They were interrupted by the telephone. After a brief conversation, he came back, rubbing his hands together.
‘Excellent news. There is someone who has the silk we need for your outfit,’ he told her. ‘We shall go tomorrow to pick it up.’
‘Monsieur Dior, you don’t have to do this for me. It was just a whim, you know. I don’t know what I was thinking of, in the middle of a war. I feel ashamed of myself.’
‘But it was not a whim,’ he said seriously. ‘Everything has a meaning. And why should you be ashamed? Those who want to destroy beauty should feel shame – not those of us who want only to create it. But I haven’t finished telling you – we even have a motorcar to use tomorrow. And it’s the weekend. Can you imagine? We shall pay a visit to Madame Delahaye on the way.’
The ‘motorcar’ that Dior had promised turned out to be a most extraordinary vehicle – an antediluvian, black Simca that had been adapted to run on firewood; petrol having been unobtainable since the start of the Occupation. It had a huge, stove-like apparatus bolted on to the rear from which pipes ran all over the bodywork, culminating in a tank mounted on to the front. Copper had seen the things all around Paris, but she was aghast at the idea of travelling in such a dangerous-looking contraption herself. Dior was enraptured.
‘Our own car! I haven’t been in a car for four years.’ He spoke as though it were a Rolls Royce.
Copper had brought the Frightful Bounder’s camera along and took a photograph of the vehicle. ‘It looks like one of the flying bombs the Germans are using on London. Are you sure it’s safe?’
‘Of course. It belongs to a good friend and she has kept it in immaculate condition.’
The Simca was rusted and dented in every panel, and the outlandish wood-burning apparatus seemed to have been fixed on in a distinctly amateur fashion. It hardly bore the hallmark of a well-maintained vehicle. Copper thought longingly of the army jeep that Amory had taken away. ‘If you say so.’
‘I’m so excited,’ Dior said, beaming. ‘Let’s be off.’ He was wearing an old tweed jacket with corduroys and a jersey, and he looked like a country schoolmaster. She saw that he was holding the driver’s door open for her.
‘Aren’t you driving?’ she demanded.
‘Me? Of course not. I never learned. I hate mechanical things. I can’t even ride a bicycle.’ He frowned. ‘Surely you know how to drive?’
She bit her thumb nervously. ‘Well, I got a licence in the States. But I’ve hardly driven at all. Only the jeep a bit. And I wouldn’t even know how to start this thing.’ She peered inside. The back seat had been removed and the space was piled with wood.
‘Extra fuel,’ Dior said proudly. ‘We can travel a hundred and fifty kilometres.’
A passer-by, scornful of their lack of mechanical knowledge but willing to help, showed them how to start the Simca. This involved lighting the stove on the back with a bit of rag soaked in cooking oil and waiting for the fumes to build up with a lot of hissing and roaring. Eventually, the engine chugged into life, the whole vehicle lurching to and fro on its ancient springs.
‘You see?’ Dior said triumphantly. ‘She is magnificent.’
Copper’s heart was in her mouth as they set off, the stove fuming and rumbling on their tail. She clutched the steering wheel in a death grip, fighting the machine’s apparent desire to veer in any direction except straight ahead. What would happen if the whole thing exploded? The Simca jolted along at thirty miles an hour or so, with an occasional loud bang from the exhaust.
Their first stop was the house of Madame Delahaye, the fortune teller Dior set so much store by. She lived in a smart little apartment in the 16th arrondissement that did not look in the least supernatural. The woman herself was impeccably middle-class, with shrewd eyes, her hair oiled back into a bun and pearls at her throat. However, Dior behaved towards her with great respect. He evidently took her completely seriously.
Copper was presented to the clairvoyant, who stared into her face, then nodded slowly, as though confirmed in something she had long suspected.
‘This is the young woman who brought you the gift – as I predicted?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘Show me your palms, Mademoiselle.’
Copper held out her hands, which were shamefully sooty from the Simca. Madame Delahaye inspected them carefully, tracing the lines and occasionally wiping off smut. ‘I see much money, much love – but also much trouble. There is a golden-haired woman who casts her shadow over you. We must read your cards, my dear.’
The cards came out and were carefully shuffled and laid out on the gleaming table. Madame Delahaye pored over them.
‘This young lady will bring you luck,’ she announced to Dior. ‘Keep her close to you.’
‘I intend to. Will she get her husband back?’
Madame Delahaye pushed forward a card showing a man riding a horse. ‘He travels far away,’ she replied enigmatically. ‘He thinks of her, but the road back to her is long and he is set in a thicket of thorns. He cannot see the way. And she’ – Madam Delahaye pointed at a card showing a woman in a garden – ‘she turns her back on him.’
Copper winced.
‘But there is a hand coming from the east,’ Madame Delahaye went on, ‘which places a crown on her head.’
‘How wonderful,’ Dior sighed. ‘And my Catherine?’ he asked.
Again, the clairvoyant shuffled the deck and laid out the cards. Dior watched anxiously as she studied them. ‘It’s clear,’ she announced briskly. ‘Your sister is alive, she is well and she will soon return to you.’
‘You are sure?’
‘Look.’ Madame Delahaye pushed a group of cards forward. ‘It’s as clear as day, Monsieur Dior. There she is. The cards never lie.’
Dior put his hand over his mouth, overcome. His eyes were shining with tears. ‘Thank you, my dear friend,’ he said, when he’d got himself under control. ‘Thank you a thousand times!’
Copper was touched by Dior’s emotion, but also somewhat suspicious of the clairvoyant’s certainty. She was holding out a hope that she could not possibly guarantee. Catherine, she knew, was his favourite sibling. With his mother dead, one brother in a lunatic asylum and the other a suicidal eccentric, Dior’s family was shrinking. That was, of course, why he clung to foolish tokens like Madame Delahaye’s prophecies. What a lot of strange fancies and ideas knocked around in that supposedly solid Norman head of his.
There was a discreet episode in the little hallway after the reading, with Madame Delahaye murmuring that she simply couldn’t accept the offering that Dior pressed on her, and Dior insisting that she must. It was evidently a well-practised ritual between them, and it ended with Madame Delahaye pocketing her fee with downcast eyes and a demure simper.
They continued their journey eastwards out of Paris towards Meaux. Dior was in good spirits.
‘I’ve never known her to be wrong,’ he said brightly. ‘Not even in the smallest detail. If she says Catherine will come back to me, then I believe it. And I won’t listen to all those cynics who tell me I’m a fool.’ There was a particularly loud explosion from the Simca’s exhaust that made Copper jump, and he giggled. ‘Isn’t this fun?’
‘It might be, if I didn’t have to drive.’ The roads were potholed by the convoys of heavy tanks that had passed over them, though there was hardly any traffic now. The skinny wheels of the Simca were barely able to cope with the broken surface. The old car lurched wildly to left and right. German signposts still stood in places at the roadside, efficient pointers in ugly black script. Dior wound down the window, inhaling deeply.
‘Smell that country air.’
A wave of cold air, redolent of cow dung, filled the car. She glanced at him. There was a smudge of soot on his nose. She couldn’t help smiling. His sense of fun was infectious. ‘It’s nice to see you happy.’
‘I want to be happy. And to make others happy. It’s one of my chief desires in life – to be a merchant of happiness. That�
�s not such a bad thing, is it?’
‘It’s a very good thing. Is that why you chose couture – to make people happy?’
‘Well, you know, I think couture chose me, rather than the other way around.’ He crossed his legs, visibly relaxing. ‘From my little corner, I see what pleases people. And I learn how to give it to them. New ideas are so important. The art of pleasing is to know what people want even before they want it. Lelong has been doing the same thing for decades: changing a line here, a shade there. Every collection is more or less the same as the last collection. If you show him something new, he sends it back to the drawing board to be changed, again and again, until it’s exactly like every other design he’s ever sold. That’s what drives Pierre Balmain crazy. The art of fashion is to make a collection look new each time; even though you have to rack your brains to do it.’
‘Why don’t you leave with Pierre? Set up a new fashion house together?’
‘I prefer the back rooms,’ Dior said firmly. ‘I’m not ambitious like Pierre. I saw my father go bankrupt and I lost everything in my turn. To go through that again – no, thank you. I prefer my pencils and my tranquillity.’
They reached a small, stone village buried in the countryside. Past the straggling street of houses was a nineteenth-century warehouse, now abandoned, its rows of windows broken or shuttered.
‘This must be the place,’ Dior said.
The grim old mill was surrounded by formidable nettles and almost unapproachable. ‘This is like a castle in a fairy tale,’ Copper commented.
‘And we need to find the dragon.’ He beat a path to the entrance with his umbrella and knocked on the door imperiously. Eventually, it opened a little, revealing part of a female face.
‘Who are you?’
‘Customers,’ Dior said brightly. ‘May we come in?’
‘The mill is closed. My father is sick in bed. What do you want?’
‘Shantung,’ Dior said succinctly.
‘We have nothing,’ the woman replied, starting to close the door.
With surprising determination, Dior pushed it open again. ‘Wait. Let me just take a look,’ he said persuasively, insinuating his long nose into the gap and peering inside. ‘Come along, Mademoiselle. There’s nothing to be afraid of – we’re friends.’
Reluctantly, the woman opened the door to let them in. She was in her twenties. Copper could see why she was so cautious. The scarf she wore couldn’t hide the fact that she’d had her head shaved recently – or the bruised eye and cut lip that had no doubt been administered at the same time.
‘Did the Resistance do this to you?’ Copper asked.
The woman nodded, looking grim. ‘And they beat my father.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Claudette.’
‘Very sorry indeed, Mademoiselle Claudette,’ Dior said. ‘We don’t want to hurt you. The silk, now. Is it true you have some?’
‘The Germans confiscated it all,’ the woman replied, looking even more sullen.
‘I’ll pay well,’ Dior said. ‘Cash. And not a word to anyone. You won’t get into any trouble.’ The cry of a baby could be heard somewhere in the building. Dior cocked his head to one side. ‘Boy or girl?’
‘Boy,’ she said.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Hans,’ she replied shortly.
‘I am sure you will change that to Jean by and by. And I’m sure you need things for him, don’t you?’ He crackled notes suggestively in his jacket pocket.
Claudette hesitated for a moment, looking from one to the other. Dior’s mild face seemed to reassure her. She led them through the dusty corridors to a storeroom. The rows of shelves were almost empty except for three rolls of fabric wrapped in brown paper. ‘This is all that’s left. There’s nothing more.’
Greedily, Dior unwrapped the rolls. They contained several yards of Chinese silk – a lime green, a pale mauve and a light rose. In this grim setting, and after the khaki years, the colours were strange, almost painful reminders of a world gone by. Dior’s eyes gleamed.
‘How much do you want for them?’
‘A thousand francs the metre.’
Dior laughed indulgently. ‘Who do you think I’m making dresses for? Marie Antoinette? A hundred the metre.’
An hour later, they were heading back to Paris, the car overflowing with silk. Dior was gleefully clutching the rustling folds to his bosom to keep them from being smudged. They had settled, after a prolonged negotiation with Claudette, on 250 francs per metre. ‘This is probably the only shantung left in France today,’ he chortled. ‘And you’re going to be wearing it.’ He buried his long nose in the silk, as though it were an armful of roses, and inhaled luxuriously. ‘My God, how good it smells.’
‘What does it smell like?’ she asked, interested.
‘You’ve never smelled silk?’
‘Not that I recall,’ she confessed. ‘Good old American cotton is what I wear.’
‘Here. Smell!’ He thrust the silk into her face, almost making her veer off the road. ‘What do you think of that?’
‘It smells animal,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘Kind of like children’s sweaty hair.’
‘That’s the sericin. It’s the natural glue the silkworms produce. It’s miraculous stuff. Do you know that it stops bleeding? And heals wounds? And keeps skin young?’
‘You’re making this up.’
‘Not at all. I know my trade, young lady. Silk is the best fabric to have next to your skin. It’s antiseptic and it keeps away wrinkles.’
‘Well then, I’ll only wear silk from now on,’ she said solemnly.
‘Which colour do you like?’
‘Green or lilac, I think. I somehow never saw myself in pink.’
‘Ah, my dear Copper. How little you understand yourself.’ He beamed at her. ‘The time of leaves and buds is over. You are a rose. It’s your time to bloom.’
‘Redheads can’t wear pink.’
‘Absolute nonsense. As I intend to prove to you.’
‘You’re such a tyrant,’ she said irritably. ‘You keep asking my opinion and then deciding on the exact opposite.’
He laughed happily. ‘It’s the Socratic method, my dear. Think of it as an education.’
He didn’t stop chuckling even when one of the ancient tyres burst, bringing them to a shuddering halt.
‘Now what are we going to do?’ she exclaimed.
‘You know I’m not mechanical,’ he said blithely. ‘There must be some way of fixing it, if you just look.’
Copper got out, sighing. She prowled around the Simca, looking for the spare tyre and the tools with which to put it on. They were fixed under the wood burner. Dior peered out at her over his armful of shantung and waved encouragingly. She set to work, hoping her Paris frock was going to be worth it. She manhandled the spare wheel out of its cradle. Dior watched her with benevolent interest as she wrestled with the jack, which hardly seemed strong enough to lift the car with its heavy load of extra plumbing and firewood.
‘I’m going to have to find somewhere to stay,’ she panted, heaving on the rusty tools.
‘My dear, you’re most welcome to stay with me as long as you like.’
‘That’s so kind, but I can’t trespass on your hospitality forever.’
‘You’re proving yourself invaluable so far. I would have no idea how to do what you’re doing now.’
‘Well, I have to find somewhere. I can’t go back to rue de Rivoli.’
He nodded. ‘That is certain.’
‘And I need to get down to work. I have to earn my crust.’
‘Leave it to me,’ he said when she got back into the car half an hour later, very much the worse for wear after changing the wheel. ‘I’ll find you somewhere to stay. I have an idea.’
The next day, she took her story and photographs to the postal centre and had them airmailed to Harper’s Bazaar in New York. She filed the story under her maiden name, Oona Reilly. If she was to make
a fresh start, that seemed to be appropriate.
Applying to Harper’s, Copper realised, might have seemed ambitious, even presumptuous, to some people. But she reasoned that if she was going into the journalism business, she would start at the top and work her way down. Besides, as she’d said to Amory, she knew it was a damn good story.
Harper’s was primarily a fashion magazine, but had also been allocating space to the subject of women in wartime. There was an outside chance they might be interested. She had made the point in her article that the punishment of ‘collaborators’ very often turned out to be an attack by a mob of men on a defenceless woman, involving stripping her naked and shaving her hair – or worse. There was a very ugly dimension to it that had nothing to do with justice.
Now she had to wait for a reaction. In the meantime, there was her accommodation to sort out.
As it turned out, Dior had found her a rather grand apartment in a rococo block on the place Victor Hugo. The trees outside were leafless and the weather was cold, but the flat had some minimal heating, and even lukewarm water for part of the day. It had belonged to a German sympathiser, one of Christian’s clients, who had fled Paris after the Liberation, leaving two months’ rent paid.
‘So you’ve got two months to find your feet,’ Dior said with his usual optimism. ‘Plenty of time.’
The rent was a great deal higher than she thought she could ever afford, and she quailed at the prospect of having to pay it in two months’ time. There were three bedrooms and it was a lot bigger than she needed. But it was a refuge for the time being. And it was undeniably convenient. In addition, the place was still furnished with the collaborator’s excellent furniture and his fine collection of Lalique glassware. Dior had even found a kindly bonne named Madame Chantal, who would help with the cleaning twice a week. He had paid her wages two months in advance.
However, Copper was not permitted to luxuriate in these indulgences. As soon as she had unpacked her suitcase, Dior dragged her out to see the project he was so excited about, making sure that she brought the camera she had ‘inherited’ from George Fritchley-Bound. Somewhat to her surprise, Dior took her to the Louvre.
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