The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  Dietrich caught up with her. ‘If you wish I will order everybody living in the street to search. Everybody out of their houses in the rain, to search, on pain of arrest. Shall I do it?’

  He meant it, too. Have him act like the enemy, even for Noëlle? ‘No, just help me look.’ Back on the pavement, she turned round and round, willing Noëlle to appear through the blur. Her hair was streaming, her clothes too.

  ‘If Ramon had found her on the stairs, would he have taken her away with him?’

  ‘No.’ Ramon, for all his flaws, was not a man knowingly to inflict pain. ‘He would have put her back inside the flat. It’s Martel,’ she moaned. ‘He’s got her.’

  ‘How would Martel have got inside your house?’

  ‘I don’t know! But he threatened to sell Noëlle, pass her around filthy men until she died. My girl.’ Her guts twisted and she bent forward to control the pain. ‘Please,’ she murmured through desiccated lips. ‘Please.’ A flash of memory: in a field in England, she’d demanded of a Romany, ‘Read my love-line.’

  And the woman had said, ‘It is unclear. It is severed. I see children. You will kill.’

  Now I understand. She gripped Dietrich, her nails penetrating to the flesh under the sturdy cloth of his jacket. ‘Why my child, why not me?’ She saw a matching pain in his eyes, but this time it didn’t frighten her. It was like reading her own emotions in large script.

  ‘Why your child?’ He spoke in German, slowly. ‘Why my child, Coralie?’

  She struck him with her fists because otherwise the scream inside her would rip through tissue and bone. ‘I can’t bear it. I want to die.’

  ‘So, perhaps you do understand. Come.’ He led her across the road, back to the flat, using the keys he’d taken from the hallstand. ‘She must be indoors. Nothing else makes sense.’ In the flat, he said, ‘You search this side of the hall,’ he indicated the kitchen, ‘I will search the other. Open everything. Everything.’

  In the bathroom there was an airing cupboard fitted into a corner, so poky that Coralie had to roll her towels to fit them on the shelves. She opened the door without hope and saw, in the gap between the floor and the bottom shelf, a small form. Head at an angle, knees drawn up. Coralie sank down and reached in. Noëlle came out in the same shape, as if she’d been set in a mould. Coralie carried her to the lounge where she found Dietrich pulling items from a sideboard.

  He came over and pressed his knuckle into the hollow under the child’s ear. ‘She’s all right.’

  Voice thick with sleep, Noëlle murmured, ‘Found you, Maman.’

  He put a glass in her hand. ‘Calvados. I found it in your sideboard.’

  It was left over from Christmas. Coralie sat up and raised it to her lips.

  ‘Are you all right now?’

  ‘Mostly. I can’t believe how I panicked.’ Her right ankle was throbbing because running up and down the street had strained already weakened ligaments. She hadn’t known fatigue like this since giving birth.

  Dietrich had lit a fire – the first in the grate since she’d attempted to burn Ottilia’s documents, but no warmth reached her. He fetched a blanket and wrapped it around her, sitting down beside her. ‘Are you able to talk?’

  ‘Won’t they expect you back at work?’

  ‘No. I don’t report to anybody in that building. But we are here, and unlikely to be interrupted unless your child wakes.’ They glanced at Noëlle, curled like a dormouse on a quilt in front of the fire. ‘Or your husband drops in again.’

  ‘He won’t, but I’m in no mood for chat.’

  ‘“Chat” is not what I have in mind. I have been waiting to tell you of my life after Paris. I had not the strength the other night, but now feels right.’

  She took a slug of Calvados; Normandy apples with the innocence fermented out of them. ‘All right. Speak.’

  He told her that the letter she’d concealed had been his son’s last cry for help. ‘Waldo was begging for release from military training and he must have thought I had turned my back. My poor boy. He was desperate. When I left you at the Expo, it was because I had received a telegram, stating that Waldo had collapsed.’

  ‘That’s why you went so abruptly.’

  He signalled to her to be quiet. ‘Once, you asked me to listen while you recited something deeply painful. I ask the same of you now. The telegram mentioned an accident, though nothing of how serious it was. I raced by taxi to Gare de l’Est, got on a train that was just about to pull out, and by the early hours, I was over the German border. Nobody could have travelled faster. Even so, I was too late. Waldo was dead even before I left Paris.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Dietrich got up, walked to the window. ‘His heart failed.’

  ‘That only happens to old men.’

  ‘It happened. The afternoon he died, the afternoon you and I went together to the Expo, he ran in the heat. He should not have run at all, the oxygen supply to his blood was insufficient. It was a boiling day and each boy carried ten kilograms on his back – considered top weight. Waldo doubled it, because he wanted to prove himself a man. Twenty kilograms. Do you know how much that is?’

  She thought of Donal, staggering under the weight of laundry baskets, wheezing, ‘These weigh a ton!’ Twenty kilos . . . She bought flour in two-kilo sacks. Ten of those.

  ‘I tried it.’ Dietrich turned to face her, firelight flickers stripping the years from him. ‘I drove to a lake near my family home, to see how far I could run round its perimeter with twenty kilos on my back. Forty years old, that gave me some excuse, but I was near to collapse before I was a quarter of the way round. I could not have done what Waldo did.’

  ‘You think he put that weight on his back, knowing it would kill him?’

  ‘I admire my son—’ He stopped and fixed Coralie with a reproach she could not sustain.

  ‘Dietrich, I didn’t kill Waldo.’

  ‘No? That letter needed to reach me.’

  Shame had nowhere to hide in her face. She looked away, saying, ‘Brownlow dropped it on purpose. He set me up.’ When Dietrich made no response, she nodded in bitter acceptance. ‘I can’t pin it on Brownlow, can I? I opened it because I wanted to know who was writing so often, who might take you away from me.’ She wanted to express her sorrow, but knew he must have heard trite condolences too often. She waited. Waited for words of forgiveness. Waited until she wondered if he’d even heard her.

  At last Dietrich spoke. ‘I admire my son for choosing such a courageous and defiant—’ He stopped. Breathed deeply. ‘Such a defiant—’ A muscular spasm gripped him, pulling the line of his chest and shoulders out of shape.

  She ran to him, grasping a hand that shook convulsively. Was it his heart too? Was he having a seizure? ‘Dietrich?’

  A terrible sound escaped him and she saw his face twist. She drew him to her, taking his weight, while something broke inside him. At last she allowed herself to say, ‘I’m sorry. Darling, I’m so sorry.’ Then, because he didn’t throw her off or unleash any rage on her, she said, ‘I love you and I want to make it up to you.’

  ‘It is too late.’

  ‘I want to make you happy.’

  ‘That is beyond possible.’

  ‘Then at least let me take away some of your pain. Let me try.’ I can help you, she vowed silently. I can help you mend and you – she looked to Noëlle, murmuring in her sleep – you can protect us from Serge Martel.

  Becoming lovers again required several weeks of tentative courtship, rebuilding intimacy. When, one diamond-cold night just before Christmas, Coralie invited Dietrich to join her in the rustic bed, it was with a new consciousness of him as a hurt and complex man. They loved with a mute intensity because their bond had deepened, beyond words.

  He had allowed her to see into his soul, as he had allowed nobody else. She had been hurt and rejected almost beyond bearing, but chose to trust again. Only when some cruelty of war thrust itself in front of them did their closeness waver.

>   The months marched on; the German clamp tightened. War raged throughout the world, changing in shape but never lessening in savagery. A mood of resistance grew in France.

  On rue de Seine, Noëlle celebrated her third birthday, and a year later in 1941, her fourth, by which time she had stopped asking about ‘Papa Ramon’ whom she never saw any more. She had learned to look forward to visits from ‘Oncle Dietrich’, who was teaching her German and was very gentle with her. Life went on.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 25

  TUESDAY, 24 MARCH 1942

  Coralie opened her eyes to citrus light. She was in Dietrich’s flat, the one that had once been Ottilia’s, in a bedroom facing the Jardin du Luxembourg. It must have been early because the birdsong was louder than the strict-time step of the sentries marching alongside the park railings. The sentries always turned off rue de Vaugirard on to rue Guynemer where, after a hundred steps, they would stamp, turn and march back. She lay contemplating the day ahead. Today she launched her latest spring–summer collection, and she ought to be up, choosing what to wear. But instead of flinging back the bed covers, she reached out and stroked a man’s taut stomach.

  Just enough pressure to invite him awake.

  Dietrich rolled over and took her in his arms, kissing her slowly at first, with heightening passion as he came fully conscious. He stroked the curve of her waist, her hip, fingers exploring and teasing until she was whispering his name and pulling his lips to hers.

  They tangled, with a sense of mischief that came from the very private nature of their relationship. Dietrich had finally induced Coralie to relinquish her apartment and move into this building, though only after a sustained siege. She had insisted on keeping a token independence, moving herself and Noëlle into the flat one floor up, where the art collection had once been stored. Micheline occupied the ground floor, acting both as Coralie’s nanny and as concierge, with Florian Lantos, whom she’d married. Each morning, Micheline took Noëlle to a nursery school on boulevard Saint-Germain.

  Noëlle remained a slight child, and would probably always be so as rationing and shortages had stripped everyone’s diet of proteins and essential fats. For all that, she was happy, delightfully opinionated in three languages. French, of course, German and American English, the latter taught her by her godmother Una, her Tante Nou-Nou, until Coralie put a stop to it.

  Germany had declared war on America in December 1941, after its ally Japan had bombed the Hawaiian port of Pearl Harbor. In a stroke, Una and her compatriots lost their neutral status. Just as Una had handed over her Rolls-Royce before it could be seized, she’d resigned her flat on avenue Foch to a German intelligence chief, taking Coralie’s old home on rue de Seine, which she shared with Arkady. ‘Musical chairs for the dispossessed.’ Arkady was at last her acknowledged lover. Her SS Sturmführer was history, and most evenings, Una could be found at home knitting jumpers from scraps of wool – or making dinners from scraps of food.

  Most people kept to their homes now, shopping in the mornings when the shelves were better stocked. At night, Paris went dark, pinpricks of light showing where the brothels and nightclubs were.

  The Rose Noire thrived because Serge Martel was now one of the most powerful black-marketeers in Montmartre. The Vagabonds still played three nights a week, but Coralie never went.

  Martel had not denounced her. His interest in Dietrich had mutated to a cautious truce. Coralie’s business was thriving, miraculously protected from the officious probings of German tax inspectors. She was safe, Noëlle was safe, and they had Dietrich to thank for it.

  ‘Tuesday is a stupid day to launch a collection,’ she murmured into Dietrich’s shoulder. ‘People have hardly got their week started. But we know what’s ahead.’

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘Easter.’ Which came in early April, and after that, Hitler’s birthday on the twentieth. A rumour was circulating that the Führer intended to celebrate in Paris. Whether he came or not, parties and receptions would be held in his honour, and Coralie had planned her launch to give her workroom time to complete the commissions that were building up.

  ‘I shall come to see you late this afternoon,’ Dietrich said, against her lips.

  ‘No, come early.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The rules. Never the twain.’

  ‘It’s for everyone’s good.’

  A regime had established itself at La Passerinette. German customers before lunch, French after. Many high-ranking German officers had brought their wives to Paris and these women expected precedence over the French. Coralie dared not offend them, and running La Passerinette resembled diplomatic hopscotch. It was why these last moments in bed were precious.

  So why spoil them by picking at a scab she ought to leave alone? ‘Dietrich, this month, I’ll be depositing the last tranche of my debt to Ottilia. The bank manager is getting suspicious. He thinks I’m a black-marketeer. Which Swiss bank should I transfer it to?’

  ‘Good try, darling.’

  ‘I wish you’d tell me where she is.’

  ‘It is safer for you and her if you do not know.’

  ‘Because I keep imagining her on a train to Germany.’

  Suddenly Dietrich was leaning on an elbow, looking down at her. ‘Why?’

  ‘Una and I were discussing it. All the Jews who were rounded up last year – the ones from the Marais and the Sentier – were taken away by train to Germany, but even Una can’t find out where exactly. She had a friend at the American Embassy who was going to make enquiries, but he skipped the country. We can’t bear the thought of Tilly being among the deportees. Some of Madame Thomas’s friends were taken.’

  ‘Madame Thomas?’

  ‘My bookkeeper, who Violaine lives with.’

  ‘She’s Jewish?’

  ‘Madame Thomas is, though I hadn’t known it. She’s frightened and keeps asking me if I think it will stop.’

  ‘What will stop? The persecution of Jews in France? Only when the French government puts its foot down, and when my country reverses its stratagem to rid the world of Jews. I think, all considered, that deportations will begin to increase.’

  ‘How can you be so—’

  He kissed her into silence, then made the sound that meant, I really have to get up. Before throwing back the covers, he said, ‘Poland is where the deportees end up.’

  Never did she feel more separate from Dietrich when they spoke of the human cost of occupation. He was not a cruel man, but he was pragmatic, seeing a degree of suffering as inevitable. And let nobody think he was anything but a proud and loyal German! Their perspectives were so different. She often visited Amélie Ginsler, and her friend would describe the arrests of Jewish men in the neighbourhood, which had begun as far back as 1940. Those between certain ages without citizenship had been taken to holding camps, and their families had waited in vain for them to return. ‘We keep our heads down,’ Amélie confided. ‘We’re afraid, though I often wonder, what if we stood shoulder to shoulder and said, “No”?’

  Watching Amélie tend her daughter, Françoise, Coralie had absolved her friend of such responsibility. If the French government, police chiefs and others down the ranks refused to stand up for humanity, how could one mother? How could she herself? How, if she was being fair, could Dietrich?

  Coming back in from the bathroom, seeing her sitting in bed with her arms linked around her knees, Dietrich said, ‘You are anxious about this collection?’

  Was she ever! ‘I’ve taken a risk with the materials I’ve used.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Not now.’ She got out of bed, nipping into the bathroom ahead of him. Later, buttoning the waistband of her cycling culottes, she promised, ‘All will be revealed at eleven o’clock. I’ll keep a standing space for you, so don’t be late.’

  She arrived at the shop to find Violaine strewing paper chrysanthemums in the window display. They’d put the collection together in spite of the fact that many of the fabric warehouses of the Sentier
had closed. Foreign straws, like sisal, baku and Leghorn were unobtainable. Fur-felt too, as the trade with America and Canada had fallen victim to sea blockades. Even wool-felt was a luxury, as its main producer, the Low Countries, was occupied and Germany took its output. There might eventually arise a domestic straw-plaiting industry, Coralie supposed, similar to that found in the English county of Bedfordshire, but until that happened, she and Violaine made do with whatever they could find.

  She bade Madame Thomas good morning. ‘It’s kind of you to help out in the shop today.’

  Jeanne Thomas was arranging chairs borrowed from the café across the street, placing them in two lines to create the effect of a catwalk. For an extremely short cat, Coralie admitted, but this show should still be an event.

  Two events, a morning and an afternoon one. Printed programmes being out of the question, she chalked the running order on a blackboard. Customers would be given a handwritten programme as they arrived, cut from discarded 1941 desk diaries, on which they might note down the hats they wanted to try later. They’d better have brought their own pencils.

  Champagne would be served, canapés too: pastry parcels of minced veal and pine nuts, vol-au-vents filled with chestnut and goat’s cheese soufflé, the ingredients bought from a local black-market trader who was making a fortune supplying luxury provisions to the Germans. The promise of canapés and a Château Latour 1929 should guarantee a good audience at both sessions, Coralie told herself. She even had a professional mannequin. Solange Antonin, who had modelled for Javier and had a posture to rival that of Queen Nefertiti, had graciously agreed to lend her professional skills for one day, her fee the pick of the collection.

  In spite of their unpromising start, Solange had won a grudging corner of Coralie’s heart. The girl had suffered. There had been a miscarriage in her past, an induced one, Coralie gathered, although Solange had never provided any details. Dashed hopes a-plenty, too. But what really brought them together was a shared dread of Serge Martel. His fine white teeth had torn off the top half of Solange’s ear.