The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘Can I help?’

  She greeted Dietrich like an old friend. ‘I’m embarrassed, but you wouldn’t have a shilling on you?’

  He took a two-shilling piece from his pocket and the crone pocketed it, then stumped away. Obviously they didn’t give change round here.

  ‘She wouldn’t take my gloves so it would have been my shoes.’

  Dietrich considered her in silence. The sun burnished his hair and it burst on Cora that, yes, she had seen him before. In the Catholic cathedral of St George, Southwark, where her father had taken her as a child. There’d been a little side window she’d loved to stare at while the rituals of the mass went on over her head. A golden chalice had stood in the embrasure, bathed in light streaming through stained glass. The window depicted a knight entangled with a dragon. ‘You’re my St George,’ she said.

  ‘Riding to your rescue with a shilling? You were right about Mid-day Sun. I take it you did not back him in the end? Otherwise, you would not be short of cash.’

  She groaned. ‘It’s a long story. What about you?’

  ‘Each-way on Le Grand Duc. Only a few pounds, though.’ Only a few pounds. How the other half lives. ‘You believe that fortune-telling nonsense?’

  ‘Just a bit of fun.’ Cora shrugged.

  ‘It did not seem so much fun a moment ago. You looked sick, like a wounded raven.’ He lifted her feathers and she flinched.

  ‘“Raven” isn’t very complimentary. Ever seen one close up? Beady eyes and a bloody big beak.’

  He laughed. ‘They are majestic and intriguing birds. And highly portentous. Don’t they hold the survival of the Tower of London under their wings? But, all right, not a raven, a blackbird. Decidedly inferior. I’d rather be a raven.’

  ‘Where’s your lady-friend?’

  He nodded towards a yellow wagon. ‘Learning her fate. She is consumed by a burning question and the only person who can answer it is an illiterate stranger who spends her life moving pots and pans from field to field. You women always want to know the small detail of your future, when, really, it is all written clearly enough.’

  ‘In the stars?’

  ‘In the newspapers. Politics forges destiny, not Fate or chance.’

  Cora frowned. Politics hadn’t drawn ticket number twenty-two out of the hat. It wasn’t politics that had stopped Donal putting her stake on Mid-day Sun, either.

  ‘Why must women be passive? Cannot they steer their own lives?’ he pressed.

  ‘Don’t know.’ ‘Passive’ was a new word, but she dug out its meaning. ‘I’ve never been behind a steering-wheel.’ She looked at his motor-car. ‘Does that go fast?’

  ‘It is a Mercedes Roadster and it goes very fast. You would like to try?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare. But—’ Words were lining up on her tongue, words that might earn her a snub. ‘I’d like to sit next to you while you drive it, the wind blowing the curls out of my hair and the smog out of my lungs.’

  ‘Smog?’ He frowned at the word.

  Fair exchange, Cora thought. I’ll keep ‘passive’ and you can have ‘smog’. ‘Dirty London air,’ she explained.

  An idea seemed to root in his mind. ‘Where would you like to go?’

  ‘Brighton for a pint of cockles on the beach.’ Then she remembered she was supposed to be a fashionable London milliner. ‘I mean, for champagne and crab, um, sandwiches. Then over to France, not stopping till we hit Paris.’

  ‘You want to go to Paris?’

  ‘Not half. See, I’ve decided to run away.’

  ‘How extraordinarily apposite. Tomorrow I am going to Paris.’

  ‘No! On holiday?’

  ‘Holiday and business. I have work, but I also have tickets for the Expo.’ He explained: ‘Exposition Internationale, where the world comes to Paris to discover architecture, technology and exotic food. You’ve heard of the Expo, surely?’

  ‘Of course.’ Never.

  ‘I have a reservation on the Pullman. The boat train? Two seats. You may have one, if you like.’

  Cora stared. He must realise she couldn’t pay her way. And what about Miss Snowdrop? ‘Isn’t your friend going with you?’

  ‘Ottilia? No, no. She was in Paris all of April. She’s making her home in London now. Her husband insists.’

  Her husband? ‘Who was the other seat for?’

  ‘The other seat,’ his gaze raked over her face, her wide cheekbones and pointed chin, ‘is for my man. But he can get another train.’

  ‘Your man?’ Oh, Lord. There were chaps who went in for funny business with their own sex. Not in Bermondsey. God help them, they wouldn’t survive half an hour there, but in the theatrical districts of London. Her mother, when she was still getting work, had brought one or two fruity-voiced types home until Jac had put a stop to it.

  ‘My man, yes. My servant.’

  ‘Servant. That’s what I thought.’

  ‘So, you wish to come?’

  To Paris, with a total stranger? Tomorrow was . . . well, it was tomorrow. Which left no thinking time, no packing time. No time for goodbyes. Though who to . . . apart from Donal? A practical obstruction hit her. ‘I don’t have a passport.’

  ‘I do, and mine allows my wife to accompany me.’

  ‘You have a wife?’ Had these people never heard of marriage vows?

  ‘Certainly, and you could easily be her, as you match her colouring and build very closely. Though, I hasten to add, you are much younger. All you need do is give your name as—’ He broke off as a figure in white stumbled out of the bow-top caravan. Cora braced herself for unpleasantness. Ottilia – was that her name? – would likely object to Cora being in the same field as her lovely self.

  But Ottilia didn’t see her. Or Dietrich. She stopped to pull on her gloves and her pearl bracelets were hampering her. Dropping a glove, she stared down as if she hadn’t the resolve to pick it up. Suddenly, the invitation for the Pullman struck Cora as outrageous. Cruel, even. ‘How can I come to Paris with you? I have moral standards, even if you don’t.’

  He smiled, as if her about-face amused him. ‘Ottilia is a friend. As for my wife, she and I live separate lives. She remains at home in Germany.’

  So he was definitely German. And that was another thing. Throw in her lot with him, and she’d never be able to set foot on home territory again. The war to end all wars had finished almost twenty years ago, but there wasn’t a house on her street that hadn’t lost a son, brother or father. Her dad, who had come to England as a refugee and joined an infantry regiment, still had nightmares about the trenches and the invasion of Belgium. He couldn’t say the word ‘German’ without spitting.

  Yet, German or not, this man was offering to grant a wish expressed not two hours earlier. ‘I’d have to go home, leave a note. I can’t just hot-foot it.’

  ‘Sounds like good sense.’

  Good sense that was to alter the course of her life more profoundly than any Gypsy seer could have imagined.

  CHAPTER 2

  Cora headed to the railway station. She’d given up trying to find Donal among the grandstand crowds. He’d find her as soon as he wanted to go home.

  But when five thirty came, and Donal still hadn’t arrived, she went in search of him. No sign of him among the home-going crowds, or in the grandstand. He wouldn’t have left already? Not with her ticket in his pocket. Would he? Had she finally goaded him too far? Three hours later, she was sure of it.

  Faced with the prospect of an eight-mile walk, Cora leaped on to the rear platform of a double-decker bus as it slowed to let a group of spectators pass in front of it. She shouted to those who craned round to look, ‘Got a seat for a London gal who’s lost everything except her faith in human nature?’ The bus was going back to the city, a works’ outing on board, and she squeezed between two girls of her own age and joined in the singing, though, actually, she felt like crying. They dropped her on the Walworth Road, giving her a two-mile hike home.

  It was close on eleven when she
reached Barnham Street and peeled off her shoes. While her blistered feet soaked up the cold of the kitchen floor, she listened for sounds of occupation. The house felt empty. So where was her dad? The pubs were long shut, so maybe he’d gone back to work. He worked for himself, and his hours were chaotic. Cora often thought that if he hadn’t needed to eat, he’d spend his life shuttling between his workshop and the pub.

  Cup of tea was what she needed. Reaching for the kettle, she found a note poking from its spout.

  ‘C. Masson: report to your father’s premises soon as you read this – WPC Flynn.’ A police serial number was written alongside the name. God help me, Cora thought, she’s turned official. She knows I took her clothes. How? Donal wouldn’t have told, surely?

  She sat over her tea, picturing Sheila writing her note, her clumpy lace-ups grinding dust into the quarry tiles. Nobody locked their doors round there, but she hoped Sheila hadn’t been wearing uniform when she called because that really would get tongues wagging. She read the note again. No mention of Jac having been told anything. If she acted fast, she might be able to save the situation. What if she offered to pay Sheila for the loan of her clothes and maybe used her black eye as a bargaining chip?

  ‘Thing is, Sheila, my dad always seems good-natured. Gentleman Jac when you meet him on the street. But when it comes to my mistakes – any excuse to give me a pasting. He can’t punish Mum any more, see, so he takes it out on me. You wouldn’t drop me in it, would you?’

  But Sheila might. Then I’d have to run away, she told herself. Take up the German fellow’s offer. But she knew she wouldn’t. Imagine Dietrich What’s-his-name’s face if she actually turned up at Victoria Station with a suitcase.

  Anyway, she didn’t have a suitcase. What she had was a job and a life and she’d better make the best of it. She took off the Paris hat and replaced it with a headscarf. Headscarves always looked penitent, somehow. If you said ‘sorry’ in a headscarf, you were more likely to be believed.

  What to do with the hat? If she walked up to Sheila holding it, it might just trigger the Flynn temper. Best hide the hat for now. From the kitchen cupboard, she took an old toffee tin and prised off the lid. Inside was a collection of buttons and belt buckles, and the heel torn off a lady’s petite dress shoe.

  Daffodil yellow, a fashionable colour twelve years ago, though a muddy tidemark wrote a sad ending to the story. On Derby Day 1925, they’d set out for Epsom Downs, Cora’s mother in a new yellow and green outfit. Only it had rained without pause and The Hill had turned into a bog. Cora remembered her mum falling on her bottom in the filth and howling, ‘I look like I’ve sloshed through a farmyard! Some bloody day out this is.’

  ‘More fool you.’ Jac had laughed. ‘Boots next time. I can’t carry you and the kid on my shoulders.’

  Words had flown and Cora’s last memory of Florence Masson was of her disappearing into the crowd, her coat darkened to the colour of mustard, her green hat dripping dye on to her shoulders. The heel of a shoe sucked off as she ploughed through the mud.

  ‘How angry do you have to be to leave your heel behind?’ Cora asked, as she pressed the toffee-tin lid gently down on Sheila’s hat. And how desperate do you have to be to leave your child?

  No answers offered themselves. Finding a torch and absent-mindedly slipping the olive green handbag over her arm, she set off to answer WPC Flynn’s summons.

  Jac Masson’s premises crouched in the shadow of railway arches. The one-storey shack had been mended with so much corrugated iron, it rattled like a set of rusty keys whenever a freight train passed. Cora aimed her torch at the double doors. A smudge of light behind a windowpane warned her that somebody was waiting.

  Inside, she gagged as solvent fumes hit the back of her throat. She never went there without wondering if her dad’s lungs were pickled, like those ancient leather shoes they sometimes pulled from the Thames foreshore. For all that, it always astonished her how Jac, with his meat-handler’s hands, could turn plain wood and reeking materials into beautiful objects. Into replica Coromandel screens, glimmering with gold leaf and coloured enamels. She loved that word: ‘Coromandel’. Exotic, sensuous. The only thing about Jac Masson that was.

  After coming out of the army, he’d got work as a theatrical scenery painter, which was how he’d met Cora’s mother. Soon, his drinking had started to lose him work, and after a few years, there wasn’t a theatre in London that would employ him. Florence had been earning well at the time, and she’d bought him a business from a man who was retiring, which specialised in enamelled folding screens. The sort found in superior dress shops and in wealthy people’s drawing rooms.

  Jac had taken to the work. Being alone all day, nobody to answer to, suited him and a flair for graphic art had put him in step with the new art-deco style of the twenties. He had developed his own motifs, featuring hummingbirds and luscious flowers and his work had become quite sought after. If he’d been anybody else, Cora thought, he’d be running a factory, perhaps from one of the new units on the Great West Road. They’d be living in a smart semi with a garden. But, being Jac, he insulted his suppliers, painted what he wanted, not what his customers asked for, and drank any profit he made.

  Even his shed radiated stubborn depression. No electricity, just hurricane lamps and a smelly paraffin stove.

  The light she’d seen came from the area he called his ‘paint-bay’, which was separated from the main workshop by a cowhide ¬curtain. Behind the curtain he applied his paints and gold leaf, or sprayed surfaces with Japan-black lacquer, layer upon layer, until cheap pine panels resembled inlaid ebony.

  Cora heard a whisper and went to peer through a hole in the leather curtain. In the bluish light of the paraffin stove, she saw her father. He was sitting on the ancient club chair he’d bought from a junk shop. Side-saddle on Jac’s knee, her ugly policewoman’s hat tipped back, was Sheila Flynn. They had their arms around each other.

  Kissing! Cora’s mouth turned down in disgust. Her dad and Sheila Flynn gorging on each other’s faces! Jac’s hand was wedged inside Sheila’s jacket, under her shirt. As for her hand, it was where it definitely ought not to be.

  Cora closed her eyes and heard, ‘So, shall we tell her in the morning, Jac?’

  ‘Must we tell her at all?’ Jac’s voice was a rumble. Slurred but intelligible, which told Cora that he’d been drinking beer, not whisky. ‘Won’t it be obvious when we’ve gone?’

  Gone where? Cora opened her eyes and found a bigger hole to peer through. There was a selection because Jac had once hurled paint stripper at the curtain and it had burned through it, forming what looked like bullet holes. Oh, God, they were kissing again. Cora saw tea things laid out on the seat of a chair. A teapot and a tin mug, a rose-patterned china cup and saucer. Her mum’s teacup! A prized possession because it had been among the props used in The Importance of Being Earnest. How dare Sheila Flynn drink from it! Cora was about to wrench back the curtain when she heard Sheila say, ‘I’m going to give her hell for taking my things.’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ muttered Jac.

  ‘It’s only a rag, that dress, but what a cheek, going into my room. My best hat, too. And she’ll have seen all the other stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  Sheila’s voice turned girlish. ‘I had a shopping spree. All the pocket money you give me gone on lovely things.’ It became a baby’s lisp. ‘Oo like me looking pretty, don’t oo, Jacky?’

  Too much. Cora hauled back the curtain, breaking a fingernail in her hurry to shine her torch into the lovebirds’ eyes. She was rewarded with a comical display of shock. Sheila got off Jac’s knee so fast that he yelped. She demanded, ‘How long have you been there?’

  ‘How long have you been fornicating with my dad?’ Cora shot back. ‘He’s still married to my mother, or had you forgotten?’

  Jac got up, stiff joints making him ungainly. ‘You’d better know, Cora, this woman is everything to me. Don’t you misuse her good name, not in my hearing. ’r />
  Sheila preened. See? her little smile implied. I’m the special one.

  Cora pointed the torch at her father. ‘How much is everything?’

  Sheila answered, ‘We’re getting married. We’re going to set up house in Barnham Street, so you’d better start looking for new lodgings.’

  ‘How can you marry him when Mum’s still alive?’

  ‘Divorce,’ Sheila said triumphantly. ‘The new law says three years’ desertion is grounds and your mother’s been gone a lot longer than that.’

  ‘But you’re Catholic,’ Cora lobbed back. ‘So’s Dad, when he can be bothered. You can’t believe in divorce?’

  Jac found his voice. ‘I believe in anything that will make me happy. Coming home to Sheila every night is all I want.’

  ‘But what about me? I don’t earn enough to take a place of my own.’

  ‘You’ll go into lodgings. Or,’ Sheila threw Jac a playful look, ‘she could rent my bedroom. Donal wouldn’t mind.’ Then, her gaze closing on the green silk dress, she bared her teeth. ‘You can pay to have that washed, Cora Masson, and I shall want new stockings, too. And where’s my hat?’

  ‘Who blew the gaff on me?’ Cora wasn’t playing for time. It was suddenly more important than anything to know if Donal had betrayed her. If he had, she hadn’t a true friend in the world.

  ‘Somebody left the key in the wardrobe and I heard you’d been hanging about the place. Since Donal wasn’t likely to be dressing up in my things, it had to be you. So? I’d say a fiver for a day’s hire. It should be twice that, except I know you’ll have lost all your money on one horse. You’ve no more sense than – what?’ Anger flared in Sheila’s eyes. ‘What have you got to grin at?’

  ‘You. I reckon that when it comes to being a self-righteous prig, you take the biscuit, Sheila Flynn.’ Cora gestured to her father, and took a deep breath. ‘When it comes to theft, he takes all the bloody biscuits. He’s been living off my earnings since I left school. Marry him? You need your head examined. He might say he’s in love and buy you a few fancy dresses, but give it a couple of years, you’ll be stuck with your arms in the wash-tub, looking forward to a black eye every Saturday night. Men like him—’