Page 15 of The Dressmaker's Gift
The waiter sets my salad down in front of me and I pull myself together, trying to summon a smile, shaking my head as he asks whether there is anything more I need. I go through the motions of picking at my lunch. Ordinarily I would devour it, but I have no appetite today. I’m too busy pondering that flash of awareness triggered, no doubt, by the thoughts of my great-grandmother’s death and the passing police car.
And then I realise that alongside the shock of that all-too-vivid image that I’ve suppressed for so many years, there sits another niggling feeling which forms itself into a question in my mind: whose hand was it that reached into my head and opened that locked compartment? I have a feeling that it doesn’t belong to anyone I know. It doesn’t belong to my grandmother Claire, nor to my mother.
As my racing heartbeat slows and I glance around the crowded, noisy café, picturing Mireille and Claire here, half a century before me, I realise that I’m searching for someone else, someone who is missing. The third girl in the photograph.
Where is Vivienne?
1941
Every head in the sewing room turned when Mademoiselle Vannier entered with the new girl. In the momentary silence, as the whirr of the sewing machines paused and the low murmur of snatched conversations stopped, one of the steel pins that Mireille was using to piece together a blouse fell to the floor with a faint patter. She bent, quickly, to pick it up before it could roll into one of the cracks between the boards and be lost: replacements were expensive now that supplies of metal were being channelled into the munitions factories in Germany.
As she straightened up, Mademoiselle Vannier was introducing the new seamstress. ‘Girls, this is Vivienne Giscard. She joins us from anatelierin Lille, where she has gained valuable experience working with chiffon. She will also be helping you, Claire, with trimmings and beadwork. And she’ll be staying upstairs in the apartment. Please help her to feel at home.’
Mireille shifted her work along, making space at the table, and a chair was found for Vivienne, who smiled at her new neighbours as she set her sewing kit down and pulled on a neatly pressed white coat.
Mireille immediately liked the look of this latest addition to their team. She had wide hazel eyes and long, copper-coloured hair which she wore braided into a thick plait to keep it out of the way of her work. It would be good to have a new flatmate, especially now that the other girls had moved on and it was just Mireille and Claire in the apartment. Their paths seemed to take them in very different directions and the distance between them felt wider than ever. So maybe the presence of this new girl would help to lighten the atmosphere a bit.
That evening, the three girls shared their evening meal together, and Vivienne produced a bar of chocolate to round off their supper of bread and soup. ‘One of the few advantages of Lille being part of Belgium these days!’ she said, as she peeled back the wrapper emblazoned with the Côte d’Or palm tree and elephant. ‘They really do make very good chocolate, when they can get the ingredients.’
Mireille’s mouth watered in anticipation and she gave a small sigh of contentment as she took one of the squares and let it melt on her tongue. ‘I can’t remember when I last tasted anything so delicious. How did you manage to get your hands on it?’
Vivienne smiled, and her wide eyes seemed to illuminate her whole face when she did so. ‘It was a going-away present from my family. I think they were worried that there wouldn’t be anything to eat in the big, bad city.’
‘Well, they were pretty much right on that front,’ laughed Mireille, gesturing towards the empty soup bowls and the scattering of crumbs on the breadboard which were all that remained of their scant supper. ‘Are your family still in Lille?’
‘My parents live north of there.’ Vivienne waved a hand vaguely and passed the chocolate again.
‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’ asked Claire as she popped another square into her mouth.
‘Just one brother. How about you?’
As the girls chatted, savouring every last delicious morsel of the chocolate, it seemed to Mireille that a new friendship was being shared around the table as well that evening – and that tasted even better than anything a Belgian chocolatier could have concocted. Claire, too, seemed happier and more relaxed with a new flatmate to fill the silences, as intangible and as chilly as a river mist, that had permeated the apartment in recent weeks.
As well as bridging the distance between Mireille and Claire, Vivienne brought with her news of a very different France beyond the city limits.
‘When Hitler’s armies advanced, Lille was besieged. It was a terrifying few days. The French garrison fought desperately and managed to hold the city long enough to allow allied troops to be evacuated from Dunkirk. But in the end, the power of the Nazis was overwhelming. They drove their tanks into the centre of town and our troops were forced to surrender. Thousands of soldiers were marched through the Grand’Place as prisoners of war. It took hours for them to pass by.’ Vivienne shook her head, recalling the sight. ‘And then all those thousands of men were taken away. And suddenly our city wasn’t French any more. The Germans drew new lines on their maps and decreed that Lille was now part of the Belgian administration. It’s been a bewildering couple of years.’
Vivienne described how she had been forced to work in the spinning mills, producing thread for the Nazi war effort. ‘But I managed to continue to make some money on the side with my dressmaking. Having no new clothes, it turned out that my skills were needed more than ever by our friends and neighbours. I have perfected the art of remaking coats into dresses and dresses into skirts. I even made a suit for the Comtesse de Rivault, out of a pair of curtains that she’d salvaged from her home before it was appropriated as a billet for German officers. She was the one who helped me get the job here at Delavigne Couture. She was a good client, before the war.’
As Mireille lay in her bed that night, waiting for sleep to come, she pondered her new friend. Vivi, as they had quickly taken to calling her, seemed a true kindred spirit and Mireille was glad to have her in the flat. And yet, as the hunger pangs – which those few squares of chocolate had been unable to assuage – griped in her belly, she realised that Vivi had disclosed very little information about herself. She had shared lots of details about her work in a local dressmakingatelierbefore the war had overwhelmed Lille, where she had specialised in the tricky job of sewing chiffon evening gowns for society ladies; she had told them how hard the work had been in the factory, running the machinery that spun thousands of yards of yarn every hour under the watchful eye of a German foreman; and she had described the sleepless nights spent listening to the bombing raids by the British air force on the nearby metalworks and railway yards. But, Mireille realised, as her eyelids began to grow heavy, what she had described had seemed impersonal, somehow, a little like a cinema newsreel. She had shared very little about her family – the parents and the brother that she’d mentioned in passing.
Never mind, she thought, there would be more such evenings together when they would share their rations and their stories. And her lips curved in a smile of contentment as sleep finally came, as it always did in the end in spite of the hunger and the cold and the ever-present, nagging anxiety that she would be caught or denounced as a Résistante. At last she set aside the burdens which she endured in silence through her waking hours, and slept.
Claire enjoyed Vivi’s company too. She was a breath of fresh air in the apartment and it was nice having someone she could confide in about Ernst. Vivi asked questions and seemed to understand the relationship in a way that Mireille could – or would – not. Although Claire had to admit that even Mireille was a bit less uptight with Vivi around. There was an ease and a lightness about Vivi that was infectious, and her friendship had greatly improved the atmosphere in the sewing room as well as the apartment, as far as Claire was concerned.
One evening Ernst took Claire out to dinner at Brasserie Lipp, a lively restaurant on the Boulevard Saint-Germain which was renowned for its hearty German-style menu. Claire couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten so well as she picked up her cutlery and made inroads into her plate of great slabs of pork, dripping with Calvados and cream. Ernst ate his with gusto, but she soon set down her knife and fork as she discovered that the rich food was more than her stomach was used to or could cope with. She glanced around the room, admiring the tiled panels on the walls depicting flowers and foliage, and the grand, tall mirrors. And then she did a double-take as a familiar face caught her eye. Reflected in one of the mirrors was the profile of a young woman whose hair fell in a thick russet braid down her back. It was Vivi! Claire craned her neck slightly to see who she was with. There were two others sitting at the same table. One was a sandy-haired man, wearing a crisp white shirt and a paisley necktie; he had a distinguished air about him and looked relaxed, clearly at ease in this expensive ambience. As she watched, he lifted a bottle of white wine from an ice-bucket beside the table and reached across to fill the glass of the third person seated at the table, a slightly dumpy woman in a grey uniform.Well, thought Claire,so I’m not the only one who enjoys the company of our German neighbours.She wondered whether she should go across and say hello to Vivi, perhaps introduce her to Ernst. They could make a party of it, maybe, and all go on to dance in a nightclub somewhere.
But when she suggested it to Ernst, he glanced across and seemed to recognise the woman in uniform. ‘No,’ he said, mopping grease from his lips with a linen napkin, ‘let’s not. I know her from the office – she’s very dull. I’d much rather enjoy your company without having to share you with anyone else. Maybe you can introduce me to your friend another time, though. She looks very pleasant.’
‘She is,’ said Claire. ‘She’s great fun. And a good seamstress as well.’
The next day, as the other girls chatted away in the sewing room, Claire quietly asked Vivi whether she’d enjoyed her meal the night before. Was it her imagination, or did Vivi look a little startled?
‘I didn’t realise you were there too,’ she said. ‘You should have come over and said hello.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Claire had smiled. ‘You can introduce me to your friends another time. And I won’t tell Mireille. I think we both know how stuffy she can be!’
Vivi had nodded, lowering her eyes to her work, as the sound of Mademoiselle Vannier’s heels clicking across the floorboards had put an end to any more talk.
