The Dress Thief

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘Was the Comte de Charembourg your grandfather’s patron?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He bought some paintings but he was very young then. Young men don’t collect art, they chase girls,’ she finished imperiously.

  He squeezed her hand, not gently. ‘There’s another thing. I want to understand how you and M. le Comte know each other. How it is he sees you as a sweet, blank page.’

  ‘Because of Alsace, because of the war. My father fought alongside him. At the outbreak of war they both joined the London Rifle Brigade. During a battle – near Arras, I think – the comte was thrown into the air by shell blast and my father ran forward to rescue him.’ She faltered because, after her conversation with the comte in Javier, she could no longer picture that heroic scene with any clarity. ‘When he heard both my parents had died, the comte helped grandmother financially.’

  ‘Alsace … art … London … war … so many things link you.’

  She snatched her hand away. ‘Is it the Comte de Charembourg you’re interested in?’

  ‘I’m interested in you.’ He pushed their chairs together so they fused at the leg. She shivered and he flung his coat around her.

  She’d have liked to cuddle up but his probing questions had made things complex again. ‘Because of your job, you can’t help prising out people’s secrets?’

  ‘Guilty.’

  ‘Let me save you some time. The comte isn’t my father, in case you’re wondering. People always think it, because he’s been generous to me.’ She picked up her wine, meaning to knock it back, but instead choked and grabbed a napkin. ‘They said it at school when they wanted to be mean. I asked Mémé, when she’d had a little to drink, and she said I must never think it. She said I looked very like my true father and nobody who’s seen a photograph of John Gower would ever doubt it. Now see what you’ve made me do.’

  He spread a napkin over the wine stain on the tablecloth and called for a refill. ‘As I said before, you don’t have to explain yourself to me.’

  ‘You’re trying to explain me to myself!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He touched the curls at her temple. ‘Nobody’s stolen more of your hair, I hope?’

  He was trying to sooth away the storm, but she felt idiotic because she had wine dripping into her shoe. People walking by would think she was his younger sister. ‘I’m going to have my hair cut short,’ she said, reaching for a subject she knew often touched a nerve with men. ‘Really short, once Bonnet’s finished with me.’

  ‘Bonnet now?’

  ‘Finished painting me. I told you I was sitting for him. Light falling on my hair is the most important part of the composition, he says. He says, if he wanted me to be all neck and shoulders, he’d have asked me to put my hair up.’ Ah, a reaction. Like a spark from a locomotive wheel as it grates the track. She pursued it. ‘Bonnet was my grandfather’s pupil. Did you find that out too? That’s why he’s a master of female flesh, like my grandfather. He paints slowly and has to be cajoled into completing his work. I get very cold sitting for him.’ There.

  ‘Alix, have you any idea what the image of you sitting naked for another man does to my self-control? If we were together in a hotel room, I would enjoy this conversation very much. It would have a very different texture and very different possibilities.’

  She looked away. Unable to say anything clever or remotely seductive in return, she snapped, ‘I told you we would argue.’

  ‘You did.’

  She turned back to see him reaching for The Times, his expression closed. Obviously the bombing of a faraway town meant more to him than she did. Of course it did. Her ignorance would bore any intelligent man. She suspected that under Verrian’s light manner lay a very serious character. To get his attention, she raised her glass in a toast. ‘Your health.’

  He nodded. ‘Yours too. Though you should stop sitting around in the buff in Montmartre attics if you want to keep it.’ He folded up the newspaper and stood. ‘Time I took you home.’

  *

  She wouldn’t let him come into her building. ‘Our concierge snoops.’

  ‘Will I see a light go on, so I know you’re safe?’

  She promised to hold the apartment door open and switch on the hall light. Their stairwell bulbs had been replaced recently, after months of darkness, but they were blown again already. ‘You’ll see a glow right up there.’ She pointed to the mansard roof.

  ‘I’ll wait. I’m afraid I have to work over this weekend, but I’ll see you Monday. Same café?’

  ‘All right.’

  He waited for Alix to reach the top of the stairs and was rewarded with a wink of light. The Times wedged under his arm, he turned, sighing deeply. This was turning into a long, long day, but he didn’t feel ready for his bed. He was doing everything wrong. Problem was, there were so many versions of Alix he wasn’t ever sure which one he’d meet. He felt frustrated. The woman who had mesmerised him in the Deux Magots was not the minx whose ears he’d wanted to pull tonight.

  In a narrow street off St-Germain he entered L’Arancia, a restaurant in the vaults of an ancient building, favoured by Sorbonne University students and the staff of the News Monitor. He needed company. He didn’t exactly want company, but knew he ought not to be alone. He nodded to the chef-patron, an Italian called Visconti whose wife, Basque-born Arantxa, looked harrowed under the candle sconces. Verrian guessed Arantxa knew already of the bombing of Guernica.

  Derek Chelsey sat at his usual corner table, editorial secretary Beryl Theakston beside him in a velvet hat. Three male journalists made the rest of the party.

  ‘Haviland, wail-fellow-hell-met!’ Chelsey bawled over the chatter of diners. ‘You’ve blown it with the langoustine tails, but we’re having beef stew.’

  As predicted, Chelsey had been quickly reinstated as editor of the French language News Monitor. Lord Calford had very soon tired of Verrian’s sardonic style and put Chelsey back in his post.

  ‘Arantxa my angel, get this man a chair. Hand that over – no desk work over dinner.’ Chelsey held out his hand for Verrian’s newspaper, snorting as he recognised the typeface. ‘Reading the opposition? Suppose you can be forgiven this once. We were talking about it, “The Tragedy of Guernica”. None of these bright sparks knew where Guernica was.’ Chelsey damned his colleagues with a broad wave. ‘They do now it’s bombed to buggery. Just when we needed you in Spain, hey, Haviland?’

  ‘It’s awful, this war.’ The braid shook on Beryl’s hat. ‘German pilots machine-gunning people as they run away. Beastly, wicked – pitting bombers against little children.’

  ‘Not bombers,’ Verrian corrected, ‘fighter planes.’ According to The Times’ special correspondent who had witnessed the smoking aftermath, bombers had begun the attack on the Basque town, dropping high explosives on its centre. Marketplace, churches, even a hospital hit. Fighter planes had come in after, flying low to pick off the terrified survivors with machine-gun fire. He added, ‘It’s not war, Beryl, it’s murder. They even bombed farmsteads outside the town.’

  The Times article had revived memories Verrian had thought were locked away forever. His mind kept filling with one persistent image: a vehicle opened like a tin can, the boil of amber as a fuel tank exploded. Being with Alix had briefly quelled those memories – he needed her. There, he’d admitted it. Without her, the only pacifier left was alcohol.

  ‘Damn good copy though. Whose work?’ Chelsey filled a fresh glass with wine from a jug.

  ‘Steer, I’d say.’

  ‘Don’t like the Monitor getting scooped. The good stories are all in Spain.’

  ‘And plenty of them. It’s become brutally easy, opening hatches over towns. It happened yesterday when we were having tea.’

  ‘Oh, don’t, Mr Haviland.’ Beryl shuddered.

  Derek Chelsey charged everyone’s glass. ‘It’s war, Haviland,’ he slurred. ‘If you feel you know so much about it, why are you here?’

  *

  Before finally falling into bed,
Verrian wrote a letter to a friend in London who worked for the War Office. Alix’s comments about the Comte de Charembourg’s war service had piqued his curiosity. Had they really been comrades in arms, an aristocrat and her father? Even Alix seemed to have her doubts, and call it professional cynicism, but to Verrian it also felt unlikely. ‘Both men apparently served in the London Rifles,’ he wrote. ‘All I can say of John Gower, to make him easier to trace, is that he married a foreign-born woman and had one child, a girl.’ He sealed the letter, wrote a Whitehall, London, address on it and threw it aside for posting next day.

  Then he lay on his bed and pondered Chelsey’s parting shot. Why was he lingering in Paris and not sharing the suffering in Spain?

  *

  It was the end of an equally shattering day for Jean-Yves de Charembourg, who had just read about the fate of Guernica in his mistress’s bedroom on Avenue Montaigne. Hearing a bathroom cabinet click shut, he put the newspaper aside, because politics was forbidden between himself and Hélène after dark. He’d acquitted himself poorly this evening, and though Hélène was philosophical, generous even, he felt diminished. The mind was a great rationaliser, while the body was an ungovernable child, unable to camouflage its needs and failings. After bumping into Alix – had it really been only that afternoon? It felt like a week – he’d emerged from Maison Javier emotionally skinned. She’d stood before him in her penitent’s smock, accusing him of betraying her. You lied. If only he and Danielle Lutzman had told her the truth from the outset! If Danielle had allowed him to speak of his love for Mathilda, and the circumstances of their first meeting, a lifetime of fiction could have been avoided. But … to be fair, when Alix was small, lying had felt comfortable and right. Nobody had guessed she’d grow up with questions in her blood. She blamed him unfairly, but she could hardly turn on her grandmother. Old Danielle was all she had.

  And his blackmailer had been in contact again. Ninette had taken the call that afternoon, writing down a garbled message. She’d brought the note to him as he walked through the door of his home, bewilderment in her face. Another five hundred thousand francs was to be placed behind the column in Notre-Dame-d’Auteuil.

  ‘Papa?’ she’d asked. ‘Is it true you owe somebody all this money? He was talking about a murder in Kirchwiller … he said he knows who did it. He made me write down names of others who know.’ She showed him. ‘You and somebody called Lutzman, oh, and poor Mme Haupmann. What could Grandmother’s old housekeeper know about anything? She’s ancient! He said Grandmother knew all about it too, which is ridiculous. And then he said something that made my skin creep – “Somebody pretty will get hurt” if you don’t pay up … Not me, Papa?’

  Thank God, he’d managed to convince Ninette it was a prank. The pig, his blackmailer, wanted the money by the end of the week.

  Pay a blackmailer, keep a blackmailer. How, though? He was cleaned out and couldn’t sell the rest of his bank shares without alerting the financial community to his cash problems. One had to be so careful of one’s credit. He’d have to sell something physical. His car, the Panhard? But by the end of the week?

  Hélène came into the bedroom bathed in a miasma of Chanel No. 5. ‘Are you awake, Jeannot?’ she whispered.

  He pretended to be asleep.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘Alix, Monsieur wants you in his studio, at once.’

  Alix took the lift and, when she emerged, found herself following the aroma of coffee. It was early Monday morning and she’d left home without breakfast, eager not to repeat last week’s crime of being late. The weekend had dragged because Verrian had been too busy to meet her. Or had he been holding himself aloof? She stopped a few feet from Javier’s studio door, biting her lip. Why did Javier want her? Could she have been tailed to Godnosc’s? Had someone seen her taking fabric samples? Or looked inside her shoe … Now she was being ridiculous. She knocked at the door.

  Javier wasn’t alone. His elderly Spanish maid was pouring coffee so strong it overpowered the house perfume, Ersa, which was sprayed in the room every morning. The maid indicated to Javier that his cup was full.

  ‘Si, si,’ he replied, not looking at it. Dozens of sample books were spread across his desk. Filled with sketches, fabric and embroidery samples, they were the working drawings of a professional lifetime. Javier’s archive. ‘Sit down,’ he told Alix. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ Alix sat, ramrod straight.

  ‘Ana-Sofia –’ Javier made a request in bullet-fast Spanish and the maid fetched another cup and a jug from which she poured hot frothy milk followed by coffee black as engine oil.

  ‘When I was a boy,’ Javier picked up his cup, ‘my mother ran our island’s laundry and my father made his living driving a cart down to the port. He would meet the boats, and bring the passengers up. A taxi service before there were motorcars. In the mornings, everybody was rushing and my elder sister, Abigaíl, would make coffee you could cut with a knife. It would be left on the side, but the milk was always boiling hot. I cannot change my habit, though the French shudder at it. Habit is the last to die.’

  He slid a brown-paper parcel towards Alix. ‘Open it.’

  She used her scissors to cut the string. Paper fell open to reveal a tight coil of blond horsehair lace. ‘Goodness, there must be ten miles of it.’

  Javier smiled. ‘I tried your lace on Oro – you will allow me to pay your grandmother for the sample – and you have solved the problem. Alix, I salute your instincts.’

  ‘I suppose this was expensive?’

  ‘Beyond expensive, but that hardly matters – there is something very particular I want you to do for me.’ Javier opened a drawer and brought out a newspaper. ‘My sisters Abigaíl and Carmen are the only family I have now and they will not leave our island though I tried to bring them away. Nobody knows what will be the fate of Spanish Jews if the Fascists win this war, but my sisters will not come to France.’ He put a cube of sugar into his coffee, gently so it wouldn’t splash the precious books beside him. ‘What would you say to them, Alix, if they were your sisters?’

  ‘Um …’ She’d known about the civil war in Spain, even before meeting Verrian, but had assumed the politics were too complex to attempt to understand. ‘Do … um, do Spanish Jews have reason to be fearful?’

  Javier blinked and she amended, ‘I mean, are they in the same position as German Jews? My grandmother reads about their plight in l’Humanité and it upsets her.’ She hoped Javier would extricate her, but he seemed content to wait while she unravelled her logic. ‘Grandmother is terrified of Nazis … they’re the German National Socialists—’

  ‘I do know that, Alix.’

  ‘Yes, sorry. She’s afraid she’ll wake up one day and find them in France. I don’t like to think about it. You’ll think me very stupid, but I always supposed politics stopped at a country’s border, like language or signposts. It was that way in England.’

  Javier nodded, growing serious. ‘Petite, you were seen wearing a very beautiful Lelong dress a few nights back. Is it one you bought yourself?’

  A blush scorched her cheeks. She stammered that she’d borrowed it from Mme Kilpin. No point in lying. Una Kilpin’s presence at the Rose Noire gala opening would have been as obvious as their dresses. ‘She invited me to call and opened her wardrobes for me.’

  ‘How marvellous. Did you see many fake couture gowns among her hoard?’

  ‘I – I don’t know. But her boudoir has white carpet, thick as bearskin, and walls polished to such a sheen you can almost see your reflection in them. Her wardrobe doors are mirrors too. When she opened them …’ Alix was sure Javier had used the word ‘fake’ to shock her. The last thing she wanted was to seem familiar with piracy – or, worse, end up confessing her involvement. ‘I’ve never seen so much pale gold and biscuit in my life. You know, she buys clothes in other colours too, but never wears them?’

  ‘Extraordinary. Who understands the very wealthy? The truth—’ The maid returned with fresh cof
fee and Javier snapped at her to leave.

  Alix eyed him in dismay. She’d never known him to be rude before. This was it. He was going to confront her about her stealing. She steadied herself, praying she’d come through it with dignity. ‘The truth, Monsieur?’

  ‘… is,’ he continued, ‘they’re afraid of leaving their cats and the grave of our parents.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Abigaíl and Carmen. They said they would come with me, packed their trunks, gave away their food stores. The cart came, we loaded it, but at the last, they would not climb on board. I helped them put everything back inside and I left. I came home and drew sketches of dresses. My shows must go on, no?’

  Alix nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘You spent your childhood in England, I believe?’

  ‘I was born and went to school there.’

  ‘Your father was English?’

  ‘A Londoner, a railway engineer.’

  ‘Ah,’ Javier wagged a finger. ‘You have inherited his wisdom. You can judge the load-bearing capacity of lace.’

  As she laughed in relief, Javier pushed his newspaper towards her. The Times, dated 28th April, the one Verrian had been reading. ‘Please, read me the column that describes a town destroyed by an air attack, I have not had the courage to read it yet myself. Say it quietly – I do not want Ana-Sofia to hear.’

  As Alix read the eyewitness account of the destruction of a Basque town, she was conscious of breaking terrible news. Javier must have heard about the attacks but not the detail. ‘… at 4.30 p.m. the church bell rang … and the population sought refuge in cellars … Five minutes later, a single German bomber circled over the town at low altitude, then dropped six heavy bombs … thenceforward the bombing grew in intensity, ceasing only with the approach of dusk.’ She glanced up. Javier was looking fixedly at a spot behind her head. ‘The whole town … slowly and systematically pounded to pieces … I’m sorry, Monsieur. So sorry.’