The Dress Thief (4 page)

‘I’ve been fretting all day.’

‘About me?’

‘I read in the paper how they treat Jews in Germany even worse now. I used to have cousins there. What will become of their families? And this civil war in Spain – how many must die before somebody puts an end to it? Then you didn’t come home, all evening you didn’t come home. Were you kept
late?’

Alix was tempted to say, ‘Mlle Boussac asked me to teach a new girl the ropes,’ but she reminded herself she was twenty, too old for lies or prevarications. ‘I went to see Paul le Gal. I had a glass of wine on his boat and forgot the time.’

‘Le Gal, whose mother—?’ Mémé bit off the rest. ‘You were alone with that slaughterhouse boy?’

‘His sisters were there. And Paul doesn’t work at
the slaughterhouses any more, Grandmère.’ The affectionate term ‘Mémé’ had disappeared for the moment. ‘He works at Les Halles, offloading the fruit and vegetables.’

‘So. Alone with a porter whose mother made her living on the streets.’

‘That’s not true. Sylvie le Gal was never … what you’re implying. Her business failed, that’s all.’ Alix would always be loyal to Sylvie, whose smile had cut
through the uncertainty and stress of her first weeks in Paris.

She’d been going for a job interview in Boulevard Haussmann and had got her
Métro
lines mixed up, emerging miles away near Place de la Bastille. Close to tears – it was her sixth failed interview in a week – she’d struck up the nearest avenue, searching for a street name. She didn’t see the pavement billboard until she crashed into
it: ‘Learn Tango in ten weeks’. A blonde head had poked out of an upper window, followed by a cheery, ‘Since you fell over my sign, I’ll give you the first lesson free.’

Like Bonnet, Sylvie had been an unfettered spirit. Her skirts were too tight, her tops too low, but she was that rare type who loved men and women equally. She never got cross if you muffed your steps either. Just slowed things
down till you got it. But her school had closed, and with debts and two little girls to feed she’d taken to dancing at seedy
bal musettes
and in the nightclubs of Pigalle. According to Paul, she would dance with men and … whatever followed. What followed was a jump from a bridge, which confounded Alix because she couldn’t match happy Sylvie with death in freezing black water. ‘Paul’s sisters wanted
me to stay,’ she told Mémé. ‘They miss their mother.’

Danielle Lutzman wasn’t ready to retreat. ‘What will this Paul do when they’re twelve years old and one of them doesn’t speak? How will he teach that little girl about life if she won’t speak?’

‘Muddle through. People tell him to hand them over to the church orphanage. But then the river would have won.’

‘You talk nonsense.’ Mémé knotted
her fingers. Because her speciality was fine needlework, she kept her hands soft with
paraffin cream and from her slender earnings paid a local woman to do the rough work in the house. For all that, her knuckles seemed ready to break through the skin. ‘I wouldn’t take them to the nuns either,’ she conceded. ‘When I was young I went to Strasbourg to work in the lace mills. The nuns would visit,
but they never asked about us Jews. Only the Catholic virgins mattered to them.’ Mémé rapped on the tabletop. ‘Eat. Finish your soup.’

Alix obeyed and Mémé said, ‘You’ve a good job at the exchange, money every month. You might become a supervisor, catch a man who wears a suit to work, with a house in a nice suburb. Instead you want to get into trouble by a market boy?’

‘Paul and I are just friends.’

‘Pfah! Drinking wine in the dark, that’s “just friends”? Not in my day.’

‘Things are different now.’

‘And some things never change. Men chase, girls get in the family way and lives are ruined. You are all I have, Aliki. I want you safe.’

Alix hovered on the brink of confessing her visit to Hermès. There was a speech ready in her head:
I don’t want to spend my life in the telephone building
 – “I’ll put you through, sir, please stand by.” I don’t want to marry a man in a dull suit. I want to learn the fashion trade and eventually open my own studio. Be the new Chanel, Vionnet, Jeanne Lanvin … open a shop in the 1st arrondissement
. A glance at the sewing table warned that rhapsodies would fall
on stubborn ears. Out loud she said, ‘I want to go into the couture business.’

‘Work sixteen-hour
days and get crab’s claws?’ Mémé held up fingers bent like river weed. ‘Believe me, Aliki, go into that trade, you might as well put your life on a roulette wheel.’

It was all very well for Mémé to tell her to stay safe, Alix mused a few days later as she crossed the Jardin du Luxembourg on her way to meet Paul, her hands deep in her pockets, her head bowed against a bitter wind. After all, there’d been no sign of caution the day Mémé announced they were moving to Paris.

July 1935, they’d been sitting at
the kitchen table of their home in south London. The day was sticky and hot, an open window letting in the noise of tradesmen’s traffic. It was also Alix’s once-a-month afternoon off from Arding & Hobbs, the department store where she’d worked since leaving school. She’d intended to spend her free time on Clapham Common, making a sketch for her portfolio. Back then her unstated ambition was to go
to art school, starting with evening classes, then full time if she could ever afford it … somehow progress from there to being a dress designer. An ambition not helped that day by Mémé’s demand that she stay home and trim a bucket of runner beans a neighbour had given them.

As Alix de-stringed and Mémé sliced, her grandmother had announced, ‘I want us to live in Paris.’

Alix had laughed without
looking up.

‘I mean it, Aliki. I’m sick of London.’

‘Why Paris?’

Mémé waved her paring knife. ‘The other day I took lace collars to a place in Portman Square. Hours I’d spent on them! The buyer –
dummkopf
slattern – picks them up as if they are a bunch of watercress.’

‘What’s that got to do with Paris?’

‘In Paris, such girls are not given the job of buyer. In Paris, such girls sell watercress.
I know I shall be happy in Paris.’

‘You won’t. You don’t know anybody there.’

‘My friend Bonnet is there.’ Then Mémé had stopped, as if astonished by her own words. Before Alix could question her, however, she added quickly, ‘He lives in a rough quarter and keeps strange hours, so we won’t meet him. What I mean is, half of Alsace lives in Paris. I will see people who look like me and sound like
me.’

‘But I won’t know a soul.’

‘What will you miss? After all, I don’t see any school friends calling.’

‘Because they’ve all gone to finishing school in Switzerland.’ She silently added,
I never had real school friends, none who would visit me here
. ‘What about my job?’ Alix continued. ‘I got a good
report last month and there’s a vacancy coming up in the silks department that I’m certain
to get.’

‘In Paris, you’ll have fifty silk departments to choose from.’

The truth eventually came out, though it took a few days. It was nothing to do with
dummkopf
buyers really: Mémé was frightened by the rise of anti-Jewish feeling in London. She told Alix, ‘While you were tucked away at school in the country, Moseley’s Blackshirts were taking lessons from Hitler. Jews are being attacked
now in the East End. London is not safe.’

‘Nobody round here supports them. Nobody with any sense.’

A neighbour, who was taking tea with them that afternoon, took Alix’s side: ‘They won’t come over the river, Mrs Lutzman.’ She’d winked at Alix. ‘No Blackshirts in Wandsworth.’

‘No?’ Mémé’s logic was offended. ‘I was on the bus. I went to Spitalfields to buy silk thread and some boys got on and
shouted at us old women. They knew we were Jewish. They were Black-shirts.’

‘Spitalfields is east London, Mrs L.’

‘And now they know which bus I get on, so they can find me.’

Nothing would dissuade Mémé. In her mind, London had become a nest of Nazism: of window breaking, of beatings and attacks. Always thin, by the time the August heat arrived she resembled a bundle of sticks. Alix caved in.
She handed in her notice and spent August organising travel papers. She sold their furniture and acquired the addresses of accommodation agencies from the French embassy. By the time the leaves were falling,
they were on the boat train heading for Dover, their household possessions packed for freighting on. Alix was coming to terms with a new future.

Once in Paris, Mémé got piecework from an
embroidery atelier, but was paid less than in London. It was a shock, the low wages of Paris’s luxuries industry. Yet another was having to pay six months’ rent in advance for a tiny flat, six floors up, with no hot water. Alix wore out her shoes looking for work, but either she didn’t have the right permit, or her French was inadequate, or she was at the back of a queue reserved for ‘French citizens
only’.

They were facing destitution when the job came up at the telephone exchange. That godsend followed fast on the heels of another – her meeting with Sylvie le Gal and through her, Paul. While Sylvie taught Alix to foxtrot, shimmy and tango, Paul gave her lessons in fashion piracy and corrected her French. Every accurate sketch Alix made of a couture outfit before its launch earned them two
hundred black-market francs. She and Paul split the money – it kept the bailiffs from the door. That was another part of Alix’s life Mémé knew nothing about.

Where was Paul this evening? He wasn’t usually late. Alix took an illegal shortcut across an area of lawn, keeping a sharp lookout for the park-keeper who would blow his whistle if he saw her treading on the sacred grass. Paul always waited
for her by the lion statue, bathing its proud underbelly in the smoke of his Gauloises cigarettes. Nearly a week had gone by since she’d
been aboard the
Katrijn
, so it must have taken him longer than usual to sell the Hermès sketch. That worried her. Paris was full of copyists like herself, swarming around the collections each season. March was a quiet month, the spring–summer collections already
history. There’d be a brief flurry in April with the mid-season launches, then nothing till the frenzy of the autumn–winter shows at the end of July. But even in quiet months, you couldn’t slack. It had to be
your
sketch on the fast boat to New York if you wanted to make money.

A familiar figure in a mariner’s jacket suddenly emerged from behind the lion’s plinth. Alix ran forward. ‘Paul, you
were hiding.’

‘Sheltering – I didn’t realise you’d got here. You look like a cold princess,’ he told her as they kissed cheeks. ‘I like your coat.’

‘Flea market,’ she said, twirling so he could appreciate the generous fullness of the black cashmere skirts. ‘Rue des Rosiers.’ Not quite Schiaparelli, but almost – clearly copied from the Italian designer’s spring offering. The coat had a belted
waist and had originally been ankle-length, but Alix had shortened it and embroidered roses on the collar, so it was now an original Alix Gower. ‘Shall we go for coffee?’ Alix thought Paul looked tense. ‘Tough day?’

‘No more than usual.’

She didn’t press. ‘Who’s looking after the girls?’

‘Francine.’ He meant the old barge-woman who moored
alongside him at Quai d’Anjou. ‘I can’t be long. She’ll
be half drunk by now and showing her bloomers to the men on passing coal barges.’

It was said without humour and Alix took his hand. ‘Think on the bright side – maybe tonight she won’t have her bloomers on.’

Paul gave a bark of laughter. ‘That would clear the wharf! Come on, let’s stroll like the lovers we aren’t, eh? Good day at work?’

She answered in BBC English, ‘
I’m sorry, sir, I cannot
place your call as there is washing on the line
.’ Switching to French: ‘Now what? You’re glaring.’

‘I can’t understand that bloody language. You know that talking English to me is like throwing a ball too high for a dog.’ Gem-green eyes glinted – Paul was fair like his sisters, rough-hewn, typical Frankish descent. But touchy as a cavalry officer.

‘So I got an education, somebody paid for me,’
she soothed. ‘You respect learning, or you wouldn’t break your back sending your sisters for extra lessons. When Lala’s lead violin at the Paris Opéra or La Scala, it’ll be because of you.’

They walked on, scattering pigeons. The park was almost empty, children and their nannies long gone. The writers, poets and students who haunted this Latin Quarter niche would be in the cafés on Boulevard
St-Michel. Paul stopped once to light a cigarette, hunching around the flame until the tobacco lit. He drew heavily, his eyes lowered.

‘Tell me before I burst,’ Alix finally prompted. ‘How much did you get for the Hermès?’

Paul blew out a stream of smoke. ‘Nothing. My contact couldn’t do anything with it. Not enough detail.’

‘Not enough detail?’ Along with bitter disappointment came fear. If
this trickle of income dried up … she didn’t want to think about it. ‘Show me anyone else in Paris who remembers detail as I do, who can reproduce as perfectly—’

‘Nobody doubts you, Alix. Well, I don’t. But that’s not the point. They need the real thing.’