Page 45 of The Dressmaker's Gift
‘It’s certainly busy through there.’ The woman smiles, tilting her head towards the main exhibition hall.
‘I know. It’s a fantastic party. I just wanted to get a breath of air.’
‘I understand.’ She turns to face the dress in the display case. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? You enjoy the history of these pieces, don’t you? I’ve seen you here before,n’est-ce pas?Usually you are writing in your notebook. Are you a journalist?’
I tell her about my internship at Agence Guillemet, which will soon be coming to an end, and that I’ve been piecing together the story of my grandmother – the one I mentioned to her that day when we met in the Lanvin exhibition, who worked in couture during the war years.
She nods. ‘It’s a good thing to do, writing it down. The strands of history can be so tangled and complex, can’t they? Here at the museum, we attempt to tease out some of those strands, letting the clothes tell their stories. And stories are so important, aren’t they? I always believe we tell them in order to make sense of the chaos of our lives.’
‘You work here, then? At the Palais Galliera?’
She digs into the clutch bag she carries and hands me a card. She is Sophie Rousseau – manager of early twentieth century collections.
‘Thank you, Madame Rousseau. My name is Harriet. Harriet Shaw.’
She shakes my hand formally. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Harriet. And I’ve enjoyed our conversations. Get in touch when you’re next coming in. If I have the time, I’ll take you to see some of the gowns we have from the 1940s in our archives in the basement here.’
‘I will. Thank you.’
She appraises me with her warm grey-green eyes. And then she says, ‘I don’t know if it would interest you, but there’s a huge development project planned for the museum, to create a new, larger exhibition space in part of the basement. We will be taking on some additional staff shortly to begin planning for it. The museum will be closed for a while, but when we reopen we’ll be able to display many more of the items that are kept hidden away in the archives. Send me your CV if you like and I’ll pass it on. When you’ve finished your grandmother’s story, there are plenty more to help tell here.’
‘A job? Here at the Palais Galliera? It would be beyond my wildest dreams!’ I exclaim. ‘I’d love to send you my CV.’ I tuck her card carefully into my handbag.
‘Well now, it’s probably time to return to themêlée, don’t you think?Allons-y!But I’ll look forward to seeing you again soon, Harriet. Enjoy the rest of your evening.’
I float through the remainder of the party, trying – and failing – to keep my feet on the ground as I imagine myself working in these very rooms. Perhaps it’s the champagne giving me courage, but I’m beginning to dare to dream of a life for myself in Paris.
1945
Each weekend, Mireille made the trip to visit Claire at the American Hospital in Neuilly, bringing with her news from the world outside: a world no longer at war. She would tuck her arm into Claire’s and take her outside to walk slowly along the paths between manicured lawns and beds full of bright flowers, letting the summer sun coax a little colour back into her cheeks. When Claire grew tired, they would sit on a bench beneath the trees and Mireille would entertain her friend with stories from the Lelong couture house, describing the latest designs created by Monsieur Dior and adding snippets of gossip about the clients who came for their fittings.
At first, it seemed that Claire was reluctant to return to the world that she’d been taken from, almost as if she didn’t want to be there. But slowly, week by week with help and care, Mireille watched her friend return to life. And very gently, when she sensed the time was right, she began to prompt Claire to talk about the things that had happened to her and to Vivi. Some of the memories were still too painful to bring out into the light of those Paris summer days, but Claire talked about working in the textile factory and the sewing room in the camp’s reception centre, and she remembered how Vivi had never stopped finding ways to resist, in spite of the beatings and the torture, the starvation and the cold. When others around them had been deprived of the last scraps of their humanity, Vivi had refused to relinquish hers. It was those memories, more than anything else, that helped Claire to begin to heal.
Mireille was cycling back from Neuilly one Sunday evening when she reached the Pont Neuf. She dismounted and propped her bike against the wall, then slipped down the steps on to the island in the middle of the Seine. The willow tree was still there, on the point at the end of the Île de la Cité, a survivor of the battle to liberate Paris. She crept in beneath its branches to sit for a while, and think of home and watch the river flow past. She heard the sound of footsteps hastening along the cobbles of the quayside behind her, but thought nothing of it, assuming it would be one of the boatmen going about his business, returning to his vessel in the golden light of the summer’s evening.
The footsteps stopped. Then she heard a voice, softly calling her name.
She scrambled to her feet, steadying herself against the solid trunk of the tree. And there, parting the languid greenery and ducking his head beneath the willow’s branches was a man in a French army uniform. He set down his heavy kit bag and as he reached her side he put out a hand, tentatively, to touch her face, as if making sure she was real, not some vision from a long-lost dream, standing there beside the river as it turned to gold in the evening light.
‘I was coming to find you in the Rue Cardinale. I saw you from the bridge. At least, I thought it was you, with those curls, so I had to come and check,’ he said. ‘Mireille Martin. How I have missed you.’
And she lifted her hand to cover his and spoke the name that she’d kept a secret for so long, the name of the man she’d fallen in love with.
‘Philippe Thibault. How I have missed you, too.’
When they’d made the journey from Dachau to the hospital in Paris, it had felt like a dream to Claire. How could it have taken so long for the train that she and Vivi had travelled on to reach the camps when the Red Cross ambulance taking her back was just one long day’s drive? She had been that close, all along, and yet she had been worlds away from her home in the city.
It had taken a few days to arrange the transport and during that time Monsieur Leroux had scarcely left her bedside. Although now she knew he wasn’t ‘Monsieur Leroux’ at all.
The first thing he’d asked, as he sat holding her hand, was whether she knew where Vivi was. She’d looked at him in numbed silence at first, still seeing shadows of her friend’s eyes in his. Her head felt heavy and sore in the aftermath of the fever, and she was confused by the sight of him here at Dachau, struggling to understand what she was seeing and hearing. The sound of Vivi’s name, spoken aloud by him, was a shock.
Her lips were dry and cracked and he had to lean close to make out her reply. ‘I couldn’t save her,’ she whispered. ‘I tried. She saved me, but I couldn’t save her.’ Then the tears began to fall, soaking the parched, drawn skin of her face like rain falling after a drought, and he gathered her frail body into his arms and held her as she cried.
In the days that followed, while they waited for her to be strong enough to make the journey back to Paris and he made the arrangements with the American Hospital, he was a constant presence at her bedside. He fed her the nutritious soup, which was all her starved body could digest at first, a few spoonfuls at a time, filling her shrunken stomach. He made sure she drank the bitter-tasting tonic and he gently massaged ointment into her hands and feet, soothing and mending the broken, scarred skin. He refused to leave, even when night fell, and she would awaken from her nightmares to find him there, holding her hand, soothing her as Vivi had done before. ‘Hush now. I’m here. You’re alright.’
She couldn’t talk, yet, about what had happened at the Gestapo headquarters in the Avenue Foch, nor on the train journey to Dachau, nor at the camp. Instead, he talked and she listened in amazement – sometimes wondering whether she’d dreamed what he’d told her about himself and about Vivi.
The first thing was his name. Laurence Redman. (‘Everyone calls me Larry, though,’ he’d told her). Not Monsieur Leroux, after all, although the French was a direct translation from the English.
