The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  She flipped open the letterbox and sniffed the air inside. Vaguely mushroomy . . . Chances were, the shop was still empty.

  Violaine’s flat above the salon was in darkness. The whole building was as dark as a coal-hole, not a crack of light escaping from any of the windows. As it was too late to ring door-bells, she turned for home.

  On the pont des Arts, she stopped to catch her breath. Paris sprawled on either side, like badly raked embers, dots of light everywhere. The blackout had been in force since the declaration of war, but people were getting careless. If German bombers ever came at a full moon, they’d follow the Seine as easily as a white-painted road. There had been regular alerts since September, sirens screaming, people tumbling out on to the street, gas masks bumping as they tried to work out where the nearest air-raid shelter was. All false alarms so far.

  They called it the ‘drôle de guerre’. A joke of a war.

  The country that invests everything in defence will fall to the nation that invests everything in attack. Dietrich had spoken those words to Coralie at the Panthéon, beside the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. He’d known what was coming. Perhaps, instead of fantasising about setting up on her own, she ought to be thinking about leaving Paris. Children were already being packed off to the countryside and schools were closing. Just the other day Julie, her young nanny, had asked Coralie if she meant to join the outflow. ‘Some people I know are moving to the Haute-Vienne for safety. It’s remote there.’

  ‘So remote I’ve never heard of it,’ Coralie had replied. Truth was, she had no safe haven. No friends or contacts outside Paris. Like most people, she was relying on France’s vast wall of defence, the Maginot Line, to keep the Germans at bay. She was relying on an army of two million men, and doing what that Gypsy woman had predicted for her in a field two long summers ago –‘stitching and shaping’.

  In other words, just carrying on.

  Rue de Seine was a street of galleries and antiques shops including – she glanced up – Galérie Clisson. She tutted at the chinks of light showing in the upper windows as she passed. Teddy argued that if the Germans were to bomb Paris he’d rather like his street to go first. Generosity and selfishness were united in him: he was living proof that you could love a person without actually finding much in them to admire.

  Her own place stood at the junction with rue Jacques Callot. Running lightly up the stairs and closing doors silently, she stopped in the hallway and listened. Breathing, from a tiny set of lungs and the drizzle of the nanny’s snores. Julie must be in the sitting room, asleep in a chair.

  Coralie crept into a little bedroom and knelt by a truckle bed, stroking the smudge of black curls on the pillow. Her daughter was deeply asleep, fists clenched. Coralie bent to kiss each fist in turn, and when little arms rose in a reflex movement, she sucked the child into a cuddle. Settling her back down, she sniffed. Fish. Dropping a last kiss, Coralie tiptoed out, preparing to do tactful battle with Julie. Noëlle must never eat fish. Born two months premature, she was still tiny. The smallest bone could choke her.

  Passing the kitchen door, which was ajar, Coralie noticed crocks piled on the drainer. Even for Julie, an indifferent washer-upper, it was a mess. The smell of fish was very strong. Bouillabaisse soup, if her nose told her right. Coralie went to the sitting room and turned on the light.

  A figure slumped in an armchair woke with a rough grunt.

  ‘Ramon – what the bloody hell?’ Coralie instinctively searched for a second figure in the room, but he was alone. That was something. Julie was only nineteen, and came from a respectable family of booksellers on nearby rue Jacob, but that hadn’t stopped Ramon flirting shamelessly with her. Coralie cringed at the memory. The passionate, hot-blooded man she’d thought she’d married merited a simpler definition: womaniser. She looked around. How did one man make so much mess? He’d disembowelled a newspaper. He must have read it in four different places. He’d been smoking, too, a full ashtray alongside the messy remains of a meal. She stood over him, and poked his leg. ‘Where’s Julie?’

  ‘Uh? Oh. She went home. No point us both being here.’ His shirt was wide open displaying a crop of body hair.

  ‘I hope she left before you started undressing.’

  Ramon looked down, as if trying to see his nakedness through another’s eyes. ‘I showed her a bit of chest. It’s hilarious, the way she squeaks when I look at her. The more prudish, the more they secretly want to be deflowered.’

  ‘She squeaks because you’re an oaf. Honestly, this place smells like a homecoming trawler. You know I don’t allow fish.’ Damn this blackout. ‘I can’t open a window unless we sit in the dark.’

  ‘Let’s lie down in the dark, then.’ Ramon reached for her, teeth feral and white. She turned away. There’d be none of that. The shock, a year ago, of learning that Ramon was being unfaithful had almost felled her. She’d begun to let her guard down, to feel the protective passion that, in a maturing relationship, replaces superficial attraction. Rejection, anger had been razor blades to the heart. Why did men always betray her? Was she so worthless?

  ‘Passion burns . . . like dry straw,’ her former tutor, Mademoiselle Deveau, had once told her. ‘Men are good at walking away . . . We women stay around poking the ash.’ Recalling, in those words, the dangers of victimhood, Coralie had let Ramon go. They got on all right, these days. When he was in good spirits – and her stocks of energy were sufficiently high – they could share a laugh. Noëlle adored him so he was free to come and go. But not to get spicy with Coralie.

  ‘You didn’t leave Noëlle alone when you went out for food?’ Coralie carried the remains of Ramon’s supper through to the kitchen.

  He followed her. ‘Course not, she came too. And, yes, I gave her some fish and, no, she won’t die.’ Ramon nuzzled her neck.

  Coralie had her hands in the sink by this time, and had found a soiled nappy among the cups. It occurred to her to slap Ramon round the face with it, but her anger failed to boil over. She was still too angry with Henriette to turn on anyone else. She shook him off. ‘If you knew what kind of day I’d had—’

  ‘Ah! Your show . . . Of course! You’re still wearing a hat, so it must have been good.’

  ‘I don’t get the logic but, yes, I was pleased. Afterwards . . .’ She related the rest of the story.

  Ramon gave a burst of hilarity. He never half laughed. ‘I told you Henriette would come back and claim her own. I suppose she cheated you?’

  She told him about the promised sixty thousand francs, which had somehow turned into a bill for a higher sum.

  ‘My sister is like a whale, mouth open. They don’t understand, all those little fish, that when they swim into that great mouth, they are dinner. You are one of those little fish, Coralie.’

  ‘I am not!’

  In her bedroom, Coralie put her hat into its box and shuffled round the gigantic bateau-lit. Teddy’s wedding present to her, the bed took up most of the floor, leaving just enough room for a single wardrobe. As she reached up to put the hatbox on the top, Ramon pulled her down again. ‘Can I stay,chérie?’

  ‘What’s wrong with your own mattress? Or should I say “mistress”? I’m going to warm up the last of that soup. I hope you’ve left me some bread.’

  ‘It’s too late to eat.’

  ‘For you – I’ve been on my feet all day.’ Slithering off the bed, she added grudgingly, ‘You can stay on the sofa, but don’t badger me, ha? Get carried away and I’ll do to you what Teddy’s always threatening to do with Voltaire.’

  ‘That magnificent cat. It would be a crime.’

  ‘Yet so tempting.’

  As she lit tea lights in the sitting room and laid a place at the table for one, Coralie reminded herself that, even if his taste for fidelity had been short-lived, Ramon had made her safe. He was human too, in a way she was not, caring about the underdog and the poor of the world. For all her grumblings at him, a stubborn affection remained, So really, she decided, she could make up a bed f
or him in the sitting room. Just for one night.

  Midnight. She lay listening to Ramon’s breathing. His left arm was crooked around her, and she could hear the tick of his watch under her ear. She gave in too easily, that was her problem. Had Dietrich abandoned her because she’d given herself too readily? Men didn’t value what came for free.

  What about the ring Dietrich had offered her? It hadn’t dropped out of a cracker. That man was incomprehensible. ‘I sow the seeds of my own downfall,’ she murmured. ‘Sow them, water them and tend them. I’m very thorough but, of course, I am my father’s daughter.’

  Snuffling sounds from along the hallway warned Coralie that Noëlle was waking. With a tired groan, she threw back the covers and reached for her slipper-satin dressing-gown, the one Dietrich had bought her. It still had its rose-petal sheen because she washed it in soap flakes.

  When she finally returned to bed, Ramon was sitting up. ‘I’ve a favour to ask.’ Laughing at her response, he said, ‘Not that. I need lodgings for some friends. That’s really why I came to see you.’

  ‘I’m flattered.’

  ‘They won’t stay for long and they’ll sleep on the floor. Soon as they get new papers, they’ll be gone.’

  ‘What kind of friends?’ He always referred to himself as an anarchist, pledged to smash the corrupt framework of society. ‘Friends’ could mean anything. ‘What are you mixed up in?’

  ‘In war, chérie. Like it or not, we all are. So, can you find room?’

  CHAPTER 12

  A few days later, Ramon came back at six a.m. with a bunch of very-yesterday flowers and two down-at-heel men, whom he referred to as ‘evaders’.

  Wary-eyed above black, ragged beards, they could have been a vagabond double-act that had just been booed offstage. Those clothes will have to be burned, she thought. She’d put them on the fire with a pair of tongs. ‘Do you speak French?’ she asked them.

  The men stared mutely at her, fuelling her irritation. They’d not only woken her, but Noëlle too. A distant cry of ‘Maman!’ was followed by the bump of a small body rolling out of bed.

  ‘They’d better not be call-up dodgers,’ she threw over her shoulder. When she returned, Noëlle on her hip, she gave them another inspection. One had a violin case under his arm, and a battered suitcase seemed to be their joint luggage. Their smiles at the sight of a child seemed genuine, though, and she realised they were younger than she’d imagined. ‘So, what’s an “evader”?’

  ‘A person who needs shelter. How about some breakfast?’ Ramon strode past her to the kitchen. She found him throwing open cupboards.

  ‘Where are they going to sleep?’ she demanded.

  ‘In the roof. Ah, voilà!’ His hand closed around a tin of condensed milk. ‘Have you got butter?’

  ‘They’re going to sleep in the loft?’ Her flat occupied the building’s mansard roof. Somebody at some time had added a ceiling. The space above, accessed by a ladder, was too low for a man to stand. ‘It’s for storing junk and I’m sure there are birds’ nests in there.’

  ‘It’s more comfortable than they’re used to and all they want is to lie down somewhere safe. I’ll bring blankets and sleeping rolls.’ Ramon dropped his voice. ‘They were in Spain, fighting in the International Brigades, but after demob they were pushed over the border to our side, then shoved into Gurs. That’s an internment camp for people whom France can’t think what to do with. They walked out and now they need to be laundered.’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘Given new identities, I mean. They’re musicians and want to work here in Paris. That’s why I’m helping. Music lovers stick together.’

  ‘Are they Spanish?’

  ‘Hungarian.’

  ‘Why can’t they go home to Hungaria, or wherever?’

  ‘They’re Gypsies. Romanies.’

  ‘Oh, no. I won’t have Gypsies here. Gypsies steal. They steal children.’ She drew Noëlle so tightly against her hip that the child wailed.

  ‘Coralie! I am ashamed of you.’ Ramon took Noëlle into his own arms. ‘If that prejudice is true, then all prejudices are true. This infant could be despised her whole life – some will say she carries your sin on her head. And you, being born in Belgium, must be thick and I, as a Frenchman, must be a glorious lover. Well, that last one is true, hein?’

  He always rounded off his attacks with a joke – he knew that, despite herself, she found his humour infectious. Well, she wouldn’t smile this time.

  He took her hand, and she flinched because his was cold. They’d walked through a chilly dawn. How far had those two lads walked in all? A long way, if they’d come from the Spanish border.

  ‘They aren’t wanted in their country, Coralie, and they certainly can’t travel through Germany. They are stuck here.’

  ‘All right. I’ll make coffee and eggs, and I’ll think about the rest. Butter’s in the larder cupboard. Looking at it won’t fetch it down! I’m not the maid-of-all-work, you know.’

  Over breakfast, she extracted a price: ‘Ramon, I need coal, enough to last all winter.’

  He made discouraging noises. ‘Supplies are low. The factories are burning it night and day, armaments and all that. ’

  ‘So you want your daughter to freeze. You’re all heart, Ramon Cazaubon.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. Now pass the jam.’ Seeing her expression, he laughed. ‘Please, Madame.’

  ‘Tell these boys they can’t smoke here. Not anywhere in the flat. I don’t want my child smelling like an ashtray. And smoke’s bad for children.’

  ‘It never did me any harm.’

  She made no answer, just glared, until Ramon tutted in exasperation and called, ‘Comrades, there are house rules!’

  Shaved and bathed, the two men were revealed to be only a little older than herself. Arkady and Florian. Coralie laughed when they shuffled into the sitting room wearing blue suits Ramon had found for them. Having survived on prison rations for a year, they looked like forced labourers abducted from a rice field. ‘The boys’, as she would always think of them, listened gravely as she laid down her house rules. Lavatory seat down after use. Knock before entering the bathroom. Whispering only after Noëlle’s bedtime. And no smoking, ever, whatever Ramon said on the subject.

  From then on, whenever one of them reached thoughtlessly into his pocket, the other would hiss, ‘Not allowed!’

  They smoked in the street and Coralie worried about that. Any half-awake gendarme would question two identically dressed loafers, or follow them back to the house. So, in the end, she allowed them to smoke in the stairwell, with the window open. The shop on the ground floor was run by a couple who lived elsewhere, and who used the flat above as their stockroom. They met only occasionally on the stairs but, even so, she instructed the boys to curb their native Hungarian, not even to whistle their own folk tunes, in the shared part of the building. Going down one morning to hang out washing, she caught Arkady sweeping up ash. Bright, Arkady was. Never had to be told twice.

  He took the linen basket from her and carried it downstairs. He had true musician’s hands, like a lute-player’s in a Renaissance painting. He’d carried his violin intact from Hungary, preserving it through battle and bombardment between 1936 and demob in October ’38. It had survived Gurs, a place of pigsty dormitories and mud. ‘Because he sleeps with violin,’ Florian explained. ‘He is his baby.’

  Florian’s ‘baby’ was a hammered dulcimer. That was what had been in the suitcase, padded under a few items of clothing. Coralie watched, fascinated, whenever he hung it round his neck like an ice-cream vendor’s tray. When played with metal hammers, it sang like a harp and Noëlle would go into a trance. When Arkady added accompaniment, it was like no sound Coralie had ever heard. Noëlle would grab Coralie’s hands, squealing to be danced on her feet.

  Two weeks flashed by, filled for Coralie with washing, cooking and conversation. Laughter, too, all the better for being unexpected. It eased her frustration over La Passerinette. She
’d returned to boulevard de la Madeleine a couple of days after her moonlight visit, and pressed the bell marked ‘Beaumont’. Getting no answer, she’d pressed the one above. An older woman had come down and told her that Violaine certainly had the keys to the shop. And, no, it had not been sold. Violaine had been put in temporary charge by the Baronne von Silberstrom, but neither woman was available.

  ‘Poor Violaine collapsed. Nervous exhaustion and I’m not surprised, the way that woman, Royer, drove her. She is recovering her health in a clinic outside Paris and, before you ask, I don’t recall its name.’

  Without Ottilia von Silberstrom’s London address, Coralie was defeated. Taking over La Passerinette had become a need, a dream with a pragmatic lining. She knew she could shake the place up, and she also knew she could never again work for another woman. Those closed blinds! They taunted her, as had a glimpse, on her last visit, of a white-clad female leaving the place. Red-gold hair, an enveloping fur collar, it had to be Ottilia.

  Grinding her teeth, because the traffic was too dense even for a suicidal dash, Coralie had watched the figure climb into the back of a taxi which disappeared round a corner into rue Cambon. Coralie had later telephoned Una McBride.

  ‘If you hear that the Baronne von Silberstrom is in Paris, will you find out where she’s staying? I tried the Ritz on rue Cambon, but she isn’t there.’

  Una had promised to keep her ear to the ground.

  ‘I met her in London once, but I can’t say we’re well acquainted.’

  To fill her time, Coralie started teaching the boys ‘proper’ French. Julie joined in. Nineteen, with long brown hair and full lips, she enjoyed having two young men vying for her attention and Coralie grew uneasy. Duelling musicians would be bad enough. Enraged parents, demanding the identity of their daughter’s seducer would be more dangerous than neighbours or policemen. As she couldn’t turn the boys out, she tried, gently, to point Julie towards alternative employment. She couldn’t afford a nanny at the moment, she said – but the girl burst into wild tears. ‘My parents’ house is so gloomy, nobody talks, and you need me. I am Noëlle’s second mother!’