The Dress Thief

by Natalie Meg Evans

  Paul helped her scramble over the gunwale, caught her in his arms and kissed her as she brushed rust off her skirt. ‘Don’t,’ she chided. ‘I’ve come to work – I’ve got a copy, scorching hot, but I have to get it on paper.’

  ‘I was asleep but heard you in my dream,’ Paul said against her mouth. Twenty-two, he wasn’t much older than her, but he seemed so because his work as a porter in the fruit market kept him muscular and smoking roughened his voice. Alix let him kiss her, knowing it wasn’t fair to either of them. They were friends and business partners, and tonight was business.

  She pushed him away firmly. ‘I have to sit down, or I’ll lose what’s in my head.’

  A circular table with four mismatched chairs filled the barge’s prow. Paul pulled up a seat, lit a lantern and watched Alix take a sketchbook and crayons from her bag. Stillness came over him, lending him beauty despite the scars on his face and the bump of a broken nose. ‘I’m always afraid you’ll find a rich man and forget about me.’

  ‘I saw a rich woman earlier,’ Alix said as Suzy wobbled towards them, wine glasses and a carafe on a tin tray. ‘She was drizzled in furs the same colour as her car.’

  Suzy poured wine with the solemnity of a head waiter while Lala set two glasses of milk on the table, which was actually a cable drum with ‘PTT’ stamped on the top. Paul, Lala and Suzy sat in silence as Alix sketched, discarding page after page as she tried to reproduce the Hermès scarf. It was sharp as a photograph in her head, but her pencils wouldn’t understand. Dusk fell. Lights came on in the Hôtel Lambert above them, casting golden playing cards on to the quay. On the far bank, Port des Célestins threw flares over the water. Her audience was fidgeting, but Alix didn’t mind, because she knew they were rooting for her. They were all cut off the same cheese. All survivors. Lala protected Suzy and practised her violin so one day she could put a hat down and play to tourists. Suzy chopped vegetables for each night’s supper, standing on a box, until she had a huge pile of equal-sized pieces. Paul worked all hours to feed them and school them. Alix understood their sadness as she’d lost her mother at birth. Losing the one you’d had all your life must be even worse.

  ‘Nearly forgot –’ she dug into her handbag for the Zollinger’s package. ‘One each, girls.’ Lala and Suzy stared at the chocolates until Alix, laughing, gave them permission to unwrap them.

  ‘Can I smell the paper?’ Paul asked.

  ‘I couldn’t afford four. D’you know, the assistants wrap each chocolate in little pleats and twist it? It’s mesmerising – except I was hopping from foot to foot with impatience—’ Alix shushed Paul as he began an answer. ‘Let me get on.’

  The tip of her tongue poked through her teeth. Like the twins making luxurious inroads into violet cream, she slid into a far-off state. ‘I will get this damn scarf and we will get paid. Six out of ten? One day, fox-fur ladies will come to my shop and beg to be allowed to buy my designs.’

  Chapter Two

  It was nearly nine o’clock when Alix finally closed her sketchbook, realised how long she’d been sitting and exclaimed, ‘I’m late, I’ll have to run.’

  Paul saved her the trouble by taking her home on the crossbar of his bicycle. Alix lived on the Left Bank, on Rue St-Sulpice in the 6th arrondissement. Crossing the Seine at the Pont de Sully, they careered down Boulevard St-Germain in the middle of the road. Alix gasped as headlights streamed towards her. Just as her nerves were failing, Paul swerved off St-Germain and there were the table-leg spires of St-Sulpice, her home church.

  ‘Paul, you can – ouch!’ He skimmed a drain cover. ‘I’ll walk the rest.’

  ‘Don’t you want me to pedal you up your stairs?’

  ‘Very funny. Mme Rey would come out and batter you with her mop.’ The concierge of Alix’s building was a put-upon soul who used her mop more in warfare than cleaning. ‘I’d better go up, Mémé will be so worried.’ She took a step back, knowing Paul would want to take her in his arms.

  ‘Two minutes won’t make any difference to your grandmother.’

  ‘You don’t know my grandmother.’

  He groaned. ‘Why do I always have to say goodbye to a closed door?’

  She pecked him on the cheek. ‘You’ll let me know about the Hermès sketch? You’ll sell it?’

  ‘I’ll take it to my usual contact with my fingers crossed.’ What he always told her. No names, no promises. ‘Goodnight, then?’

  ‘Goodnight. You’d better get back to the girls.’

  She watched him wheel around a couple of parked cars and cycle away into the shadows of the great church.

  *

  The door to Alix’s courtyard stood ajar. She closed it quietly, then sniffed. Urine. Getting worse.

  New tenants had recently moved into some former wash-houses behind Alix’s apartment building. She sometimes counted up the adults and felt there must be at least five families crammed in. Other residents complained about the newcomers’ cooking smells and their plaintive singing. Alix was intrigued by them, but she’d never dare approach them. Moustached men looked at her with hooded fascination, their womenfolk staring between wings of black hair. Mme Rey called them ‘foreign vermin’ – ‘Not a scrap of French among them, no effort to learn.’

  Alix never joined in the condemnation. If she’d come to Paris with her own kind, she wouldn’t have improved her schoolgirl French very far either. Being dropped in at the deep end, nobody standing by with a lifebelt, that’s what made you fluent in a language. Her job at the telephone exchange demanded clear, correct French, and at some point, she couldn’t pinpoint when, she’d stopped mumbling and begun speaking. Meeting Paul had helped because he’d corrected her errors without judgement, though he’d also taught her Parisian slang and numerous swear words.

  ‘If you want to be mistress of a language, get a lover.’ One of the first things he’d said to her, accompanied by that rogue of a grin.

  Entering the lobby, Alix whispered a familiar incantation: ‘Six flights of steps, blessed Providence, may our next apartment have a lift.’ With luck, her grandmother wouldn’t have realised how late it was. But when she reached the top landing, their door flew open and a voice rimmed with anxiety cried, ‘Vey ist mir, Aliki, you didn’t notice the sun go down and the moon come out? I have to pull out my hair, thinking you’ve been killed or worse? Where have you been?’

  ‘Sorry, Mémé. I lost grip of time.’ They spoke English at home, or what Alix called ‘Mémé’s English’.

  ‘Go to the table. Don’t move. I’ll get your food.’ Danielle Lutzman let her granddaughter work out the contradictory commands before adding, ‘You can tell me what kept you while you have your soup.’

  Their apartment, hunkered in the mansard attic of a once grand house, could never conceal its kitchen smells. Alix knew at once it was onion soup with thyme, cooked in beef-bone stock with a sprinkling of parmesan. Served with a crusty baguette … which would be stale by now; it needed to be eaten fresh from the oven.

  *

  She took off her jacket, substituting a thick cardigan. The flat was chilly. They paid for coal with their rent, and the heating was supposed to be on twice a day, but it was twice a month, if they were lucky. In winter, they were forced to use kerosene heaters which gave off fumes. When they complained about the cold, Mme Rey would explain that they’d used up their allowance of coal, or she’d claim the boiler was playing up. ‘My son Fernand will poke it when he’s here next,’ she’d promise. Ah, the elusive Fernand. She cheated them, but a concierge had power. She was the eyes and ears of the landlord.

  Alix looked about her as she waited for her soup, realising that just ten minutes inside Hermès had re-calibrated her ideas of elegance. Their serviceable sitting room now looked shockingly bleak. The linoleum was cracked, carpets worn in places to the warp. Stains on the walls told depressing tales of kerosene. The only charm was a small collection of paintings by the Impressionist painter Alfred Lutzman, landscapes and views of his home town of Kirchwiller
in Alsace. Mémé had salvaged them from her pre-London life. Lutzman had been Mémé’s husband, Alix’s grandfather.

  Alix longed to know more about her Alsace roots, but her grandmother was touchy about those days. She’d just mutter, ‘It was a hard, harrowing time,’ then change the subject or find Alix a job to do. It made Alix all the more determined to get a sense of who, and what, she was.

  They’d arrived in Paris in September 1935, foreigners in a city wounded by riots and unemployment, nervous of German remilitarisation just over the border. Alix had lost count of the times she’d been challenged about her nationality. It was a question with only one right answer: ‘French.’

  She was English, of course. Germanic Alsatian. Jewish, though not in a religious way. She could technically claim French heritage as Alsace had been grabbed back by France in 1918. A mixture, in other words, and without a story to go with it. Paris had laid bare her ignorance and, weary of her grandmother’s evasions, she’d reached out to someone to fill the gaps. She’d gone in search of Raphael Bonnet.

  Raphael Bonnet was one of ten thousand painters living in Paris, but had the distinction – in Alix’s eyes – of having been her grandfather’s apprentice. Following Alfred Lutzman’s sudden death, Bonnet had helped Mémé and her daughter Mathilda relocate to England, an episode her grandmother had described as being like ‘amputation without opium’.’ Alix could only imagine how essential Bonnet had been to someone as fearful as her grandmother. Mémé often spoke of him, a smile touching her lips, but during their eighteen months living in Paris, she’d never visited his studio in Montmartre … and Bonnet never came to the flat.

  When asked why, Mémé would reply, ‘He’s busy! Always working on his next exhibition, which of course he never finishes. He should waste time with us?’

  Yes, Alix thought, he should. If people liked each other, they met for lunch, went to museums, walked in the park. Her best guess was that Bonnet was a piece of Alsace that Mémé had taken to exile in England, cherishing the friendship because he represented a bridge between the home she’d left and that new place where she would always be a stranger. When Bonnet returned to France, letters and Christmas cards had kept the bond alive. And when London began to feel dangerous, Mémé’s thoughts had leaped to Paris and her old friend. Having come here because of Bonnet, Mémé now stubbornly avoided him. Was it because years had gone by and each would be an old version of the person they remembered?

  They still wrote to each other, though. His letters, which Mémé let her read, had whetted Alix’s appetite to meet the man. He sounded irreverent, a little wicked, his word-sketches of the people in his world cruel as well as hilarious. He dropped tantalising references into his letters of his Alsace past, and only the river and a few arrondissements separated them. Paris was small compared to London … it would be foolish not to search him out … no?

  So one afternoon Alix had crossed the river, striking north along the grand boulevards, climbing ever-narrower streets to Paris’s hilltop village: the Butte de Montmartre. Asking at a tobacconist’s for ‘M. Bonnet, the artist?’ she had been directed to the Place du Tertre, to a café in the shade of an acacia tree. Her informer had grunted, ‘Grey beard, paint on his waistcoat. Make your way to the bar. He’ll be propping it up.’

  When she located a stocky, bearded man who matched the description, and told him her name, he’d blinked for long seconds before engulfing her in a bear hug such as she’d not felt since her father was alive.

  ‘Alix? Danielle’s granddaughter? Mathilda’s girl? Mon dieu, who else could you be? Mathilda come to life, and I see the old man in your eyes! Everybody –’ Bonnet had invited first his intimate friends then the entire tavern to embrace Alix – ‘Alfred Lutzman has come at last to his spiritual home in the person of this lovely girl. Let us drink to a miracle!’

  A friend, a past, an identity in one shot: Raphael Bonnet told her more about Alsace and her family in an hour than Mémé had in her whole life. He’d introduced her to red wine too, and to a lusty crowd of artists’ models, erotic dancers, musicians and those he termed, ‘artistes of the jug’. Drinkers. Quite an awakening for a young woman whose experience of sex, alcohol and men could be written in the margins of a museum ticket.

  Bonnet had wanted to visit them at the St-Sulpice flat, he confided, but Alix’s grandmother had forbidden it. ‘She thinks me an unsuitable acquaintance and she’s right.’ He’d gestured to a crowd of men and women clustered around a piano where an African man was banging out jazz. ‘My tastes shock her, my friends would deafen her. Besides, I know too much. Your grandmother likes the past to stay in the past, so, alas … it is perhaps hello and goodbye.’

  But Alix wanted the friendship, wanted more than one sip of this heady bohemian life. ‘I shan’t give you up now I’ve found you, M. Bonnet,’ she told him. They still met at least once a month. Mémé never suspected; Alix made sure of that.

  And the more Bonnet drank, the more he talked. Over a jug of Beaujolais, Alix learned the shocking fact that Alfred Lutzman had not died in his bed; he had been killed.

  ‘How? Who did it?’

  Bonnet had become uncharacteristically vague. An unprovoked attack, by thieves who broke into the house and were probably disturbed. ‘Best ask no more – your grandmother wouldn’t like it.’

  No indeed, especially as Mémé had always claimed that Alfred had died of a heart seizure, in his sleep. Since that day, Alix had tried to wring more from Bonnet, but it was hard to make him concentrate. His anecdotes spun off into surreal realms and changed with every retelling. He’d hop over the decades, throwing out names like exploding chestnuts. He could be bawdy too.

  ‘Remember fat Fiametta, the snake-dancer who comes in here with a big, covered basket? You know where she keeps her red-and-black asp?’

  After a bottle or two, Bonnet would always try to borrow money from Alix. But she loved him all the same. He listened to her, really listened. He also agreed passionately with her that, had he lived, Alfred Lutzman would have been a leading artist of his generation. According to Bonnet, Lutzman had been the finest exponent of human flesh of the time. Of the paintings on Alix’s walls, only one had a human subject, a smiling girl whose black plaits were crowned with a coif of stiff, Alsatian lace. The picture was titled Mathilda and was the most precious of all to Alix.

  Knocking her out of her daydream, Mémé put a steaming bowl in front of Alix and pulled out a chair for herself. A ceiling light hung over the table, and in its glow Alix saw the traces of tears on her grandmother’s cheeks. She almost put her spoon down, but stopped herself. With Mémé, you never cut straight to the most important question. She nodded at a nearby work-table strewn with gossamer silk and bobbins, and asked, ‘Is that the Maison Javier embroidery? They keep giving you new commissions. You must be exhausted.’

  ‘It’s hard work but I never knew any other kind. Finish your soup. Sit nearer the table – you want that skirt ruined? How is the bread? Stale, I should think.’

  ‘It’s fine if I dip it in. Shadow work, isn’t it, where you stitch on the reverse of the silk …’ Alix laid down her spoon. ‘Mémé?’ A tear was slipping from her grandmother’s eye. Mémé powdered her face each morning and evening, covering age spots and blemishes, but the powder was smudged and the scar above her left eyebrow showed white. ‘Were you so worried when I didn’t come home?’

  ‘I’ve been fretting all day.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘I read in the paper how they treat Jews in Germany even worse now. I used to have cousins there. What will become of their families? And this civil war in Spain – how many must die before somebody puts an end to it? Then you didn’t come home, all evening you didn’t come home. Were you kept late?’

  Alix was tempted to say, ‘Mlle Boussac asked me to teach a new girl the ropes,’ but she reminded herself she was twenty, too old for lies or prevarications. ‘I went to see Paul le Gal. I had a glass of wine on his boat and forgot the time.’
/>
  ‘Le Gal, whose mother—?’ Mémé bit off the rest. ‘You were alone with that slaughterhouse boy?’

  ‘His sisters were there. And Paul doesn’t work at the slaughterhouses any more, Grandmère.’ The affectionate term ‘Mémé’ had disappeared for the moment. ‘He works at Les Halles, offloading the fruit and vegetables.’

  ‘So. Alone with a porter whose mother made her living on the streets.’

  ‘That’s not true. Sylvie le Gal was never … what you’re implying. Her business failed, that’s all.’ Alix would always be loyal to Sylvie, whose smile had cut through the uncertainty and stress of her first weeks in Paris.

  She’d been going for a job interview in Boulevard Haussmann and had got her Métro lines mixed up, emerging miles away near Place de la Bastille. Close to tears – it was her sixth failed interview in a week – she’d struck up the nearest avenue, searching for a street name. She didn’t see the pavement billboard until she crashed into it: ‘Learn Tango in ten weeks’. A blonde head had poked out of an upper window, followed by a cheery, ‘Since you fell over my sign, I’ll give you the first lesson free.’

  Like Bonnet, Sylvie had been an unfettered spirit. Her skirts were too tight, her tops too low, but she was that rare type who loved men and women equally. She never got cross if you muffed your steps either. Just slowed things down till you got it. But her school had closed, and with debts and two little girls to feed she’d taken to dancing at seedy bal musettes and in the nightclubs of Pigalle. According to Paul, she would dance with men and … whatever followed. What followed was a jump from a bridge, which confounded Alix because she couldn’t match happy Sylvie with death in freezing black water. ‘Paul’s sisters wanted me to stay,’ she told Mémé. ‘They miss their mother.’

  Danielle Lutzman wasn’t ready to retreat. ‘What will this Paul do when they’re twelve years old and one of them doesn’t speak? How will he teach that little girl about life if she won’t speak?’