The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  If she ever recovered from her fright, Coralie believed she might one day smile at the memory of Dietrich flinging open doors along the corridor, only to discover that every room was a stationery cupboard or an office. ‘I followed behind like chief mourner at a very slow funeral.’

  ‘You shamed him. Good for you.’

  ‘More likely he was protecting the carpets. When I came out of the lavatory, he sort of shrugged and let me go. I still don’t know what it was all about, and you must never tell Ottilia. We have to get her to safety, though, before he finds her.’

  Una nodded.

  Coralie shuddered. ‘You think, when they come for you, that you’ll fight back . . . but you don’t. You drop like a dog. There was a man at the Lutetia, Spanish, I think . . .’ But she didn’t want to speculate on his fate.

  Violaine’s fate, on the other hand, would hopefully be revealed shortly. Coralie had been too scared to go back to La Passerinette, so Arkady had gone for her. The air in the flat vibrated with shock. Noëlle had cried herself to sleep, apparently. Una had described playing interminable games with the little girl, promising every minute, ‘Maman’s coming home real soon, honey.’

  Ottilia had cried, too, when Coralie appeared, shaking and dishevelled. She was still emitting muffled sobs in her room. Una fidgeted, then picked up Coralie’s cup, taking it through to the kitchen.

  ‘Arkady’s been such a long time,’ she fretted when she came back into the sitting room.

  ‘Not if he keeps having his papers checked.’

  Una seized on that. ‘Yes, he’s Hungarian. They’ll wave him through.’

  ‘Except he’s a Gypsy,’ Coralie pointed out.

  ‘His papers don’t say that.’

  No, but his features do, and I shouldn’t have let him run my errand. Though her legs were ready to buckle, Coralie stood up to prepare supper. ‘Keep busy, girls, that’s the ticket,’ she said, in Miss Lucilla Lofthouse’s voice.

  Una called after her, ‘I’ve said it before, you do the darnedest English accent, honey. How long did you live there in all?’

  ‘Oh . . . a few years. I pick up accents. Coralie, the human parrot. Shall I do my Marlene Dietrich impression of a woman throwing together vegetable stew and salt beef?’

  Arkady arrived home minutes before curfew. He’d been stopped eight times, he said, but his papers had held up. A German guard had even given him a cigarette.

  ‘What about Violaine?’

  ‘She is at the American Hospital in Neuilly.’

  Neuilly was to the north-west, a well-heeled suburb of Paris.

  There had been a note, Arkady told Coralie, stuck through La Passerinette’s letterbox. ‘With a signature I am not reading.’ And everything else from the salon had gone, he said.

  Coralie had temporarily forgotten about her ransacked workroom. A little voice nagged, Now what will you do? Buy more stuff, she told it.

  Arkady couldn’t tell her who had organised Violaine’s transfer to the American Hospital and Coralie gave up caring because Noëlle suddenly woke, screaming for Maman.

  CHAPTER 17

  On 21 June 1940, Maréchal Petain, hero of the Great War, and his deputy Paul Laval met Adolf Hitler in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, some fifty kilometres north-east of Paris. It was the very same carriage in which the Germans had signed terms of surrender in 1918. Pétain secured peace for France on heavy terms. The financial and human cost would wring the people dry.

  Pétain was now free to form a government to work with, not against, the invaders and France was to be split into two zones. The new map showed a jagged line running westward as far as Tours, then straight down to the Spanish border. It gave the Germans control of the Atlantic and northern coastlines. Their army would occupy the northern zone, including Paris. The southern section remained under French control and people quickly named it ‘the free zone’, which made Coralie wonder if she and her friends were now prisoners.

  The following day, they gathered round the wireless to hear the words of an exiled army general, Charles de Gaulle. Curtains drawn, they listened as he urged all free Frenchmen to fight on. Never to submit to slavery.

  Arkady muttered, ‘I will get to England and join his army.’

  ‘You stay right here,’ Coralie told him. ‘There’s more than one way to fight a war.’

  ‘No, there is just one, with blood.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ Una was clearly unhappy with the turn of the conversation, ‘how is your assistant, Coralie?’

  ‘Violaine? The hospital sent her home – poor thing’s spent more time in hospital recently than anybody should. Thankfully, her neighbour came back from the country and is looking after her. I’ll go later in the week, make sure they’ve got enough to eat.’ And face her ransacked workroom: she had to plan how to get her business back on its feet.

  Meanwhile, there was plenty to worry about at home. Confidence in German goodwill was running short, as was food. As Parisians returned, shops reopened and the streets bustled once more, the pressure on supplies was showing. For the occupiers, the city still resembled an open banquet, German soldiers consuming everything while ordinary people queued for whatever was left. ‘Haricot beans and spinach!’ Una complained that evening, pushing her fork through her meagre supper. ‘German command has requisitioned any number of restaurants. They call them Soldatenheime, which means “canteen”, and you can bet they don’t serve the lentils and sawdust we get. Meanwhile, our hospitals ration medicines for our war-wounded.’

  Una had walked home that evening from the American Hospital in Neuilly where she was now working as a volunteer. Coralie would never have imagined it of her glossy friend, but Una had trained as a nurse in America. She’d done it, she confessed, to shock her socially ambitious mother and escape her grandmother’s matchmaking. ‘I grew up being told, “McBride ladies do not work,” so I chose the toughest profession I could, just to show ’em. Turned out I was quite good at it, and I might still be nursing had I not fallen in love with a Frenchman and wound up in Europe, only to fall into Mr Kilpin’s clutches – but that’s another story.’ A twelve-hour shift had left her hollow-cheeked. ‘You’ve never seen such wounds, such infections, and the place is full to bursting. Why do men do it to each other?’

  ‘Make war?’ Coralie thought about it. ‘Because, like childbirth, they think it’s going to be a breeze until they’re in the middle of it.’

  ‘I so wish for a child,’ Ottilia said sadly. She rarely concentrated on what was being discussed around her, and would randomly fish out fragments. ‘When I was engaged to Dietrich, we would plan the children we would have. Two girls, two boys.’

  ‘We have to get her to England,’ Una whispered, ‘before she bumps into him and offers to have his babies.’

  Coralie muttered, ‘I had to explain the other day why she had to pay at the counter for eggs. She actually said to the shopkeeper, “Have them delivered to rue de Seine.”’

  ‘We’ll get her away, though “to England” means across the demarcation line, through Free France to Spain, then on to Portugal.’

  Coralie made a face. ‘Getting her to Gare Montparnasse without her nerves snapping will be hard enough.’

  ‘I’ll talk to people at the hospital,’ Una promised. ‘There’s a network among the staff getting American Jews out of France. I can’t ask them to help – they’re taking enough risks as it is – but I’ll pick their brains. Meantime, take Tilly to La Passerinette with you today. Remember, hats are God’s way of reminding women that they have heads with brains in them.’

  Good idea. They could make a tea party of it. Coralie went to the kitchen and searched out the last scrapings of butter. She had a bag of flour too, so a cake of some sort was not out of the question.

  In her workroom, replaying the moment she’d found Violaine, and the shelves stripped bare, Coralie let out a hiss of rage. Sewing machines, hat-stretchers, ribbon boards, marottes and sunflower stalks could all be repla
ced. So too, eventually, could her precious hat blocks.

  It was the thought of thieves stepping over Violaine that angered her most. A Gypsy at Epsom Downs had once told her that she’d kill. She had come to understand what a lethal mix hatred and impotence could make.

  Locking the workroom behind her, she collected Noëlle and Ottilia, who were bouncing on their bottoms on the salon sofa, and together they went upstairs to Violaine’s flat. They were let in by Jeanne Thomas, the neighbour, whom Coralie had met once before and who had taken over Violaine’s care. A spare woman of around sixty, she greeted Coralie with recognition, but her curiosity was for Ottilia, who, in a spring outfit bought at Javier in 1938, held the eye like a newly opened magnolia blossom. Her auburn hair made a shining frame to her face.

  By contrast Violaine, propped against pillows, her curls lank, her spectacles keeping her place in a large-print book, was a pitiful sight. ‘Violaine, it was my fault!’ Coralie exclaimed, grasping her hand. ‘I’d have found you earlier but I chickened out of coming. Got as far as place de la Concorde, then legged it. All that time you were locked in by that scum-of-the-earth—’

  Violaine cut through Coralie’s emotion: ‘It was Lorienne.’

  Coralie studied Violaine, wondering if her marbles had come loose during the ordeal. ‘Lorienne left Paris ages ago. Went to Dijon, I heard.’

  ‘She did not leave. Good day, Madame la Baronne.’ ¬Violaine gave her hand to Ottilia who, until that moment, had been ¬concentrating on removing her skin-tight gloves. Coralie felt something flit between the two women. Sympathy?

  Violaine repeated that Lorienne had not left Paris. ‘The Dijon story was to save face. You terminated her tenure, Madame, did you not?’

  Ottilia bit her lip. ‘Dietrich assured me she was understating her profits to cheat me. So distasteful, dismissing people, and in the end, I had my London solicitor write the letter. Lorienne replied in the vilest terms, calling me a . . . I won’t say it.’

  Violaine nodded, seemingly unsurprised. ‘She took a job in another milliner’s – with Henriette Junot, in fact. One of our customers saw her there. She has some kind of role as Henriette’s deputy. She calls herself “directrice”.’

  ‘What can you remember about the day she came back here?’ Coralie asked.

  Violaine made a face. ‘It was the twelfth or thirteenth of July. The streets were in turmoil and I feared the shops would close and I’d be left without food. I couldn’t cross the road at my usual place – so many cars nose-to-bumper, honking their horns. Finding a fishmonger and a grocer’s that had anything left took me hours. Back home, I unlocked the street door and someone shuffled me inside.’

  ‘Lorienne?’

  ‘That white-blonde hair is unmistakable, I should think,’ Ottilia murmured.

  ‘She had two others with her.’ Violaine closed her eyes. ‘Lorienne wanted to know why the hats were gone from the window. I told her they were locked away, that we’d closed for the duration. She said, “The hats are mine now. Mademoiselle de Lirac sold them to me.” I didn’t believe her, but she pushed me to the workroom and flattened me against the door until I gave her the key.’

  ‘You said three people?’

  ‘Three women. One,’ Violaine’s lips bent in disapproval, ‘wore trousers. She had short hair and a gruff voice.’

  Henriette – who else? It stank of revenge. Coralie asked, ‘They cleared the shelves?’

  ‘In laundry bags that they brought with them.’

  ‘And shut you in deliberately?’

  ‘I’d bought peaches and apples at the shops, and there was water in the kettle. Otherwise I would have died.’

  ‘Didn’t fancy those fish, then?’

  Violaine turned unfocused eyes to Coralie, but proved herself equal to a joke. ‘Oh, no, not raw.’

  Noëlle, who so far had sat quietly beside Ottilia, pointed to the basket containing Coralie’s cake and lisped, ‘Oh, no, not raw.’

  Everyone laughed, chasing away tension. Madame Thomas went to make tea, Coralie accompanying her. As the water boiled, Madame Thomas spoke of her pleasure at having somebody to care for again. She’d given up her work as a bookkeeper during her late husband’s illness, she said, nursing him until his death five years ago. ‘And after that, a silence descended.’

  Coralie heard herself asking if Madame Thomas would care to take on La Passerinette’s accounts. ‘I was going to put a notice in the window. I’m reopening in October, and I need to run things more professionally. I’m all right with figures, but I’d rather make hats!’

  ‘October?’ Violaine cried, when Coralie repeated her plan over tea. ‘Why so long? We may be struggling, but it’s not the same for everyone. Fine goods are flying off the shelves. Madame Thomas, tell her!’

  Ottilia got in first. ‘You can’t buy stockings or lingerie because the shelves are stripped bare by German soldiers, sending gifts home to their wives and sweethearts.’

  Madame Thomas pursed her lips. ‘Or buying them for a certain kind of girl here. It’s the old story. If you’re prepared to shame yourself, you’ll do all right.’

  Very well, September, Coralie conceded. Two and a half months in which to find a workshop’s-worth of new tools and make new stock. ‘What’s gone is gone.’ She could barge into Henriette Junot’s and demand the return of her property but she’d be met by innocent faces, laughed out on to the street.

  Paris was teaching her the lesson she’d first learned in London – a working-class girl who dared to reach for her dreams found plenty of people ready to shove her back down. Down she must go . . . only to bob back up again, like a champagne cork. She watched Ottilia eating cake with a silver fork – Violaine’s kitchen drawer had yielded just the one and everyone else was eating with their fingers – and thought, I reckon I have problems, but Tilly has ten thousand enemies in Paris, and if she’s shoved under, she won’t resurface.

  CHAPTER 18

  Six days later, on the last Friday of June, Coralie de Lirac and Una McBride sat at a table in a low-lit nightclub, dressed as if war belonged to a different universe. They’d left Ottilia at home, watching over Noëlle, and Coralie was looking forward to a few hours’ unfettered fun.

  The Vagabonds had been given a spot at the Rose Noire, and tonight was their debut. Nursing their drinks, because wine here was now shockingly expensive, Coralie and Una waited for the music to start. The electricity had just blown again. The lights were back on in Paris but supply was erratic up there in Montmartre.

  When the Vagabonds finally trooped on, Una whooped.

  ‘Last time they played here, they only just escaped with their limbs intact,’ Coralie reminded her.

  ‘Oh, those Corsicans are long gone,’ Una assured her. ‘They made hay while Martel was in prison, but now he’s out, they’ve melted into the free zone. It’s illegal to move currency from one zone to another, so professional criminals are having to choose. The Vagabonds of Swing are in business and the light of civilisation shines once more.’

  Looking round, Coralie couldn’t see much proof of it. And when she saw a party of six German officers sit down at a table nearby, she questioned her sanity in being there at all.

  Dietrich was among the group. Thank Heaven the lighting was so low, Serge Martel’s glass centrepiece having been turned off so as not to overload the circuit. ‘This wine’s too warm,’ Coralie complained, reassigning her anxiety. ‘We should ask for an ice bucket.’

  ‘Honey, we’d get an empty one. Who’s delivering ice?’

  ‘And we’re outnumbered by men. Lucifer’s mother would get a dance here tonight. I don’t want to talk to any bloody Germans ever, let alone dance with one.’

  ‘Too bad, because one of them is gazing at you most intently. Nice-looking, if you go for the frozen-warrior type.’

  So, he’d seen her. Coralie stared fixedly at the stage. The Vagabonds began with Edith Piaf’s ‘Ma Coeur Est Au Coin d’Une Rue’, a melancholy number. Arkady’s playing was as assur
ed as ever, but Florian seemed tentative. He had returned alone to Paris and had a lost, neglected look about him His crimson shirt hung loose. At some point, he’d discarded his dulcimer for a rhythm guitar, and looked as if he was regretting that, too.

  After ‘Ma Coeur’, Arkady swung into a blistering ‘That’s A Plenty’. Coralie murmured, ‘Poor Florian can’t keep up.’

  ‘His fault for bolting to the country. All the proper musicians stayed put, got drunk and played “La Marseillaise” as the Nazis closed in.’

  ‘Did he and Julie marry?’

  ‘No. Even Florian can do better than that silly girl.’ Una sniffed.

  ‘Julie’s not silly, just young. Oh, Lord, brace yourself.’ Two men in badly pressed suits were stubbing out cigarettes, preparing to advance. They looked French, but that was all that could be said for them.

  ‘Dancing, ladies?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’ Una allowed the taller of the two to lead her to the floor.

  ‘So?’ The other faced Coralie. She vaguely recognised him. She was sure he’d once been a doorkeeper here. Why wasn’t he in the army? He seemed to read her and said aggressively, ‘Something you want to say?’

  ‘I’d rather dance than talk,’ she said. A few circuits of the floor would keep the peace.

  Afterwards Coralie accepted another glass of warm wine, and asked about Martel. ‘They say he’s out of jail . . . Really? After what he did?’

  All true, her companion said. Martel had been pardoned by the new regime. He’d have been here tonight, except he’d been sent to a holding centre.

  ‘Getting used to open spaces again?’

  ‘Being deloused, more probably.’ The man gestured over his shoulder. ‘He won’t like this lot.’

  At first she thought he meant the Germans, until he turned to glare at Arkady’s Vagabonds.

  ‘Third-rate foreigners. They only got the spot because they’re instrumentalists. Singers are too much trouble now that lyrics have to be vetted for anything anti-Nazi.’