Page 28 of The Dressmaker's Gift
Hand in hand, Thierry and I climb the hill to where we’ve left the car. As we pass the little grey stone church that watches over the harbour, I hesitate.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s go in.’
The thick oak boards of the salt-scoured door are silvered with age and the ironwork is rusted, but with a little encouragement the handle turns and we step inside. The interior is simple, with whitewashed walls and wooden pews, but the chapel has an air of serenity, symbolising the quiet dignity of the generations of fishermen’s families who have come here to give thanks for the safe return of boats from the sea, or to grieve for those lost to the ocean’s cruel force.
Outside, a tiny graveyard has been created on a terrace scratched into the hillside behind rough granite walls. And it is here that I find the stones that bear the names of my family. Thierry spots them first. ‘Harriet,’ he says quietly. ‘Come and see this.’
First there is Aimée Meynardier, née Carlou, beloved wife and mother, and beneath her name is carved that of her husband, Corentin: my great-grandparents. Claire’s father died in 1947, it says, so he survived the war. But then I read the names on the stone that stands alongside theirs and my heart breaks. ‘To the memory of Luc Meynardier (1916-1940) killed fighting for his country, beloved son and brother; to the memories of Théo Meynardier (1918-1942) and Jean-Paul Meynardier (1919-1942), killed at Dachau, Germany’; and beneath these three names has been added another – that of Marc Meynardier, Claire’s fourth brother, lost at sea in 1945.
So my great-grandfather buried all four of his sons. Or rather, he didn’t bury any of them. None of their bodies were ever brought home to rest alongside their parents. They lie in unmarked graves, or as ashes scattered in a German forest, or as bones picked bare on the ocean floor, and only this stone records their names.
And who was it that buried my great-grandfather, Corentin? Did Claire stand here, with her English husband beside her, and weep for the entire family that she had lost?
As I lick my lips, I taste salt and I can’t tell whether it’s from the Atlantic wind that blusters through the gravestones or from the tears that run down my face.
Thierry gathers me into his arms and kisses them away. He holds me close, sheltering me, and his eyes search for mine. ‘Those were terrible times,’ he whispers. ‘But they are over now. And you are here, to visit your family and to honour their memory. How proud they would be, Harriet, if they knew you had come to find them. How proud they would be to know you. And to know that, through you, they live on.’
1942
The summer heat was oppressive. The sun blazed through the tall windows, turning the sewing room into an oven. The curtains couldn’t be pulled to shut out the glare as the seamstresses needed the light to sew by. The smell of scorched starch and the steam from the ironing tables made the air even hotter and heavier, until sometimes Mireille felt she could scarcely breathe. She longed to sit beneath the willow tree on the riverbank back home, cooled by the dappled shade cast by the graceful arch of its branches overhead as she listened to the hushed song of the river.
The brutality of the war seemed to grow day by day. There was no word of what had become of Monsieur and Madame Arnaud and, when she’d gone back to look one day, their house had been locked and deserted.
Christiane’s body had been recovered from the rubble of the factory workers’ housing at Billancourt. Claire, Mireille and Vivi had been to visit her grave in a cemetery to the south of the city. Vivienne and Claire had wept as they placed the sprigs of lily of the valley, that they’d picked from the front garden of a boarded-up house, at the foot of the simple headstone that marked where Christiane lay. But Mireille had stood, dry-eyed, her heart frozen with too much sadness and too much pain and too much loss. The last time she’d stood beside a grave, it had been to bury Esther in a hastily dug, shallow plot alongside so many of the other refugees who’d been mown down on the road that day as they’d fled Paris.
She tried to stem the flow of her thoughts and focus on her work, but even with the windows pushed open as wide as they would go, she had to pause frequently to wipe her hands and brow so that the drops of sweat didn’t stain her work. Silk was the worst for showing water marks, but the new artificial fabrics that they often worked with these days, now that silk was so scarce, were almost as bad.
As the afternoon wore on, Mireille felt the heat wrap itself around her like a heavy cloak that she couldn’t shrug off. She glanced around. Many of the other girls seated at the table looked as if they were struggling to stay awake, exhausted by hunger and hard work and the ever-present fear of the enemy’s iron grip on the city in which they lived. A weariness had crept into Mireille’s bones, sapping her body and her mind of their characteristic energy. This was another reality of the war, she realised – the quietly toxic corrosion of the spirit. The garments that the girls worked on in theatelierseemed grotesque, suddenly, rather than the beautiful creations that she had taken such a pride in before. Circumstance had transformed them into tastelessly ostentatious declarations of wealth in this time of hardship and deprivation. The women who visited the salon these days were the frumpy ‘grey mice’ or the hard-faced wives and mistresses of Nazi officials, or the greedy, self-obsessed ‘queens of the black market’, as themodels called them behind their backs. All of them sought to cover the ugliness of reality with a fine gown or an elegant coat. When had it happened, wondered Mireille as she let out the waistband of a satin evening skirt, the tipping point when French fashion had changed from being perceived as something the country could take pride in to something grotesque and vulgar, tainted with shame?
At last, Mademoiselle Vannier told the seamstresses to begin clearing away, signalling the end of another working day. The thought of sitting upstairs in the cramped apartment, which would be even stuffier than the sewing room up there under the roof of dark slates which had been baked by the sun all day, did nothing to lift Mireille’s spirits. So instead, she headed out into the streets and made for the river. With no real sense of where she was going, she crossed the Pont Neuf on to the Île de la Cité in the middle of the stream, turning away from the busy hub around Notre-Dame and made her way towards the downstream end of the island. And then she realised what it was that had drawn her here. Unseen by the stream of homeward-bound workers and the truckloads of soldiers that sped past, intent on other prey, she slipped into the narrow stone stairway which led down to a small patch of trees and grass below. Apart from a boatman who was busy making fast his boat for the night, that end of the island was deserted. As if beckoned by the graceful arms of its branches, Mireille walked to the very end point where a willow tree trailed its green fingers in the waters of the Seine. She’d noticed it there, from afar, as part of the scenery along the river, but only now did she seek refuge beneath it. Some instinct drew her to it, an instinct which the weight of her despair couldn’t crush.
Just as she would have done if she’d been at home with her family, Mireille settled herself under the canopy of willow leaves, leaning her back against the trunk. She kicked off her shoes and rested her weary head against the rough bark, letting the tree’s bulk take her sadness and cast it out on to the ever-flowing river. She wished her family were there with her: her parents would reassure her and lend her some of their quiet strength; her brother, Yves, would make her laugh and help her forget her cares for a while; and her sister, Eliane, would listen and nod and understand so that Mireille wouldn’t feel all alone in the world. Blanche – Esther’s baby – would gurgle and busy herself making mud-pies in the earth that sustained the tree, and she would chuckle as she was hugged and loved by the family that had taken her in. Mireille’s longing for them tugged at her heart, as powerful and as constant as the current of the river.
And she longed for someone else, too. The young man she’d known for just a few brief days, whom Claire and Vivi knew as ‘Fréd’, who had held her and kissed her, in the fleeting, precious moments she’d spent alone with him before he’d left on his dangerous journey back to England. And then he had whispered his real name in her ear so that she’d know who this man truly was: this man who loved her.
She sat beneath the sheltering arms of the willow tree as dusk fell, bringing with it a faint breeze from the river. She lifted the weight of her hair away from her neck and allowed the evening air to cool it. The images of the faces she held most dear, coupled with the reassuring solidity of the tree’s trunk at her back, reminded her that there were some things that the war couldn’t ever destroy.
What she had felt that afternoon in theatelierwas what the occupying forces wanted her to feel: defeat. If she gave in to it then she would have lost and they would have won. But now she knew she could always come back here, to this place which was the nearest thing to her true home that she could find in the city, amongst the hard-paved streets and the tall buildings that shut out the sky. She could come here and be with those she loved, joined to them by the ribbons of water that met, at last, in the ocean beyond. And those vital lines of connection would give her back her sense of what really mattered. They would make her feel part of a larger whole. And she knew that they would keep her from being defeated.
Claire had been delivering a message to a tobacconist’s shop just off the Place Chopin and was walking home, swinging her attaché case which felt a good deal lighter now that it merely contained the sheets of music for her ‘singing lesson’ which had camouflaged a sealed brown envelope. Not that the envelope had weighed anything at all, really, but she always felt a load slip from her shoulders once a delivery had been successfully completed, allowing her to return home buoyed up by a sense of relief.
It was pleasant to be out, after the oppressive heat of the day. The evening was still warm and she couldn’t bear the thought of a hot, stuffy Métro ride, no doubt preceded by a long wait on a dirty platform, so she decided to cross the Pont d’Iéna, facing the imposing bulk of the Eiffel Tower, and walk back along the river. As dusk fell, it promised a faint hint of coolness and she looked forward to feeling the gentle river breeze on her hot cheeks.
As she walked along, she was surprised by the stream of buses and police trucks that overtook her. One of the buses stopped at a junction before turning on to the bridge, and as it did so she caught a glimpse of frightened-looking faces behind the windows. A child turned to look at her from the rear window as the bus drove on and his eyes were large and dark in the paleness of his face.
She came to a place where queuing vehicles formed a wall outside the winter velodrome. A road-block had been set up to prevent people from walking or cycling past. Soldiers stood at the barrier, checking the papers of passers-by and Claire felt a pang of fear grip her guts. But she knew that if she were to turn and walk away she would draw attention to herself. She had nothing to hide, she reminded herself; her papers were in order and she had a valid-sounding excuse for being out. So she resisted the impulse to run and stood in the short line at the barrier, waiting her turn. The wall of buses and trucks crept forwards in stops and starts, directed by French policemen. She couldn’t see what was happening on the other side, but it seemed as if they were disgorging their passengers at the entrance of the cycling arena before driving off again.
The soldiers who were checking papers waved the couple in front of her through, but as they attempted to make their way towards the velodrome, an officer, wearing the black uniform of the Gestapo, stepped out between the buses and shouted at them to go around the other way. As he strode over to berate the soldiers at the road block, Claire realised who he was. The uniform was new, but she recognised his blonde hair and broad shoulders. She glanced around, wondering if she could walk away unnoticed while he was giving the soldiers a dressing down, but it was too late – he’d recognised her too. She felt his eyes upon her and when she turned to face him, a look of amusement played about the thin line of his lips.
‘Good evening, Ernst,’ she said calmly, as she held out her papers for the sentries to check, trying to stop her hand from shaking as she did so.
‘Claire!’ he exclaimed. ‘What an unexpected pleasure seeing you here.’ He turned to the pair of soldiers and barked some commands at them in German, then drew Claire to one side. He reached out his hand, attempting to take hers, but she merely gave him her identity card, pretending not to have understood the gesture.
He glanced at the piece of paper in his hand which bore her photograph, then back at her. ‘It’s been a while,’ he said. The smile slowly faded from his face as she refused to smile back at him. ‘You didn’t reply to my invitations to meet for dinner, after we’d bumped into each other so unexpectedly at the museum that day.’
‘No,’ she replied evenly. ‘After seeing you with your wife and your son, they weren’t invitations I felt like accepting.’
He frowned, irritated now. ‘But Claire, surely you knew what your position was? What did you expect? We had fun, you and I. You certainly didn’t object to the nice things I gave you – the stockings and the perfume. And you didn’t seem to mind drinking champagne and having fine dinners bought for you at the best restaurants in Paris.’ His eyes were cold and hard, and glinted like steel.
