The Girl Who Dreamed of Paris Page 13

  The vendeuse shook her head. ‘Madame Junot never sees her collections launched as she has such highly strung feelings. One cruel word, even a sharp glance, can throw her into despair. Her première has gone in her place. She is where she best likes to be, up in her studio.’

  On the second level, doors with glass portholes offered glimpses of women and girls at work. Neat buns and white sleeves under cotton pinafores. A silent machine, Coralie thought. I could be a little cog if I play my cards right. ‘What are they all working on?’

  ‘Rooms one and two deal with clients’ commissions. The rest are producing the autumn–winter collection – our in-house collection, I should say. That launches at the end of September. Orders will also come from Javier’s clients, so September is desperate. If Madame likes you, she may give you a trial. One more flight.’ The vendeuse pointed up narrow stairs. ‘I’m Amélie Ginsler, by the way.’

  This flight led up to an attic room where a lone figure sat at a table under an open skylight, stitching a cone-shaped hat, using a marotte as the support. Seeing cropped hair, loose trousers and a white tuck-fronted shirt, Coralie presumed she was about to meet her first male milliner – until Amélie addressed the figure as ‘Madame Junot’. ‘This young woman is looking for employment and says she has worked extensively in London.’

  Madame Junot stitched on. Coralie was wondering if she’d even noticed their presence, when she twisted her head in a sharp movement and pointed at the hatboxes Coralie had brought in with her. ‘What’s in those?’

  ‘My clothes. I’ve spent so many years travelling between London and Nivelles, where my family live’ – believing in a new identity was easy if you practised it several times a day – ‘that my worldly goods always end up in the wrong place. Yesterday, I took the Paris train on a whim. No time to find a suitcase.’ She added what she hoped was a musical laugh.

  ‘They’re La Passerinette boxes. Not a spy for them, are you?’

  ‘Of course not, Madame. I’m here to work. I live to create hats.’ To cover all possibilities, she added, ‘I can sell them too.’

  Henriette Junot stared so intently that Coralie feared she had sweat stains under her arms. The disturbing eye-contact broke only when a girl, not much older than fourteen, sidled in.

  ‘Loulou!’ Madame Junot clicked her fingers. ‘Go down again and fetch a slouch hat, one of the practice models.’ When the little assistant eventually returned with a floppy-brimmed felt hat, Madame Junot threw it to Coralie, then pointed to a pair of scissors. ‘Show me what you’re made of. Fit it to me. Trim the brim. Make it suit me.’

  Suit a woman with a domed forehead and what might tactfully be called a strong jaw? Coralie stammered, ‘Of course,’ and pretended to sink into thought while desperately fishing for inspiration. Trim the brim? She’d had so many ruler-smacks from impatient needlework teachers in her life that her knuckles throbbed when she even picked up a pair of scissors. It was one of the many reasons she’d preferred to stay in the make-room at Pettrew’s, why she’d dodged promotion.

  Taking the kind of breath that propels the brave into freezing water, she turned the hat round several times, opened the scissors and cut. The blades had a mind of their own, slicing deep into the brim. No choice now but to keep cutting. When a halo of black dropped to the floor, and she heard Amélie Ginsler gasp, she knew she’d reached the point of no return. Actually, she’d created a pudding bowl for a village idiot. Ignoring the raised eyebrows, she turned the stump this way and that, as if contemplating a beautiful enigma.

  Loulou unwittingly came to her aid – by yawning. It told Coralie that she needed an idea, fast. Her millinery skills were sorely wanting but perhaps she did have an eye for shape and proportion. Dietrich had thought so. ‘You think in pictures,’ he’d said.

  ‘So, I’m going to create for you . . . something absolutely simple.’ Coralie asked Loulou for a length of Petersham ribbon, and a box of pins. ‘Oh, and would you thread a needle with black?’ As the child searched inside a cupboard, Coralie amputated the last vestiges of brim. She folded the lower edges under and secured them with the pins Loulou brought. She was now holding something between a toque and a fez. ‘Needle, please.’ She made herself relax. Tense fingers always get stabbed.

  Her tacking was rough because she could hear feet shuffling. Nipping the thread with her teeth, giving the hat a final stretch with the insides of her thumbs, she asked Madame Junot to sit in front of the mirror.

  Henriette Junot didn’t so much sit as sprawl, one trousered leg extended, head to one side. That’s right, make it as difficult for me as you can. As she approached her, though, Coralie remembered how she’d felt at La Passerinette, sandwiched between mirror and milliner. A woman hands over power to her milliner, like a man offering his throat to the barber who shaves him. ‘Madame Junot will please say if I do anything to make her uncomfortable?’

  ‘You bet I will,’ came the reply.

  Henriette Junot’s nose was straight and her brown hair hung like curtains either side of her face. As for that chin – ‘doorstep’ came to mind. Coralie placed the makeshift hat, tilting it to the side and forwards to obscure most of Henriette’s right eye.

  ‘I can’t see.’

  ‘But we can see you, Madame.’ Coralie felt a flicker of excitement. Almost by accident, she’d minimised Henriette’s protuberant forehead. Now she needed to give the impression of wider cheekbones to balance the jaw. She reached for some black gauze, scrunching it into a rough flower-head which she pinned to the side of the hat. Something interesting was taking shape.

  The woman’s best feature was her eyes, black as midnight, and Coralie thought, Had I the nerve, I’d cut her hair. She took the less radical option, tucking Henriette’s behind her ears. The finished effect was neat. Elegant, even.

  But reminiscent of the English nannies Coralie had seen wheeling their charges along the paths of parc Monceau. The hat needed further softening. Henriette Junot needed softening. Some part of her obviously yearned for it or she wouldn’t spend her life whisking up fragile frippery for other women. Coralie looked around for more trimmings but the attic studio was as spare as its owner. Not even a vase of flowers.

  Flowers . . .

  ‘Loulou, open those hatboxes carefully until you find roses. I want three or four heads.’

  Loulou found them, thornless Zéphirine Drouhins, Dietrich’s last bouquet. She’d worked out that he must have ordered them via the hotel desk before they’d gone to the Expo. Which meant he’d still cared for her then, even if his feelings had taken an abrupt turn later in the day. Her fault? Something she’d said?

  Being a delicate climber, the rose heads drooped prettily when secured to the front of the hat. Their rich hue lent tone to Henriette’s skin and lips.

  Nobody said anything as Coralie took a length of black lining silk from the back of a chair and draped it around Henriette’s neck. Framed in black, the Zéphirines leaped to prominence and Coralie suddenly thought, Two would have been enough. Trust her to bung four on. ‘A good picture, Madame?’

  Henriette looked to Amélie, who answered, ‘Very good. Actually, beautiful. Perhaps I have brought you a true talent, Madame.’

  ‘Been looking hard for one, have you?’

  Amélie flushed. ‘I meant, considering the raw material we gave the young lady, the result is extraordinary.’

  ‘Raw material? You mean, the head she had to work with?’ Henriette Junot yanked off the silk mantle. ‘I find that very hurtful.’

  ‘Madame, I meant considering we gave the young lady poor materials and a pair of left-handed scissors.’

  Left-handed scissors existed? Now she looked, Coralie could see their cutting blade was on the left side. No wonder she’d nearly sliced the hat in half. She let nothing of this escape. ‘I hope you may find a vacancy for me, Madame Junot, now you’ve seen my skills.’

  Henr
iette pulled the hat off. Without looking at Coralie, she said, ‘All our starters take a two-week course to acclimatise to our house style. After that, they shadow a senior for a month, learning our customers’ likes and dislikes.’

  ‘I’d enjoy that,’ Coralie said.

  ‘We don’t pay our starters to attend the course.’

  ‘I see.’

  Henriette flared, ‘Why should you expect it? You’d be getting the benefit of our teaching and expertise. You should pay us.’

  ‘How much would I get after the first two weeks?’

  ‘For six months, we pay apprentice rate. Four hundred francs per month.’

  That wasn’t enough to live on. But if she didn’t find a job before her belly swelled, she’d have to beg in the street, or throw herself on the mercy of the British Embassy – who would send her back to London. ‘I will accept, Madame, for the chance to work at such a —’ she was poised to utter the word ‘prestigious’, not sure if she had it right, when the proprietress interrupted.

  ‘Come back in the first week of October and I’ll make up my mind. No promises.’

  ‘I can’t start now?’

  The expression that crossed Henriette Junot’s face was growing familiar to Coralie. She’d seen it on the face of the Duet’s desk clerk, on that of the chambermaid and on the visages of a dozen salesgirls. It was contempt.

  ‘Surely you know that all the best establishments close in August? Nobody worth knowing stays in Paris during August. Our customers have ordered their autumn millinery and everyone else can go hang. I’m off on a month’s holiday tonight.’

  ‘The workrooms stay open, though?’

  Henriette breezed over the interruption. ‘We throw a little drinks party on the last Friday of September when guests view the new season’s stock. After that, it’s business as usual. Yes, come back early in October. I may even remember your name.’

  *

  August began with a bank holiday, and Paris gave herself up to tourists and those without second homes or the means to bolt to the seaside. Walking up the Champs-Élysées, her hatboxes bumping against her legs, Coralie fantasised about iced lemonade. The cafés and restaurants on this exclusive avenue were making the most of the holiday trade. Open doors with tongues of red carpet under moustache-shaped awnings made her think of insatiable mouths and mocked the hunger in her belly. Let one door open to her today, before despair set in. For the last four days, she’d eked out her money by eating nothing but bread and drinking from public fountains. Home was currently a hostel dormitory, whose rusted window gave a view of drainpipes. Her mattress smelt fishy and was so thin that she could still feel the imprint of wooden slats on her back. The other occupants had watched her progress to the last bed in the row, staring fixedly at the hatboxes she had brought in with her. Stared at her clothes, at her dusty shoes. She’d slept with those under her pillow.

  Today her aim was to get temporary work as a plongeuse, a pot-washer. Low-grade, but it would guarantee one good meal a day. She’d so far enquired at two places. At the first, the patron had taken in her pink, flounced dress and the Zéphirine rose she’d pinned to her hatband and laughed. The second had asked her to show him her hands. Inspecting Coralie’s long fingers and buffed nails, he’d shaken his head. ‘You wouldn’t last two hours, Mademoiselle.’

  Seeing a couple rise from a table outside Fouquet’s brasserie, Coralie lingered until they’d put down their money, then snatched up their abandoned water glasses, draining them one after the other. Paris heat seemed to increase with every day.

  ‘Pardon, Mademoiselle.’

  A man bumped into her, setting her hatboxes swinging. She hadn’t dared leave them at the hostel, though the value of their contents was greatly reduced as she’d already sold her Javier pieces. Mademoiselle Deveau had been right. A few hundred francs was all she’d got for those beautiful, unworn clothes. Emotions on a hair trigger, she burst out at the man who’d banged into her, ‘Look where you’re going. It’s not like I’m hard to see.’

  ‘As I said, pardon.’ The man touched his greasy hat. Clearly, he committed the cardinal sin of picking it up by the pinch of the crown, rather than the brim. You could see where his fingers clawed repeatedly. No amount of re-blocking and cleaning would ever save it. It was what Pettrew’s repair department would call a ‘brush and boomerang’, meaning, give it a brush and send it back.

  Nauseous suddenly, Coralie pushed on as the outlines of tables and chairs merged with ornamental box bushes and white umbrellas. Feeling like an insect stranded on a gigantic billiard table, she sank down at the first empty table she saw. When a waiter brought water, she took the glass straight out of his hand, then ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. Tomato omelette, dressed lettuce and bread. Lots of bread. She’d intended to cross the river to the student quarter, rather than pay eighth arrondissement prices, but she wouldn’t get that far. When her food came, she tried not to wolf it down, but dining room manners were beyond her. It was only when the waiter came to clear and suggest, ‘Mademoiselle might like coffee,’ that she checked her handbag to ensure she had loose change for a tip. The bag gaped and her pulse sounded the alarm. Five minutes’ desperate digging produced no miracle. Her purse had been stolen.

  *

  She cried. Not noisily, not theatrically but in hunched despair. What did you do when this happened? Offer to come back and pay later? How? She didn’t even have enough for another night in that rotten hostel.

  ‘Dietrich von Elbing,’ she muttered out loud, ‘if I ever see you again, I’ll either kill you or myself in front of you.’

  ‘The former, I hope. Murder has a delicious grandeur. Suicide is always vulgar.’

  She looked up, trying to join the dots of the figure looming in front of her. She made out a white suit, and a travel satchel over one shoulder.

  Thierry-Edgar Clisson placed his Panama on the table. ‘May I join you? I was dawdling on my way to the station. I’m booked on the night train to Nice, then onwards to Morocco. I believe I mentioned my holiday to you when we met the other day – a little sojourn among the souks. I delayed it to oblige Graf von Elbing, but he let me down.’

  He pulled out a chair, fluffed his cravat and removed a flying bug from his cuff. ‘You too, by the sound of it.’

  ‘You know he went without telling me?’

  Clisson regarded Coralie with interest, though a waiter was hovering. ‘I was intending to tiptoe around a gallery before going to the station, but your predicament promises far more diversion. Will you join me for coffee?’

  ‘Iced lemonade, please, and you’ll have to pay. A bastard in a hat stole my purse. What is it with this city?’ She craned her neck forward, ready to grab Clisson if he showed signs of leaving. ‘Why did Dietrich go? You were the last to see him. He must have said something.’

  ‘We-ell, I may have a piece of the jigsaw, though which jigsaw puzzle are we building? That of the romantic hero you are in love with or the angry, embittered man I met in Berlin ten years ago? Or the Dietrich neither of us knows?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Clisson sighed. ‘At the German pavilion, when you were off powdering your nose, somebody brought a message.’

  ‘Who? What message?’

  ‘A deliciously handsome young German. Claus von Something. The message was delivered in a whisper, but I gathered that it was a summons home.’

  Their drinks arrived, Coralie’s cloudy lemonade clinking with ice cubes, Clisson’s coffee dripping through a metal filter into a cup. She asked, ‘Did you get to see those Russian icons?’

  ‘Not a sniff. I waited in vain for a telephone call, or, indeed, an apology.’

  Clisson said more but Coralie was back on the roof terrace, staring over a river full of reflections. ‘Monsieur Clisson, why didn’t he tell me he was going?’

  ‘Call me Teddy. One of my American custome
rs gave me the name, and I rather like it. We waited for you – Graf von Elbing was concerned. You’d been unwell and he feared you might have collapsed or got lost. But then another of those glorious, chisel-featured gentlemen came up to emphasise the urgency. The Graf left then, asking me to wait for you.’

  ‘I was there all the time, by the balcony. You only had to look round!’

  Teddy sighed. ‘My dear, if you must play the tempestuous Juliet, forewarn your Romeo. The dear Graf was looking towards the door, not at the balcony.’

  ‘I came back through a different one.’

  ‘Schoolgirl error. I didn’t wait for you either because I was rather put out. I had been snubbed in the matter of dinner. Slighted over the Dürer engravings, left to drink champagne alone and treated as a message service. Who would not storm off?’

  She took a gulp of her drink, almost moaning at the feel of ice cubes and lemon pulp on her tongue. ‘What is this Dürer thing?’

  ‘He was a fifteenth-century German artist. The German artist. He is their da Vinci, in the same league as any of the Italian greats. The engravings are of religious scenes.’

  ‘Most of the stuff I saw at Ottilia’s I wouldn’t want on my wall. There were a few nice bits, flowers mostly, and some paintings of fruit—’

  Clisson cut in, ‘You’ve seen the von Silberstrom collection?’ He might have asked if she’d been present at the discovery of the True Cross.

  ‘I helped pack and catalogue it.’

  Clisson went very still, then spooled his hand, meaning, ‘Continue.’

  ‘Dietrich told me that Ottilia had inherited a fabulous collection from her grandfather, and he’s trying to keep it out of the hands of swindlers. He’s sending it into safe-keeping.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Um . . . Neuendorf?’

  ‘Hohen Neuendorf, in Germany?’ Clisson was almost biting the rim of his coffee cup.