The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  December 1943 brought freezing pipes and snow, which, because of the stove smuts in the air, turned instantly to dirty slush. Just as cold and long as previous winters. And then, shortly after New Year, a letter:

  * * *

  9 January 1944

  To Madame C.

  * * *

  Ma chère femme,

  It is perishing in these hills, but I live well enough with a group of fine men (and women!) and our friend with the violin. We are forming a fighting unit and cannot wait to be tested against the enemy and the bastard Milice, whom we hate even more than the Germans. Meanwhile, we amuse ourselves picking off the odd convoy and shooting informants. My old skills are coming in useful. All those years spent calculating tunnel depths and the span of arches have not been not wasted. Do you travel often by rail? I hope you and the child are well, I think of you often.

  * * *

  My love, as always,

  R.

  Written on onion-skin paper, it had been inserted behind the label of a wine bottle.

  The forger Bonnet brought it to her. ‘Pardon, Madame, I drank the wine – I believe I was meant to – and it was a good Côtes-d’Auvergne. Read it, burn it. What a man, our Ramon, eh?’

  What a man, but a suspicion of what he might be engaged in made Coralie even more fearful of reaching out to anybody. Her fellow agent, Moineau, had not been near her for months. One morning in mid-January, when she called at rue Mouffetard to collect intelligence dockets for avenue Foch, the butcher shook his head.

  ‘Your usual’s not available today, Madame.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘The cuts of meat you like are unobtainable now. Try elsewhere.’

  It seemed she wasn’t even part of the Resistance any more. Fritzi had not honoured her promise to visit, and Coralie now avoided walking down avenue Marigny. It wasn’t until early February that a visit to parc Monceau shifted her spirits. If golden aconites and the first snowdrops could push their heads up and smile, so could she, she told herself. She would start the new year afresh, if a little late, by appointing an assistant milliner.

  There had been truth in Lorienne Royer’s malevolent note: How will you fare without your right hand? Coralie had always relied on good technicians, such as Madame Zénon, the Ginslers and Violaine. She missed having people to advise her and help develop ideas. Often, these days, she hit the limits of her skill. It wouldn’t be long before people whispered, ‘Coralie de Lirac is only as good as her staff.’

  On 14 February, she placed a card in La Passerinette’s window and in various shops in the Sentier. Within hours, hopeful young women were knocking at her door, eager to relate their experience, as she had once done. They confided how little they were being paid, and how they needed better commission.

  ‘My brother is a prisoner of war.’

  ‘My mother is sick.’

  ‘I have a child to care for, and my husband is doing service du travail obligatoire in Germany.’

  Poor things. Yet she said, ‘No,’ to them all. None of them had looked very much like Violaine or Amélie, but she knew that seeing white hands stitching and moulding cloth, curls falling over furrowed brows, would be too much to bear. She took the notices down and struggled on. Then, towards the end of the month, she received a visitor.

  ‘I am told, Madame, that you are seeking an experienced milliner.’

  ‘I was . . . Are you here for your daughter?’

  A chuckle. ‘No, Madame, for myself. My name is Georges Blanchard and I have been a milliner all my life. I am retired, but . . . ’ His savings had been depleted by years of exchange-rate banditry. And he was bored and . . . ‘The days are long.’ She invited him in, and met a bear with a limp. He was six feet four, a Great War veteran and had suffered shrapnel injury. Her workbenches would be far too low for him and he’d crack his head on the salon chandelier. But he made her smile. She hired him on the spot.

  And then Moineau tinged his bicycle bell at her as she cycled home one evening, her wheels crunching over the last of the snow. ‘Got a light, Cosette?’

  ‘Hello, stranger.’ She pulled over and they pretended to share a cigarette.

  He’d been hiding, he told her. Fortitude had been infiltrated by Gestapo informants in January, twelve members arrested. He’d been tipped off by a friendly French policeman before they nabbed him.

  ‘Who was caught?’ Not Mademoiselle Deveau, she hoped.

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’

  ‘Will it make you sleep better to know, Cosette? Anyway, I only get code names.’ He dragged on his cigarette, then held it out to her and, as she took a half-hearted puff, said, ‘The fat old bird on the canal? She never used a code name, always Francine. They got her. So, are you ready for a new parcel?’

  ‘Oh dear – I mean, yes, of course.’

  ‘Still at the place on rue de Seine? You haven’t gone back to that alley by Saint-Lazare . . . What was it?’

  ‘Impasse de Cordoba. I have the key to it, for emergencies.’

  ‘Bien. Get supplies in. Still got that ration book?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She tried not to think of Fortitude’s twelve doomed operatives. Instead she worried about Una, who hadn’t answered any letters since September ’43. She took to wearing her choker again. She wasn’t sure she would actually prefer cyanide to the Gestapo, but she liked having the choice.

  On the last day of February, Moineau delivered a twenty-three-year-old forward gunner who had bailed out over occupied Luxembourg after bombing targets in Germany’s industrial Ruhr. Crawford Lesoeur, an officer of the Royal Canadian Air Force flying for the RAF, had broken his leg when his parachute came down in trees. After eight months in hiding, he was only now fit enough to make his way to England.

  He was scheduled to stay at rue de Seine for three days, and because he couldn’t climb up into the roof space, Coralie donated her bed, taking the box-room that had been Noëlle’s. Not that she slept much. Every creak, every night sound was a black Citroën pulling up in the street below. It was the slam of a car door, the approach of booted feet. On what was supposed to be Lesoeur’s last day with her, Moineau called to report a problem with the next safe house. She’d have to keep her airman hidden a bit longer, and take him to the next location herself – the usual courier was dead.

  Coralie went out and queued for food, eyes skinned for possible danger. She bought small amounts at a time so that nobody would see her enter her flat with provisions for two.

  When her guest asked if she was married, she spoke of Ramon, and risked saying, ‘He’s with the Maquis, in central France.’ It made her proud and shone a light on her feelings because, though she missed Dietrich brutally, she was choosing sides again. When Crawford Lesoeur gave his opinion that Germany had to be pummelled to defeat, she nodded agreement. When he said that a well-prepared French Resistance would play its part when the Allies invaded, she took it as the compliment it was meant to be.

  ‘When will the invasion come?’

  ‘It already has, from the air, anyhow. Our bombers are preparing the way for ground troops. I’ll think of you, Madame, and when I’m home, I’ll tell the boys where to come if they have to bail out.’

  Ten days after he’d arrived, she escorted Lesoeur by train to Narbonne where she bought him a ticket for Perpignan. As a Canadian, he spoke French but his accent would give him away. Coralie gave him cotton wadding dipped in clove oil.

  ‘Stick it under your gums, pretend you have toothache.’ She gave him a supply of grimy hundred-franc notes to supplement the overly crisp emergency currency the RAF supplied to all its crew. ‘Come back to Paris with your fiancée when all this is over.’

  ‘I don’t have a fiancée.’

  ‘What do those English girls think they’re up to? Tell them to buck up from me.’

  There came another evader, and another. They kept coming. British and American bombers were attacking Germany round the clock,
and attacking French targets too. The toll among airmen was high. For every pilot, navigator or gunner she helped, there must be ten who crashed to their deaths or were taken prisoner. She’d lie in bed thinking of Dietrich in Germany, at risk from bombs being dropped by Donal. She’d think of Donal, in deadly danger from anti-aircraft guns and Luftwaffe fighters. Trust her to care for men on both sides. Every day, she read German and French newspapers, longing for the headline ‘Adolf Hitler Dead!’

  One lunchtime in early April, her assistant said, ‘Why aren’t we doing a spring collection?’

  ‘We’ve missed the boat, Georges.’

  ‘There isn’t a boat. We are free spirits in a land of headless chickens.’

  ‘I’d sell my soul for a roast headless chicken.’ Coralie swallowed a spoonful of turnip soup. It was lunchtime, and they were at a Champs-Élysées café that had once guaranteed a decent meal because of its German clientele. Now, to paraphrase Arkady, everything was running out, except turnips.

  ‘I mean it,’ Georges persisted. ‘We could create a collection in a month, if we really put our minds to it.’ His voice dropped coaxingly; ‘What about that bet you told me about, the one with Lorienne Royer? Which of you would bring out the best spring collection?’

  ‘That bet was with Henriette Junot, five years ago. I don’t recall mentioning it.’

  ‘Bets never die, and now that Lorienne has taken over the Junot salon, she’s the one to beat.’

  ‘She stole my medieval idea last summer. Her autumn–winter show was all horns and veils. Some of her models looked like reindeer caught in net curtains. I haven’t bothered to check on her this time round.’

  ‘You see? She’s beating you. Why don’t you want to play the game?’

  ‘Let’s just say there are things between Lorienne and me that are more profound than whose collection gets the best write-up in the fashion columns.’

  Georges let the matter drop, but on 1 May he came into work and said, ‘Sad news yesterday. Paul Poiret has died.’

  ‘The couturier?’

  ‘I worked for him, long, long ago. A fiery character, but if I were a woman, I’d strew flowers in front of his funeral cortège, for he was a pioneer of the natural shape.’

  ‘Then he probably died of shock.’ Coralie demonstrated her waistline, cinched to a breathless twenty-three inches. ‘I’m afraid we’ve gone back to being artificially cut in two.’

  ‘If we did a collection, we could pay tribute to him. That way, its late delivery would seem appropriate.’

  ‘Paul Poiret . . .’ Coralie envisaged the Oriental-style robes that had shocked and entranced society in 1911. Not that she’d been around, of course, but she’d read the great man’s autobiography. Thanks to Poiret, ankles had been uncovered for the first time in three generations. ‘That silhouette was long and slim. The style is so different now.’

  ‘Turbans,’ Georges prompted.

  ‘Oh, no, I did turbans in ’thirty-nine–forty.’

  ‘Lorienne is giving us big round heads. Again.’ Georges mimed a yawn. ‘And you know, turbans are so “now”. They can be made of almost anything and they lend themselves to every mood. Sharp, simple . . . ’ Georges leaned closer to her, ‘even subversive. Ah, a reaction!’

  ‘Subversive? How, exactly?’

  ‘We could decorate them with secret motifs, seen only from above. A message to the brave boys of the Allied air forces.’

  Did he mean something RAF crew could see as they flew over France? ‘Arrows saying, “This way to the Normandy coast,” embroidered in English? You’re a man after my own heart, Georges, but I don’t see it working.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’ Georges made her a cup of coffee, just as she liked it, with powdered milk and a spoonful of honey. The only man in her life ever to make her a hot drink – until she remembered Donal making tea for her once and a witch-hazel compress for her black eye.

  ‘No. No, you’re right, Georges. Let’s do it,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to be subtle, but it’ll be fun.’

  Georges rubbed his hands. ‘And not all our German ladies have gone home. We could have them promoting a coded message, all unsuspecting. The game, you know?’

  She didn’t think she’d told him about the game – Bait the Occupier – but then again, she did mutter to herself as she worked, often forgetting he was there.

  ‘How about this?’ He took out a notebook and scribbled something. ‘A turban, sporting a radio mast with antennae and ‘Vive la France” embroidered under the band, so nobody ever sees it.’

  She couldn’t explain her sudden rash of irritation. A sense that Georges was encroaching on her territory? ‘A design like that could get us a one-way ticket to Drancy!’ She flipped his notebook closed.

  Georges was quiet for the rest of the morning, and when, later, she invited him to discuss ideas, he said curtly, ‘Me? I’m the man who holds the scissors. It is Coralie de Lirac who spins the fantasies.’

  She’d hurt him. Her big mouth again. ‘Georges, I’m sorry. We’ll produce a line of turbans. They can be made from silk and cotton waste and I will always say that you originated the idea.’

  ‘Whatever you wish. You’re the boss.’

  Coralie de Lirac à La Passerinette invites you to

  the first showing of her spring–summer collection

  on Saturday, 27 May 1944, at 11.30 a.m.,

  boulevard de la Madeleine

  It felt like a good crowd though many of her German ladies had gone home. They seemed all to leave at once, as if summoned by a call from the Fatherland. Those who remained were either Hilferin – servicewomen – tethered by their work – or those made homeless by Allied bombing. Coralie was amazed that stranded women still wanted Paris hats but she wasn’t going to argue. She’d been indiscreet in the past, not just in playing ‘the game’ but in laughing about it with French customers, assuming it would go no further. She, who had worked in a laundry and a factory, should have known that juicy gossip is as uncontainable as a tray of eels. This collection had to repair the damage she’d done to her own reputation: not only did she still have to feed herself and her ‘parcels’, she was sending money for Noëlle’s keep and saving for her daughter’s ongoing education. Ottilia, however loving and well-meaning, should not assume all of Coralie’s maternal responsibilities. The war could not go on for ever and Coralie was beginning to see beyond the daily grind to a time of reunion. Digging between the lines of censored news reports, she detected a tilting of the balance in favour of the Allies. When the time came to collect her child, she wanted to go to Geneva as a successful woman.

  As before at La Passerinette, there would be two parades but Coralie had reversed the running order. French first today. Instead of the usual mid-week event, she had chosen the last Saturday in May. Nobody left Paris for country weekends any more.

  A few minutes, then they’d start. She’d hired Félix Peyron to act as wine waiter. As hostess, she would deliver the commentary once the parade started. Once again, she had asked Solange Antonin to be her mannequin, and Solange had agreed readily, admitting that her pampered life as the trophy of high-ranking SS officers was, in its way, as limiting as life at home with her parents. Within that gilded incarceration, old insecurities – and her old rages – had returned. With a vengeance . . .

  No sign of rage today, thank goodness. Solange was in that semi-trance she always adopted before a show. Georges was in the corridor with her, arms crossed, lips clamped. ‘I’m supposed to dress her, but she won’t let me touch her head.’

  Coralie said, ‘Just hand her the hats and let her put them on.’

  ‘What – any old how?’

  ‘You can give directions but don’t touch her.’ Coralie penetrated Solange’s trance by telling her that she looked breathtaking.

  Solange smiled slowly. She was wearing a turban of cream silk jersey swathed around a narrow fez, its folds obscuring her ‘forbidden ear’. Two plain goose feathers reared up at the front, forming a
V.

  Coralie had dressed her in a Grecian-style black tunic that was at odds with current fashion but would allow the hats to shine. She said again, ‘Thank you for coming. Your being here assures me an audience. You’re so famous these days.’

  Actually, the word was ‘notorious’. On 13 April last year, Solange had shot Serge Martel.

  Unfortunately, in Coralie’s view at least, not fatally. But she had done it publicly, using a side-arm borrowed from an SS lover. As a result, Solange had gained that special fame reserved for beautiful women driven to a crime passionel.

  ‘Bend your knees as you exit or you’ll leave those feathers in the door frame,’ Coralie warned, before returning to the salon to start the show. She wished Georges would cheer up. He’d worked hard on this collection, his craftsmanship impeccable, but no amount of cajoling had persuaded him to add ideas of his own. To all her suggestions, he’d replied, ‘If that is what Madame wants . . .’

  He’d not forgiven her, evidently. Still, he looked smart today in his tailed suit and starched collar. And they’d been working together for just a bare three months. Get this collection out of the way, then she’d take him out to dinner and let him lead the conversation. It couldn’t be easy for a man of his vintage to deal with a young female employer.

  She checked her own appearance. She’d chosen a turban of cherry-red jersey, intricate as a nautilus shell, with twin feathers pointing to the left. Red-dyed goose. Every hat in the collection featured a V-shape, made of feathers, wired fabric or starched linen. The shape was the message.