The Dress Thief

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘No, I mean, yes.’ Alix hurried up the first flight of stairs.

  The concierge called after her: ‘My boy Fernand’s here tomorrow, delivery of coal. You’ll leave a tip, hein? He gives his time for nothing and it’s hard work, all those sacks.’

  Outside the door of her flat, Alix caught her breath and ironed out her expression. Inside she found Mémé cooking potato pancakes on a skillet. The fleshless shoulders were hunched and Alix knew instantly that something was wrong.

  As they sat down to eat, Mémé sighed. ‘Old Misery Mop told me the landlord means to increase the rent.’

  ‘What?’ This couldn’t be happening. Not with the copying work drying up, and coal to pay for as well. ‘Why now?’

  ‘The World’s Fair is opening in June, drawing people from the four corners of the globe, so the newspapers tell us. Our landlord thinks they’ll stay forever. He wants a thousand francs a month more from next quarter.’

  ‘Next quarter starts 25th March …’ Alix calculated. Just over two weeks away. She felt like the camel bracing itself for the last straw. She used a word learned from Paul that fortunately Mémé did not understand. ‘Right, we’ll find a flat near the canal or out at La Villette. We’ll get somewhere for half what we pay here.’

  ‘No, Aliki. I like a good address. Things like that matter when you’re my age, and how would I make new friends by the canal? I’m too tired to move again.’ Mémé gazed at her work-table. ‘I could get another hour a day out of my fingers. Poor Brandel will have to go. Who are we with a charwoman anyway? Rockefellers?’

  ‘I’ll clean. And –’ Alix pulled in a now-or-never breath, acting on a decision she was hardly aware of having made – ‘I was thinking, I might apply for piecework with Maison Javier. You know, sewing I could bring home? I have the skills, and you could recommend me. Then in time –’ she ignored the warning glint in her grandmother’s eye – ‘I could get a full-time job there. Javier promotes women, so I could work my way up to being a première. Premières are paid really, really well if they’re good.’ Meanwhile, I would steal for Paul’s contact and keep us all afloat. Maybe even hit the jackpot. Seven hundred thousand francs …

  Danielle Lutzman’s mouth twitched in pain, then shock. Anger soon came. ‘You hear me say I’ll slave another seven hours a week, and you talk of throwing away your good job at the telephone company? A job I shamed myself to get you?’

  ‘I’d stay until I was sure …’ Alix caught up with Mémé’s last comment. ‘What d’you mean, “shamed”? I got myself the job at the telephone exchange.’

  ‘Just when I need to feel safe, you talk of giving up the job that puts a roof over our heads?’ Mémé beat her fist on the table so hard the crockery jumped. Alix seized the bony hands.

  ‘Don’t, please, Mémé! Whatever I said to frighten you, I didn’t mean it. I’ll stay at the telephone company. I’ll work longer shifts.’ She added silently, I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.

  Yet, despite her protestations, she was to look back on this as the moment she stepped to the edge of the cliff, looked down into a pit crawling with deceit and danger … and jumped.

  Chapter Five

  NEWS MONITOR

  10th March 1937

  * * *

  V. Haviland, Madrid correspondent,

  reports from the heart of Spain’s civil conflict.

  * * *

  A man lying in the gutter may comfort himself by looking up at the stars. For your man in a Madrid gutter, a layer of dust excludes the stars. He lies where he has thrown himself as fighter planes swoop over a street of cafés and shops. They fly in triangular formation, Heinkel fighter aircraft of the German Condor Legion, strafing the pavements with machine-gun fire, blowing out glass, raising chips the size of gaming dice from the road. The noise is past deafening and humans dart like terrified mice beneath raptor shadows.

  The din becomes unbearable until, suddenly, they are gone. They don’t come in plain day any more, thanks to the presence of fighter aircraft provided to Spain’s left-wing government by its Soviet allies—

  Jean-Yves, Comte de Charembourg, glanced up in irritation as a cough from the doorway broke into his reading. His secretary stood with a letter pinched between thumb and finger, his expression conveying its unsavoury nature.

  ‘You will wish to see this at once, M. le Comte.’

  Shaking his newspaper in half, Jean-Yves made a mental note to come back to that article later. Whoever ‘V. Haviland’ was, he’d obviously rolled in the dust of Spain. The News Monitor had been Jean-Yves’s weekday reading when he’d lived in London and he’d been pleased to discover it could be bought in Paris from a vendor near the British embassy, if a day or two late. There was a French-language version, but it tended to pussyfoot around international sensitivities. Three decades spent in London had not made an Englishman of the Comte de Charembourg, but it had taught him the value of a press that colludes with its readers rather than with those in power. ‘Second post, Ferryman?’ he asked his secretary.

  ‘It came by hand, Monsieur.’ Jolyan Ferryman always addressed him as ‘Mon-sewer.’ The boy’s French, though textbook correct, came with an excruciating English accent. To be in Ferryman’s presence was to wince more than was comfortable or dignified.

  ‘Just put it on my desk. Who’s it from?’

  ‘The personage declined to give his name and I felt it unseemly to ask. It was a working type of person.’

  Jean-Yves got the subtext. His gentleman-secretary resented performing tasks more fitted to a footman. Tough. This household couldn’t run to footmen. In fact, if prices kept increasing, Jean-Yves doubted he would run even to a secretary much longer. Now, that would be a tricky conversation to have with his wife. When it came to their style of living, Rhona de Charembourg aspired to the grand ways of her English girlhood. Aisleby Park, with fifty indoor staff and an estate ten miles round, was Rhona’s pattern of respectable living. Had she known she’d end up ruling a household of four domestics and a part-time gardener … undoubtedly she wouldn’t have married him.

  Jean-Yves dismissed Ferryman and tore open the letter, extracting a sheet that reeked of cigarette smoke. Without doubt, a worker’s brand.

  The click of the garden gate took him to the window in time to see his wife and daughters leaving the house. Each woman wore a suit of fine Prince of Wales check. His two daughters each held a dog lead with a white Pomeranian on the end of it. Rhona, Christine and Ninette with Tosca and Figaro, taking the air on Boulevard Racan. A charming ritual that wouldn’t last much longer. Christine was marrying this June and the family circle would be cut by one.

  Better read that letter. DE CHAREMBOURG was written across the top. He absorbed what followed and the blood faltered in his veins.

  He sat down. Forced himself to breath evenly. He’d suffered chest trauma in the Great War and, though only fifty-six, he sometimes rasped like a spent hackney horse. He reread the letter in silence:

  On 21st December 1903, you slew Alfred Lutzman. Time to pay. There are witnesses living. Meet my terms or I will tell your dirty secrets.

  I can hurt someone you love.

  His gaze flew towards the boulevard where his wife and daughters strolled. In what way, hurt? When his telephone rang, he snatched it up. ‘De Charembourg. Who is this?’

  ‘You got my note, M. le Comte? You understand my meaning?’ The voice was hoarse, the accent hard to place … something guttural mixed up in Parisian argot.

  Jean-Yves answered in his crispest Academy French – an instinctive defence. ‘Whoever you are, I imagine you are hoping for money. Prepare to be disappointed. Your accusations are as wild as they are offensive.’

  A crackling pause. Then: ‘You lead an interesting life, Monsieur. So many friends. So many lady friends … Can your wife count them on her fingers? I’m sure she tries.’

  ‘How dare you speak of my wife?’ How did this creature know anything of his life? Of his discreet liaisons? He was so
careful.

  The caller gave a thick laugh. ‘You are an appreciator of female beauty, and what is wrong with that? Women and girls, ah … so tender and vulnerable, no? Is it not tragic when a young girl is hurt? You would not wish to cause the mutilation of a girl’s face?’

  ‘God, no. Of course not. What—’

  The voice became businesslike. ‘Five hundred thousand francs and nobody you love will know what a bastard you are – well, you were. I know what you did to Alfred Lutzman.’ The line went dead.

  Jean-Yves discovered his shirt was soaked. At last, after so many years, the horror of that winter’s day in Kirchwiller had come back to haunt him. Five hundred thousand francs was equivalent to a year’s untaxed income. How would he find such a sum?

  In London he’d held a responsible position in the Banque d’Alsace, retiring with shares that bolstered his current, modest salary as a director of a textiles firm. Rhona had brought money to the marriage too, but what remained of that was invested for their daughters. And there was far less of it than she imagined. As Miss Aisleby, heiress to her grandfather’s coal-mining fortune, she’d once been the richest girl in northern England. By the time she inherited, the Aisleby pits were exhausted and war had wiped out her invested fortune. Her grandfather’s debts and death duties took much of the rest. Jean-Yves often tried to explain that it was mismanagement and socialism that had swallowed her wealth, not theft, but Rhona still believed her money existed somewhere. She certainly spent as if it did.

  Bluntly, he wasn’t up to the luxury of a blackmailer.

  He realised the telephone receiver was slick with sweat, and wiped it quickly. Who did that malevolent voice belong to? And how could a stranger ever know about events that took place in Alsace thirty-five years ago? It had all been hushed up.

  He could think of only one person who might tell him. He must break a taboo and ask her to meet him.

  *

  ‘Paul, I’ll do it. I’ll steal Javier’s spring–summer collection so neither of us need worry about money ever again. I’ll slip into his show in disguise with a sketchbook up my skirt. Just don’t ever tell my grandmother.’

  Having said her piece, Alix dug her fork into a mound of grated carrot doused in vinaigrette. She had radishes on her plate too – and cold green beans, boiled egg, onion and slices of Toulouse sausage. This café on Butte de Montmartre specialised in the cheap and the vibrant. It was Friday lunchtime, 12th March, and though the wind was still sharp, Place du Tertre was bright with sunshine, the trees squeezing into bud. Alix had just completed a night shift at the exchange and a further four hours to cover for a sick colleague. She felt light-headed. ‘It’s mad, stealing a whole collection. And impossible but …’ She broke off.

  Paul was making a dam of salt in a trickle of wine. When she asked, ‘Am I dining alone?’ he made a face and responded, ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

  Oh, no. Surely his contact hadn’t approached somebody else to steal the collection? Not after she’d spent sleepless nights working out how to do it without actually breaking into Maison Javier in the night and carrying away the clothes. She watched Paul trying to spear a radish only for it to bounce off his plate and on to the cobbles. ‘If it’s bad news, give it.’

  Paul grimaced. ‘I’m planning my words so you don’t bite my head off.’

  ‘I always bite your head off.’ A closer look revealed the blur of sleeplessness in his eyes too. ‘Midnight oil?’

  ‘Nightmares. Every time I close my eyes, I see my mother’s corpse.’

  ‘Oh, don’t, Paul.’

  ‘And the police came to my boat.’

  ‘Police?’

  ‘Wanting to see my mooring permit.’

  ‘You do have a permit?’

  He gave her a look that said, What d’you think? ‘Alix, you always say you want to be a couturier and open your own fashion house? Well, my contact has arranged a job interview for you.’

  Her heart scudded to a halt. ‘What?’

  ‘At Maison Javier. Then you wouldn’t have to sneak into his shows; you’d be at the heart of his organisation.’

  ‘Oh.’ That was it then. The chance she’d dreamed of. Only …

  ‘Did I say something wrong?’

  ‘No. Well, a bit.’ Paul was enticing her to break her promise to Mémé, but offering her the chance to betray herself too. It was so hard to explain. She stared across the square, then waved her fork at an artist erecting his easel. ‘See him, with the little fat legs? Bonnet – my artist friend who lives here on the square? –’ she indicated a row of old houses behind her. ‘He says that man has spent twenty years sketching tourists, smoothing out their chins and the bumps on their noses. When he goes home, there’s a lake of charcoal dust on the cobbles with his footprints in it, a memento of where he’s stood all day. For him, making a pretty picture and getting paid is what it’s about.’

  Paul grunted. ‘From what you’ve told me about Bonnet’s empty food cupboards, he could do with selling a picture now and again, rather than criticising those who do.’

  She leaped to Bonnet’s defence. ‘He’d rather starve than paint to order! My grandfather felt the same. He believed that a finished picture had lost its soul.’

  Paul tried to spear another radish. ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘Mémé says so. Grandpapa would paint the same scene over and over, trying for the perfect cast of light.’ Paul’s snort ignited her anger. ‘If you’d ever read Zola’s l’Œuvre you’d understand. In the book, Claude Lantier struggles against an establishment that only wants safe, traditional art. His whole life is dedicated to producing one great painting that fuses nature with authentic passion.’

  ‘Only he runs out of paint and dies?’

  ‘No, he hangs himself.’

  ‘Oh.’ Paul sent another radish careering into Alix’s lap. ‘Always a way out, isn’t there?’

  Alix was bitterly sorry for her tactlessness, but she wanted Paul to understand why she was so torn. She needed money, but the means being offered was dangerous and, more important, immoral. To her, couture was art. Copying a dress was like taking an apple from an orchard. Stealing a collection was like burning the orchard down. It was taking a man’s genius, his soul.

  Paul said, ‘Do you want this interview or not? It seems a heaven-sent chance.’

  It was an impossible choice. She’d have to give in her notice at the telephone exchange and withstand Mémé’s distress. And what if she got taken on at Maison Javier only to discover she’d been mistaken about her talent? You could carry dreams around with you for years, like a cluster of balloons, only to discover they were all empty air. Gesturing towards the radishes, she told Paul, ‘Use your fingers. Who’s watching? I think, after all, I won’t become a couturier. Bonnet asked me to pose for a painting. I’m off for a sitting after lunch.’ She’d run into the artist at a second-hand clothes stall in Rue des Rosiers. She’d been selling a tweed skirt she no longer wanted.

  He’d chuckled when she told him her rent was going up. ‘That’s fate telling you it’s time to pose for me, michou. I can’t pay much, but it’ll give you something to throw at your bastard landlord.’ He tapped his nose. ‘Our secret.’

  Paul poured wine for them both, the cheap kind that left a red stain in the glass, and said gravely, ‘Being an artist’s model is fine when you’re young, Alix, but do you want to live to see your wrinkles on a gallery wall? This interview is for the bottom rung at Javier, but it’s a start in a career where women climb to the top.’

  Her own argument, lobbed back at her. ‘You only want me to do it so I can steal.’

  ‘I want you to have your dreams too. But steal, yes, once. Just once. Alix, I’m desperate for money! I didn’t tell you the end of my nightmare: my mother’s corpse reaches up and grabs Lala and Suzy off me, down into the water. I can hear them screaming my name as they go.’

  She drank her wine, feeling it rough on her tongue. ‘This interview … when is it?’


  Paul caught her hand. ‘Tomorrow.’

  So soon?

  ‘I can tell my contact you’ll go? Take the job, pirate the collection? I’ll write down the details.’

  She shushed him. In his excitement he’d forgotten to whisper. Slowly she responded, ‘If I do, I’ll never pretend stealing is right. You understand?’ He was reaching for a pencil, so she said again, ‘I’ll never pretend it’s right.’

  ‘I’m not your judge.’ Paul began writing on the back of a discarded bill. He formed his letters as circles, adding sticks top or bottom as appropriate, and marched his words to the edge of the page. Knowing he hated being watched, Alix turned away, following a troop of schoolgirls with her eyes. Pallid, uncooked girls – she must have looked like that once. An old man laid his beret on the cobbles and began to play a bourrée on elbow pipes.

  Paul handed her a note which read, ‘Javier, Rue de la Trémoille. Say Mme Shone sent you, ask for première Mme Frankel. 11.03.’

  ‘Do you mean eleven thirty?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Change it.’

  ‘Mme Shone … she’s your contact?’

  ‘Sort of. Tomorrow, remember. Alix? You won’t be late?’

  *

  After they’d paid for their lunch and she’d kissed Paul on each cheek, she crossed to Bonnet’s house. He rented two second-floor rooms overlooking the square. She searched in vain for a light switch inside the front door and eventually shouted up to him. No reply, so she climbed the creaking stairs and knocked at a door she was just able to make out in the gloom. At the invitation ‘Come in unless you’re the taxman!’ she pushed.

  Bonnet was in the middle of the room, brushing glue size on to a canvas. Assuming she was late, she apologised, but he said imperturbably, ‘I thought I’d get on with a different job. Wish I hadn’t. Go get yourself ready.’

  As she undressed behind a screen, Alix became increasingly aware of a foul smell. She emerged wrapped in a robe, sniffing. Linseed, turpentine, spirits for cleaning and some for drinking … the usual smells of an artist’s garret, but also something more. ‘Bonnet, is there a dead rat under the floor?’