The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘I love Paris at every season.’

  As they crossed the river, Coralie asked, ‘Dietrich, are you in love with Ottilia?’

  He kept his eyes ahead. ‘We were to be married, but it couldn’t happen.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I asked.’

  Dietrich stopped, turned Coralie to face him. ‘I love her, yes.’

  Not much you could say to that. Actually, saying anything was out of the question because Coralie suddenly felt sick. The rest of the way to the Duet, she breathed deeply and when they arrived, she took the stairs rather than wait for the lift, making it to her bathroom just in time.

  Next morning, she called at a pharmacy on boulevard Malesherbes for something to deal with sickness and, returning, found Brownlow in the lobby. Usual dapper self, even the silk panel at the back of his waistcoat ironed smooth. He was collecting post from the desk clerk. They both noticed her and she fancied Brownlow said something crude. Had a lady pinched his seat on the Pullman, he’d have got over it. But a Bermondsey chiseller like her? The affront was eternal.

  She hung back as he left the lobby, not fancying a ride in the lift with him. When it came down again, she found a letter on the floor. A German stamp and ‘Herr Graf von Elbing’ on the front suggested Brownlow had been careless.

  What made her tear into it like that, though? Appalled, she tried to re-seal it, but there was no disguising what she’d done. Pulling the letter from the envelope, she read the first line: ‘Mein lieber Vater’. My dear father.

  She’d sunk, really sunk. The lift made its whining, decelerating noise and she heard a man’s cough. Brownlow, waiting for her – or, more likely, waiting for the lift because he’d laid out the letters and found one short. Where to hide it? Her dress had no pockets. She had no stocking tops to push it into because she’d gone out in ankle socks. There was a mat on the lift floor. She shoved the letter underneath with half a second to spare before Brownlow opened the door.

  CHAPTER 7

  At last, Dietrich was taking her to the Expo. Forty-four countries had designed pavilions for the event, though, as Dietrich pointed out, only Frenchmen had been allowed to do the actual building so many remained unfinished two months after the official opening.

  ‘They’d be finished if Germans had built them?’

  ‘Naturally. The German pavilion was the first completed.’

  ‘I thought the Russian one was,’ she teased.

  ‘You always have a comeback, Coralie. Tell me something fascinating instead. Tell me what you see.’

  They were walking down the Chaillot hill between an avenue of fountains, the newly constructed Palais de Chaillot behind them. In front of them, the Seine flowed molten amber in the evening light. ‘If you rolled a huge ball through the middle of these fountains and across the river, the Eiffel Tower would go down like a skittle. Satisfied, Monsieur le Comte?’

  ‘Oh, delighted.’

  ‘Can we go to the Japanese pavilion first? I like Oriental things.’

  ‘Then you’ll be disappointed. The Japanese pavilion is modernist architecture in its purest form.’

  ‘Why does everything have to change?’

  ‘Because life would stagnate otherwise. Coralie, tonight I have things to say to you.’

  ‘You do?’ Her thoughts flew to the letter, which must be hidden still, like a murder victim covered with a sheet. She turned away to hide her guilty flush. Anything, anything but discovery. ‘What things?’

  ‘Be patient. First, we are meeting a business associate on the German pavilion’s roof terrace.’

  She sensed a change in him. A refocusing, as when the wheel is turned on a cine-projector and the picture sharpens.

  The German pavilion was floodlit, an eagle dominating its summit. Flags rippled at the entrance, red and white, imprinted with black swastikas. Coralie and Dietrich were held up at the doorway by a group of people conversing in German. A man was screwing a flash-bulb connector to an important-looking camera, talking as he did so. He wore a swastika armband on his sleeve. Dietrich seemed interested in what he was saying.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Coralie asked.

  ‘This man wants to photograph the Russian pavilion.’ Dietrich pointed to an edifice on the opposite side of the boulevard. Two giants dominated that roof: a man with a hammer, a woman with a sickle. ‘He reports for his home newspaper in Bavaria and wants to show how inferior Russian work is to German.’

  ‘But it isn’t. It isn’t as tall as this building but it’s still beautiful. I don’t understand why everything German has to be the best.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was. I am repeating another’s opinion.’ Dietrich addressed the group in his own language. The man with the camera answered and then, to Coralie’s confusion, made a straight-arm salute and cried, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ Dietrich replied.

  Inside the pavilion, Coralie let him lead the way. She didn’t know where to look or what to say. She’d seen Pathé newsreels of the German leader making speeches to crowds fifty rows deep. She’d heard the people returning his name from one throat with fanatical enthusiasm. She’d seen black-shirted boys outside pubs in South London copying them, but it had never occurred to her that Dietrich might share the mania. She felt as if she’d left one Dietrich outside the pavilion and come in with another.

  Swastikas everywhere. On the floor tiles, on photo displays, even in the stained-glass windows exalting German craftsmanship. What had become of saints with faraway expressions? Coralie hung even further back as Dietrich greeted two men, clicking his heels, declaring, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  What was wrong with them? English people didn’t go round shouting, ‘God save the King!’ at each other. She pretended to be fascinated by photographic panels displaying brand-new roads, Autobahns, which looked as if they stretched for ever, not a tram or a delivery truck to be seen. At the same time, she eavesdropped on Dietrich and his companions who were speaking in gruff, rapid German. Earlier that month, she’d asked Mademoiselle Deveau if she could spend one of their twice-daily sessions learning German instead of French. Giving the dry smile that was the nearest she ever got to outright humour, Louise Deveau had answered, ‘You plan to astonish Dietrich some day by conversing in fluent German? I wish you well. Not every man likes a surprise.’

  Coralie had made good progress, but not enough to make sense of what the three men were saying, beyond their regular references to ‘der Führer’. They made a breathtakingly good-looking trio, though: tall and well-built. Dietrich and the man nearest to him in age were both very fair while the youngest, probably in his early thirties, had light-brown hair. They might have been three film stars stopping for a chat.

  At last they shook hands and parted, then Dietrich looked around for her.

  She stepped forward. ‘Your business associates?’

  ‘No, friends. Good friends. Let’s get a drink.’

  Trailing him up a flight of stairs, Coralie saw that the railings were formed from interlocked silver swastikas.

  On the roof-garden terrace, Dietrich ordered beer for himself and ice-cold apple juice for Coralie, which arrived in a tall glass with a straw. She drank it fast. She could have asked more about his friends – but she didn’t really want to know. It should be no surprise that Dietrich was political but, ignorant as she was, she didn’t like the feel of his allegiances. He ordered her another apple juice and, while they waited, took something from his pocket.

  ‘I have important things to say to you, but sometimes objects speak louder than words.’ He opened his palm, revealing a gold ring with a blood-red stone at its centre.

  ‘Oh. It’s . . .’

  ‘Old and dull.’ He smiled. ‘I am starting to appreciate your tastes, but this is no trinket.’

  ‘Are you giving it to me?’

  He looked deep into her eyes, flooding her with emotions that scared her. ‘You have given me so much that I want to give something of myself to you. Put it into your bag and look
after it.’

  She pretended she hadn’t heard and put the ring on her middle finger. It was too large so she gave it back, watching him drop it into his jacket pocket with resignation. ‘Give it to me again in November, on our birthday.’

  ‘Yes, we need to talk about your future—’

  ‘Herr Graf von Elbing, good evening!’ A thin man with a sunburned complexion stopped at their table and extended his hand to Dietrich.

  This, presumably, was the business associate. Coralie waited for ‘Heil Hitler’, and when it didn’t come, wondered if you only did that with friends. Or maybe you didn’t heil if you were wearing a white linen suit and crushing a Panama hat under your arm, as the newcomer was. Dietrich made introductions.

  ‘My companion, Mademoiselle de Lirac. Coralie, may I present Thierry-Edgar Clisson, an old acquaintance and a fine art dealer, in every sense.’

  Clisson laughed. ‘You flatter me, Graf. Enchanted, Made¬moiselle.’ He kissed her hand.

  That kiss was Clisson’s last moment of silence for several minutes. Spouting like the Chaillot fountains, he told her that he was going abroad for a holiday in a few days and this was his final meeting before he went. ‘A whole month, bursting with friends. Fishing, outdoor cooking, lounging, every dissipation imaginable.’ Home in Paris was over the shop in rue de Seine, he told her. ‘Do you know it? A mere stone’s throw from where Baudelaire lived, and George Sand too. I hope you are impressed.’

  ‘Terribly,’ she said. ‘Were they both painters?’

  Dietrich’s headshake warned of pitfalls, so she left it at that.

  The floors below his apartment, Clisson told her, housed the most exclusive gallery of medieval art in France, and upstairs he entertained the crème de la crème. There, or at his château at Dreux in the Eure-et-Loir. ‘Thanks to my childhood, I cannot be easy with just one home. Don’t you feel the same? My parents separated and I tramped back and forth between continents until I turned twenty-one, when I realised I was bringing joy to nobody but the cobblers who re-heeled my shoes. I wrote to both parents saying that henceforth, if they wished to see me, they must travel.’

  ‘That was brave. Did you see them again?’

  The waiter arrived, and Clisson ordered champagne, insisting that it was his treat. Meeting his ‘dear, dear friend and so charming a lady’ demanded the best Pommery. He waited until it was poured before answering, ‘My father ended up in a colonial outpost, married a native girl, and spawned a brood of children as incomprehensible as his paintings. Did I say he ran a painting academy for the terminally untalented? He never could afford the passage back to France. Hurrah. It is propaganda put about by sentimentalists that parents always love their children and vice versa.’

  He likes cats, Coralie thought. His silver cufflinks had a feline paw-print etched on them.

  ‘Of my mother,’ Clisson continued, ‘I saw a great deal. Here and in Berlin. She remarried, a German air-force man. Perfectly nice fellow, the general, so I relented. Trains from Paris to Berlin are very good, the journey no trouble when one travels first class.’

  ‘Your mother was an excellent woman.’ Dietrich spoke his first words since making the introductions.

  Clisson never took his eyes off Coralie. Neither did he blink. Perhaps he couldn’t, as his eyes bulged like a frog’s. She had no idea if he admired her or was inspecting her for cracks. Even when he spoke to Dietrich, he stared at her. ‘Are we dining together tonight?’

  ‘No. Mademoiselle de Lirac and I will return to our hotel.’

  ‘So be it. I shall dine at Le Roi George in the British pavilion while you retire to your bed.’ If he’d said, ‘while you bed your mistress’, Clisson couldn’t have been clearer. Then, at last, he released Coralie’s gaze. ‘Dear Graf, let us get to business. Your note implied that you have some pieces from the von Silberstrom hoard to wave under my nose. Last time we spoke, you implied that the collection was to be kept intact.’ Clisson flashed ¬Coralie a roguish glance. ‘Mademoiselle de Lirac? What does your ¬Dietrich know of the future that makes him suddenly anxious to sell paintings for cash?’

  Coralie could have answered, ‘Ottilia needs to keep her husband happy,’ but just shrugged, unsure if she liked this gushing Frenchman.

  ‘I am a Sensitive.’ Clisson patted her wrist. ‘I absorb impressions and, let me tell you, a stroll around this pavilion is equal to ten hours listening to loud martial music. There will be war and Dietrich knows how it will start, and we all know who will start it.’

  ‘The Germans? They’re boasting, that’s all,’ Coralie put in. ‘They finished their pavilion first and they’re making everyone else feel self-conscious.’

  Clisson looked hard at her. ‘I’m intrigued. De Lirac . . . Which part of France do you come from? Something in your accent I can’t quite place.’

  She said hastily, ‘You gentlemen want to talk business and I need to visit the powder room.’

  ‘Ladies are not expected to run away the moment the word “business” is uttered. This is France, not England.’ Then Dietrich swore, realising what he’d said. He turned to Clisson, clearly intending to divert his attention. ‘When we met last, you expressed an interest in some engravings by Albrecht Dürer.’

  Clisson’s eyes boggled. ‘Sublime articles.’

  ‘Well, they are still not for sale. What I am selling is a set of delightful Russian icons. If you view them tomorrow, I guarantee you first refusal.’

  ‘But I’m going away on holiday, I told you.’

  ‘Delay it, because I am going away too, and once I am gone, this opportunity closes.’

  Coralie made her escape, and was through the doors of the roof terrace before she allowed shock to overtake her. So, he was leaving. The ring had been an attempt at a parting gift. What was she going to do without him?

  She found a lavatory some distance away. Inside a stall, she was sick again. Apples and champagne, not a great mix. Returning to the pavilion, she lingered in the swastika-decked foyer, unable to summon the will to climb the stairs. If someone threw a mattress down, she reckoned she’d lie on it and sleep for a week.

  Clisson’s talk had scared her. Surely Germany couldn’t be planning a second war after the hell of the last. War would mean choosing sides and she had no illusions now as to where Dietrich’s loyalties lay.

  People dressed for dinner were filtering around her, like waves around a rock, so she returned to the roof garden, choosing a different door because she wasn’t ready for Clisson’s perceptive eye. She’d look at the flowers, she decided, and maybe even the display of Mercedes cars parked under an awning. She ached to be alone with Dietrich and have him reassure her that his planned trip to Germany was a short necessity, that Paris was where he wanted to be.

  The carnations and freesias were at their scented peak in the evening air, but their beauty left her cold. She went to the car display, pretending she was selecting a Mercedes to drive away. For perhaps ten minutes, she inspected burr-walnut dashboards, chrome dials and reflections of herself in black panels. Clisson was still talking, she noticed, waving his hands in the air. Another bottle of champagne was arriving. Frustrated, Coralie went to the garden’s edge, staring over the river that flowed like oil through a magenta twilight. Reflections soared from its depths, shimmering piles of gold sovereigns.

  A party boat smashed through them, fireworks exploding from its stern, reminding her of the fireworks that had lit the London sky in May for the coronation of George VI . . . Slipping away from Donal who’d taken her to see the display from London Bridge, she’d run back to Bermondsey. She’d had a rendezvous to keep with a sailor whose eyes were long-lashed and up-tilted. She’d lain with Rishal on the grass of Southwark Park and listened to him talk of his home, ‘l’Ȋle Maurice’, where people spoke French. He’d been ecstatic to find a girl in London he could talk to. Ecstatic described the five succeeding nights. Then, on the sixth, he hadn’t turned up. His ship had sailed and that was that.

  Well, not quite
. Coralie spread a hand over her stomach. Time to stop pretending all this sickness was down to coffee and funny foreign food. Using her fingers as a rough abacus, she counted just short of eleven weeks since Coronation night. She’d missed her monthlies twice in a row. Oldest tale in the book, wasn’t it? Girl sleeps with boy, boy flits, girl is left with a bun in the oven. What the hell would she tell Dietrich? She had to say something before he left for Germany or he might come back and bump into her pregnant belly. She tried out a line: ‘Dietrich, I’ve been a fool but I need help.’

  She turned around. The table was empty. Dietrich and Thierry-Edgar Clisson had gone.

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘Monsieur le Comte has left, Mademoiselle. He checked out and paid his bill an hour ago.’

  Coralie shifted irritably. She’d never thought the Duet’s desk clerk was quite the full payload. ‘Von Elbing,’ she said. ‘Graf von Elbing.’ The man was obviously mixing Dietrich up with some other guest.

  ‘As I said,’ the man stated flatly, ‘Graf von Elbing paid his account and left.’

  Coralie planted her feet. No fainting, no vapours. Dietrich, being a tidy sort, had paid his bill to keep his account clear. He’d saunter back in a moment and she’d be in his arms. ‘Where has he gone?’

  ‘I have no idea, Mademoiselle.’ Was that a smirk? ‘The taxi took him to Gare de l’Est, so I presume Berlin. He has gone home.’

  Home. To his proper, respectable life. That’s what the clerk meant. Colour stinging her cheeks, Coralie demanded, ‘Did he leave anything for me?’

  The clerk made a weak show of searching the shelf under his counter. ‘It seems not. And, Mademoiselle, the establishment would be obliged if you would vacate your room tomorrow morning.’

  A thought struck her. ‘Did Brownlow accompany him? That’s his man-servant.’

  ‘I believe not.’