Page 34 of The Dressmaker's Gift
Mireille shot her a glance of gratitude as she set her sewing things on the table and, with trembling fingers, began to tack together the pieces of a waistband.
She had scarcely slept and had eaten nothing since her return the night before, unable to get the images of Claire and Vivi’s faces out of her head. The dyer had said they were in bad shape. She couldn’t bear to think about what they had been through during those four days in the Avenue Foch. But they were alive, she reminded herself. That was all that mattered.
She tried hard to concentrate on her sewing. One stitch, then the next, then the next ... It helped her to shut out the images of her friends’ pain-wracked faces, for a little while at least.
Heads bent over their work, the others shot surreptitious glances at her from beneath their eyelashes. The room was filled with an oppressive silence, heavy with questions unasked and unanswered. Then, without a word, one of the girls slid across from her usual seat into one of the empty chairs next to Mireille. After a moment’s hesitation, the girl on the other side followed suit. Scarcely glancing up from her work, Mireille nodded her thanks to them for their gesture of solidarity. And then, blinking the tears from her eyes, she forced herself to sew another stitch and another ...
Returning upstairs to the silence and the darkness of the apartment was almost as bad as it had been the night before. She made herself heat up a little soup and eat it, wrapping herself in a blanket to keep out the bitter cold. She was just washing up her bowl when a soft tap on the apartment door made her freeze in terror.
But then she heard a familiar voice, softly saying her name, and she breathed again.
Monsieur Leroux accepted her offer of a tisane, and then insisted on making it himself while she stayed in the sitting room, curled up in her blanket. He handed her a cup of lemon balm tea and she cradled it in her hands, letting it warm her.
‘Is there any news?’ she asked once he’d settled himself in the chair opposite.
His eyes were filled with pain when he raised them to meet hers. ‘Nothing more yet. They’re being held in the prison at Fresnes.’
She sat up. ‘Fresnes? But that’s not far. Can we go and see them at least?’
He shook his head. ‘Even if they would let anyone visit them, it would be too risky. The intelligence I have is that Claire and Vivi managed to convince the Gestapo that you’d already been picked up. Things are so chaotic these days that they can’t easily trace whether or not it’s true, so they’ve stopped looking for you now. If you turn up, you’ll be arrested on the spot. And it would make things even worse for the other two.’
‘But what will happen to them in prison?’
He shrugged. ‘We can’t be sure. I have a contact on the inside, so I’m hoping to get some more news soon. Mostly they use Fresnes as a holding place for political prisoners before moving them on to one of the prison camps in Germany. If they are deported it won’t be easy to keep track of them. The people who are taken to those places ... they tend to disappear.’
She studied his face for a moment. Outwardly, he was trying to maintain his usual calm facade. But the shadows beneath his eyes and the lines of pain etched around his mouth betrayed the depth of his anguish. Vivi was clearly more to him than simply another agent in the network that he controlled. Perhaps she really had been his mistress. And perhaps those other rumours about him made more sense now, too. All those women he’d been cultivating – had they had other uses as well? Did he convince some to become agents, persuading them to take on roles within the network as he had done with Vivi? And were others the ‘contacts on the inside’ he spoke of, the ‘grey mice’ he’d wined and dined and clothed in couture, feeding him with intelligence from inside the Avenue Foch and the prison at Fresnes? She’d always warmed to him and had trusted him with her life. But now she wondered whether there might be a ruthlessly cold and manipulative side to him as well. Were Vivi and Claire simply expendable pawns in a horrific game of chess being played out across Europe?
As if reading her thoughts, he said quietly, ‘You know, I always believed that the network was more important than any individual within it. But losing Vivienne and Claire has proven me wrong.’ For a moment, his whole face crumpled as he tried to stop himself from breaking down. A single, terrible sob wrenched itself out of him, from deep down inside, and he covered his eyes with his hands.
Quickly, Mireille set down her cup and moved across to him. She knelt on the floor at his side and took his hands in hers. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the pain in their depths made her feel ashamed for having doubted him even for a moment. It was clear that he cared as deeply about Claire and Vivi as she did.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re not wrong. You know as well as I do how determined the two of them were – are – to play their parts. They’d be furious if they thought the network had fallen apart because of them. If ...’ She stopped, then corrected herself. ‘Whenthey come back, do you want to be the one to tell them that we gave up because of them? Of course not! We have to keep going. Because we have to put an end to the terror and the arrests and the disappearances. We have to win.’
As she spoke, Mireille felt the strength of her conviction return, flowing through her veins with a heat that seemed to thaw the icy grip of the winter.
He squeezed her hand, then let go of it in order to fish in his pocket for a handkerchief with which to mop his face. Once he’d regained his composure, he said, ‘You’re right. Of course, you’re right. We can’t give up. We have to keep fighting, even if it takes the last breaths in our bodies.’
‘Good,’ she replied. ‘That’s agreed then. I’ll start my duties again, as soon as you can get the links re-established.’
He shook his head. ‘No, Mireille, I’m afraid we can’t use you any more, neither as a courier to replace Claire, nor as apasseuse. And we certainly can’t have another wireless operator located here. As I told you, they’ll be on the lookout for you and if you’re picked up out there on the streets it’ll be the worse for the others, as well as for you with everything you now know.’
Mireille’s hand went to the locket around her neck and her fingers tightened into a clenched fist. ‘Please, Monsieur Leroux, I have to do something. I can’t just sit here while they’re out there, enduring ...’ Her words trailed off.
Then she spoke again, more quietly this time but with an undertone of determination. ‘One of my friends who lived in this apartment was shot down in cold blood by the Nazis. Now two more have been arrested and tortured and deprived of their liberty. Their rooms stand empty, and I can’t bear to look at them. So let me use those three rooms to shelter others who need them. This whole building is deserted when the salon closes and the other seamstresses go home. I’m the only one left. If we run it as a safe house for the network, it will mean that those rooms don’t stand empty any more. And it will stop me from going crazy. Because I’ll be doing something for people like Vivi and Claire. And then, when they come back to us, when all of this is over, I’ll be able to tell them that I was brave like them. I’ll be able to look them in the eye and say that, like them, I never gave in.’
Monsieur Leroux raised his gaze to hers. He shook his head again, but this time it was more in admiration than in defeat. ‘You know, Mireille,’ he said, ‘you three young women are some of the bravest people I’ve ever met. And one day, when all this is over, I hope we will all be reunited in a better world. That really is something worth fighting for.’
The door slammed shut and Claire’s prison cell was plunged into darkness, apart from the letterbox-like slit in the door which allowed a glimmer of light to slip beneath its ill-fitting cover. As her eyes adjusted, she could just make out the narrow bed with its coarse blanket and the bucket in one corner of the room.
She sat down on the hard mattress and covered her face with her hands. Defeat crashed over her like a breaking wave, an overwhelming force that knocked her feet out from beneath her and held her under for a moment so that she felt she could hardly draw breath. Until now, she’d always known Vivi was close by. In the back of the truck that had brought them here, swaying and swerving through the streets, she’d crouched on the floor beside the stretcher and held Vivi’s hand. Gently, she’d brushed the hair away from Vivi’s face, being careful not to touch the swollen, bruised skin around her eyes and jawline. As she slowly regained consciousness, Vivi had begun to shake uncontrollably and Claire had hushed her and soothed her with those same words that her friend had used to reassure her when her nightmares had woken them both. She repeated them over and over until they became more of a prayer than a statement: ‘Hush, now. I’m here. We’re together. Everything will be alright.’
Vivi’s hair and clothes were damp. Through swollen, broken lips she managed to whisper that they’d filled a bath and held her head under the water repeatedly until she was certain that she would drown. ‘But I didn’t talk, Claire. They didn’t break me. I knew you weren’t far away and that kept me strong.’ She reached a hand up to touch Claire’s blackened eye. ‘And you were brave too.’
Claire nodded, unable to speak.
Vivi squeezed her hand, weakly. ‘I knew you would be. We will stay brave together.’ She closed her eyes then and slept. Claire sat watching over her for the rest of the journey until the truck pulled up with a jerk at the prison gates.
They’d been taken to separate rooms inside the prison. With support, Vivi had managed to stand and then she’d been half-carried by guards into a room where the door was shut firmly behind her. A female guard escorted Claire down a long corridor. She’d hobbled, trying to use only the outer edges of her feet where the pain was just about bearable. Then the guard had made her stand, while she herself sat behind a desk and filled in a pile of paperwork with Claire’s details. And finally, without a word, she’d led Claire here, to this darkened cell, in the solitary confinement wing of the prison.
