The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  “Are you all right?” Kat asked urgently. “Come and lie down.”

  Margaux shook her head.

  The bathroom wheezed with the sound of Kat’s grandmother’s shallow breathing.

  Then Margaux spoke. “I thought I could tell you. But I . . . I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Kat was horrified to see that her grandmother was weeping: silent, aching tears. “Don’t be sorry,” she cried, wrapping her arms around Margaux, panic of a kind she’d never felt before making her hold on tight—like a child herself—to the only mother she’d ever known.

  What she’d seen on Margaux’s face after the bloodlessness passed was a terror so stark Kat never wanted to see it again. It was as if her grandmother had witnessed death itself, as if the dark angel had reached for Margaux with outstretched arms.

  Kat didn’t ever want to unravel herself from her grandmother. But that was, of course, impossible. Instead she would wear Margaux’s dresses and not ask another thing about them.

  At last Margaux extracted herself and kissed Kat’s cheek. “I’m being a fool,” she said. “The dresses are from my modeling days. A perk of the job, I suppose you could say.” Then she dragged herself up from her chair and shuffled along the hallway.

  Kat stayed where she was, kneeling on the floor. She didn’t know what was worse: her grandmother’s initial distress or the lie that had followed.

  Besides perhaps the first ten dresses, the vast majority of the sixty-five gowns were not from the period when Margaux had modeled. And local department stores in Australia would never have had such dresses to give away to their models. All Margaux had proven was that Kat’s initial conjecture—that the dresses couldn’t have come from the secondhand couture business—was right. That would have been the easier story to massage into believability, yet Margaux hadn’t done so. And nor had Margaux given any satisfactory answer about the cottage.

  It was Kat’s turn to shut her eyes. Why would Margaux lie like that? Kat recollected the look on her grandmother’s face and knew she would never ask.

  Ten

  The following week at work, Kat had just pulled the mystery blue gown out of its box so she could stare at it some more when her phone rang.

  “Katarina Jourdan speaking.”

  “Hello.” A voice with an English accent rolled charmingly through the phone. “I’m Elliott Beaufort. You’re probably busy so I’ll keep it brief. I’m a historian and author, and I’m currently researching a book about a family of women who did some remarkable things during both world wars.”

  At the man’s name, followed by the word “author,” Kat felt a flash of recognition. She searched her memory and recalled that, about a year ago, her book club had gone to hear an author speak about his latest book. She hadn’t been able to go herself, and at the next meeting her friends had giggled like teenagers with a crush on a boy band about the witty, erudite author. They’d all agreed they’d happily leave their husbands for him. Kat, recently separated, hadn’t listened to the rest of the conversation, but she was almost sure the author’s name was Elliott Beaufort.

  “I understand you’re possibly related to a Margaux Jourdan,” he continued. “I found the connection in some bio details of yours on the internet. I’m trying to work out if your Margaux Jourdan is the same one I’m looking for. And I’m sorry for the strange call,” he added. “People usually hang up on me because they think I’m trying to sell them a computer virus. Maybe we could arrange a time to talk properly, when it’s convenient. I can email you some information about me too, so you can make sure I’m not trying to scam you.”

  Kat laughed. “You don’t sound like a telemarketer. But I’m pretty sure my grandmother isn’t the woman you want. What kind of remarkable things did this Margaux Jourdan do?”

  “She supposedly worked for an auxiliary service of the RAF where women did things like packing parachutes. But she really worked for a government organization called SOE—the Special Operations Executive. She was sent to France throughout the war to gather information from the Nazis and pass it on to the Resistance. She was a spy, in other words.”

  “Then it’s definitely not my grandmother,” Kat said confidently, ready to hang up and let him go and give his spiel to a relative of a different Margaux Jourdan somewhere else in the world. “She was in England during the war but she didn’t do anything like that.”

  “What did she do?” Elliott asked.

  Kat cast her mind right back to a school assignment, a family tree, when everyone had had to write down the names of their relatives, important dates and what their occupation had been. Kat’s tree had looked like the scene of a massacre—beside almost everyone’s names, including those of Margaux’s parents and brothers, were the words: died during the war. And besides Kat’s mother’s name: died 1973. Kat had thrown the tree in the bin and not handed it in because hers was so different to everyone else’s in her class.

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t talk about it,” Kat said, voice no longer confident, each word dressed with uncertainty. Cottages, dresses and now a man trying to pass her grandmother off as someone who’d spied. Oh, Margaux, Kat thought, what’s going on?

  “That’s very common.” He sounded as if he were trying to reassure her but Kat’s unease clung to her like latex.

  Was it also common, when talking about the past, to have a face white as bone, for eyes to turn black with fright?

  “Well, this next question will definitely exclude her,” Elliott said in that same gentle tone and Kat had the feeling he could sense her disquiet. “Do you know if your grandmother was born in France?”

  “Yes, she was. On the first of November, 1918.”

  “Really?”

  Now Kat heard both surprise and hope in his voice. She wanted to hang up the phone and not hear his next words.

  “It makes her the only Margaux Jourdan—not that there are many of them in the world—who has the same birth date as the woman I’m looking for. Was she born in Lyon?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kat said slowly. It would have been on the family tree she’d thrown away but a detail like that had been unremarkable to her when set beside the word died repeated so many times. “I’d have to check.”

  “I could talk to her, if that’s easier for you,” he said.

  Kat shook her head emphatically. “She won’t talk to you. She’s . . .” Kat searched for the right words, knowing she had to keep this man away from her grandmother so he didn’t frighten her the way Kat had with her questions on the weekend. “She’s a little reclusive.”

  Elliott’s sigh expressed his disappointment. “Is there any chance you could find out if she was born in Lyon? And maybe answer some more questions?”

  Annabel’s voice returned Kat to her workroom at the museum. She sat up straight, drawing professionalism around her. “I’m at work. So I can’t right now. Are you in Sydney?”

  “London.”

  The words fell from her mouth. “I’ll be in London next month,” she said. It might be the wildest of goose chases, despite a coincidence of birth dates. Or it might somehow give Kat the answers to her questions about the cottage, the gowns and her grandmother’s visceral, animal fear.

  “Brilliant!” Elliott said, and Kat found herself agreeing to ask her grandmother whether she had indeed been born in Lyon and also scheduling a time to meet Elliott in London.

  She hung up the phone, shaking her head. Going back to London was something she’d organized only yesterday as the V&A Museum’s French couture expert was eager to discuss Kat’s potential Dior discovery—the blue dress—and it so happened that one of the House of Dior’s archivists would be visiting the V&A at the same time and wanted to talk to Kat too.

  She felt herself childishly crossing her fingers—perhaps Margaux would tell Kat she’d been born in Paris or Marseilles and then Kat could forget all about Elliott Beaufort. But that wouldn’t banish the memory of her grandmother’s bone-white face, Kat knew—nothing ever would�
��and so she wasn’t at all sure if that was the outcome she really wanted.

  * * *

  When Kat’s phone rang again, it was the childcare center calling to tell her that Daisy had been complaining of a sore stomach for the past hour.

  “You took her to the toilet?” Kat asked desperately, knowing that of course they would have tried all the obvious things. She couldn’t afford another afternoon off work. But nor could she ignore her possibly sick child. She felt tension creep up her neck and across the top of her head. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said.

  She wouldn’t be solving any dress mysteries today. Instead, she’d have to grovel to her boss to ask for the afternoon off, and possibly the next day too, depending on how sick Daisy was.

  Daisy greeted her with a wan smile and a clinging hug that told Kat she wasn’t feeling her best. All of Kat’s irritation dissolved with the whispered words, “Can you carry me, Mummy?”

  Kat scooped her daughter up into her arms and carried her to King Street Wharf where they caught the ferry home. Once Daisy was settled on the sofa, tucked in a blanket, Tylenol administered, the Wiggles singing too-bright nursery rhymes on the television, Kat dialed her ex-husband’s mobile.

  It was answered by an intern at the children’s hospital’s emergency department, who asked her to hold. As Kat waited, the sounds of monitors and pain and crisis brought back with too-sharp force the weekend that finally ended her marriage.

  Paul had been attending medical conferences with greater regularity in the year after Daisy was born, which Kat understood—even though it made the childcare juggle a nightmare. Conferences were important for someone like her husband who was both emergency physician and researcher. But then Lisbet had fallen very ill on a Saturday night—Why did these things always happen on Saturday night?—and Kat was sure she had appendicitis. She’d taken her to the hospital and run into Simon, a doctor and friend of Kat and Paul’s since medical school. When she saw him, she’d said, unthinkingly, “I thought you were at the conference with Paul.” Simon looked so completely blank that Kat knew at once the conference was fictitious. And Simon’s face, moving from confusion to horrified comprehension, told her he’d arrived at the same conclusion.

  All that weekend, while Lisbet had her appendix taken out and Kat and Daisy slept by her bedside—Daisy was still being breastfed and couldn’t be left with anyone—Kat seethed at her husband for what she imagined must be an affair with a colleague or perhaps even a medical student. When he arrived home, she discovered it was something far worse.

  “I’m not having an affair,” he’d said belligerently. “I just need some time out every now and again. To play golf and eat normal food instead of pasta all the time. So I take weekends in Queensland occasionally.”

  Time out from what? Kat had wanted to scream. All he had to do was work and look after the garden and change the goddamn toilet roll when he’d finished with it; she had to work and cook and organize cleaners and know when the girls needed to go to the dentist or when they needed injections, had to organize childcare and costumes for Book Week and haircuts and new shoes and all the other things that children required, and which threatened to make her head explode.

  And then he’d said, “If I asked you for a weekend off to do nothing, you’d act like the world’s biggest martyr because you’d never take a weekend off from being a mum.”

  That was when she knew their marriage was over. He was right. She would have been furious at him for wanting a weekend away from the demands of family. But what kind of person would slink off anyway, while she’d juggled emergency surgery for one child and the demands of caring for another who was still just a baby. She told him she wanted a divorce and had felt ever since the sure and certain knowledge that he would never forgive her for leaving him, which was how he saw it.

  “What is it?” Paul’s brusque voice came over the line.

  “I’m really sorry and I know it’s inconvenient but can we work things out so I can go to London next month?” she asked.

  She hoped that apologizing up front would enable them to amicably work out the arrangements for the girls while she was away.

  “Again?” Paul complained. “Kat, I can’t drop everything to look after Elizabeth and Daisy every time you go away.”

  He said it as if she were taking a holiday and she bit back the retort: what about the unspoken expectation that she would take a day off work whenever one of the girls was ill, like now? If Paul had them overnight and they fell ill, he simply dropped them at her house the next morning along with the words, “She threw up,” or “She has a fever,” and left it to Kat to gather up the wan child and tuck her into bed and call the museum to say she couldn’t come in, while Paul drove off to the hospital.

  Paul’s reasoning was that he was saving lives while Kat was just mucking about with dresses. It didn’t matter a bit to him that, over this past year, all the articles she’d written for journals and all the papers she’d presented at conferences were paying off and she was becoming something of a spokesperson on fashion conservation.

  Her resolve to remain calm collapsed like a snagged hemline.

  “I’ve made the next trip as short as I can,” she said. “It’s very hard to get to London and back in just a week or two, but that’s what I do every time. Would you prefer that I didn’t work and asked the court to increase your child maintenance payment instead?”

  It was a cheap shot and they both knew it. Kat loved her work too much to ever quit.

  She tried to regain the high ground she’d leapt off. “I can get in a nanny. Or the girls can stay with friends for a night or two. There are lots of options. They don’t have to stay with you.”

  “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Telling everyone I’m too selfish to look after my own children? Of course they’ll stay with me.”

  “No, I wouldn’t love it,” she said sadly. “What I would love is for none of this to ever have happened.”

  A sound made her spin around. Poor Daisy was scrambling for the kitchen cupboard where they kept the bucket they used if someone was sick. But she didn’t quite make it, and now the floor was a mess and Daisy was sobbing.

  “I have to go,” Kat said.

  Daisy reached out her arms and, despite the mess, Kat picked her up and held her tight and kissed her hot little forehead and told her it didn’t matter. Intermingled with Daisy’s tears were tears of Kat’s own.

  Later, when Daisy had dropped into sleep, her hand still holding her mother’s, Kat tried to tap out a one-handed email to friends to arrange weekend sleepovers for Lisbet and Daisy. Then she emailed Paul the remaining dates, trying not think about the fact that her life was made up of beads of guilt strung together with the certainty that she wasn’t doing right by anyone, least of all herself.

  * * *

  Later that night when both girls were asleep, Kat rang her grandmother. “I was wondering if I should pop over to France while I’m in London next month,” she said, lying. “But not Paris. Somewhere else.” She paused, as if thinking. “Where were you born, again?”

  “Lyon,” Margaux said. “But I was only there as a young child before we moved to Paris. I don’t remember enough about it to give you tourist advice.”

  Lyon. Kat froze. Keep going, she told herself.

  “I had a call from an author earlier today,” she said as casually as she could. “He’s looking for a woman called Margaux Jourdan. He’s interested in what she did during the Second World War.”

  The ensuing silence spun on and on, stretching Kat’s nerves so thin they almost snapped.

  Then her grandmother said, “I never thought anybody would come looking for Margaux Jourdan.”

  What to say in response to that?

  Finally her grandmother added, “I worked during the war, like every woman did. Packing parachutes at an air base, I think. I don’t know. There’s a lot your mind loses, like socks in a washing machine, when you’re as old as I am.”

 
“If you can remember anything more,” Kat said almost pleadingly, “then I can tell him and he’ll see that you’re not the Margaux he’s looking for.” Even though you have the same birthdate. And the same birthplace. And you said you packed parachutes, which Elliott mentioned too.

  “I didn’t do anything worth remembering during the war,” her grandmother said. She hung up the phone.

  Eleven

  Kat walked hesitantly into the Beaufort Bar at the Savoy Hotel. It had been a long time since she’d met a man in a bar for a drink, and while this was a business meeting rather than a personal one, she still felt like an awkward teenager as she stepped past groups of impeccably suited businesspeople.

  She’d arrived in London two days ago at the break of dawn and had driven to the house in Cornwall to pick up some more of the dresses. They didn’t belong in an isolated cottage and were in excellent condition so she’d convinced herself that wearing them only a few times would be less of a sin against the tenets of conservation than leaving them abandoned in musty wardrobes. Besides, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about them, wondering if, away from her life as a Sydney mother, they might suit a Katarina Jourdan who could actually have a drink at the Savoy Hotel at six in the evening without having to move heaven and earth to make it happen. Nor had she been able to stop wondering about where they’d come from.

  The one she’d chosen to wear today was from the 1953 Tulip line. It was black, with a wonderful bodice designed like a collared shawl that gave the dress a completely unexpected and rather flattering touch. Her hand strayed up to smooth down the collar as she took in the jet-black walls and curved alcoves lined with gold, the moody opulence of the bar. Throughout the room, people relaxed in brown leather armchairs and black velvet sofas and Kat realized she’d been so busy getting herself to Cornwall and then back to London that she’d forgotten to do any research on Elliott Beaufort. She hadn’t even googled a picture of him.