The Dress Thief

by Natalie Meg Evans

  Back in the cabine, Violette – promoted today from receptionist to dresser – pulled her to a gap in the curtain. ‘Look, a gatecrasher.’

  Alix saw a girl standing behind the last row of chairs, making marks in a notebook wedged between her thigh and the seat in front.

  Alix said to Violette, ‘As my first pirate, she can stay and have champagne, but take every piece of paper off her, even her bus ticket.’

  Rosa tapped Alix. ‘I need you.’

  Just time to shake talcum powder under her arms and climb into her next model. This time, she felt more relaxed. Relaxed enough to be sorry that Paul hadn’t made it. By the time she’d made four appearances, she knew for sure he wasn’t there.

  She stepped into a ball gown painted with vast pink and red flowers. The band was playing ‘There May Be Trouble Ahead’. As she and the other mannequins came out in a thunderclap of billowing silk, applause erupted and people stood. It was in that moment of stunned disbelief that Alix saw Verrian open a window to let a young man scramble inside. A man with red-gold hair. Paul – in naval uniform. The band swung into a fast foxtrot, and Heloïse, Javier’s Titian-haired mannequin, shouted to the newcomer, ‘Hello, Royale. Come and dance with me again!’

  Paul had no objection and suddenly all the girls wanted partners. There were plenty of men to oblige. Only Alix refused, until she felt strong arms come around her, smelled the beguiling invitation of bergamot and plain soap. She sighed, ‘I think it’s all right.’

  ‘Very all right. Are you going to marry me?’

  ‘Of course. Will you tell your parents?’

  ‘Not now. Lord Calford’s never at his best in a crowd.’

  ‘Will he like me?’

  ‘No questions – I might step on your hem.’ Verrian said no more while the music played fast. But when a saxophonist improvised a drowsy solo riff, he murmured, ‘I swear, Alix, nothing will take me from you but war or death.’

  Alix swept her peony-pink skirt over her arm and pressed close to her love, her eyes closed. The saxophonist played ‘My Blue Heaven’. Their song, their universe.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following people whose input and support have made the publication of The Dress Thief not only possible, but huge fun. Firstly, my agent Laura Longrigg whose creative advice and faith in my writing provided the rocket fuel to get this book into shape. Then there is my editor at Quercus, Kathryn Taussig, whose skill and enthusiasm has brought this novel into being. Thank you Jenny Richards for conceiving the beautiful cover artwork and Talya Baker for her copyediting. I’d also like to thank Brigid Irwin for her early proofing of the manuscript, novelist Helen Carey for her unwavering support over the years, Mel Hayman-Brown, Emma Cameron and my sister Anna McKay for supplying encouragement and for reading early drafts with inspired insight. Thanks to my husband Richard who has not only put up with me longer than is reasonable, but who, with his pilot’s hat on, helped my research into aviation. Thanks also to Jeremy Blackham for his advice on navy affairs and who, with Candy Blackham, visited the magnificent interior of St-Sulpice and stood in as my ‘eyes’ on that occasion. In time-honoured vein I state here that any factual mistakes in the retelling are my own. Appreciation is due to my mother who planted the writing seed and took me on my first trip to Paris; and my son, Sam Evans, who dealt with his writer-mother with patience and good humour. I must acknowledge Eileen Kitchen, doyenne of the London garment industry, whose experience of getting shut into her workroom at night inspired a scene in this book. And Chrissie Kitchen deserves mention for being a fabulous friend, cheering me on and always being up for a glass of sauvignon blanc. And finally … this book could not have existed without Paris, the city I fell in love with when I was too young to know what I was getting into.

  Natalie Meg Evans

  Suffolk, 2014

  Author’s Note

  The Dress Thief makes reference to many couturiers, shops, people and events, and it may help to know which existed – indeed, still exist – and which are my inventions.

  Of the couturiers mentioned … Chanel, Lanvin, Vionnet, Lucien Lelong, Patou, Poiret, Worth, Schiaparelli and Molyneux are real. Hermès, which features in the early pages, is of course real too, and in 1937 launched the printed silk squares so famously associated with them. Jeanne Lanvin was famous for her perfume, Arpège, whose bottle features a design of herself and her little daughter Marguerite holding hands. She also created ‘Lanvin blue’, which Jean-Yves de Charembourg considers to be the only blue that blends perfectly with yellow. That is strictly his own opinion but he will happily defend it over a glass of chilled Alsace Riesling. Lanvin blue is described as a lavender shade, but in my view it is closer to the petals of a periwinkle flower. M. Javier, who as a couturier is entirely my own invention, agrees with me as he does in most things.

  Mabel Godnosc is also a figment of mine, but there were numerous Mabels in Paris at the time the book is set, in London and in New York, shamelessly copying and reproducing haute couture for the masses – entirely in the service of democracy. Modes Lutzman is Alix’s invention and, as Alix is my invention, you will not find it however many times you walk up and down Rue Jacob.

  The Deux Magots on Boulevard Saint-Germain is real. I have drunk coffee and written a few paragraphs there, as every novelist should. The carved Chinese wise men gazing down from their high perch alone make a visit worthwhile, though the traffic outside is more intrusive than it would have been for Alix and Verrian. Arantxa’s restaurant is invented, but based on a real one near the Sorbonne, whose steaks I will never forget even if I can’t recall the exact location. The Rose Noire is fictitious, but Bricktop existed in Rue Pigalle, its proprietess Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith being an American hot jazz legend and friend of Cole Porter. She kept her venue open throughout the thirties, closing only with the outbreak of war.

  Verrian Haviland’s employer the News Monitor is invented and I borrowed the title from the long-gone Loughborough Monitor. Zollinger’s, the Swiss chocolatiers that Alix visits on Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, is an invention, which is a shame as – had they been real – I’m sure they would have sent me a box of hand-wrapped chocolates every Christmas. Lindt and Suchard are real, however, and make lovely chocolate (Well, you gotta try, petal, as Mabel Godnosc would say!). Speaking of whom, Mabel’s bible, the New York Fashion Daily, is emphatically not real. Do you think I’m going to accuse a real newspaper of running counterfeit frocks?

  All my named Parisian locations are factual with the exception of Boulevard Racan, where the comte de Charembourg resides. I named his street after Seigneur de Racan – an aristocrat, poet and dramatist – who was, most fittingly, disappointed in love and often financially embarrassed. In one of those moments of strange serendipity, I was in the 16th arrondissement, researching locations, when I glanced up at a street sign and discovered I’d wandered into Square Racan. Kirchwiller in Alsace does not exist, but do go to Alsace if you can – drink its wine and visit its medieval towns. I recommend October when the leaves have turned gold. Mesmerising.

  Alix lived in Wandsworth in south London before going to Paris, and Wandsworth is every bit as solid as you might wish. Charlotte Road, Alix’s drab street, does not exist. Had it done so, it would now be expensively gentrified and a nightmare for parking. Arding & Hobbs department store, where Alix had her first job, is still going strong as part of the Debenhams chain. Grindle & Whiteleather, Lucy Haviland’s clothes store of choice, has no existence outside my imagination and, had it existed, would have gone out of business in the 1960s as Mrs Whiteleather would have vetoed short skirts and Mr Grindle would have refused entry to any gentleman not wearing a tie. Heronhurst, home to the Havilands, is offered up as a vocal exercise and tongue-twister, but can’t be found on any map of West Sussex.

  *

  The town of Durango in the Basque region of Spain was bombed by German and Italian warplanes on 31 March 1937, entering history as the first undefended civilian settlem
ent to suffer aerial attack. The more famous Guernica was bombed by the German Condor Legion and Italian war planes on 26 April 1937. Though these attacks, and the devastating firestorms they caused, caused international shock and revulsion, it is well to remember that Madrid had experienced repeated bombing over many months without other nations doing much to intervene. The Spanish Civil War is often described as the seedbed of aerial conflict, the grim ‘practice run’ for the slaughter and destruction of the years following. The report on the Guernica bombing, part of which I selectively quote in the novel, appeared in The Times newspaper on 27 April 1937 having been cabled to London from Bilbao by the correspondent George Steer.

  Pablo Picasso first showed ‘Guernica’ at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, which features in The Dress Thief. Having been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the Expo, he added this now-iconic panel in response to the bombing of Guernica, doing much to raise awareness of the atrocity. The painting is now on permanent display in Madrid.

  ALIX’S SCRAPBOOK

  Ah … the cloche hat!

  One of those images that sum up an age in a single stroke. Cloches had been lurking at the back of every milliner’s shop forever. Country girls liked them in fine straw because they could be pulled down to protect the face and ears from the sun. Fastened with a ribbon, they withstood the briskest wind. In the twenties they came of age, complementing the new proportions of fashion for short skirts and dropped waists. They fitted snugly over shingled hair and were tight enough not to fly off in an open-top car. They masked the eyes while making the most of bow lips, pixie jaws and swan necks. The cloche finished the brand new look, the age of the boy-woman. In the 1930s, brims came back. Hair was a little fuller, but hats needed a brim to balance the widening line of the shoulder.

  The 1920s chemise style, which evolved into the straight, body-skimming styles of the 1930s, came principally from the sketchbooks of Madeleine Vionnet and Coco Chanel. What French designer Paul Poiret began at the dawn of the twentieth century by releasing women from corsets and trip-me-up skirts, Chanel and Vionnet continued and refined.

  The dancer Caryathis started the trend for short bobs and Eton crops, so it seems …

  Distressed by a lover’s rejection, she scissored off her long skein of hair, tied a ribbon round it and draped it over the faithless one’s doorknob. That’s a gesture you can only make once. Legend has it she hurried off to an evening party, with no time to cover her head with a turban, entered the room – to gasps of shock – and the rest is history.

  Soupe à l’oignon

  de

  Natalie Meg Evans

  My favourite recipe for onion soup has a roux base. It starts much like a caramelised onion sauce, but the end result is a creamy soup that works well as an evening meal if you serve it with plenty of Gruyère toast and maybe a side salad. I was always taught to use the mild white onions for this because they have a more delicate flavour. However, when testing this recipe I used the basic ones that come out of Lincolnshire fields and have a coarse, yellowish skin. They were fine. Not sure about red onions, however. Would they make pink soup?

  For a generous pan-full, serving 4 people, you’ll need:

  2oz (50g) butter

  1lb (half a kilo) of onions

  2 pints (1.2 litres) of bouillon or good stock – chicken, beef, vegetarian … whatever you prefer. This soup derives its punch from the stock, so use the one you like the most

  1 oz (25 g) plain flour – white or wholemeal

  A bay leaf and a stalk of celery

  Salt and pepper

  A glass of dry white wine

  For the Gruyère toast:

  1 French baguette loaf

  4oz (100g) Gruyère cheese, grated (Cheddar is fine if you can’t get Gruyère)

  Plan for two slices of toast per person, more if you like

  Paprika for sprinkling

  First, melt the butter in a large pan over a gentle heat. Careful not to let it burn.

  Peel and finely slice the onions, add to the melted butter and sweat them. Check your heat and keep them moving. Cook till golden and almost caramelised.

  Add the flour and cook it with the buttery onions, stirring until it smells lightly toasted. Now take the pan from the heat, pour in the stock and beat continuously so that it thickens without lumps. A birch whisk is ideal for this but my Labrador ate mine, so I just beat it with a wooden spoon. (The soup, I hasten to add, not the dog.)

  Return the pan to the heat, turning up the temperature till the onions are simmering in the stock. Adjust the heat. Your soup should be quite thick and creamy, but if you boil it too violently, it will stick to the bottom of the pan.

  Tip in the white wine, the bay leaf and the celery stalk. Add salt if you need it – but take care if using shop-bought stock because this can be very salty. Hold off with the pepper for now.

  At a gentle simmer, the soup will be ready in twenty minutes or so, but it’s better if you can slow cook it for an hour or more.

  Start making the toast twenty minutes or so before you want to eat. Get the grill up to a moderate heat. Slice your French bread diagonally into inch-thick (2.5cm) pieces.

  You are aiming to toast the bread slowly so that it is golden brown and quite dry. Keep an eye on it and turn it.

  When the toast is done, turn up the grill. Sprinkle on the grated cheese. Put under the grill and pull them out as the cheese starts to bubble. Shake on a bit of paprika.

  Taste your soup for seasoning. Remove the bay leaf and celery stalk. Add your pepper.

  To serve, warm your soup bowls, ladle in the soup and float the cheese toasts on top.

  Bon appétit!

  Fashion and Femininity in the Thirties

  Natalie Meg Evans

  One of the unexpected side-effects of world war is that it expands opportunities for women. Those inter-war years in Europe and America were often more ‘interesting’ than comfortable, but they widened female horizons in ways unimaginable to a secure, pre-1914 generation. I think of the English Edwardian age and the French Belle Epoque as lush, domestic eras, where feminine culture and manners prevailed, when women were cosseted and corseted. I characterise the 1930s as the hard-nosed ‘manly decade’ that succeeded the ‘boys’ own’ decade of the 1920s. All highly subjective thinking, I admit, but here are images that spring to mind when I contemplate those inter-war years …

  Art Deco is the cover-all term for 1930s style, with its cool, unemotional lines. Bold, new industry reflecting a world where machines were to be mankind’s saviour. Architects responding with flat-topped, curve-cornered shapes in everything from factories, railway stations and homes to those temples of popular culture – cinemas. Bright, white rendering promising clean, efficient living and wrap-around metal windows gazing inscrutably at a world that is far more chaotic than the inside space.

  Painting becomes increasingly abstract: its lines distorted and its forms deconstructed. In art, the principles of machinery are applied to nature, with hardoutlines and geometric shapes predominating. Motor vehicles forget that they evolved from horse-drawn coaches and follow the trend, becoming long and sleek. Furniture joins in, losing its fuss and grandiosity. Fashion is not far behind.

  If the thirties were a masculine era, the 1920s scream ‘boy’ to me. For the first time in recorded history, women leave home with the backs of their necks bare; not because they’ve rolled their luxuriant locks up in a bun, but because they’ve left those coils of hair on the hairdresser’s floor. This new, elfin look syncs perfectly with post-war reality. Millions of young men have died … who wants to be reminded of those golden days of tight waists, indigestion and heavy hair? A legion of serious young women are stepping forward to fill the void left by their dead brothers. The twenties is the era of the working woman, the dawn of the motor age, of bicycles and cheap transport. Cage doors fly open. Hems rise and short hair is jammed under a neat, cloche hat.

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bsp; America sends jazz to Europe to whip the new freedom into a froth. Dancing becomes intimate and very physical, kicking the waltz rhythm out of the door. I’m sure the time-honoured job of chaperone disappears at this point. How can you keep an eye on your innocent young charge when she’s bunny-hopping from one side of the room to the other? Or when the young man holding her so indecently doesn’t give a damn for convention, because he’s already seen the worst things that life can throw at him?

  No doubt many a parent, governess, vicar and politician tried to slam the cage door shut again in the twenties, but the bird had already flown … in her mind at least. History shows us that you can change laws but rarely can you change thoughts. Did women embrace the boyish styles of the 1920s because, after four years’ indiscriminate slaughter of young men, they secretly rejected motherhood? Or were they kicking off the trappings of fragile femininity that the men had gone to war to protect? Or because they wanted to replace their brothers? Or because they had to replace their brothers? What we do know is that there were not enough men to go around any more, and many women lived out their lives as unwilling spinsters. Others discovered the freedom of careers and independent earnings. If fashion seeps from the subconscious … what was the female subconscious saying at this point?

  On to the 1930s: the decade of The Dress Thief, when the boys grew up. The economic crash of 1929 marred the fun anyway, arguably producing the conditions that led to the next war. Fashion reacted.