The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  “Tell me something funny,” she said suddenly. “There must be something you’ve seen or done that’s made you laugh. Isn’t there?”

  He didn’t reply immediately and Estella worried that he’d misunderstood, that he thought she was trying to make light of the last two days. But it was the opposite. She couldn’t fully comprehend everything that had happened without knowing its counterweight, without remembering that there were other emotions one could feel besides grief and anger.

  “Something funny,” he repeated, considering. “How about this? A British soldier who escaped from one of the camps wrote in his report about two fellow prisoners. One of them had been there for almost a year; he had a photo of his wife stuck to the wall above his bed. The other man arrived one night and was given the bunk below. The first thing he did, in the dark, was to stick a photo of his wife to the wall too. When they woke up in the morning, they realized that they each had the same picture. That their wives were one and the same. That she must have got tired of waiting for the first man to come home so she’d married the second. What are the chances that they would have both gone to the same camp, been allocated to the same set of bunks? Fate has the best hand in this game called life, don’t you think?”

  “That wasn’t funny,” she insisted, shaking her head. “Oh God, it’s so awful it’s like the worst kind of bad joke where you keep waiting for the punch line.” She gave a wry smile. “What are the chances? Maybe the same as the chances of me bumping into you and Lena in Manhattan.”

  “One of fate’s better games,” he said cryptically and she didn’t know if he was being sarcastic or not.

  He rolled onto his side a little, probably so that he didn’t have to turn his head all the time to see her. Estella watched him breathe, watched him wait out the spinning that must still be in his head.

  “All right?” she asked.

  “Getting there.”

  “Well,” she said, “since your funny story didn’t exactly lift my mood, maybe you can tell me what makes you feel good about what you do.”

  “Every time an airman gets to the embassy in Spain, every time we get intelligence from a prison camp about a nearby airfield or other potential bombing targets or Nazi activity, every time a man escapes a prison camp even if only for a day, it makes me feel good,” he said. “Victory in battle isn’t one glorious fight. It’s a million tiny wins, wins that nobody notices. But every man we get out of a prison camp, or who evades capture after his plane goes down, is a man we can send back in to fight. Every minute the Germans spend searching prisoner-of-war camps for tunnel spoil or escape equipment, or reading letters to find codes is a minute they’re distracted from the main game. Every piece of intelligence we receive from prisoners about a strategic railway junction or munitions plant is another target the bombers can zero in on with accuracy.”

  She studied his face. Even in sickness it was resolute. “But nobody knows what you’re doing. And the people you’re saving, you don’t know them. How do you put your life on the line for strangers who never thank you?”

  “It’s not for strangers,” he said quietly. “It’s for every one of those Jewish men we saw being marched off to Drancy. It’s for every courier or passeur who’s been betrayed to the Germans and tortured before being killed. It’s for every one of the one hundred people the Germans shot in reprisal killings because they caught one person scratching a V for victory onto a wall. I know all of those people, Estella, and so do you. They’re the people who gave their life for nothing unless I make it mean something. Like you should make Lena’s mean something.”

  She stared at the ceiling. “How?” she whispered, so ashamed for ever having doubted his intentions.

  “You’ll find a way.”

  This time, she rolled over to face him. His dark eyes glinted at her in the blackness of the room. She felt again what she’d felt at the piano, that the sensation of being near him was more unsettling than flying over the ocean, that it left her lunging forward and back at the same time, wanting to be close to him but also wanting to pull away because whatever lay in the space between them was so powerful that, once she dove into it, there would be no recovery.

  He turned his head to stare at the ceiling. “You can leave me now,” he said gruffly and it was like a slap in the face.

  “Peter said to ignore you until you could stand,” she said weakly, knowing she’d somehow lost the power she’d had.

  “I don’t need a nurse anymore.”

  A nurse. That was how he thought of her. She rolled off the bed.

  When she reached the door, she heard his voice.

  “If anything happens, go find Peter at this bar.” He gave her an address.

  “What do you mean, if anything happens?”

  “Goodnight Estella.”

  He closed his eyes, shutting her out. And Estella knew that she was the only one who felt it, that he had no interest whatsoever in moving any closer to her, of seeing what might happen if they were to touch.

  Estella didn’t sleep. Instead she lay awake and thought about Alex: the night she’d arrived at the theater and he’d been standing in the middle of a group of admiring women, so debonair that he barely had to raise a smile to get any of them to look at him. The man who’d followed her out into the street to give her a jacket so she wouldn’t be cold, who’d gone with her to help Monsieur Aumont. The man who’d tried to find Lena a family, who’d gone back for Lena’s body and whispered the most beautiful poetry over it. The man who’d never once laid a hand on Estella in any compromising way, the man who frustrated her and made her laugh, who made her feel more emotions in the space of five minutes than she’d ever felt in a lifetime. The man who’d tried to save his mother despite the personal cost, the man who was trying to save a nation without regard for himself.

  My God, she thought, one hundred times or more that night: I’m in love with Alex. I’m so in love with Alex I can’t see straight.

  That he didn’t love her was so perfectly clear she had to close her eyes rather than look at the fact. He wanted rid of her, done of her, had wanted her only to help Lena and she’d failed at that. Yet…he remembered that night in Paris, the night she’d first met him, with talismanic reverence. As if it stood for something more than two strangers exchanging a map of a prison camp.

  By five in the morning, as the sun was stretching its lazy rays into the sky, Estella could no longer stand it. She didn’t know what she planned to do: make a declaration, ask him to clarify his feelings, or whether she just wanted to see his face but she stood up and walked down the hallway to his room. She’d heard piano music playing intermittently through the night, which meant he was at least able to stand. But there’d been silence for the last hour at least.

  She tapped lightly at the door. “Alex?” He didn’t answer so she stepped inside.

  The bed was empty. The piano stool was empty. The room was empty. His bag was still there; perhaps he was in the kitchen. She sniffed the air for food or coffee, remembering he hadn’t eaten in more than a day, but she couldn’t smell anything.

  He wasn’t in the kitchen. Nor the garden. Nor on the roof. Wasn’t in the house at all. She could feel his absence just as she felt his presence, she now realized, acutely. She waited for an hour but he didn’t return. Then she hurried upstairs. Dressed. Walked down to Rue Pigalle to the address Alex had given her and saw Peter polishing glasses. She almost turned away. The last time she’d spoken to Peter, he’d said she was to blame for Lena dying. She didn’t know if she had the strength right now to withstand any more of his bitter truths. But she remembered Alex and that was enough to make her walk over to a chair and sit down. Soon Peter came over to take her order.

  “Where is he?” she murmured.

  “I told you not to let him out of your sight,” he snapped. He lowered his voice. “He’s gone?”

  Estella nodded. “A bloody Mary please.” Then, quietly, “I think he may have gotten tired of me,” she admitted. She’d tal
ked so much about her own problems, rather than about his vastly more significant ones.

  Peter leaned down and winked lasciviously. “Alley’s fine with me, love.”

  Estella found herself being shoved into an alley, wondering what the hell Peter was up to. When they got there, he began to bark at her again. “Tired of you? You’re the only woman he’s ever asked me to look after. You’re the only woman he assiduously avoids speaking about. And that tells me two things—that he cares about you too damn much, and that makes you fucking dangerous.”

  Estella’s mouth wouldn’t work. She stared at Peter as if she hadn’t been speaking French her whole life, as if she couldn’t understand him. “What?” she managed in the end.

  “And you’re so fucking dumb you can’t even see it.”

  She felt her hand lift to deflect Peter’s aggression, a futile gesture but it was all she was capable of in that moment. She couldn’t quite piece Peter’s words together into any kind of sense. “Is Alex all right?” she asked, because that was the most important question. Had he gone of his own accord?

  “You’d better hope he’s all right.” Peter smacked his hand against the wall. “Forget it. He wants me to get you out, I’ll get you out. Stay out of trouble today and I’ll fetch you tonight and get you out of this goddamned country and far away.” Peter stalked back into the bar.

  At the same time, two Wehrmacht officers with snuffling bulldogs turned into the alley and Estella could do nothing other than stride off as fast as she could, using her body’s muscle memory to find her way. Her vision was blurred and her ears buzzed with Peter’s words: he cares about you too damn much.

  Why? Because she was Lena’s sister and he felt he owed it to Lena to protect her? But, even as she had the thought, she knew that wasn’t it.

  Now she could clearly see everything she’d missed before: the fact that he’d only danced with Lena in the first place because he thought she was Estella. Standing shoulder to shoulder with him before the window of a flying boat, staring out at the blue sky. Sitting beside him on a piano stool in a jazz club laughing, and then longing. Lying next to him on a bed when he was unwell and him never once touching her, never once betraying anything of the reputation that went before him, always treating her with carefulness and restraint. She had thought it was because he barely tolerated her but that wasn’t it: it was almost as if he couldn’t bear to touch her because he was afraid of what might follow.

  As she walked up the stairs of the house in the Marais, she no longer felt it settle over her like a gloomy day. It suddenly seemed bereft, as if it was missing the one thing that brought it to life: a pair of lovers.

  Estella opened the door to Alex’s room and she lay down on the bed, on the side where he had slept, a flood of want and yearning sweeping over her. His pillow carried the scent of him and as she rested her cheek against it, she knew that if what she felt wasn’t love, then love must be so acute it couldn’t be survived. Because what she felt right now was agony.

  Part Six

  Fabienne

  Chapter Twenty-four

  June 2015

  Estella’s funeral was held at the Church of St. John the Divine as per Estella’s instructions. Antique French peonies, all in white, sourced especially from hothouses, overflowed the altar, spilled down the ends of the pews and scented the air with a fragrance Fabienne had always associated with Estella. So many people came that a crowd had to gather in the vestibule, all the seats long since taken.

  Fabienne sat in the front row near her grandmother’s coffin, all the people who’d worked at Stella Designs filling the pews around her. Fabienne’s mother had been too busy to fly from Australia. Or too scared of seeing the ghost of Fabienne’s father in the pictures of Estella adorning the church.

  Fabienne made it through the eulogy with only one long and dreadful pause but she knew she owed it to her grandmother to honor her properly, and so she pulled herself together and continued to speak. “Estella told me the thing that most comforted her after the people she loved had died was a poem, which I’d like to read now:

  “When you awaken in the morning’s hush

  I am the swift uplifting rush

  Of quiet birds in circled flight.

  I am the soft stars that shine at night.

  Do not stand at my grave and cry;

  I am not there. I did not die.”

  Fabienne’s voice cracked on the last line and she swallowed hard to stop the sob that wanted to break free. “My grandmother might not be here with me anymore, bodily, but I know she did not die. Her legacy is sweeping. More than the soft stars or the birds in flight, she is walking the streets of Manhattan, of Paris, of any city in the world where women buy her clothes. She is in the button on a sleeve, the pleat of a skirt, the peony on the shoulder of a dress. She did not die,” Fabienne repeated, knowing she had to finish or she would break down utterly, “and I’m so very glad that I was lucky enough to call her my grandmother, that my life was blessed by her presence. I’m so very glad that she lived.”

  Her hand flew up to her mouth as she stepped away from the microphone and the applause rang out, more beautiful than any hymn, for Estella.

  Fabienne saw Will briefly at the wake in Gramercy Park.

  He kissed her cheek. “Your eulogy was beautiful,” he said.

  Then she had to turn away and talk to and thank all of the other mourners, to laugh with her grandmother’s employees over stories of Estella and her grandfather and their two desks, which had sat opposite each other in their shared office, a desk her grandfather rarely used, preferring to be on the floor of the atelier. Two desks that had been empty now for a year or more, her grandfather’s for longer, and Estella’s since she’d been too frail to go to the office anymore.

  As they talked and reminisced, Fabienne felt the proof of her assertion that Estella was not in her grave, but here in the room in the hearts and minds of so many people. And in their souls, or in Fabienne’s soul at least.

  The most difficult moment of the day was when Kimberley, the designer who’d been in charge of the atelier for the last year or so, approached Estella. “What will you do with the business now?” Kimberley asked.

  Fabienne shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  All of it was hers—the business, the house in Gramercy Park, the house in Paris, the furniture, the archive of clothes, the paintings, the money. She had more things than she could even comprehend and she had no idea what to do with any of it. Because she lived in Australia and had a job in Australia and she could not imagine sweeping into the enormous void left by Estella.

  Finally the guests left. Will had waved to her before he’d departed a couple of hours before, extracting himself from Kimberley who had either been exchanging design stories with him or who had seen in him the same things that Fabienne had. And Fabienne wasn’t jealous, just sad. Kimberley would be so perfect for Will. She lived in New York for a start. And she was an artist.

  Alone at last, Fabienne looked around the front living room of the Gramercy Park house, at the champagne glasses pinked with lipstick, at the plates and napkins and bits of food clinging to dishes and tables, at the coat someone had left on a chair, at the phone abandoned and beeping on a sideboard, at the detritus of celebration and sadness. Tiredness descended upon her.

  She turned on her heel and walked out of the house, all the way to her grandmother’s offices on Seventh Avenue. Stella Designs was one of the few fashion businesses that still operated there, clinging onto the long history of the street, which was now being swept away like litter as clothing factories were transformed into twenty-first-century capital-raising and technology businesses.

  On the fourteenth floor, she unlocked the doors; everyone had been given the week off and she knew it would be quiet and peaceful. Perhaps there she might recapture the sense of what she’d said at the funeral, wouldn’t feel the utter lack of Estella.

  But Estella’s empty desk only made the lack more visceral. The
re was the sewing box that had come with Estella from Paris when she was twenty-two years old, the photographs of Fabienne, her father, her grandfather, and Janie, her grandmother’s best friend who’d died—was that ten years ago? Nothing lasted. Nothing.

  Her grandfather’s desk sat opposite, kept dusted and neat by Estella’s secretary, Rebecca, who’d done the same with Estella’s over this last year of disuse. More peonies, pink this time, sat extravagantly in Estella’s favorite orb-shaped aquamarine vases, dragging France across an ocean and laying it down at Fabienne’s feet. But it all looked wrong without Estella being wheeled to her desk or, if Fabienne was to look back a decade or so, without Estella walking into a room in that way she had, model-like, as if life was a catwalk and she would continue to parade on it forever.

  Fabienne sat down gingerly in Estella’s chair but it was too capacious and she jumped up, not wanting anyone to catch her, the impostor, unable to take Estella’s place.

  “Fabienne?”

  “Jesus,” Fabienne exclaimed, bringing one hand up to her chest and whipping around to the door. “Rebecca, you scared me.”

  Her grandmother’s diminutive and young but extraordinarily organized secretary smiled. “Your eulogy was so lovely.”

  “Thanks,” Fabienne said. “I thought I gave everyone the week off?”

  Rebecca held a box out in front of her. “I came to get this. I thought I’d drop it off to you tomorrow but you’re here so you should take it now.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Estella gave it to me about five years ago. She told me to keep it for you until…”

  She died. The words hung in the air. Fabienne stepped forward and took the box. “I’m going back to Gramercy Park,” Fabienne said. “It doesn’t feel quite right being here yet.”