Page 29 of The Dressmaker's Gift
She met his gaze steadily. ‘If I’d known you were married, I never would have accepted those things from you.’
She held out her hand for her identity document, attempting to bring the encounter to an end and be on her way, but he held it just out of her reach and smiled again, relishing his power.
‘Not so fast, mademoiselle, I think I need to ask you a few questions. What brings you to this part of the city tonight?’
She held up her attaché case. ‘A music lesson. I have singing classes sometimes.’
‘Permit me,’ he said, with exaggerated politeness, taking the leather case from her and opening it. ‘Ah, you have hidden talents I see,’ he observed, fanning out the sheet music. ‘Hidden from me, anyway. You never mentioned that you sang, on all those evenings we spent together.’
She continued to meet his gaze levelly. ‘No, it’s something I’ve only recently taken up. I have more time to spare in the evenings these days.’
He shoved the sheets of paper back into the case and handed it back to her. Then he held out her identity card but, just as she reached to take it, he whisked it away again, amusing himself as a cat does with a mouse, she thought.
‘So who are you keeping company with now then? Apart from your singing teacher who lives all the way across town from the Rue Cardinale?’
She was silent, but continued to hold out her hand for her ID document.
‘Those two other seamstresses, I suppose.’ He grinned. ‘The ones who were with you in the museum that day? I never did think they were a very good influence on you, you know, Claire. Perhaps you should be a little more discerning in the company you keep.’ His piercing blue eyes swept over her, and seemed to linger on the scuffed attaché case.
She tried to force herself to stay calm, keeping her voice level. ‘I could say the same to you, Ernst.’ She gave him a cool, appraising look that took in his black uniform from the silver braid on his cap to the polished toecaps of his boots. ‘I suppose all this is something to do with your new role, is it?’ She gestured towards the buses.
He laughed. ‘No, not at all. We leave such everyday duties as rubbish disposal to the French. I have far more important people to track down.’
Her gorge rose as she realised what he was saying, and she fought to swallow her nausea. As her anger surged, overflowing, she blurted out, ‘You are despicable.’ She was shaking all over with rage and fear, but stood her ground, waiting for him to give her back her papers.
Just then a commotion broke out at the road block as the soldiers tried to detain a man. Ernst glanced over his shoulder towards the source of the shouting. A flicker of annoyance passed across his features as his work got in the way of the game he’d been enjoying playing with Claire. ‘Go on then, take it.’ He thrust her identity card at her. ‘I have more important things to do than waste any more of my time on you. But you can’t come through here. You’ll have to go the long way round. I’m afraid the privileges you once enjoyed are no longer available to you these days, Mademoiselle Claire.’ And he dismissed her with a flick of his hand before drawing the revolver from the leather holster slung from his belt and turning his back on her.
She walked away quickly, her whole body still shaking, and she replayed his words in her head as she hurried homewards. What had he meant by the things he’d said about Mireille and Vivi? Was he just testing to see how she’d react? She shouldn’t have let him goad her until her anger got the better of her. And what did he mean about having more important people to track down? She told herself it was simply malice – his love of the powerful position he now held, coupled with his annoyance at being rejected by her, but something in the way he’d said those words made her skin prickle with fear. And what were those buses full of frightened-looking people doing there? There were so many of them, being herded into the sports centre. Where would they sleep? How long would they be held there? And for what purpose?
Back in the apartment, she lay awake long into the hot night, gazing unseeing into the blackness, haunted by Ernst’s words and by the dark, scared eyes of the child who had looked out at her through the windows of that bus at it drove onwards towards its darkly sinister destination.
Harriet
When the pressure of work at Agence Guillemet builds to a level where tempers fray and exhaustion kicks in, I take refuge once again in the Palais Galliera. Sitting among the exhibits grounds me and always gives me that sense of reconnection with the roots of fashion, reminding me that these are more than just clothes: they are tangible relics of our history.
I wander through the main gallery, where an exhibition of 1970s fashions brighten the space with their vivid colours and flowing, hippy-ish lines.
I allow my thoughts to settle as I sort through the latest strands of family history that Simone has shared with me – both hers and mine. I’ve been reading up, too, about what was happening in Paris at the time. I realise that Claire witnessed the horrific Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup, when more than thirteen thousand Jews were arrested by the French police, as part of a Nazi-directed programme. They were held in unbearable conditions in the very heart of the city before being sent to the death camps. Of those thirteen thousand people, four thousand were children. And one of them was the little boy whose eyes, looking out of the bus window, haunted Claire’s dreams. How terrifying it is to think that, little by little, day by day, this vast city could have become so paralysed by fear and oppression that its people could have allowed that to happen.
My train of thought is interrupted by a woman in an elegantly cut black jacket who has walked into the gallery. Her silver-grey hair is cut into a bob and she looks vaguely familiar. Then I realise she’s the woman I saw here before, at the Lanvin exhibition. She stops to read the description of a psychedelic jumpsuit with widely flared sleeves, taking out a small notebook to jot down a few notes. Then she gives me a nod of recognition and a smile and continues on her way.
I check my watch. It’s time to get back to the office. We’re planning a product launch for the agency’s eco-cosmetic client and it’s going to be held on the Côte d’Azur in the summer. There are logistics to plan, models’ contracts to arrange as well as their hotels and transport, press releases to write and a particularly demanding photographer’s emails to reply to. Stress levels among the account managers are at an all-time high. Even Florence, who gives the impression of always being cool, calm and collected, has been seen to hurry through the office. The South of France launch is scheduled for the second week of July, immediately following the Haute Couture Autumn/Winter Shows which are always held in Paris then. Simone has told me that, with staff stretched so thin, there might be a bigger role for the two of us in one or other of these events.
And while the Haute Couture shows would be nice, we’re keeping our fingers crossed for Nice!
1943
It was another bitterly cold winter. On the increasingly infrequent days when there was coal for the boiler, the seamstresses huddled over the cast-iron radiators during their breaks, attempting to warm cracked, frost-nipped fingers that were reddened and stung with angry chilblains. Mireille wore a pair of fingerless gloves that her mother had sent, knitted from an old jersey of her brother’s. She’d sent pairs for Claire and Vivi too at Christmas time. Once again, the girls wore as many layers of clothing as they could fit under their white coats, padding their gaunt, bony bodies just as the snow padded the angular rooflines and gables of the buildings in the streets around the Rue Cardinale.
Whenever they could afford it, the three friends would go and sit in one of the cafés on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in the evenings after work, where it was warmer than in the apartment above Delavigne Couture. They’d order a bowl of watery cabbage broth, crumbling pieces of hard bread into it, and try to make their supper last as long as possible so that they could delay the moment when they’d have to go home and climb between bedsheets that felt damp with cold. From a corner in one of the cafés, Radio Paris declaimed reports of the latest German victories. Back in the safety of the apartment, Vivi whispered that many of these were lies. The radio station was German-controlled. In reality, their armies were suffering more defeats than successes these days, stretched across many fronts. Mireille took heart from that, and didn’t ask Vivi how she knew these things. But, at the same time, she was aware that the three seamstresses were taking greater risks than ever in their Resistance work. A new French police force had been set up, known as the Milice, and they were intent on capturing as many members of the Resistance as possible. It had been announced that there would be a twenty-thousand-franc reward for denouncing a Résistant, a strongly tempting incentive for citizens who were starving and one that was already proving horribly effective.
It had taken a while to re-establish the lines of communication through the network after the losses of last year. Everything seemed a lot less stable these days. Safe houses were changed frequently and Mireille was instructed to use different routes for each ‘delivery’ she did, to try and avoid the possibility of detection by the Milice and the Gestapo.
She shivered as she stood beneath the clock at the Gare de l’Est, watching its hands tick slowly round to the half hour. The train she’d been instructed to meet was overdue, but there was nothing unusual in that. Timetables were less and less reliable and often trains were cancelled completely if the rolling stock or the line was needed by the German forces for other purposes. It was another bitterly cold day and her winter coat provided little protection against the easterly wind that cut through the worn fabric. She looked up as a train pulled in at one of the platforms, but it appeared to be an empty freight service as no passengers got off.
Then a shouted command made her jump. ‘Out of the way! Stand aside!’ She pressed herself against the brick column that supported the clock as two soldiers waved their rifles to clear a way though. Behind them, escorted by more armed soldiers, a line of female prisoners were marched across the station concourse and over to the platform where the empty train waited.
Some of the women were smartly dressed, others were dirty and dishevelled; some of them wept, while other faces were blank with shock. But Mireille could smell the fear on all of them as they passed close to where she stood – a mixture of sweat and urine and breath that was stale with dread.
