The Milliner's Secret Read online

  She drew shapes on his chest, waiting for the shortening of his breath. This new power might come in handy. ‘Dietrich, what exactly is it you do for a living?’

  ‘I effect the transfer of items from Person A to Person B, taking a commission.’

  That was clear as mud. ‘What items?’

  ‘Art. Jewellery, sometimes, or rare books. Oriental antiques. Even old instruments and musical scores. If somebody has something rare or beautiful and is willing to sell it, I will transact the exchange.’

  ‘You’re a dealer.’

  ‘I prefer to call myself a middle-man.’

  ‘It’s not very romantic.’

  ‘You’d rather I were a handsome prince?’

  ‘Yes.’ She laughed, because it sounded as if he’d forgiven her. But still she wasn’t at ease. A wife in Germany she could deal with, but not rivals in Paris. And already he was shifting away, immune to her caress.

  After putting on his clothes, he leaned over and kissed her. ‘I’m going up to my suite to take a bath. Shall I start yours running?’

  ‘I don’t want a bath yet.’ She belted her arms around his waist, feeling the grain of his jacket, finding the flap of a pocket. ‘Why don’t you stay?’

  He kissed her nose. ‘No, and don’t you go back to sleep.’

  The door closed behind him. She waited a minute then opened her hand. Bit devious, picking a man’s pocket as he kissed her, but his secretive ways were driving her mad.

  CHAPTER 5

  The key was like the one to the coal-shed at Barnham Street, though less rusty. The tag read, ‘Von Silberstrom, Flat no. 1’.

  ‘Von Silberstrom’ sounded German. She sniffed the tag, in case some identifiable perfume clung to it. Then, feeling stupid, she flumped back on her pillows. Now she had to get the blasted key back into Dietrich’s pocket without him knowing.

  She could intercept him on his way out, though if he’d changed his jacket, and his manservant had hung it away, she’d be in trouble. She hadn’t a key to his suite and could hardly ask sniffy Mr Brownlow to let her in. She closed her eyes, thinking she might just put the key on the floor of the lift to make Dietrich think he’d dropped it.

  She woke, as from drugged sleep. Someone was calling her name.

  Cora, get up! On your feet! Behind her eyelids, a face formed. A face framed with yellow-grey hair, a shaggy moustache obscuring the top lip. Opening her eyes, she saw the same face staring down. ‘Dad,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t hurt me. Marry Sheila if you want. I won’t say anything to anybody.’

  ‘Wake up, Liebchen. You did not order dinner.’

  Her vision cleared. ‘Dietrich?’

  ‘Who else would be leaning over your bed?’

  ‘What did I just say?’

  The mattress dipped as he sat beside her. ‘You said, “Cora, get up,” and mistook me for your father.’

  ‘He calls me Cora. Called, I mean. He’s—’

  ‘Dead. You told me on the train that you are an orphan, that you have nobody in the world. Do you often recall your father to life in your dreams?’

  He knew she’d lied to him. It was in his voice, but she tried to duck the inevitable. ‘Did your meeting go well?’

  ‘Perfectly well. But I had intended to call somewhere beforehand, only when I looked for the key to get in, it was missing from my pocket. Have you seen it?’

  ‘I expect it dropped out of your jacket.’

  It was Dietrich who found it, nestled between her arm and her side. ‘To know it was in my jacket suggests that you took it. Am I right?’

  She thought of denying it but, in the end, nodded. ‘I was curious.’

  ‘To know my private affairs, where I go, whom I see? If I wished to share such things, I would do so. Don’t you understand that, Cora?’

  ‘Don’t call me that. I’m Coralie.’

  ‘Since we are playing the game of truth, you are Cora Masson from a place called Bermondsey. You came to Paris with me to escape a cruel situation.’

  Her breath scraped. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You took my manservant’s seat on the train. You recall me having a conversation with Brownlow, just before the train left Victoria? I was instructing him to make enquiries about you.’

  ‘That’s beastly!’

  ‘It was good sense. You had no luggage, you looked as though you had spent all night being chased by bloodhounds. I wanted to know who I was travelling with. Before becoming a gentleman’s gentleman, Brownlow was a London police officer.’

  She groaned. A bloody copper. No wonder the man gave her that bring-out-the-handcuffs look every time they bumped into each other.

  ‘When you ran up to me at Victoria Station, calling at the top of your voice, it was your true accent everybody heard. Brownlow used to walk the beat in Greenwich, which I believe is a little way downriver from Bermondsey. A few telephone calls unearthed the name “de Lirac” because it seems your father always gave – should I say “gives”? – that name when arrested for being drunk and disorderly.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say this before?’

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you to tell me. To warn me that I have abducted the daughter of a violent man.’

  ‘Oh, he won’t follow me here, no chance of that.’

  ‘You misunderstand. I am not afraid of your father. Rather, I object to being . . . what’s the word? . . . hoodwinked.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to confess for days but the words sort of get stuck.’ Coralie lay waiting for judgement. Liars were not lovable. Liars only got away with it by being sly, using their power. She wouldn’t do that. No eyelash-fluttering, no persuasive caresses.

  ‘Do you wish to tell me now?’

  Yes. It would be a relief, actually. ‘But you have to promise not to interrupt. Even if I can’t find the words.’

  Dietrich fetched her robe and held it for her as she got out of bed. ‘You will talk and I will listen. When morning comes, there will be no more secrets between us.’

  So Coralie told him everything about Pettrews, Donal and Mid-day sun, though when she got to the part about confronting her father and Sheila, her voice almost gave out. ‘So now you know. I ran away because I’m scared witless of my dad.’

  ‘You still think he might hurt you badly?’

  ‘More than a black eye?’ She gave a dry laugh. ‘I’ll say. The bricks on the floor in the shed where he works, he’s dug them up and re-laid them. Something’s buried and I’m afraid . . . terrified . . . it’s my mum. I’ve always wondered why she didn’t come back.’

  She waited for soothing words, for an acknowledgement of her uncanny intuition or, better still, an expression of utter disbelief. But Dietrich said the worst thing possible: ‘Then we should return to London and ask questions.’

  ‘No! What if I learned that I’m right?’

  ‘Surely that’s better than not knowing.’

  She dragged at her hair. ‘I can’t go back. Whatever’s under those bricks, my father will do anything to keep it secret. Kill me, if he needs to. He’s killed before, he boasts about it. “The first time is always the hardest,” he used to say. “After that, it’s easy.”’

  ‘It is not easy, Coralie. Forgive me, but you don’t know what you are talking about.’

  She tried a different argument, wanting to smother any notion of returning to London. ‘I’d be homeless and jobless. Pettrew’s wouldn’t have me, not after I left without giving notice, and they wouldn’t give me a reference. And once my dad’s known to be walking out with a policewoman, I’d get the cold shoulder from all sides. People don’t trust coppers where I come from. In Paris, at least, I have a chance of making new friends.’

  Dietrich came and put his hands on her arms. She was shivering, though the open window let in a caressing southern breeze. ‘Friends are not so easy to make in a strange city, and the French are quite introverted. Family-oriented,’ he explained, seeing that the word was new to her. ‘Don’t expect to be drawn into a warm circle v
ery quickly.’

  ‘Being lonely among strangers beats being lonely among old friends. I can invent a new life here, a different me. I can imagine my mother living happily in New York, with a new family, still thinking about me from time to time. That way, there’s hope.’

  He sighed, accepting her arguments though clearly without sharing her logic. ‘If you intend to change identity for ever, you must begin right away and be serious about it. You must destroy everything that refers to your past.’

  She knew he was right. She couldn’t play at being Coralie de Lirac. She had to be Coralie de Lirac. ‘I threw away the clothes I travelled in. They reminded me too much of what I’d escaped.’

  ‘You must eject every memory of that old life – even the memory of those you still care for.’ Dietrich pulled her tight against him, absorbing the unexpected burst of weeping his words had provoked. He helped her to the bed and they lay side by side, Coralie’s hiccuping the only sound.

  Eventually, she said, ‘So you won’t make me go back?’

  He kissed her. ‘Not if you are completely certain about staying here.’ Reaching for the bedside telephone, he called down to room service, ordering a light supper and two brandies. Minutes later, she was propped up against the pillows, marvelling at the way the liquor snaked like fire down her throat. ‘I want to stay. I can’t explain why, but I feel anything is possible in Paris.’

  Dietrich took her glass from her so he could kiss her again. ‘And I like having you here with me. It’s a good feeling to be needed. We need each other.’

  CHAPTER 6

  As June gave way to July, Dietrich went often to the Paris Expo but always alone, explaining that his compatriots had flocked there to buy artworks and were congregating at the German pavilion. During his trip to England, he had acquired paintings of a kind that were very popular in Germany, and was set to make a year’s income in a matter of weeks. ‘The less reassuring the real world becomes, the more my fellow Germans want rustic vistas and cosy family scenes.’ He had snapped up crate-loads almost for nothing, he told her, which would be auctioned in Paris. He was busy whipping up interest.

  He couldn’t take Coralie to these meetings because his contacts knew his wife in some degree or other. ‘It would be disrespectful to Hiltrud,’ he explained.

  ‘Dietrich, do you and your wife live completely apart?’

  ‘Emotionally – yes. But I imagine our neighbours think us a conventional family, for all I’m absent much of the time. We have to consider the children’s feelings.’

  His personal apartment was just off Potsdamer Platz in the middle of Berlin, he told her. As for his wife, she rarely stirred from their townhouse in Hohen Neuendorf, a short train journey north of the city. Claudia, who was twelve, was spending summer at home with her mother. Waldo, fifteen, was at a summer camp with a lot of other boys, and Coralie sensed that Dietrich had reservations about this. The boy was not strong, owing to a heart problem that affected his breathing. Coralie remembered her first weeks at Granny Flynn’s, also aged fourteen. Nobody had given a damn about her lungs.

  Did Dietrich call his wife on the telephone for intimate chats? Or write pages to her in the privacy of his room? He wrote postcards to his children several times a week, dashing them off as they sat at their favourite outdoor tables. Those to his daughter were posted as they were, but those to Waldo always went into a sturdy envelope and Dietrich would run the heel of his hand over the gum-strip, ensuring there were no weak spots in the seal. ‘No privacy at camp,’ he’d say.

  One night, when he’d left her to her own devices, she found herself missing Pettrew’s. Missing the tea-break chatter, the walk home, arms linked, with Donal’s sisters, Doreen and Marion. She even missed working with her hands. Had anyone asked her a month ago her opinion of idleness, she’d have said, ‘Perfect! When can I start?’ Yet it seemed she wasn’t fitted for it. So uncomfortable did this knowledge make her that Coralie went up to the very top of the hotel and invited the manservant, Brownlow, to take a drink with her in the bar. With a glass in her hand, her fingers might forget their yearning to be busy.

  Brownlow’s answer was short. ‘That would be inadvisable, Miss. In any case, I don’t drink.’

  So that was that. It would have to be the wireless, or reading. Dietrich had taken her to a bookshop on rue de l’Odéon, the street where her French teacher Louise Deveau lived. Steering her away from romance writers, he’d chided, ‘You don’t need the euphemistic alternative, you have me.’ He’d bought her a book by Ernest Hemingway.

  ‘Everyone should read A Farewell to Arms, most particularly men who like war. It should be required reading in Germany, but we burn it instead.’ The shop’s owner had offered the German translation, In Einem Andern Land. Dietrich had bought that, too, saying, ‘Read the two together, and you’ll learn German without trying.’

  The first week of July drifted by. Dietrich and language lessons by day, alone by night. Brownlow was now accompanying Dietrich on his nightly excursions which was the worst snub of all.

  Her downcast manner must have impinged on him because one evening Dietrich cancelled his plans and took her to Montmartre, to boulevard de Clichy for a taste of nightlife.

  The Rose Noire was darkly anonymous. Little danger of Hiltrud von Elbing’s acquaintances chancing upon them there. The resident band were playing swing, slow and seductive, perfect for swaying in Dietrich’s arms. In their second set, they upped the tempo for the Lindyhop.

  Dietrich sat out the fast dances, but when a black man called Dezi Rice, who had previously sung onstage, approached and invited Coralie to partner him, he waved her off, saying he didn’t mind so long as she came back afterwards. She assumed it was a distaste for wild American rhythms that kept Dietrich in his chair, but he insisted it was more to do with ligaments.

  ‘What’s ligament?’ she asked later, as their dinner was brought to them.

  ‘The tissue that joins bones to bones. It stretches.’ They’d been served trout mousse in oyster shells, a house delicacy that took the place of Ȋle de Ré oysters during the hot months of summer. He bent an empty shell backwards, showing how it was hinged. ‘Damage a ligament badly enough, it snaps. See?’ He broke the hinge.

  ‘You damaged yours?’

  ‘Ruptured. And this’ – he raked his hair back to reveal a scar to his hairline, raised like the pith of an orange – ‘I crashed.’

  ‘Driving too fast?’ She remembered the lipstick-red Mercedes Roadster.

  ‘You’ve heard of Baron von Richthofen?’

  ‘The bloody Red Baron? You’re not him, are you?’

  He put oyster shells on her plate, offering her the black truffle sauce that came with the mousse. ‘No, but I flew with him in 1915.’

  ‘In the war?’

  Dietrich nodded. ‘Richthofen called me “Kleiner” because, for a while, I was the youngest pilot in the army air service.’

  ‘Were you an air—’ She bit her lip. She’d been about to say ‘air ace’. She had to keep reminding herself that Dietrich had been on the wrong side. ‘Did you get shot down?’

  ‘Winged, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I was hit by a Canadian pilot flying a DH.2. That’s a British plane, and it was a dog-fight over the British forward lines near Arras.’

  ‘I suppose the Canadian thought he was doing his job.’

  ‘Of course. My gunner would have got him, given a chance. We went into a spin but I straightened out, landed in a ditch, and fractured my patella. My knee,’ he translated. ‘And gained this.’ He indicated the scar.

  ‘You should pretend it’s a duelling scar.’

  ‘My father had one of those across his left eye, like all good Prussian aristocrats – he despised mine because it did not come from the edge of a sword.’

  Coralie sipped her wine, a chilled Pissotte from the west of France recommended by the club’s friendly sommelier, Félix. How strange life was. Last month, she’d been a factory hand whose favourite tipple was Guinness. H
er opinion of Germans had been pretty cut and dried. Now look at her, in steamy cahoots with a man who’d won his spurs shooting down British boys over France. By the time their oysters shells were empty, she’d learned he’d been sixteen when the Great War started – which made him thirty-nine now – and eighteen when he flew his first mission for the Kaiser. She’d been a babe in arms.

  A new conversational topic was in order. Looking around, she asked Dietrich what he thought of women dining in hats. Several expensively dressed women were doing just that. ‘I’d feel funny, eating with a hat on.’

  ‘In my mother’s day it was de rigueur except at private dinner parties. Since you cannot Lindyhop in a hat any more than you can march in rubber flippers, why bother?’

  Maybe. She’d enjoyed being hurled round the dance floor but, still, these after-dark hats with their diamond pins and cowlicks of net were very desirable. She could imagine herself perched on a window-seat, the wireless on, constructing satin pillboxes for wealthy clients. Trimmings in a basket . . . busy fingers. Only this time, working for herself.

  ‘I’m going to order steak for us next.’ Dietrich leaned back to catch the eye of a waiter.

  ‘Make sure they cook mine properly.’ She’d seen plates go past with blood-gravy.

  ‘You must to learn to eat meat pink, not grilled to the texture of a pilgrim’s sandal.’

  When she said, ‘Pink for hats, brown for meat’, he took her face between his hands and kissed her until a waiter coughed discreetly.

  ‘Or we could go home?’ Dietrich said. He consulted his watch, which had luminous hands and a worn leather strap.

  ‘We don’t have a home.’

  ‘No. We have freedom, now you’ve unburdened yourself.’ When the waiter had left, he continued, ‘You have unburdened yourself? Or do you need to tell me more about this friend, Donal? Was it he who took your virginity?’