by Paul Gallico
She hesitated, her feet seemingly sinking into the pile of the carpet up to her ankles. Then her fingers crept into her handbag and tested the smooth feel of the roll of American bills. ‘That’s why you’re ’ere, Ada ’Arris. That says you’re ruddy well as rich as any of ’em. Get on with it then, my girl.’
She mounted the imposing and deserted staircase, it then being half-past eleven in the morning. On the first half-landing there was but a single silver slipper in a glass showcase let into the wall, on the second turn there was a similar showcase housing an outsize bottle of Dior perfume. But otherwise there were no goods of any kind on display, nor were there crowds of people rushing up and down the stairs as in Marks and Spencer’s or Selfridges. Nowhere was there any sign of anything that so much as resembled the shops to which she was accustomed.
On the contrary, the elegance and atmosphere of the deserted staircase gave her the feeling of a private house, and one on a most grand scale at that. Was she really in the right place? Her courage threatened to ooze again, but she told herself that sooner or later she must come upon some human being who would be able to direct her to the dresses, or at least put her right if she were in the wrong building. She pressed on and indeed on the first floor landing came upon a dark handsome woman in her early forties who was writing at a desk. She wore a simple black dress relieved by three rows of pearls at the neck, her coiffure was neat and glossy; her features were refined, her skin exquisite, but closer inspection would have revealed that she looked tired and care-worn and that there were dark hollows beneath her eyes.
Behind her, Mrs Harris noted a fair-sized room opening into a second one, grey-carpeted like the stairs, with fine silk hangings at the windows, and furnished only with several rows of grey and golden chairs around the perimeter. A few floor-to-ceiling pier mirrors completed the décor, but of anything to sell or even so much as to look at, there was not a sign.
Mme Colbert, the manageress, had had a bad morning. A usually kind and gracious lady, she had let herself quarrel with M. Fauvel, the young and handsome head of the accounts department, of whom otherwise she was rather fond, and had sent him upstairs again to his domain with his ears reddening.
It was merely a matter of his inquiring about a client whose bills seemed to run too long without payment. On any other day Mme Colbert might have favoured the accountant with a penetrating and not unhumorous summing-up of the client’s characteristics, idiosyncrasies, and trustworthiness, since sooner or later they all bared themselves to her. Instead of which she railed angrily at him that it was her business to sell dresses and his to collect the money and she had not the time to inspect the bank accounts of clients. That was his affair.
Besides giving short answers all morning, she had ticked off several of the sales girls and even permitted herself to scold Natasha, the star model of the House, for being late for a fitting, when, as she knew well, the Métro and the buses were engaging in a go-slow strike. What made it worse was that the exquisite Natasha had responded to the sharp words in a most un-prima donna-like manner, she did not argue or snap back, only two large tears formed at her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
And then besides, Mme Colbert was not at all sure that she had not muddled the invitations and seating for the afternoon’s review of the collection. As head of the department she was an important and all-powerful person on the first floor. It was she who issued or denied invitations to see the collection, sorted out spies and curiosity seekers, and barred the undesirables. She was in charge of seating arrangements as complicated as those facing any head waiter of a fashionable restaurant, as clients must be placed according to importance, rank, title, and bankroll. She was the directrice of a fashion parade, having something to say as to the order in which the creations appeared, and likewise she was the commander-in-chief of a battalion of black-garbed sales women, deploying them on the staircase and taking great care to match them psychologically to their clients - a gay and gossipy sales girl for a gay and gossipy woman, a silent and respectful sales person for a mature and important customer, an English-speaking girl with a persuasive line for an American, a good bully with a commanding aspect for a German, etc.
When such a powerful person was out of sorts or illhumoured, repercussions would ring far and wide. The crise which Mme Colbert was suffering had to do with her husband Jules, and the love, respect, and affection for him which had grown over the twenty years they had been together. Dear, good, decent, clever Jules, who had more knowledge in one fingertip than all the rest of them in the Foreign Office, with their rosettes and political connexions. But one thing Jules lacked, or rather two - he had not the ability to push himself and - he had no political friends or connexions.
Beginning as a poor boy, he had achieved his position by brilliance and application. Yet, whenever there was a better or higher position opening he was rejected in favour of someone of lesser intellect but greater connexions who then from his new position of eminence used Jules’s experience to handle his job. As his wife, and an intelligent woman au courant with affairs in France, Mme Colbert knew that many a difficult problem had been solved by her husband’s brains and intuition. Yet, time and time again he had been passed over for promotion, time and time again his eager optimism and enthusiasm had been shattered. In the past year for the first time Mme Colbert had become aware of a growing hopelessness and misanthropy in her husband. Now a man of fifty, he felt he could look forward to nothing but the existence of a Foreign Office hack. He had all but given up, and it broke her heart to see the changes in the man to whom she had given her devotion.
Recently, there had been a sudden death at the Quai d’ Orsay; the chief of an important department had succumbed to heart failure. Speculation was rife as to who would replace him. Jules Colbert was one of those in line for the job and yet—
It saddened Mme Colbert almost to the point of desperation to see how her husband’s buoyancy from his younger days struggled to break through the weight of pessimism that experience had laid upon his shoulders. He dared to hope again, even against all of the political corruption which would shatter his hopes and this time leave him an old and broken man.
This then was the burden that Mme Colbert carried about with her. She had helped her husband by working and taking financial strain off him and so had built herself into her position in the great dressmaking house. But she realised now that this was not enough and that in another way she had failed. The wife of a diplomat or a politician must herself be a diplomat or politician, conduct a salon to which the great and the might-be great would be invited; she would wheedle, flatter, intrigue, even if need be, give herself to advance her husband’s interests. Here was the ideal situation for such assistance; a plum was ready to fall to the right man and there was no way she could influence it into the lap of Jules. There was no one in those circles who cared a fig for her or her husband.
This knowledge drove Mme Colbert almost frantic with unhappiness, for she loved her husband and could not bear to see him destroyed, but neither could she do anything to prevent it and break the ugly pattern of his being shunted aside in favour of someone who had the right connexions of money, family, or political power. She lay awake at nights racking her brains for some means to help him. By day she could only become more and more convinced of the futility of her efforts, and thus her bitterness was carried on into the life of her daily work and began to affect those about her. She was not unaware of the change in herself; she seemed to be going about in some kind of nightmare from which she could not awake.
Seated now at her desk on the first floor landing and trying to concentrate on the placing of the guests for the afternoon show, Mme Colbert looked up to see an apparition ascending the stairs which caused a shudder to pass through her frame and led her to brush her hand across her brow and eyes as though to clear away an hallucination, if it was one. But it was not. She was real enough.
One of Mme Colbert’s assets was her unvarying judgement in estimating the qu
ality of would-be customers or clients, divining the genuine article from the time-wasters, penetrating the exterior of eccentrics to the bankrolls within. But this woman ascending the stairs in the worn, shabby coat, gloves of the wrong colour, shoes that advertised only too plainly her origin, the dreadful glazed imitation leather handbag, and the wholly preposterous hat with its jiggling rose, defied her.
Swiftly Mme Colbert’s mind raced through all the categories of clients she had ever seen and known. If the creature had been what she looked like, a cleaning woman (and here you see how marvellous Mme Colbert’s instincts were), she would have been entering by the back way. But, of course, this was absurd since all of the cleaning was done there at night, after hours. It was impossible that this could be a client of or for the House of Dior.
And yet she waited for the woman to speak, for she realised that she was so upset by her own personal problems that her judgement might be warped. She had not long to wait.
‘Ah, there you are, dearie,’ the woman said, ‘could you tell me which way to the dresses?’
Madame Colbert no longer had any doubts as to her judgement. Such a voice and such an accent had not been heard inside the walls of the House of Dior since its inception.
‘The dresses?’ inquired Mme Colbert in chilled and flawless English, ‘what dresses?’
‘Oh come now, duckie,’ admonished Mrs Harris, ‘aren’t you a bit on the slow side this morning? Where is it they ’angs up the dresses for sale?’
For one moment Mme Colbert thought that this weird person might have strayed from looking for the little shop below. ‘If you mean the Boutique— ’
Mrs Harris cocked an ear. ‘Bou - what? I didn’t ask for any booties. It’s them dresses I want, the expensive ones. Pull yourself together, dearie, I’ve come all the way from London to buy meself one of your dresses and I ’aven’t any time to waste.’
All was as clear as day to Mme Colbert now. Every so often, an error came marching up the grand staircase, though never before one quite so obviously and ghastly as this one, and had to be dealt with firmly. Her own troubles and frustrations rendered the manageress colder and more unsympathetic than usual in such circumstances. ‘I am afraid you have come to the wrong place. We do not display dresses here. The collection is only shown privately in the afternoons. Perhaps if you go to the Galeries Lafayette— ’
Mrs Harris was completely bewildered. ‘Wot Galleries,’ she asked, ‘I don’t want no galleries. Is this Dior or ain’t it?’ Then, before the woman could reply she remembered something. She used to encounter the word ‘collections’ in the fashion magazines, but thought they had something to do with charity, such as the collection in the church on Sunday. Now her native shrewdness cut through the mystery. ‘Look ’ere,’ she said, ‘maybe it’s this ’ere collection I want to see, what about it?’
Impatience seized Mme Colbert who was anxious to return to the miseries of her own thoughts. ‘I am sorry,’ she said coldly, ‘the salon is filled for this afternoon and the rest of the week.’ To get rid of her finally she repeated the usual formula: ‘If you will leave the name of your hotel, perhaps next week some time we can send you an invitation.’
Righteous anger inflamed the bosom of Mrs Harris. She moved a step nearer to Mme Colbert and the pink rose attached to the front of the hat bobbed vigorously as she cried: ‘Coo, that’s a good one. You’ll send me a invitytion to spend me money hard-earned dusting and mopping and ruinin’ me ’ands in dirty dish water, next week, perhaps - me that’s got to be back in London tonight. ’Ow do you like that?’
The rose bobbed menacingly a foot from Mme Colbert’s face. ‘See ’ere, Miss Snooty-at-the-Desk, if yer don’t think I’ve got the money to pay for what I want - ’ERE!’ And with this Mrs Harris opened the imitation leather bag and up-ended it The rubber band about her roll chose that moment to burst, dramatically showering a green cascade of American five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar notes. ‘There!’ at which point Mrs Harris raised her indignant voice to roof level, ‘what’s the matter with that? Ain’t my money as good as anybody else’s?’
Caught by surprise Mme Colbert stared at the astonishing and, truth to tell, beautiful sight, murmuring to herself ‘Mon dieu! Better than most people’s.’ Her mind had turned suddenly to her recent quarrel with young André Fauvel who had complained about the fall of the French franc and clients not paying their bills, and she thought ironically that here was a genuine cash customer and how would he like that. There was no gainsaying that the mound of dollars on the desk was real money.
But Mme Colbert was now confused as well as taken aback by the appearance and manner of this weird customer. How had she, who professed to scrub floors and wash dishes for her living, come by so much money and in dollars at that? And what on earth did she want with a Dior dress? The whole business smacked of irregularity leading to trouble. Nowhere did it add up or make sense, and Mme Colbert felt she had enough trouble as it was without becoming involved with this impossible British visitor who had more money on her person than she ought.
Adamantly, in spite of the sea of green dollars covering her desk, Mme Colbert repeated: ‘I am sorry, the salon is full this afternoon.’
Mrs Harris’s lip began to tremble and her little eyes screwed up as the implications of the disaster became clear. Here, in this apparently empty, hostile building, before cold hostile eyes, the unimaginable seemed about to happen. They didn’t seem to want her, they didn’t even appear to want her money. They were going to send her away and back to London without her Dior dress.
‘Lumme!’ she cried, ‘ain’t you Frenchies got any ’eart? You there, so smooth and cool! Didn’t you ever want anything so bad you could cry every time you thought about it? Ain’t you never stayed awake at nights wanting some-fink and shivering, because maybe you couldn’t never ’ave it?’
Her words struck like a knife to the heart of Mme Colbert who night after night had been doing just that, lying awake and shivering from the ache to be able to do something for her man. And the pain of the thrust forced a little cry from the manageress. ‘How did you know? How ever could you guess?’
Her own dark unhappy eyes suddenly became caught up in the small vivid blue ones of Mrs Harris which were revealing the first glint of tears. Woman looked into woman, and what Mme Colbert saw filled her first with horror and then a sudden rush of compassion and understanding.
The horror was directed at herself, at her own coldness and lack of sympathy. In one moment it seemed this odd little woman facing her had held a mirror up and let her see herself as she had become through self-indulgence and yielding to her personal difficulties. She thought with shame how she had behaved towards M. Fauvel, and with even more contrition her feckless scolding of the sales girls and even Natasha, the model, who was one of her pets.
But above all she was appalled at the realisation that she had let herself be so encrusted, so hardened by the thoughts with which she lived daily that she had become both blind and deaf to human needs and cries emanating from the human heart. Wherever she came from, whatever her walk in life, the person opposite her was a woman, with all of a woman’s desires, and as the scales fell thus from her own eyes, she whispered: ‘My dear, you’ve set your heart on a Dior dress.’
Mrs Harris would not have been a veteran member in good-standing of her profession had she forborne to reply: ‘Well, now, ’ow did you know?’
Mme Colbert ignored the sarcasm. She was looking now at the pile of money and shaking her head in amazement. ‘But however did you— ?’
‘Scrimped and syved,’ said Mrs Harris. ‘It’s took me three years. But if you wants somefink bad enough, there’s always ways. Mind you, you’ve got to ’ave a bit o’ luck as well. Now tyke me, after I won a hundred pounds on a football pool I said to meself, “That’s a sign, Ada ’Arris,” so I started syving and ’ere I am.’
Mme Colbert had a flash of intuition as to what ‘Syving’ meant to such a person and a wave of admiration for the co
urage and gallantry of the woman passed through her. Perhaps if she herself had shown more of this kind of courage and tenacity, instead of taking out her frustration on innocent and helpless sales girls, she might have been able to accomplish something for her husband. She passed her hand over her brow again and came to a quick decision. ‘What is your name, my dear?’ When Mrs Harris told her she filled it in quickly on an engraved card that said that Monsieur Christian Dior, no less, would be honoured by her presence at the showing of his collection that afternoon. ‘Come back at three,’ she said and handed it to Mrs Harris. ‘There really is no room, but I will make a place for you on the stairs from where you will be able to see the collection.’
All rancour and sarcasm vanished from the voice of Mrs Harris as she gazed in ecstasy at her admission to Paradise. ‘Now, that’s kind of you, love,’ she said. ‘It looks like me luck is ’olding out.’
A curious feeling of peace pervaded Mme Colbert and a strange smile illuminated her countenance as she said: ‘Who can say, perhaps you will be lucky for me too.’
AT five minutes to three that afternoon three people whose lives were to become strangely entangled, found themselves within a whisper of one another by the grand staircase in the House of Dior, now crowded with visitors, clients, sales girls, staff, and members of the press, all milling about.
The first of these was M. André Fauvel, the young chief accountant. He was well set up and handsome in a blond way, in spite of a scar upon his cheek honourably acquired, and the source of a military medal won during his army service in Algeria.
It was sometimes necessary for him to descend from the chilling regions of his account books on the fourth floor to the warmth of the atmosphere of perfumes, silks, and satins, and the females they encased, on the first floor. He welcomed these occasions and even sought excuses for them in the expedition of catching a glimpse of his goddess, the star model, with whom he was desperately and, of course, quite hopelessly in love.