The Girl Who Dreamed of Paris Read online

  He likes cats, Coralie thought. His silver cufflinks had a feline paw-print etched on them.

  ‘Of my mother,’ Clisson continued, ‘I saw a great deal. Here and in Berlin. She remarried, a German air-force man. Perfectly nice fellow, the general, so I relented. Trains from Paris to Berlin are very good, the journey no trouble when one travels first class.’

  ‘Your mother was an excellent woman.’ Dietrich spoke his first words since making the introductions.

  Clisson never took his eyes off Coralie. Neither did he blink. Perhaps he couldn’t, as his eyes bulged like a frog’s. She had no idea if he admired her or was inspecting her for cracks. Even when he spoke to Dietrich, he stared at her. ‘Are we dining together tonight?’

  ‘No. Mademoiselle de Lirac and I will return to our hotel.’

  ‘So be it. I shall dine at Le Roi George in the British pavilion while you retire to your bed.’ If he’d said, ‘while you bed your mistress’, Clisson couldn’t have been clearer. Then, at last, he released Coralie’s gaze. ‘Dear Graf, let us get to business. Your note implied that you have some pieces from the von Silberstrom hoard to wave under my nose. Last time we spoke, you implied that the collection was to be kept intact.’ Clisson flashed ­Coralie a roguish glance. ‘Mademoiselle de Lirac? What does your ­Dietrich know of the future that makes him suddenly anxious to sell paintings for cash?’

  Coralie could have answered, ‘Ottilia needs to keep her husband happy,’ but just shrugged, unsure if she liked this gushing Frenchman.

  ‘I am a Sensitive.’ Clisson patted her wrist. ‘I absorb impressions and, let me tell you, a stroll around this pavilion is equal to ten hours listening to loud martial music. There will be war and Dietrich knows how it will start, and we all know who will start it.’

  ‘The Germans? They’re boasting, that’s all,’ Coralie put in. ‘They finished their pavilion first and they’re making everyone else feel self-conscious.’

  Clisson looked hard at her. ‘I’m intrigued. De Lirac . . . Which part of France do you come from? Something in your accent I can’t quite place.’

  She said hastily, ‘You gentlemen want to talk business and I need to visit the powder room.’

  ‘Ladies are not expected to run away the moment the word “business” is uttered. This is France, not England.’ Then Dietrich swore, realising what he’d said. He turned to Clisson, clearly intending to divert his attention. ‘When we met last, you expressed an interest in some engravings by Albrecht Dürer.’

  Clisson’s eyes boggled. ‘Sublime articles.’

  ‘Well, they are still not for sale. What I am selling is a set of delightful Russian icons. If you view them tomorrow, I guarantee you first refusal.’

  ‘But I’m going away on holiday, I told you.’

  ‘Delay it, because I am going away too, and once I am gone, this opportunity closes.’

  Coralie made her escape, and was through the doors of the roof terrace before she allowed shock to overtake her. So, he was leaving. The ring had been an attempt at a parting gift. What was she going to do without him?

  She found a lavatory some distance away. Inside a stall, she was sick again. Apples and champagne, not a great mix. Returning to the pavilion, she lingered in the swastika-decked foyer, unable to summon the will to climb the stairs. If someone threw a mattress down, she reckoned she’d lie on it and sleep for a week.

  Clisson’s talk had scared her. Surely Germany couldn’t be planning a second war after the hell of the last. War would mean choosing sides and she had no illusions now as to where Dietrich’s loyalties lay.

  People dressed for dinner were filtering around her, like waves around a rock, so she returned to the roof garden, choosing a different door because she wasn’t ready for Clisson’s perceptive eye. She’d look at the flowers, she decided, and maybe even the display of Mercedes cars parked under an awning. She ached to be alone with Dietrich and have him reassure her that his planned trip to Germany was a short necessity, that Paris was where he wanted to be.

  The carnations and freesias were at their scented peak in the evening air, but their beauty left her cold. She went to the car display, pretending she was selecting a Mercedes to drive away. For perhaps ten minutes, she inspected burr-walnut dashboards, chrome dials and reflections of herself in black panels. Clisson was still talking, she noticed, waving his hands in the air. Another bottle of champagne was arriving. Frustrated, Coralie went to the garden’s edge, staring over the river that flowed like oil through a magenta twilight. Reflections soared from its depths, shimmering piles of gold sovereigns.

  A party boat smashed through them, fireworks exploding from its stern, reminding her of the fireworks that had lit the London sky in May for the coronation of George VI . . . Slipping away from Donal who’d taken her to see the display from London Bridge, she’d run back to Bermondsey. She’d had a rendezvous to keep with a sailor whose eyes were long-lashed and up-tilted. She’d lain with Rishal on the grass of Southwark Park and listened to him talk of his home, ‘l’Ȋle Maurice’, where people spoke French. He’d been ecstatic to find a girl in London he could talk to. Ecstatic described the five succeeding nights. Then, on the sixth, he hadn’t turned up. His ship had sailed and that was that.

  Well, not quite. Coralie spread a hand over her stomach. Time to stop pretending all this sickness was down to coffee and funny foreign food. Using her fingers as a rough abacus, she counted just short of eleven weeks since Coronation night. She’d missed her monthlies twice in a row. Oldest tale in the book, wasn’t it? Girl sleeps with boy, boy flits, girl is left with a bun in the oven. What the hell would she tell Dietrich? She had to say something before he left for Germany or he might come back and bump into her pregnant belly. She tried out a line: ‘Dietrich, I’ve been a fool but I need help.’

  She turned around. The table was empty. Dietrich and Thierry-Edgar Clisson had gone.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Monsieur le Comte has left, Mademoiselle. He checked out and paid his bill an hour ago.’

  Coralie shifted irritably. She’d never thought the Duet’s desk clerk was quite the full payload. ‘Von Elbing,’ she said. ‘Graf von Elbing.’ The man was obviously mixing Dietrich up with some other guest.

  ‘As I said,’ the man stated flatly, ‘Graf von Elbing paid his account and left.’

  Coralie planted her feet. No fainting, no vapours. Dietrich, being a tidy sort, had paid his bill to keep his account clear. He’d saunter back in a moment and she’d be in his arms. ‘Where has he gone?’

  ‘I have no idea, Mademoiselle.’ Was that a smirk? ‘The taxi took him to Gare de l’Est, so I presume Berlin. He has gone home.’

  Home. To his proper, respectable life. That’s what the clerk meant. Colour stinging her cheeks, Coralie demanded, ‘Did he leave anything for me?’

  The clerk made a weak show of searching the shelf under his counter. ‘It seems not. And, Mademoiselle, the establishment would be obliged if you would vacate your room tomorrow morning.’

  A thought struck her. ‘Did Brownlow accompany him? That’s his man-servant.’

  ‘I believe not.’

  She pressed the button for the lift, relief flowing in. Dietrich had been called away on business and would be back, or he wouldn’t have left his man in residence. Damn that clerk. She’d have it out with him later. As the lift rose, a prick of conscience made her search for the letter. She’d buy a fresh envelope while Dietrich was away, somehow forge the handwriting and steam off the stamp. It would be waiting for him when he came back.

  Except there was no letter. She rolled the rug over. Nothing. A cleaner, she told herself. A cleaner had found it.

  The door to Brownlow’s room was wide open. A chambermaid she didn’t recognise was stripping the bed.

  ‘The man who was here – is he coming back?’

  ‘Non.’

  Had a
letter been left for her? Anything with her name on it?

  ‘Non.’

  She went down to her room, still confident of a note under the door. Again, nothing. She went to bed, her fist in her mouth, her knees pulled up.

  *

  There was no drifting up through bubbles next morning. When the maid knocked, Coralie thought, I bet there’s no breakfast. Her stomach growled.

  But there was the usual generous tray. Coffee, though, not tea, as if, with her imminent departure, the kitchen’s memory had failed. She got the coffee down by stirring in all the sugar lumps in the bowl, and ate every morsel on the tray. Confusion added itself to misery when a bouquet of fragrant dark-pink roses arrived for her. Dietrich was back?

  ‘They were ordered yesterday afternoon, before Monsieur le Comte left for Berlin,’ the bellboy told her. And no, Monsieur was not back.

  She had about three thousand francs, money Dietrich had given her for taxis and which she’d squirrelled away by walking everywhere. How far would it stretch in Paris? No more hotels, for sure. It would have to be a hostel of the lino-floor-and-calico-sheet kind. The kind that catered for girls who’d been left up a gum tree.

  Her first task was to find something to pack her clothes in. In the end, she dressed in her bulkiest garments and stuffed the rest into two La Passerinette hatboxes, keeping the third for her hats. She’d sell the Javier clothes. Unworn, they were bound to be snapped up. If she bumped into her own nice chambermaid she’d ask the name of a second-hand-clothes shop. She bumped into nobody. The Duet was as quiet as Sunday, though it was the last Thursday of July.

  In the lobby, the porter coughed, implying, ‘Gratuity?’

  Bugger that. Hatboxes bumping her legs, she left without looking back. It would sweep around the hotel that Made­moiselle had left no tip and had taken the soap from the bathroom.

  *

  Miss McCullum’s words nipped at her heels as she headed in the direction of the river: ‘You really want to live somebody else’s life?’

  She’d replied, ‘Every minute of every day,’ with the impudent certainty of a one who had never truly been tested. Well, here she was, living the life of a girl abandoned in Paris, and it felt hideous.

  It was a long walk to rue de l’Odéon, but she needed to talk to somebody who knew Dietrich. Mademoiselle Deveau might have a rational explanation for his departure. If she wasn’t too late . . .

  During their last lesson, Mademoiselle Deveau had given notice that she would be leaving Paris at the end of July. ‘Come August, country air suddenly becomes an urgency,’ she’d explained. They would resume lessons at the end of September. They wouldn’t. Such luxuries were now out of the question.

  When Mademoiselle Deveau answered her knock, the relief was too much for Coralie’s fragile self-control. She burst into sobs.

  Mademoiselle Deveau led her to a chair in the hall. Through an open door, Coralie saw a pair of suitcases, strapped ready for travelling, and a box of vegetables that was presumably destined for a neighbour who was staying at home. Mademoiselle Deveau stood while Coralie sobbed out her story. Finally, she sighed. ‘You aren’t the first, I’m afraid. Herr von Elbing came to me for lessons in Berlin not long after he’d broken off an engagement.’

  ‘To Ottilia von Silberstrom. They couldn’t marry.’

  ‘“Couldn’t” depends on which rules you live by. It was put about that she’d thrown him over, but really it was his doing. I’ll tell you this: sometimes passion burns fast and hot, like dry straw. Men are good at walking away, while we women stay around poking the ash. A lesson to learn while you’re still young. What will you do now?’

  ‘Find a job. Soon, with luck.’

  ‘I wish you plenty of it – luck – but I have to go now or I’ll miss my train.’

  One last question. Did Mademoiselle Deveau know of a dealer who bought couture clothes?

  ‘Summer things? Try rue des Rosiers, but don’t sell them now. Women are buying autumn wear, if they’re buying at all. Wait till February.’

  February? If her counting was right, by February she’d have a child in her arms. Fear weighing on her like a wet overcoat, Coralie tramped back across the river, resting a while in the Jardin des Tuileries. As starlings pecked around her feet, she sketched a plan. During her daily ambles down the streets near the Madeleine, she’d counted any number of independent milliners’ shops; five on boulevard Malesherbes alone. One or other of them was bound to want an assistant of some kind. She told the starlings, ‘I have to have a job by evening or I’ll be fighting you for crumbs.’

  *

  Boulevard Malesherbes was pleasantly cool on its shady side, boiling where the sun hit. Coralie marched into the first milliner’s she came to. Introduced herself and asked if they had a vacancy.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mademoiselle, we’re not hiring.’

  At the next place, an assistant fetched the owner, who looked at Coralie’s hatboxes and asked if she’d brought samples. Resisting the urge to claim La Passerinette hats as her own work, Coralie admitted, ‘No, Madame.’

  She was asked where her last employment had been.

  ‘London.’

  Instead of the flare of interest she’d expected, the proprietress bunched her lips. ‘I’m sorry, but you would not be suitable.’

  She tried to argue, named Pettrew & Lofthouse, ‘suppliers to the British upper crust’, only to find it wielded as much magic as Brasso. London, it seemed, carried no cachet in Paris. Different the other way round, she thought gloomily, as she wrestled her boxes out of the door.

  At the next shop she waited ages, only for a junior to inform her, ‘Madame says we’re not hiring. Try again in September.’

  By the time she’d worked both sides of the road as far as place de la Madeleine, ‘Come back in September’ had become a marching song. What was it about September?

  Sunlight bounced off the Madeleine’s columns and Coralie regretted her dress of paisley-pattern challis, worn with a cerise wool jacket. The air was so humid that even the flies were still.

  Directly in front of the Madeleine lay rue Royale, a short street of luxury shops that proved equally disheartening, every bid for employment answered with a negative – sometimes before she’d finished asking. She hesitated outside the famous salon of Rose Valois at number fourteen, peering at lace brims, summer flowers and perfectly angled feathers. They’d lay her bare in an instant and she couldn’t take much more rejection. A few paces on she passed the Ladurée tearoom with its platters of pink, mint-green and chocolate macaroons. She shut her eyes, but her mouth still watered. Next, was Suzanne Talbot’s smart establishment. A couple of hours ago, she’d felt she had something to offer Parisian millinery. Now – honestly? Even Jean McCullum would struggle in this milieu.

  But she had to keep going. How many times had she fallen off a bicycle before she’d learned to ride one? Spotting another milliner’s across the street, she took her chances with the traffic and opened the door to ‘Henriette Junot’ so forcefully that she fell inside. Chance of success? Scant, she told herself, as she got to her feet, but as a reward for trying she’d sit down at the next café, order an iced citron pressé and maybe a basket of bread.

  A vendeuse stood behind glass doors, brushing a felt hat as if she were stroking a kitten. Coralie used the silent moment to examine Henriette Junot’s spring–summer offering. There was none of the usual proliferation of ‘sunflower stalks’– the metal stands milliners used for display. Just a table draped in white satin with four marottes on it, sawdust-stuffed heads with prim lips and wide-awake eyes. But what hats! One marotte wore cherry-pink gauze with a brim full of clashing yellow lilies. Two green straw hats invoked a summer meadow, flowers apparently lobbed to land where they liked. The fourth had started life as a simple Breton bonnet but had ended up as a scoop of wild strawberries, complete with leaves, star-like flowers and berr
ies. A peacock butterfly fed from one of the flowers, and Coralie was suddenly sure it was alive. She blew lightly on it and its wings trembled.

  ‘May I help?’ The vendeuse had come unseen from the rear of the shop.

  Coralie straightened up. ‘Are you good at catching butterflies? You have to be delicate or their wings break.’

  The vendeuse stared at her, then at the butterfly, and giggled. ‘It’s fake, you know.’

  Coralie extended a finger and touched a wing. Painted silk, veined with wire no thicker than a hair. After years at Pettrew’s, stitching grosgrain to felt, she was at last seeing into the soul of a truly beautiful hat. This confection of strawberries and leaves was no mere head covering. It was a mood. A caprice that captured a moment, stopping a butterfly in mid-air.

  ‘Mademoiselle? Do you desire a fitting?’

  ‘Oh . . . no.’ Coralie recited her speech in a breathless gabble, and awaited the polite dismissal.

  ‘Where did you train?’

  To Coralie’s surprise, the vendeuse had heard of Pettrew & Lofthouse, agreeing that it was a respected establishment. ‘For men’s headwear. Their ladies’ lines are considered very ordinary, and female millinery requires different skills.’

  ‘But I could learn.’ That note of desperation! Armouring herself for a polite, I regret, but . . . Coralie was astonished to be invited upstairs to the workrooms.

  ‘We are very quiet today,’ the girl explained. ‘This house provides millinery to the couturier Javier, whose autumn–winter collection is being launched –’ she consulted her watch ‘– in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Javier? Oh!’ Coralie suddenly remembered she had a fitting there tomorrow morning. The prospect of being measured and prodded was surprisingly attractive, compared to the likely alternative, tramping the streets. But as Dietrich wouldn’t be picking up the bill for any new clothes, it would be wrong to waste the fitter’s time. Coralie enquired if the ‘Madame Junot’, for whom the shop was named, was in today. Or perhaps she was at Javier, watching the collection?