The Girl Who Dreamed of Paris Read online

  ‘The Gestapo do not overlook anything. Lascar is, and always was, bad for her.’

  ‘Like too much jam? Ouch!’ Her knuckle struck a tea-chest edged with metal. She sucked, tasting blood.

  ‘I said be careful.’

  In the front room, shutters blotted out the daylight and a smell of resin took her straight back to her father’s workshop. When Dietrich switched on the main light, followed by a pair of standard lamps, Coralie counted two dozen tea-chests and as many shallow crates. It was like Rotherhithe docks when a ship was being loaded. The resin smell came from sacks full of shavings – presumably to protect the valuables inside the chests. What looked to be hundreds of unframed pictures and prints were stacked against the walls. ‘You bought all this in England?’

  ‘No, no. My English purchases are in a vault near the Hȏtel Drouot, the auction house where they will be sold.’ Dietrich was removing his jacket and tie. ‘This is Ottilia’s art collection.’

  ‘It has its own apartment?’

  ‘Not just its own apartment.’ Dietrich threw open the shutters, flooding the room with sunlight. The vista was of the Jardin du Luxembourg, summer leaves behind wrought-iron railings. ‘Look – it even has a view of the Orangerie. That’s the building through the trees. Nothing but the best for Ottilia’s pictures. They are, theoretically, worth a million pounds.’

  She gaped. As a kid, she’d played a game with Donal that began, ‘If I had a hundred pounds, I’d buy . . .’ They’d considered a hundred pounds quite sufficient for the purchase of their wildest dreams. Dietrich dropped his cufflinks into his pocket and rolled up his sleeves. ‘With Brownlow’s assistance, I have spent every day since June the nineteenth updating the inventory, wrapping and packing.’

  Coralie brushed shavings from the top of the nearest chest, which contained paintings wrapped in near-transparent paper, sealed with gum-strip and labelled. Rolls of the same misty-white paper stood at one end of the room. ‘What a job! I wouldn’t want to be stuck with Brownlow for nearly a month,’ she said.

  ‘No. Brownlow is ill-suited to an artistic environment. Show him an apple, he thinks, “Apple dumpling”, not “Still life by a north-facing aperture”.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think that either. I’d think Eve’s pudding, or fritters with vanilla sugar.’

  ‘Still, I doubt I would have to explain everything twice to you. But, seriously, you must also see I am nowhere near the end, and already I have found pieces missing – for all Monsieur Corvet’s watchfulness.’

  She sensed his anger. ‘Someone’s been stealing?’

  ‘Small items, but those are often the most important. It is why I am so determined to finish, to get these crates away to safety.’

  ‘So what’s my job?’

  Dietrich took a leather-bound book from a shelf. ‘This is the inventory I drew up two years ago, when the collection left Berlin. I will read you a name from the list, and a description, then you will find the picture. I will inspect it, make a comment as to its condition and tick it off. You will wrap and label. Only when we’ve catalogued every last thing can I judge what is missing. You, with a mind that sees in pictures . . . I should have asked you before.’

  ‘I wish you had.’ Coralie surveyed the unframed works against the skirting boards and wondered if Brownlow had been sacked. That’d be a turn-up. ‘Where’s it going, this collection?’

  ‘To Neuendorf, as soon as Ottilia gives her permission. She never gets round to things, and her husband always has better ideas on how to handle her wealth. He would like the collection but my job is to prevent all swindlers getting their hands on it, whether they be light-fingered outsiders or famous tenors.’

  He held up the ledger to the light the better to read it. ‘Right. This is where I left off last time. “View of Oxford colleges across the meadows, George Pyne, 1867, mixed medium, pencil and watercolour.” Think you can find it for me?’

  Coralie’s confidence plunged. She so wanted to help – to outdo vinegar-chops Brownlow – but the nearest she’d ever got to art was saucy seaside postcards. And what the heck was a mixed medium? Walking across the room, selecting a stack at random, she pulled out a glum-looking study of buildings and a meadow. ‘This it?’

  Dietrich took it from her. ‘My God, you are an extraordinary woman. Keep this up, we’ll be finished in time for dinner.’

  *

  It took them four days, and by the end Coralie felt she’d passed through a cultural baptism. At times, tired out by the task, they’d snapped at each other. But mostly they’d worked, joined by an invisible thread. Madame Corvet, as obliging as her husband was sour, brought them coffee and bags of brioche while they worked. At the stroke of six, Dietrich would uncork wine, and by midnight they were crashing into the tea-chests but laughing about it. When each chest was full, they nailed the lid down and toasted it with more wine. Dietrich was intrigued at Coralie’s deftness with a hammer.

  ‘When I was little, my dad worked at the Old Vic theatre. He’d take me backstage—’

  ‘Your father was a lawyer from the town of Nivelles, remember?’

  By the time the taxi dropped them back at the Duet, they were good only for bed, where they would lie entangled until Brownlow knocked at the door at around seven, informing them, in what Coralie called his coffin-voice, that he had drawn Graf von Elbing’s bath and laid out his clothes – ‘Upstairs.’ Brownlow was, Dietrich hinted, sulking. Coralie had usurped him again, but she was too absorbed by her new occupation to care.

  *

  At six twenty-nine on Tuesday, 20 July, Dietrich closed the ledger with a snap. ‘That was the last picture signed off.’

  ‘What about the ones beside the window?’

  ‘Those I am negotiating to sell on Ottilia’s behalf. She needs cash, her husband being too much of an artist to work for a living. Still, now I know what is missing.’

  Coralie slid down the wall to the floor. Her fingers felt like butcher’s sausages. ‘You mean “stolen”?’

  ‘It’s possible that Ottilia gave some pieces away. She does that – gives things to people to please them.’

  ‘Like giving La Passerinette to Lorienne?’

  ‘I try to make her understand that if you don’t respect what you have, people will take it from you. The more they rob you, the less they value what you are.’

  His voice goes to velvet when he speaks of her, Coralie thought.

  Madame Corvet came in just then, bringing peach tart fresh from the oven, and Dietrich’s next words were for her: ‘Madame, I want the lock to this flat changed, and a double one to replace it. Tonight.’

  The concierge stammered, ‘Without Madame la Baronne’s instruction?’

  Dietrich took a letter from his pocket. ‘Here is her instruction. She gives me carte blanche to do as I see fit here. Do you doubt that I have Madame la Baronne’s best interests at heart?’

  Madame Corvet cast an uncertain glance at the few unpacked pictures, but all she said was, ‘A double lock, as soon as it can be done.’

  *

  They walked back to the hotel. A fine drizzle was falling, the streets filled with a musty sweetness. ‘I love Paris in the rain,’ Coralie murmured.

  ‘I love Paris at every season.’

  As they crossed the river, Coralie asked, ‘Dietrich, are you in love with Ottilia?’

  He kept his eyes ahead. ‘We were to be married, but it couldn’t happen.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I asked.’

  Dietrich stopped, turned Coralie to face him. ‘I love her, yes.’

  Not much you could say to that. Actually, saying anything was out of the question because Coralie suddenly felt sick. The rest of the way to the Duet, she breathed deeply and when they arrived, she took the stairs rather than wait for the lift, making it to her bathroom just in time.

  Next morning, she called at
a pharmacy on boulevard Malesherbes for something to deal with sickness and, returning, found Brownlow in the lobby. Usual dapper self, even the silk panel at the back of his waistcoat ironed smooth. He was collecting post from the desk clerk. They both noticed her and she fancied Brownlow said something crude. Had a lady pinched his seat on the Pullman, he’d have got over it. But a Bermondsey chiseller like her? The affront was eternal.

  She hung back as he left the lobby, not fancying a ride in the lift with him. When it came down again, she found a letter on the floor. A German stamp and ‘Herr Graf von Elbing’ on the front suggested Brownlow had been careless.

  What made her tear into it like that, though? Appalled, she tried to re-seal it, but there was no disguising what she’d done. Pulling the letter from the envelope, she read the first line: ‘Mein lieber Vater’. My dear father.

  She’d sunk, really sunk. The lift made its whining, decelerating noise and she heard a man’s cough. Brownlow, waiting for her – or, more likely, waiting for the lift because he’d laid out the letters and found one short. Where to hide it? Her dress had no pockets. She had no stocking tops to push it into because she’d gone out in ankle socks. There was a mat on the lift floor. She shoved the letter underneath with half a second to spare before Brownlow opened the door.

  Chapter Seven

  At last, Dietrich was taking her to the Expo. Forty-four countries had designed pavilions for the event, though, as Dietrich pointed out, only Frenchmen had been allowed to do the actual building so many remained unfinished two months after the official opening.

  ‘They’d be finished if Germans had built them?’

  ‘Naturally. The German pavilion was the first completed.’

  ‘I thought the Russian one was,’ she teased.

  ‘You always have a comeback, Coralie. Tell me something fascinating instead. Tell me what you see.’

  They were walking down the Chaillot hill between an avenue of fountains, the newly constructed Palais de Chaillot behind them. In front of them, the Seine flowed molten amber in the evening light. ‘If you rolled a huge ball through the middle of these fountains and across the river, the Eiffel Tower would go down like a skittle. Satisfied, Monsieur le Comte?’

  ‘Oh, delighted.’

  ‘Can we go to the Japanese pavilion first? I like Oriental things.’

  ‘Then you’ll be disappointed. The Japanese pavilion is modernist architecture in its purest form.’

  ‘Why does everything have to change?’

  ‘Because life would stagnate otherwise. Coralie, tonight I have things to say to you.’

  ‘You do?’ Her thoughts flew to the letter, which must be hidden still, like a murder victim covered with a sheet. She turned away to hide her guilty flush. Anything, anything but discovery. ‘What things?’

  ‘Be patient. First, we are meeting a business associate on the German pavilion’s roof terrace.’

  She sensed a change in him. A refocusing, as when the wheel is turned on a cine-projector and the picture sharpens.

  *

  The German pavilion was floodlit, an eagle dominating its summit. Flags rippled at the entrance, red and white, imprinted with black swastikas. Coralie and Dietrich were held up at the doorway by a group of people conversing in German. A man was screwing a flash-bulb connector to an important-looking camera, talking as he did so. He wore a swastika armband on his sleeve. Dietrich seemed interested in what he was saying.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Coralie asked.

  ‘This man wants to photograph the Russian pavilion.’ Dietrich pointed to an edifice on the opposite side of the boulevard. Two giants dominated that roof: a man with a hammer, a woman with a sickle. ‘He reports for his home newspaper in Bavaria and wants to show how inferior Russian work is to German.’

  ‘But it isn’t. It isn’t as tall as this building but it’s still beautiful. I don’t understand why everything German has to be the best.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was. I am repeating another’s opinion.’ Dietrich addressed the group in his own language. The man with the camera answered and then, to Coralie’s confusion, made a straight-arm salute and cried, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ Dietrich replied.

  Inside the pavilion, Coralie let him lead the way. She didn’t know where to look or what to say. She’d seen Pathé newsreels of the German leader making speeches to crowds fifty rows deep. She’d heard the people returning his name from one throat with fanatical enthusiasm. She’d seen black-shirted boys outside pubs in South London copying them, but it had never occurred to her that Dietrich might share the mania. She felt as if she’d left one Dietrich outside the pavilion and come in with another.

  Swastikas everywhere. On the floor tiles, on photo displays, even in the stained-glass windows exalting German craftsmanship. What had become of saints with faraway expressions? Coralie hung even further back as Dietrich greeted two men, clicking his heels, declaring, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  What was wrong with them? English people didn’t go round shouting, ‘God save the King!’ at each other. She pretended to be fascinated by photographic panels displaying brand-new roads, Autobahns, which looked as if they stretched for ever, not a tram or a delivery truck to be seen. At the same time, she eavesdropped on Dietrich and his companions who were speaking in gruff, rapid German. Earlier that month, she’d asked Mademoiselle Deveau if she could spend one of their twice-daily sessions learning German instead of French. Giving the dry smile that was the nearest she ever got to outright humour, Louise Deveau had answered, ‘You plan to astonish Dietrich some day by conversing in fluent German? I wish you well. Not every man likes a surprise.’

  Coralie had made good progress, but not enough to make sense of what the three men were saying, beyond their regular references to ‘der Führer’. They made a breathtakingly good-looking trio, though: tall and well-built. Dietrich and the man nearest to him in age were both very fair while the youngest, probably in his early thirties, had light-brown hair. They might have been three film stars stopping for a chat.

  At last they shook hands and parted, then Dietrich looked around for her.

  She stepped forward. ‘Your business associates?’

  ‘No, friends. Good friends. Let’s get a drink.’

  Trailing him up a flight of stairs, Coralie saw that the railings were formed from interlocked silver swastikas.

  On the roof-garden terrace, Dietrich ordered beer for himself and ice-cold apple juice for Coralie, which arrived in a tall glass with a straw. She drank it fast. She could have asked more about his friends – but she didn’t really want to know. It should be no surprise that Dietrich was political but, ignorant as she was, she didn’t like the feel of his allegiances. He ordered her another apple juice and, while they waited, took something from his pocket.

  ‘I have important things to say to you, but sometimes objects speak louder than words.’ He opened his palm, revealing a gold ring with a blood-red stone at its centre.

  ‘Oh. It’s . . .’

  ‘Old and dull.’ He smiled. ‘I am starting to appreciate your tastes, but this is no trinket.’

  ‘Are you giving it to me?’

  He looked deep into her eyes, flooding her with emotions that scared her. ‘You have given me so much that I want to give something of myself to you. Put it into your bag and look after it.’

  She pretended she hadn’t heard and put the ring on her middle finger. It was too large so she gave it back, watching him drop it into his jacket pocket with resignation. ‘Give it to me again in November, on our birthday.’

  ‘Yes, we need to talk about your future—’

  ‘Herr Graf von Elbing, good evening!’ A thin man with a sunburned complexion stopped at their table and extended his hand to Dietrich.

  This, presumably, was the business associate. Coralie waited for ‘Heil Hitler’, and when it di
dn’t come, wondered if you only did that with friends. Or maybe you didn’t heil if you were wearing a white linen suit and crushing a Panama hat under your arm, as the newcomer was. Dietrich made introductions.

  ‘My companion, Mademoiselle de Lirac. Coralie, may I present Thierry-Edgar Clisson, an old acquaintance and a fine art dealer, in every sense.’

  Clisson laughed. ‘You flatter me, Graf. Enchanted, Made­moiselle.’ He kissed her hand.

  That kiss was Clisson’s last moment of silence for several minutes. Spouting like the Chaillot fountains, he told her that he was going abroad for a holiday in a few days and this was his final meeting before he went. ‘A whole month, bursting with friends. Fishing, outdoor cooking, lounging, every dissipation imaginable.’ Home in Paris was over the shop in rue de Seine, he told her. ‘Do you know it? A mere stone’s throw from where Baudelaire lived, and George Sand too. I hope you are impressed.’

  ‘Terribly,’ she said. ‘Were they both painters?’

  Dietrich’s headshake warned of pitfalls, so she left it at that.

  The floors below his apartment, Clisson told her, housed the most exclusive gallery of medieval art in France, and upstairs he entertained the crème de la crème. There, or at his château at Dreux in the Eure-et-Loir. ‘Thanks to my childhood, I cannot be easy with just one home. Don’t you feel the same? My parents separated and I tramped back and forth between continents until I turned twenty-one, when I realised I was bringing joy to nobody but the cobblers who re-heeled my shoes. I wrote to both parents saying that henceforth, if they wished to see me, they must travel.’

  ‘That was brave. Did you see them again?’

  The waiter arrived, and Clisson ordered champagne, insisting that it was his treat. Meeting his ‘dear, dear friend and so charming a lady’ demanded the best Pommery. He waited until it was poured before answering, ‘My father ended up in a colonial outpost, married a native girl, and spawned a brood of children as incomprehensible as his paintings. Did I say he ran a painting academy for the terminally untalented? He never could afford the passage back to France. Hurrah. It is propaganda put about by sentimentalists that parents always love their children and vice versa.’