the same thing.
‘I have felt a lot of emotions for you in my life,’ Skye said. ‘Frustration, confusion and, of course, love – but never hate. I did ask Vera Atkins if you were alive. She said you weren’t, as far as she’d been able to discover.’ Skye’s voice cracked. She took a deep breath and gave herself a little shake. ‘I can see why you chose that particular tone of voice and those particular things to say at Ravensbrück. They were very effective in getting me to the Revier. Now,’ she brushed quickly past the one mention of the camp, ‘tell me about the Gitanes. Don’t tell me you developed a taste for them?’
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