The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘Has he no friends who could get hold of him for you?’ Una asked.

  ‘I tried some galleries, and an auction house he deals with, but as soon as I said my name, they cut the call. In Berlin “von Silberstrom” is as well known as Rothschild in London, or Rockefeller in New York. Only, these days, our name makes people put down the phone. I rang my brother Max in Geneva, and he thought Dietrich might be in Shanghai.’

  ‘China?’ Julie gasped. The word circled the table, gathering incredulity.

  ‘I loved Shanghai Express,’ Coralie said, ‘but I wouldn’t want to be on that train. China’s at war, isn’t it?’

  ‘With Japan,’ Una said.

  Ottilia sighed. ‘Dietrich went to buy Oriental art, which is going cheaply now.’

  ‘One man’s war is another man’s profit.’ Una said it with a half-smile but Ramon growled, ‘Damn capitalist.’

  Not a capitalist, just passerine, Coralie answered silently. Flitting from tree to tree, feeding as he goes. ‘None of this explains how you got stuck in Paris,’ she said to Ottilia. It was dawning on her that this stranded creature might some day become a liability.

  The answer was simple. Once war had been declared and the night-ferry to England suspended, Ottilia couldn’t conceive of any other means of returning to London.

  ‘What about travelling through Spain and Portugal?’ Una chided.

  ‘Or Marseille?’ Coralie put in. ‘You could have sailed to Gibraltar. Or crossed from Brittany to Portsmouth.’

  Ottilia stared. ‘Where are they, though? Any of those places?’

  Such helplessness clearly appealed to the males around the table, particularly Ramon. The scourge of the bourgeoisie stared moonstruck, missing his lips with his glass, quietly mouthing, ‘Such white skin, such auburn hair.’ Meanwhile, Coralie thought that six months’ hard labour under Granny Flynn would have done Ottilia von Silberstrom the world of good.

  For her part, Ottilia was besotted with Noëlle, wanting nothing but to hold her. And, of course, today wasn’t just Christmas Day, it was Noëlle’s second birthday and after lunch came presents. Coralie had made a rag-doll. Una had bought Noëlle her first pair of proper shoes, cream kid with round toes and ribbon ties. Ramon produced a wooden dog on a string and made them scream with laughter by barking as the child pulled it across the floor. Ottilia presented a beautifully wrapped box containing a platinum and diamond bracelet.

  ‘We can’t accept that,’ Coralie said awkwardly, and Ottilia’s eyes brimmed.

  ‘But you must. I love to give and so much has been stolen from me. Really, take it because it will spare me pain.’

  When, later, Coralie tentatively broached the subject of buying La Passerinette, Ottilia breathed, ‘Of course you must have it. Yes, take it.’

  Now Coralie understood Dietrich’s frustration. Ottilia had been born to boundless wealth, but she’d lost most of her assets when she fled Germany. What she had left needed to be protected. From swindlers and, it would appear, from Ottilia herself.

  After dinner, the men elected to walk down towards the river to stretch their legs and smoke, and once they’d muffled themselves against the weather and left, Una found paper and pencils.

  ‘Let’s wrap up business while the men are away. Coralie, you want that shop. Tilly, you’d like to sell. You need ready cash, I guess?’

  Ottilia nodded. ‘I do not properly understand, but when I go to the Chase Bank, they say my money is frozen.’

  ‘Well, it’s jolly chilly out.’

  ‘I only have the money in the suitcase I brought from London.’

  Una found Radio Paris on the wireless and, to the velvet strains of Maurice Chevalier, helped Coralie and Ottilia carve out a deal. Coralie would take over the shop lease and buy the business for fifty thousand francs, to be paid in monthly instalments. That would include all the stock and whatever goodwill had survived Lorienne’s fingernails. Coralie would also employ Violaine Beaumont, who was shortly to be released from medical supervision and would return to the flat above the empty shop.

  Ottilia explained, ‘La Passerinette is her home and she is frightened of leaving it. My dear Dietrich – I mean, Graf von Elbing – says that she is a little brown bird who builds a nest and sits on the eggs, invisible to all. What bird is that?’

  ‘A chicken?’ Coralie hazarded.

  ‘Wren, surely,’ Una offered.

  ‘Dietrich speaks in pictures. Did you not notice that when you met him?’ Ottilia’s eyes sought Coralie’s.

  ‘Not really,’ Coralie hedged. Did Ottilia know of her affair with Dietrich? The childlike gaze offered no clues. Coralie had given Una a hazy outline of her early days in Paris, mentioning a German who’d ‘looked after’ her but without mentioning a name. Una, fortunately, was fiddling with the radio dial, trying to get a sharper signal, so the awkward conversation died. ‘Let’s talk about fashion,’ Coralie suggested. ‘I need lots of ideas if I’m to pay you on the nail every month.’

  Ottilia took the bait, and they drew hats until the men came home.

  Just under five months later, in May 1940, German forces attacked the Netherlands. On the tenth of the month their air force bombed the heart out of Rotterdam. On the fourteenth, the Dutch surrendered. The German Army swept on into Belgium.

  In Paris, people assured each other, ‘The Low Countries don’t have our defences or our fine army. Or our Maginot Line. The Germans won’t get this far.’

  The Germans reached the Ardennes forest, the ancient and supposedly impenetrable boundary between Belgium and France, smashed through it and turned along the Somme, to cut off the Allied troops in Belgium.

  The British Expeditionary Force, which had thought to stop the enemy’s westward advance, was driven back towards the sea. On 27 May, a massacre was averted by the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of troops from the beaches of the Flanders coast. ‘The miracle of Dunkirk’ left France with a demoralised army facing Blitzkrieg, lightning war: formations of German tanks and armoured vehicles, supported by bombers and fighter planes, moving at breathtaking speed. The Maginot Line, stood un-breached but useless. The enemy had cut around it, outflanked it.

  On 3 June, an air raid on Paris was announced by wailing sirens that shocked people from sleep. Guns pounded, impossible to know how far away or quite from which direction. The press kept up an optimistic tone. We will conquer because we are the strongest. Even so, people spoke of leaving Paris, of crossing the Loire, which would surely provide a second barrier to an advancing army.

  On 13 June, those who remained in the capital felt the ground shake from artillery fire. They saw shells streaking across a sky dark with smoke, and heard a sound like mill wheels grinding. An army approaching. Refugees spilling in from the north spoke of German fighter planes strafing them on the roads, and thousands dying as they tried to outrun the enemy to reach France and its supposedly safe countryside. In the parks and boulevards, people looked into the sky, and thought of Warsaw and Rotterdam. They noticed birds collecting in the trees, flying up, like fountain jets, then migrating in dark flocks.

  Humans took warning and began to leave too, in cars, trucks, on bicycles and horseback, grid-locking every road out. Julie and her family went, taking Florian with them. Ramon Cazaubon, though technically outside the age range for military conscription, left to offer himself anyway. Coralie and the friends who stayed with her barricaded themselves into the flat on rue de Seine.

  On 14 June, the Germans entered Paris. In tanks, in armoured vehicles, in huge numbers.

  Reichsminister Göring was one of the commanders at the forefront of the occupation. He brought with him a special adviser, a man who knew Paris well. A man who cut a fine figure in a Luftwaffe uniform and who cherished long-held vengeance in his heart.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 15

  Coralie stepped out on to the pavement, blinking in the light, Noëlle’s small hand in hers. Four days shut indoors, waiting for invasion, bombardment and death, had
been as much as she could bear. If they were going to die, let them die breathing fresh air.

  Paris had fallen. The news had been barked around the streets, in harshly accented French, from loudspeakers mounted on trucks. Electricity had been cut, telephones, too, but at least the shellfire had stopped.

  Everything looked strangely peaceful. Too peaceful. On a Saturday in the middle of June, rue de Seine should have been a hive of commerce, yet every shop and café had its shutters down. Most of the population had gone. Those who had stayed, like Coralie and her friends, were still cowering indoors.

  Had things been normal, she would have been at La Passerinette. Making, selling, celebrating nearly six months of ownership. But La Passerinette and place de la Madeleine lay on the other side of the river in what, for all she knew, was a war zone.

  ‘Maman! Look!’ Noëlle toddled a few steps, pointing eagerly. It took a moment for Coralie to see what was exciting the child.

  ‘Oh! Voltaire! He’s come home. No, darling, I’ll catch him.’

  Teddy Clisson had left ahead of the Germans’ entry into Paris, heading for his country house at Dreux. Around that time Voltaire, terrified by nights of shelling and the crump of bombs on the western suburbs, had vanished. Coralie had joined with Teddy, calling his name frantically through the traffic-clogged streets, fighting through the exodus of terrified citizens, all the way to quai Voltaire where Teddy had first found the cat as a stray.

  He’d be overjoyed to know his darling was alive, though how she’d send the news, with the postal service suspended, Coralie couldn’t imagine.

  ‘You’ve been fighting,’ she accused the cat. Voltaire was decidedly less glossy than before, and one ear hung oddly. ‘That needs bathing. Maybe I should fetch your basket . . .’ But as she bent forward, Voltaire shot away. ‘Never mind,’ she comforted Noëlle. ‘He’ll be back when he gets really hungry.’

  Coralie herself was starving, her belly tucked inwards like a dented tea tray. She and her houseguests – Una, Ottilia and Arkady Erdös – had dined well on the first day of their self-imposed incarceration, less well on the second, and for the past two days, only Noëlle had eaten. Coralie craved bread, but would any bakers have stayed open? They needed fresh produce, too – fish, milk.

  Turning back towards the house, she saw her companions looking up and down the street as if they feared she, like Voltaire, had vanished. She called, ‘It’s like the plague’s been and we’re the last people left alive.’

  ‘Let’s go forage.’ Una had a shopping basket over her arm. She’d locked up her avenue Foch apartment on the same day Teddy had left town, feeling uncomfortably close to the undefended edge of the city. She’d collected Ottilia from rue de Vaugirard and arrived at Coralie’s, announcing, ‘We’re going to pool resources and your place is easiest to heat, being small.’ Discovering that one of Coralie’s two ‘evaders’ was still in residence, she’d added a cheer. ‘I’ve always hated all-women affairs. Gorgeous Arkady can play us to sleep with his violin. Though, hah, his glissandos do put fire in my veins . . . Does one still have to climb a ladder to get into his roof-space?’

  Coralie had suspected an attraction between the two at Christmas and told Una that Arkady had jolly well better pull up his ladder whenever he went to bed. ‘Una, you can share mine – it’s huge. Ottilia can have Noëlle’s, and Noëlle can snuggle next to me.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’ Una had brought linen and blankets, a steamer trunk of clothes and ‘a box of gold-dust’, which turned out to be a dozen bars of hard soap stacked on top of wads of French francs. She’d emptied her bank account a month before, she’d said, when it seemed clear that the drôle de guerre was going to stop being funny all too soon.

  Ottilia had arrived with her makeup case, two fur coats, a canister of Indian tea and all the currency she’d brought from London, stuffed into a hatbox.

  After consulting with Arkady, they agreed that rue Mouffetard was their best bet for provisions as its market had traded almost without pause since the Middle Ages. There, they found a few stalls open and filled Una’s basket with red-stalked chard, potatoes, radishes and bruised apples. From atraiteur, they bought chicken baked with tarragon, and pigeon breast with Puy lentils. Best of all, they found a café open.

  They ordered coffee, fresh bread and butter. The Germans had shipped in bread flour, the patron said. ‘They are well organised, and we won’t starve. But our army . . . how could our magnificent army simply collapse? I blame the British, taking to their ships, leaving us undefended. Perfide! Another pot of coffee?’

  ‘Might as well,’ Coralie said. Ramon had taught her to love coffee. It had been a slow affair, but once she’d finished breast-feeding Noëlle, the smell no longer nauseated her. He’d failed to convert her to his other vice, cigarettes. She could see Arkady rubbing his fingers together, a sure sign he’d run out of tobacco. Hiding a smile, she said, ‘The Germans won’t be sharing theirs, Arkady. Better try to give up.’

  After breakfast, Arkady and Ottilia went home with the shopping. Coralie, Una and Noëlle continued towards the river. Time to brave the unknown and find out how her business had fared. She was anxious for Violaine, whom she’d not seen since the day panic had gripped Paris.

  Coralie’s first season at La Passerinette had proved more interesting than profitable. Without the capital to finance a full collection, she’d created a range of house models. Customers chose a basic shape, taking away a hat trimmed to suit them. But every time Coralie or Violaine finished a model, somebody would buy it. They could never keep the window full and, after a while, word spread that they’d gone out of business.

  Coralie’s response had been to shut up shop for two weeks in April while she and Violaine did nothing but make hats. They blocked baku and sisal shells into summer shapes. Taking La Passerinette’s signature pink and grey as their theme, they’d added swathes of net and silk flowers to give the impression of opulence. With millinery supplies ever harder to come by, Coralie had experimented with layered tarlatan and buckram, which, when covered with silk, organdie or taffeta, transformed low-cost materials. In Violaine, Coralie had a fast-fingered helper who made three hats to her every one, and who was seldom discouraged by outré ideas. For her part, Violaine had greeted Coralie’s arrival with pleasure, once she was assured that her job was safe. Her poor eyesight made her fearful of the world beyond a few familiar streets and she was happiest in La Passerinette’s workroom, behind the salon. She liked to work without interference, to be allowed a lunch hour and to have her salary paid on time, modest requirements that Lorienne Royer had found impossible to meet. From their first day together, Coralie had been determined to show Violaine that she was valued.

  She’d watch Violaine sewing millinery wire through two thicknesses of buckram, or painting shellac on to silk, and be reminded of a favourite bedtime story of Noëlle’s: ‘Once upon a time, a shoemaker took on too many orders. Kindly elves slipped in at night, and stitched for him till dawn . . .’

  With Noëlle between them, Coralie and Una’s first promenade through occupied Paris was necessarily slow. Expecting burned buildings and bomb craters around every corner, they were pleasantly astonished by the complete absence of damage. Paris had fallen, it seemed, with the grace of a lady swooning on to her sofa. Only when they reached the river did they encounter their first field-grey uniforms. Sentries stood guard at pont du Carrousel. Two stepped forward, sub-machine guns at the ready. ‘Halt!’

  ‘I leave all my worldly goods to you, honey,’ Una muttered – dangerously – in English.

  ‘Likewise,’ said Coralie. But they were politely waved through.

  ‘Why have men got pans on their heads?’ Noëlle demanded. At two and a half, her speech was already well developed – Coralie put it down to her being the only child among garrulous adults.

  ‘Not pans, darling. Helmets. So their heads don’t get hurt.’

  ‘How hurt?’

  ‘By birds dropping from the sky,’ Una a
d-libbed. They’d told Noëlle that the bombing of the Renault car factory at Boulogne-Billancourt was men practising drums for the 14 July parties.

  Mindful of the guns behind them and uncertain what lay behind the hulking Palais du Louvre on the opposite bank, Coralie tried to maintain normality. At least the Seine hadn’t changed, glinting platinum where the morning sun smashed its surface. From her first days in Paris, Coralie had loved the river. Crossing it was to be suspended between different lives – troubles always belonged to one side or the other.

  ‘Dear God, will you look at that!’ Una had stopped and was staring back towards the Left Bank. Above a skyline of grey roofs poked the Eiffel Tower. A banner fluttered from its summit. ‘I’m certain that’s a swastika.’

  Coralie thought so too.

  ‘Want to go back home?’

  ‘Maybe . . .’ Coralie knew if she turned tail, it might be days before she summoned the courage to try again. And the sentries had smiled. They made it to the Right Bank without hindrance, but on quai des Tuileries, a line of khaki motorbikes and sidecars screened the embankment wall. ‘Looks like a whole platoon has gone swimming.’

  They peered over the parapet down to the wharf below. Where lovers used to stroll and artists would sit sketching, soldiers walked with a steady, patrolling beat.

  On place de la Concorde, the familiar sight of the Egyptian obelisk swaddled in sandbags was almost comforting. Not so the machine-gun posts at each corner of the square. Important-looking staff cars, swastikas flying from the grilles, shared the road with military trucks crammed with troops under canvas tilts. Not a French vehicle to be seen.

  Coralie said, ‘Listen.’ From the head of the Champs-Élysées came the sound of martial music, underscored by a rhythmic pounding, like neatly sliced thunder. An old man – the only other civilian in the square – told them what it was.