The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  “I don’t want to go,” Nicholas said quietly.

  Skye sat up, leaned over and gave Nicholas a hug that was ferocious and quite possibly painful. His arms closed around her too, and she felt that his cheeks were wet, like hers. Then she scrambled to her feet and ran away, feeling something rip against her chest, imagining that in her tear-blindness she must have scraped against one of the walls of the cave.

  She ran fast, feet beating against the sand, up to the house and then over the moor beyond. Finally, at the top of the hill, she stopped and sank to the ground. From up here she could see everything, but she couldn’t see Nicholas and that was how it would be from now on.

  She touched her chest but found no graze from the rocks, yet it still hurt more than anything ever had.

  * * *

  Aunt Sophie was as vivacious as Vanessa, but more effusive in her affections: hugs and kisses ended her sentences, rather than periods. She was the most elegant creature Skye had ever seen, always dressed in Schiaparelli or Poiret. Liberty watched her with delighted eyes and even Skye, sitting in her bedroom at the apartment in Passy—the sixteenth arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne—couldn’t help but try to discipline her hair so it more closely approximated the lustrous upsweep of her aunt’s chestnut coiffure. But that was a minor transformation compared to everything else that happened in Paris.

  Liberty was the first thing to change. She forgot to kick Skye. She smiled. She woke up in the morning eager to go to school. Rather than staying inside all weekend, Liberty went to visit her new friends and ate ice cream with them while strolling through the Jardin du Ranelagh. She became a cool, elegant Parisienne, not unlike their Aunt Sophie.

  Skye observed this metamorphosis with openmouthed astonishment.

  The second thing to change was Nicholas. Skye wrote to him almost every day. He never replied.

  She’d been wrong when she’d thought, atop the cliff on the last day she’d seen him, that her chest couldn’t hurt more than it did in that moment. That pain had been a mere twinge. What she felt now, each day when she searched through the mail and found nothing, was a skewering—deep and raw.

  Skye was the one who stayed inside now, lonely.

  And then one terrible letter arrived, addressed to her. It came during the All Saints’ Holiday when their aunt had taken Liberty and Skye on the train to Deauville in the hopes that being near the sea might cheer Skye up.

  As soon as Skye stepped onto the beach, the clouds devoured the sun. The air gathered itself into such a furious wind that waves crested like phantoms, driving away the beachgoers until Skye was the only one left there, shivering, her aunt and Liberty urging her to come away.

  She didn’t know what was wrong, just that something was. The letter waiting for them on the hall stand when they returned confirmed Skye’s premonition. Cloud, the kind that blanketed the sky and swallowed planes, had taken Vanessa Penrose. She was never coming back.

  Every night thereafter, when Skye closed her eyes, she saw her mother plunging downward into brutal absence. She crawled into Liberty’s bed, where they lay on their backs with their eyes wide open until sleep dragged them away into nightmares. They would wake crying, Skye hiding her tears in order to console her sister.

  That all changed the day Skye resumed her flying lessons. Up in the air, she felt her mother all around her, even heard Vanessa’s voice whispering through the Gosport tube: I love you, Skye.

  Skye climbed into her sister’s bed that night impatient to tell her what had happened, eager to persuade Liberty to come flying with her so that Liberty could hear it too. Liberty shoved Skye off the mattress and onto the floor.

  “What was that for?” Skye demanded, rubbing the spot where her head had cracked against the wood.

  “You can’t come in here again until you give up flying,” Liberty snapped.

  “I’m not giving up flying,” Skye said emphatically. “Let me show you—”

  “Then get out.”

  Of everything Liberty had ever done to Skye—the kicks and pinches and stares and moans—those words hurt the most. She got up off the floor, stormed out of the room and went to sleep in her own bed.

  After that, they returned to spending most of their time apart, Skye at the flying club and Liberty with friends who preferred gossip to airplanes. The year Skye turned eighteen, she told Liberty she was leaving Paris and returning to Cornwall.

  Liberty turned into a demon.

  “This is our home, Skye,” Liberty screamed, face red, fists clenched.

  “This is an apartment in Paris. Not home,” Skye said quietly, trying to keep calm, expecting Liberty would have her tantrum and then settle down.

  Instead Liberty flew down the hall, threw open their aunt’s bedroom door and began to bellow at the top of her voice, demanding that Sophie force Skye to stay in Paris, that she fulfill her promise to Vanessa Penrose to look after Skye and Liberty. Liberty raged all night, relentless, hurling accusations and loathing at Skye in equal measure until, soon before dawn, sick to her stomach with fear that she might actually have driven her sister mad, Skye relented and said, “I won’t go.”

  Liberty didn’t say thank you, just returned to her room, fell into bed, and slept.

  Skye lay on her own bed and cried until her eyes were so swollen she could no longer see, until the collar of her dress was so damp with tears she could wring her heartache out of it. The one thing she most wanted—to return to the cove in Cornwall—had just been taken from her.

  She didn’t get out of bed until the following day. Liberty spoke not a word to her. That night, when Skye returned to her room, her bed was soaking, as if someone had poured a jug of water onto it. She slept on the sofa.

  The next day, the tires of Skye’s bike were punctured so she couldn’t cycle to the airfield. Liberty smiled at her over breakfast.

  The following week, the two assignments Skye had completed for university—where she was studying history and languages—went missing before she could submit them and she had to stay up all night redoing them. Liberty invited a friend over and they laughed and talked so loudly in the room next door to Skye’s that she could hardly concentrate.

  One month later, after Skye had fixed the punctures in her bicycle tires, she found them slashed through with a knife.

  “Oh dear. Not again,” Liberty said when Skye pointed out the damage.

  They had reverted back to their nine-and ten-year-old selves, except the crabs down the backs of bathing suits had become something crueler.

  The day Liberty turned eighteen, Skye wrote a note to her aunt and, while Liberty was out, she collected her things in a suitcase, walked to the train station, and left for England.

  PART TWO

  Kat

  Three

  CORNWALL, JUNE 2012

  Kat’s rental car bumped along a track that looked as if it had never welcomed a motor vehicle in its life, her destination her grandmother’s uninhabited cottage. It sat atop the cliff, proudly unloved, wind, sea spray and gulls its only friends: banished to the very edge of the world. The downs behind concealed any neighboring properties which were, in any case, at least half a mile away.

  The track deteriorated further so Kat parked, stepped out and stumbled as the wind grasped her, pushing her back; for a moment she thought she heard it hiss that she shouldn’t be there. She rubbed her arms, regretting both her journey and the very Australian summer dress she’d chosen.

  She hurried onto the porch, where the boards complained beneath her feet. She inserted the key in the lock and jiggled the door until it gave way. The smell of decades of neglect hurtled toward her, winding her. What had she just unfettered?

  Don’t be silly, she chided herself, first in her head and then aloud, hoping to make the unsettled history retreat and the present reassert itself.

  Kat pressed on into the kitchen, which looked out across a magnificent expanse of wild sea. The window seat in the sitting room beckoned, and she thought she might
sit there, despite the dust, and have a cup of tea. But she discovered that the kettle was the old-fashioned sort that needed to be heated on the stovetop, and the stove was ancient and fueled only by wood. Better to get on with what Margaux, her grandmother, had rather unexpectedly asked of her.

  Kat traveled to Europe from Sydney a couple of times a year to meet with fashion conservation colleagues at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and to deliver papers at conferences and symposiums—just as she had done this past week—but she had never made a trip to Cornwall to look in on this house. Because she hadn’t known it existed until three days ago.

  Margaux had called her in London and told her that the caretaker in nearby Porthleven, who apparently checked the house regularly, had grown too old and ill to do anything for months. Would Kat mind taking a look?

  Kat had been so dumbfounded at the idea of her grandmother owning a Cornish cottage that she had spluttered inarticulate and half-started sentences into the phone, extracting very little information beyond the fact it had been purchased decades ago, and the location of the key. Now, she felt that same dumbfoundedness fix her in place in the parlor as she realized the house was fully furnished and fitted out—but like a museum.

  Everything around her was from the 1920s and early 1930s, as if the occupants had gone out for the day, intending to come back, but had somewhere been lost forever. An Art Deco red celluloid hair-comb sparkling with rhinestones; a fantastic enamel clothes brush in sea green; paste rings tumbling out of a case; sheet music on the piano waiting to be played. Kat stroked the horn of the gramophone affectionately; marveled at the delicacy of a cloisonné pendant on a crimped brass chain; blew a flurry of dust off a lovely collection of glass kerosene finger lamps in various shades of green. Everything laid out, ready for a moment in history that had, perhaps, mattered to someone.

  She briefly imagined lighting the lamps, placing a recording on the gramophone, securing the pendant around her neck and returning to a time long ago when she hadn’t made any mistakes and could relive the past few years with the benefit of wisdom. Something made her shiver, as if just thinking of enkindling the items around her had made the ghosts stir. Why had those ghosts run away? she wondered. And why had Margaux bought this place that was more mausoleum than home?

  Kat made herself move into the next room, opening and shutting cupboards and checking inside drawers. She found no evidence of animal habitation and only a few spiders, most long dead, and was soon drawn back into a vortex of questions. Why keep a cottage that was never used? Had her grandmother ever visited? Certainly not in the thirty-nine years Kat had been alive. She should, Kat reasoned, persuade her grandmother to sell it.

  She was thinking about real estate agents and international removals when she reached the very last bedroom, empty of everything except a couple of wardrobes. She opened the door of one and a blaze of bright red caught her eye, followed by a shimmer of pink, a beam of sunflower-yellow. Slowly, she reached in. Her hand touched fabric. Expensive fabric: a froth of tulle, a glittering of sequins, the purr of velvet.

  She lifted down one of the hangers and what unraveled before her was, quite simply, astonishing. A long red dress—no, a gown—strapless, the bodice shaped to fit perfectly over the swell of one’s breasts, the waist nipped in, an homage to the New Look. Tumbling down from the narrow waistline was a skirt that had a life of its own; a skirt that wanted to dance, to spin around and around in a wild and romantic rush of red. Her right hand stroked the silk, as soft as newly born skin beneath her fingers.

  Impulse made Kat hold the dress up against her body as if she were contemplating buying it from a store. She turned to face the mirror and was stunned. Even though she hadn’t yet stepped inside the dress, she was no longer Kat. She was the woman she had always meant to be, the woman she’d forgotten to become beneath the demands of working full-time and having two children and divorcing one husband.

  Then she glimpsed the tag inside: Printemps-Été 2012 Christian Dior Paris and a series of numbers. Kat was holding an haute couture gown, which was what she’d suspected when she first saw it. But why—and how—did her grandmother have a Dior couture gown hidden in the wardrobe of a house Kat had never known she owned?

  Kat pulled out more hangers. Each bore something almost as remarkable as the red gown. A dress made from silk rainbows—Kat knew it was called Hellebore—from Galliano’s 1995 collection for Dior. A fabulously fun pink dress, strapless like the red, but with a mass of fabric at the back shaped into a flower-like bustle.

  Kat stopped taking garments out of the wardrobes and instead flicked through them. They were mostly dresses, but also some suits, skirts and jackets, moving from the easily recognizable 1950s fit-and-flare silhouette to the shorter skirts of the sixties, the fluidity of the seventies, the just-reined-in garishness of the eighties, the glitz of the nineties, and then on to the classically modern styles like the red gown she had first held. Every piece had a numbered Christian Dior label stitched into its back.

  There was one more gown that had her stretching up to the rack, to bring it down and hold it against her body. She had never seen anything like it. A dress of brilliant azure blue, as close to the color of the sea outside as anything man-made could ever be, and with the same prismatic quality, as if the sun sparkled on the rippling skirt even inside this dark room. It was made from an exuberance of silk and tulle, the lavishness of both fabric and color declaring that this dress was epoch-making, one of a kind—a gown her grandmother could never afford and would never have the occasion to wear. It was almost too magnificent for a princess.

  Kat sat down on the bed, shut her eyes, then opened them slowly. The dresses were still there. She reached into her pocket, withdrew her phone and dialed Margaux’s number. The call rang on and on, unanswered. She tried again. Nothing.

  So she stood up, laid each dress on the bed one by one—sixty-five in total—and photographed them like the impartial and rational fashion conservator she was.

  It was late when she finished. She locked the house, returned to her car, expelled a long breath and was unable to banish the questions any longer. Why were the dresses there? And had her grandmother intended for Kat to find them?

  PART THREE

  Skye

  They knew, if they stopped to think about it, that they were operating at the very limit of what society could tolerate even in war. But they weren’t much interested in society either, or . . . their place in it, and they were so used to being unusual that anything else would have been . . . soul-destroyingly dull.

  —Giles Whittell, Spitfire Women of

  World War II

  Four

  PARIS, SEPTEMBER 1939

  Lunch in Paris with a melange of British and French pilots turned into dinner in Paris, as well as too much champagne.

  “We’ll have to stay the night,” Skye said as the sun hid itself away and the sky became too dark to fly through.

  “We will,” Rose agreed, clinking her glass against Skye’s and then against the glasses of the others at the table.

  Valentin, a Parisian, offered a toast: “To peace. And may Monsieur Adolf give himself a deadly apoplexy from too much vigorous Nazi saluting.”

  Everyone laughed and drank to it so enthusiastically that Rose gestured to the waiter for yet more champagne. And so they drank their fears about Hitler’s ruthless and bloodless purloining of Europe into submission, and Valentin draped his arm over Skye’s shoulders as she entertained them all with stories of the acts she performed in the flying circus in England each summer, acts that helped pay her bills.

  “The anticipation of a dreadful accident is what brings people to the circus,” she told them. “I can feel them holding their breath every time I turn the plane over. They want a sensational story to share at the pub: that they were there when the sky let go of the plane and it fell to the ground”—she let her hands fly up into the air, mimicking an explosion—“and the lady inside died a tragic death.” She s
mote her hand dramatically across her forehead. “I never oblige them, of course.”

  Laughter and glasses were raised once more, toasting the crowds Skye had disappointed by living through her aerobatics.

  “I hear you can wing-walk,” Valentin said.

  “She made a jolly good display of it at last year’s Magyar Pilots’ Picnic,” Rose said, referring to the annual gathering of pilots just outside Budapest which she and Skye regularly attended for more uproarious lunches.

  “I couldn’t go to that one,” Valentin said regretfully. “I was doing my military service. You must need extraordinary balance for such a thing.”

  “And damn-fool pluck,” Rose added.

  “Or an ‘incurable reckless streak’ and ‘a lack of concern for keeping her head attached to her neck.’ That last one’s my favorite,” Skye said, accepting the cigarette Valentin passed her. “The blue bloods at the Civil Air Guard wrote all that and more into a report about my suitability to instruct for them. Luckily there are so few qualified instructors in England, and pilots are needed so desperately to bolster the RAF in case of war, that they employed me anyway in spite of my careless attitude toward my body parts.”

  “To Skye’s head,” Valentin said, raising his glass. “Long may it be attached to her neck.”

  Skye laughed and joined in the new toast.

  For it didn’t matter a bit to anyone at the table that Skye was the least wealthy flier there and possibly in England too. Her pilot friends were a group of the very early fliers who flew for love rather than because it had lately become an exclusive and voguish pursuit. They were too raffishly bohemian to ever mention money and were more than happy to pay for the champagne at this impromptu lunch that Rose had organized just yesterday. Skye was lucky to have inherited her plane from her mother and could thus fly all over Europe with these people, to Cairo too, and even South Africa once. So long as she took up the opportunities that presented themselves to earn money during the flying circus season in England, or instructing for the Civil Air Guard, which she would do again on Monday after she’d slept off her Parisian all-nighter, she’d been able to keep her little plane airworthy and herself fed and clothed.