The Dress Thief Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART TWO

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  PART THREE

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Alix’s Scrapbook

  Fashion and Femininity in the Thirties

  The Milliner’s Secret

  First published in the UK in 2014 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2014 Natalie Meg Evans

  The moral right of Natalie Meg Evans to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  PB ISBN 978 1 84866 588 0

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 84866 590 3

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  In the late 1970s, Natalie Meg Evans ran away from art college in the Midlands for a career in London’s fringe theatre. She spent five years acting, as well as writing her own plays and sketches before giving it up to work in PR. She now writes full time from her house in rural north Suffolk, where she lives with her husband, dogs and horses.

  For Richard, whose presence has been the bedrock of my life.

  Prologue

  Alsace, Eastern France, 1903

  The double crash that echoed through the timber-framed house killed one man and damned another. The first blow was metal against skull. The second was the crack of the victim’s head against the corner of a stove.

  Afterwards all was still but for whirling motes of dust and the sputtering of an oil lamp low on fuel. The young man dropped the iron bar he held. He wanted the victim at his feet to move, to make a sound, but Alfred Lutzman’s eyes were frozen in their last emotion. The portrait on the easel would never be finished.

  He wanted to get out. Why should he pay – perhaps with his life – for the madness of a moment? A muffled cry stopped him at the door. The artist’s wife stood, immobile, beneath a skylight blanketed with snow. She seemed unaware of the blood trickling from her left temple, but aware of his desire to leave. She said something in Yiddish, her voice rising. He cut her off in the crisp German that was their common language. ‘Frau Lutzman, listen to me. This tragedy –’ he glanced at the body and nausea passed through him – ‘was a terrible accident.’

  She whispered, ‘No accident. We must go to the police.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ He spoke harshly, copying his late father’s way of dealing with inferiors. ‘They’d send us to trial. I wouldn’t be afraid, but could you stand up to questioning? D’you know the penalty for murder? The guillotine. Then what would become of your child? So … we must think of something else. A story that removes suspicion from us both. I will deny I was here.’

  ‘And throw me to the wolves?’

  ‘We’ll say your husband was shut away up here, finishing a painting. Which is true. You were … You were in your kitchen cooking dinner, with the door closed. You saw nobody, heard nobody. You will not mention my name, ever.’

  Danielle Lutzman stared at him, repeating his words soundlessly. In the winter light, she looked younger than he’d originally thought, lithe under her ragged dress, her glossy black hair escaping from her headscarf. Was there understanding as well as desperation in her eyes? It seemed an age before she nodded. ‘I heard nobody, saw nothing.’

  ‘Keep to that, Frau Lutzman, and I will do the rest. Never tell the truth to a living soul. You swear?’

  She nodded once and he saw his chance to leave. The smell of death and lamp oil was growing unbearable. But it seemed he’d underestimated his own shock – he could not take the first step. Then, from below, came the clash of a door. Their eyes locked in fear.

  A voice piped – ‘Mama! I’m home.’

  Danielle Lutzman gasped, ‘It’s Mathilda. It’s my daughter. Don’t let her come up! She must not see – I beg you, stop her!’

  He could not move.

  ‘Mama, Papa, where are you?’ Wooden soles clumped upstairs. ‘I’m early. They closed school because of the snow. Papa, I’ve brought a drawing I did for you.’

  ‘Stop her!’ Danielle pleaded.

  He found his will to move too late. The door burst open and a small figure, all hair ribbons and bouncing plaits, burst into the studio.

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Paris, 1937

  Mathilda’s daughter emerged from the Continental Telephone Exchange wearing an ivy-green suit, the severity of which contrasted with her youth.

  A tilted trilby and shoes of black glacé leather suggested a young lady of means, as did silk stockings accentuating slim calves and ankles. She carried a black handbag and wore matching gloves. As she went down Rue du Louvre at a fast clip, admiring looks met her – and more than one smile of invitation.

  Alix Gower forced herself not to react. Eighteen months in this city had taught her that ‘style never smiles back’. Ice-cool Parisiennes take admiration as their due. She was learning how to emulate such women, to avoid the gaffes that reveal too much of a person’s roots. Hers were in London, where she’d lived for the first eighteen years of her life.

  Her father had been a Londoner too, a working-class man who’d survived a war only to lose to tuberculosis. Her mother had been Alsatian Jewish. Fought over for centuries by France and Germany, Alsace bred fatalistic people. It bred refugees. Though she’d never known her mother, Alix had inherited the fugitive’s cunning. Right now, she was escaping a shift at the telephone-company switchboard. She was on an errand that could get her arrested, but was doing it with the panache of a debutante on her way to the Ritz bar.

  *

  On Rue St-Honoré, her pace slowed. She loved the exclusive 1st arrondissement and though it was already quarter to five and she had a distance to go, she s
tared into every window she passed. It wasn’t just the clothes that drew her. She loved the hotel fronts with their uniformed doormen, the trees in pots, the flower displays. The patisseries with their glistening platters. She’d arrived in Paris eighteen months ago and it had set her senses ablaze.

  There was one shop on St-Honoré she never could resist. Zollinger’s was a heaven of handmade chocolates, pyramids of them topped with gold leaf and crystallised flowers. Her favourites were the violet creams, which had been her mother’s favourite and that alone made them desirable.

  Everything Alix knew of her mother had come second-hand and she hoarded details, not really caring if they were true or not. She knew that Mathilda had settled in London aged nine and left school at fourteen to work in a department store, because she had her mother’s school attendance and leaving certificates. And she knew Mathilda had served as a nurse during the war. There was a photograph and a Nurses’ Catechism to prove it. She believed Mathilda had possessed an eighteen-inch waist, because she’d inherited a fragile petticoat whose drawstring was knotted in that impossible circumference. The notes and faded flower labels Alix’s grandmother kept in a box proved that dozens of people had attended Mathilda’s funeral in 1916. And she had her parents’ wedding photograph, a snapshot of frozen hope. The rest Alix invented. Her grandmother, who might have put flesh on the bones of the story, chose not to.

  Counting the francs in her purse, Alix went into Zollinger’s, coming out an absurdly long time later with a tiny package. She checked her watch. Five past five. St-Honoré was long and she had to get to the yet more exclusive Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré. An object of rare worth was on display there, and if she didn’t hurry, it might be taken away. Or sold.

  She’d paid dearly for this afternoon’s freedom. ‘Mémé – I mean, my grandmother – has sprained her ankle and has to go to the doctor’s,’ she’d told Mademoiselle Boussac, her supervisor. ‘May I have leave of absence to take her?’ Behind her back, tense fingers betrayed the lie but the supervisor saw only a modest, dark-haired girl with her eyes cast down. A girl who seemed younger than her twenty years, but who dressed like a model girl in a fashion house and did her work well. Who had a command of English the telephone company needed.

  ‘I will understand if you say no …’ Alix lifted sable eyes that must have contained true desperation because Mlle Boussac sighed and said, ‘Very well’ – Alix could leave her shift early, but she would not be paid for the time missed and such absence must not become a regular occurrence. ‘The company cannot accommodate every family illness. If you become unreliable, your seat here can easily be filled.’

  That sounded like a dream to Alix, to turn up for work and find her seat filled. Today’s errand was part of a plan. A step towards a future which included a flat in a tree-lined boulevard and free expression of her ambitions. Those ambitions had flown ahead of her. They were waiting at No. 24, Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré.

  *

  ‘Oh, no!’ Alix stamped her foot. She was at No. 24. At Hermès, the leather and silk craftsmen. The object for which she’d lied and forfeited precious wages was where she’d hoped it would be – in the window – but it was twisted through the straps of a handbag which in turn leaned against an exquisitely stitched saddle. She needed to see it flat.

  ‘It’ was a square of silk, the first scarf to come out of Hermès’s new factory in Lyon. Well, from what she could see, it was predominantly white, the edges oversewn by hand. It had small trees printed on it, or perhaps they were bushes, and wheels and horses’ heads and what seemed to be a man in a wig. She glanced down at herself. Did she dare go in, ask to see it?

  Her suit was notches above anything her work colleagues owned, but it was not Faubourg St-Honoré standard. What if the staff took one look at her and turned her out? Or guessed her mission?

  They wouldn’t, she persuaded herself. It was no crime, wanting to see something new and beautiful. Marie Claire magazine, brand new on the stands this month, insisted that ‘confidence begins inside’.’ But then, so did self-doubt and indigestion.

  The purr of a car made her turn. A Rolls-Royce was pulling up, sand-gold panels gleaming. A chauffeur stepped out, straightening his leather gloves before opening the rear passenger door.

  A woman decanted herself with the grace of a ballerina. Definitely not French, Alix judged. She was learning the codes of French society and knew that rich Frenchwomen tamed their hair for daytime. This woman’s locks flowed in corn-yellow waves under a fox-fur hat. Her lips were crimson, her eyebrows pencil strokes. A film star? Whoever she was, the doors of Hermès opened before she was halfway across the pavement.

  The chauffeur put a cigarette to his mouth, flicked a lighter and winked at Alix. ‘Window shopping, sweetheart? You and me both.’

  Alix returned a snooty look and followed the lady inside.

  *

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ A young saleswoman, a vendeuse, blocked her path. Alix could feel the girl mentally pulling stitches out of her jacket, assessing its cut. Searching for the secret signs of wealth. Clearly she didn’t find them, because she repeated in a sharper tone, ‘Mademoiselle?’

  ‘Gloves,’ Alix replied wildly. ‘I – I’d like a pair of gloves. And a scarf.’ She glanced towards the window but didn’t dare move that way.

  ‘Gloves for the spring season?’

  ‘Er – yes. Brown?’

  Brown for spring? Tut-tut. The vendeuse gestured to a seat well away from the window. ‘Mademoiselle will please follow.’

  The lady from the Rolls-Royce was being attended by an older vendeuse and Alix heard her exclaim in American-accented English, ‘Oh my! So this is Mr Hermès’s new baby? Won’t we all go wild for it! I suppose it has a name?’

  Alix hesitated. They were talking about that scarf.

  The vendeuse replied, ‘Monsieur Hermès has named it, “‘Jeu des omnibus et dames blanches.”’

  ‘My blazing stars, you’re going to have to translate that for me.’

  ‘It refers, Madame, to the game of omnibus played in the eighteenth century and dames blanches, which are the horse-drawn carriages for the people in the towns, which are also called “‘omnibus”. It is a little joke.’

  ‘Well now, it’s a joke beyond my comprehension,’ said the lady, holding a square of silk up to the light, ‘but I can’t wait to have it around my neck. Am I allowed to own such a precious trifle?’

  ‘We at Hermès are always honoured to serve Madame Kilpin.’

  Alix inched closer. ‘Madame Kilpin’ wasn’t a film star. Film stars always called themselves ‘Miss’. Nor a diplomat’s wife. My blazing stars. A flat box lay open on the counter and it struck Alix that there must be more of these scarves in stock. Of course there would be. The minute news of them spread, there’d be a run on them. All the more reason to absorb the design, the colours. Black, burnt orange, blue …

  The motif of a horse-drawn omnibus was repeated in a double circle. Alix counted the images, noting their direction. The centre was a cartouche of ladies and gentlemen of the late-eighteenth century playing a game at a table. She counted the figures, noted their dress and hairstyles. A complex design.

  ‘And who are you, Miss Wide-eyes?’ The American twisted on her seat. ‘You are staring at me.’

  Alix backed away. ‘I’m sorry, excuse me.’ She fled out on to the street, though not before she heard –

  ‘I dare say she’s a journalist and will sell a story about me to the newspapers. What a bore. Still, six out of ten for effort.’

  *

  The light was fading as Alix crossed the River Seine at the Pont Marie and descended to the Quai d’Anjou. This was on Ile St-Louis, the smaller of the two islands that formed the ancient hub of Paris. St-Louis was an enclave of graceful streets and mossy wharfs and Alix had promised herself that, one day, she’d live in one of its crumbling mansions. She’d walked fast from Hermès, fuelled by humiliation. Six out of ten …

  Her heels clicked on the cobble
s as she came up alongside a rusty Dutch barge tied to an iron ring. The boat’s name was ‘Katrijn’, though from ‘r’ onward the name disappeared into the dent of some long-ago collision. It was home to her best friend. She called, ‘Paul? It’s me, Alix. Are you in?’

  Identical fair heads poked through the wheelhouse door, then two little girls in cotton frocks scampered on to the stern. One of the girls held a scaled-down violin in one hand and its bow in the other.

  Alix hailed the girls. ‘Lala, Suzy, is your brother home? May I come aboard?’

  Lala, the one with the violin, made a ‘hush’ motion of the lips. ‘He’s sleeping. He was at the market at four this morning.’

  ‘Were you at school today?’

  ‘Some of it. I had my violin lesson and Suzy went to her talking-lady.’

  ‘You mean her speech therapist?’ Alix laughed. ‘Will you give me a glass of wine? I promise I won’t wake Paul.’ Her feet burned and she needed to sit down to record what was buzzing in her head. The girls threw down a gangplank – little more than a ridged board. Crossing it, Alix knew she shouldn’t look down, but could never stop herself. Fate insisted that whenever she was halfway across, another vessel would chug past and the wash would make Katrijn buck and sway. She could take her shoes off, but stockings cost half a week’s wages …

  A chuckle made her look up. A broad hand was reaching down to help her, the arm above it tanned and bare. As was the torso beyond. ‘Paul, you’re naked!’ she said.

  ‘I can be,’ said Paul le Gal, showing strong, uneven teeth. ‘Have you come to make love to me?’

  ‘Shush! The girls will hear.’

  ‘No they won’t. Listen.’

  From the galley came a nightingale harmony – Suzy telling Lala to fetch a bottle of wine, Lala telling Suzy to find glasses. Though Suzy never spoke, she often sang. They’d lost their mother a year ago in harrowing circumstances and they reminded Alix of little ducklings, bobbing along in the wake of the tragedy. Swimming and swimming because the alternative was to drown.