Henriette’s smile slipped, but she pulled it back. ‘As you say, Madame Kilpin.’
‘McBride, honey. These days, I paddle my own canoe.’
As Henriette stalked away, Coralie whispered, ‘If you’re going back to the States, Una, how about taking me and Noëlle with you?’
‘I’m not going anywhere. Gladys Fisk-Castelman has been begging me to sail with her when she goes next week, but I won’t desert the city of my heart. And you are about to become famous and doesn’t Henriette know it! When Mrs F-C writes a person up, the world agogs. Is “agogs” a word?’
‘Don’t ask me, but I reckon the world will soon be too worried about conscription and food shortages to agog at anything. We may be having a quiet time of it here, but I hear it’s Hell in Poland.’
‘Whenever you talk like that, I know you’ve seen Ramon.’
‘He visited a few nights ago – he loves to see Noëlle. Say what you like about him, Ramon understands politics. He thinks the Nazis will turn west soon, and invade us.’
‘Oh, just stick to hats, Coralie. If truth is the first casualty of war, then vanity is the last. Let the bombs fall, ladies will still want what you make. You have a terrific future.’
*
By nine, the salon was empty, the collection boxed away. Discarded programmes littered the carpet and the room smelt of perfume and flat champagne. Time to go home. Coralie ached to hold her child, who would be tucked up in bed by now.
She looked around for Henriette – not to speak with but to avoid her. Tomorrow was soon enough for putting the collection, its cost and likely success through Soufflard’s mincer. As to who was rightful queen here, Coralie didn’t give a kipper’s eyebrow. Not after sixteen hours on her feet. Straightening the belt of her coat, she called goodbye to Amélie and Madame Zénon.
Her mistake was choosing to leave by the main door. Henriette was front-of-house, leaning against the display plinth. Head thrown back, eyes closed. Soufflard was speaking, but he broke off when he saw Coralie.
Henriette opened her eyes, then narrowed them at the sight of Coralie’s outdoor clothes. ‘Off, are you?’ She sounded surprised.
‘It’s quarter past nine. We don’t do a night shift.’
‘Still living in that flat on rue de Seine? Isn’t it too big for a lone woman and child?’ Henriette painted the word ‘lone’ with audible glee.
Coralie could have answered that, actually, the flat was a touch too small for two, but she’d probably still be living there when God sent the next flood. Getting her huge, rustic bed – it had been a gift from Teddy – up the stairs had taken military logistics. She doubted there were any men left in Paris willing to help her get it down again. ‘Yes, Henriette. I’m still on rue de Seine.’
‘Good,’ said Henriette. ‘I’ll have your things sent there. You, I don’t want to see here again.’
Coralie stopped herself swaying by grabbing the nearest solid object, which happened to be Monsieur Soufflard. ‘You’re telling me . . .’
‘To buzz off.’
‘You can’t!’
‘Give me three reasons.’ Henriette had gained weight in Italy and her complexion had sallowed. It had not been an entirely happy residence by all accounts – she’d fallen foul of the Fascist authorities there.
‘Three? All right. I’ve delivered you a collection everyone agrees is stunning. Two, I kept your business together so you had something to get well for—’ Henriette’s mouth twisted. She was waiting for one more reason. Right, she could have it. ‘Three, I’m your sister-in-law.’
Something darker than fury filled Henriette’s eyes. ‘Not any more. He left you.’
‘I threw him out, actually, but we’re still married and you have no right to dismiss me.’
Soufflard cleared his throat. ‘We do. The books don’t balance.’
‘They never do straight after a collection.’ Coralie hardly spared him a glance. ‘When the orders come in, the holes fill up.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying, Mademoiselle de Lirac.’
She considered reminding him that she was legally ‘Madame Cazaubon’. She’d kept ‘de Lirac’ as her professional name, but was entitled to be addressed as ‘Madame’ – unlike Henriette, who called herself ‘Madame’ to increase her status in the business world. In the end, she said nothing because Henriette was thrusting a piece of paper at her.
‘Sign it,’ Henriette commanded. ‘It’s you agreeing to leave, without claim on us.’
Coralie refused. ‘I do have a claim, not least because I’m owed commission. And I won’t give up my job while I’ve a child to support.’
‘Why aren’t you at home, looking after it?’ Monsieur Soufflard seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘I do not approve of working mothers.’
‘“Her” not “it”!’ Coralie hurled at him. ‘And I don’t give a damn whether you approve or not. I work because I have to.’
Staff were trickling into the shop, Amélie and Madame Zénon among them. Coralie was glad to see them. They’d stick up for her. Ignoring them, Henriette tried again to get Coralie to take the document. ‘We are offering you sixty thousand francs to leave, but you have to sign, releasing me from all obligation to you, now and in the future.’
Sixty thousand? Now, that made a difference. Sixty thousand would start her up in her own place, give her some buffer if sales were slow. Still, a warning bell rang. What had Donal told her, years ago, when she’d picked a fight with a big lad at school and got a bloody nose? ‘Rule one: if the other man looks relaxed, it’s because he’s got a brass knuckle in his glove.’ She said, ‘All right, I’ll sign . . .’ the triumph Henriette was not quite sly enough to conceal proved her suspicions were valid ‘. . . when I’ve shown it to a good lawyer.’
Henriette stamped her foot. ‘I’ve tried to be fair! You all heard her,’ at last, she acknowledged her staff, who drew back nervously, ‘hurling my generosity back at me.’ Henriette tore up the paper and nodded to Soufflard, who took out a pen. Using the display table as a surface, he began to write. Coralie twitched at the pedantic scratch of his nib but, at last, he held the results out to her.
It wasn’t a disclaimer, or a promissory note. It was a bill. Coralie read: ‘Stock advanced to Madame Kilpin-McBride from February 1938 through September 1939, 72,000 fr 50’. Payment to Mademoiselle de Lirac in lieu of notice, 60,000 fr. Mademoiselle de Lirac to pay Henriette Junot 12,000 fr 50.’ The last figure was underlined. ‘We will take cash, Mademoiselle.’
Coralie looked at Soufflard, then at Henriette, whose smirk shouted, ‘See?’ ‘You and your American friend have been robbing my business for months,’ Henriette crowed. ‘It’s all in the ledgers. Leave, or we take you to court.’
‘This is unjust! Una’s brought millions of francs in custom. Half the order book is thanks to her.’
‘I find that highly offensive. This is my business. My success.’ But it was mock-anger and Coralie knew that she was check-mated. She contemplated all the things she could do. Punch Henriette on the nose, or Monsieur Soufflard. Throw marottes at the mirrors. Or be dignified. She walked to the door, murmuring, ‘An egg. A bloody egg.’ She turned and said sweetly, ‘Let’s see who brings out the better collection next April, Henriette.’
‘Not you. Nobody will employ you. You’ll understand soon enough the price of stealing my friends, my staff and my little brother.’
‘Henriette, your brother is many things but “little” is not one of them.’
She let the door clash behind her. Here she was again, chucked out on the pavement, and this time she had a child to feed. She would feed her child, and send her to the best schools, too. Henriette Junot had pulled the rug, so Coralie would just have to weave herself a fine carpet.
*
She didn’t turn for home, but walked cautiously up blacked-out rue Royale to boulevard de la Madeleine,
where a half-moon enabled her to find La Passerinette and a white card in the salon’s window. It was sandwiched between glass and blinds and Coralie had no reason to believe that it was anything other than the one that had been there since June: “We regret, La Passerinette has closed down. Please ring the bell for uncollected commissions.”
Paris millinery was a small world. The gossip was that Lorienne Royer had left Paris to open an independent shop in some other town. She’d abandoned her assistant, Violaine Beaumont, to deal with irate customers and to claim her salary from the Baronne von Silberstrom in London. Coralie could well believe it, but she hadn’t yet heard that La Passerinette had been sold.
She flipped open the letterbox and sniffed the air inside. Vaguely mushroomy . . . Chances were, the shop was still empty.
Violaine’s flat above the salon was in darkness. The whole building was as dark as a coal-hole, not a crack of light escaping from any of the windows. As it was too late to ring door-bells, she turned for home.
On the pont des Arts, she stopped to catch her breath. Paris sprawled on either side, like badly raked embers, dots of light everywhere. The blackout had been in force since the declaration of war, but people were getting careless. If German bombers ever came at a full moon, they’d follow the Seine as easily as a white-painted road. There had been regular alerts since September, sirens screaming, people tumbling out on to the street, gas masks bumping as they tried to work out where the nearest air-raid shelter was. All false alarms so far.
They called it the ‘drôle de guerre’. A joke of a war.
The country that invests everything in defence will fall to the nation that invests everything in attack. Dietrich had spoken those words to Coralie at the Panthéon, beside the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. He’d known what was coming. Perhaps, instead of fantasising about setting up on her own, she ought to be thinking about leaving Paris. Children were already being packed off to the countryside and schools were closing. Just the other day Julie, her young nanny, had asked Coralie if she meant to join the outflow. ‘Some people I know are moving to the Haute-Vienne for safety. It’s remote there.’
‘So remote I’ve never heard of it,’ Coralie had replied. Truth was, she had no safe haven. No friends or contacts outside Paris. Like most people, she was relying on France’s vast wall of defence, the Maginot Line, to keep the Germans at bay. She was relying on an army of two million men, and doing what that Gypsy woman had predicted for her in a field two long summers ago –‘stitching and shaping’.
In other words, just carrying on.
Rue de Seine was a street of galleries and antiques shops including – she glanced up – Galérie Clisson. She tutted at the chinks of light showing in the upper windows as she passed. Teddy argued that if the Germans were to bomb Paris he’d rather like his street to go first. Generosity and selfishness were united in him: he was living proof that you could love a person without actually finding much in them to admire.
Her own place stood at the junction with rue Jacques Callot. Running lightly up the stairs and closing doors silently, she stopped in the hallway and listened. Breathing, from a tiny set of lungs and the drizzle of the nanny’s snores. Julie must be in the sitting room, asleep in a chair.
Coralie crept into a little bedroom and knelt by a truckle bed, stroking the smudge of black curls on the pillow. Her daughter was deeply asleep, fists clenched. Coralie bent to kiss each fist in turn, and when little arms rose in a reflex movement, she sucked the child into a cuddle. Settling her back down, she sniffed. Fish. Dropping a last kiss, Coralie tiptoed out, preparing to do tactful battle with Julie. Noëlle must never eat fish. Born two months premature, she was still tiny. The smallest bone could choke her.
Passing the kitchen door, which was ajar, Coralie noticed crocks piled on the drainer. Even for Julie, an indifferent washer-upper, it was a mess. The smell of fish was very strong. Bouillabaisse soup, if her nose told her right. Coralie went to the sitting room and turned on the light.
A figure slumped in an armchair woke with a rough grunt.
‘Ramon – what the bloody hell?’ Coralie instinctively searched for a second figure in the room, but he was alone. That was something. Julie was only nineteen, and came from a respectable family of booksellers on nearby rue Jacob, but that hadn’t stopped Ramon flirting shamelessly with her. Coralie cringed at the memory. The passionate, hot-blooded man she’d thought she’d married merited a simpler definition: womaniser. She looked around. How did one man make so much mess? He’d disembowelled a newspaper. He must have read it in four different places. He’d been smoking, too, a full ashtray alongside the messy remains of a meal. She stood over him, and poked his leg. ‘Where’s Julie?’
‘Uh? Oh. She went home. No point us both being here.’ His shirt was wide open displaying a crop of body hair.
‘I hope she left before you started undressing.’
Ramon looked down, as if trying to see his nakedness through another’s eyes. ‘I showed her a bit of chest. It’s hilarious, the way she squeaks when I look at her. The more prudish, the more they secretly want to be deflowered.’
‘She squeaks because you’re an oaf. Honestly, this place smells like a homecoming trawler. You know I don’t allow fish.’ Damn this blackout. ‘I can’t open a window unless we sit in the dark.’
‘Let’s lie down in the dark, then.’ Ramon reached for her, teeth feral and white. She turned away. There’d be none of that. The shock, a year ago, of learning that Ramon was being unfaithful had almost felled her. She’d begun to let her guard down, to feel the protective passion that, in a maturing relationship, replaces superficial attraction. Rejection, anger had been razor blades to the heart. Why did men always betray her? Was she so worthless?
‘Passion burns . . . like dry straw,’ her former tutor, Mademoiselle Deveau, had once told her. ‘Men are good at walking away . . . We women stay around poking the ash.’ Recalling, in those words, the dangers of victimhood, Coralie had let Ramon go. They got on all right, these days. When he was in good spirits – and her stocks of energy were sufficiently high – they could share a laugh. Noëlle adored him so he was free to come and go. But not to get spicy with Coralie.
‘You didn’t leave Noëlle alone when you went out for food?’ Coralie carried the remains of Ramon’s supper through to the kitchen.
He followed her. ‘Course not, she came too. And, yes, I gave her some fish and, no, she won’t die.’ Ramon nuzzled her neck.
Coralie had her hands in the sink by this time, and had found a soiled nappy among the cups. It occurred to her to slap Ramon round the face with it, but her anger failed to boil over. She was still too angry with Henriette to turn on anyone else. She shook him off. ‘If you knew what kind of day I’d had—’
‘Ah! Your show . . . Of course! You’re still wearing a hat, so it must have been good.’
‘I don’t get the logic but, yes, I was pleased. Afterwards . . .’ She related the rest of the story.
Ramon gave a burst of hilarity. He never half laughed. ‘I told you Henriette would come back and claim her own. I suppose she cheated you?’
She told him about the promised sixty thousand francs, which had somehow turned into a bill for a higher sum.
‘My sister is like a whale, mouth open. They don’t understand, all those little fish, that when they swim into that great mouth, they are dinner. You are one of those little fish, Coralie.’
‘I am not!’
In her bedroom, Coralie put her hat into its box and shuffled round the gigantic bateau-lit. Teddy’s wedding present to her, the bed took up most of the floor, leaving just enough room for a single wardrobe. As she reached up to put the hatbox on the top, Ramon pulled her down again. ‘Can I stay, chérie?’
‘What’s wrong with your own mattress? Or should I say “mistress”? I’m going to warm up the last of that soup. I hope you’ve left me some bread.’
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‘It’s too late to eat.’
‘For you – I’ve been on my feet all day.’ Slithering off the bed, she added grudgingly, ‘You can stay on the sofa, but don’t badger me, ha? Get carried away and I’ll do to you what Teddy’s always threatening to do with Voltaire.’
‘That magnificent cat. It would be a crime.’
‘Yet so tempting.’
As she lit tea lights in the sitting room and laid a place at the table for one, Coralie reminded herself that, even if his taste for fidelity had been short-lived, Ramon had made her safe. He was human too, in a way she was not, caring about the underdog and the poor of the world. For all her grumblings at him, a stubborn affection remained, So really, she decided, she could make up a bed for him in the sitting room. Just for one night.
*
Midnight. She lay listening to Ramon’s breathing. His left arm was crooked around her, and she could hear the tick of his watch under her ear. She gave in too easily, that was her problem. Had Dietrich abandoned her because she’d given herself too readily? Men didn’t value what came for free.
What about the ring Dietrich had offered her? It hadn’t dropped out of a cracker. That man was incomprehensible. ‘I sow the seeds of my own downfall,’ she murmured. ‘Sow them, water them and tend them. I’m very thorough but, of course, I am my father’s daughter.’
Snuffling sounds from along the hallway warned Coralie that Noëlle was waking. With a tired groan, she threw back the covers and reached for her slipper-satin dressing-gown, the one Dietrich had bought her. It still had its rose-petal sheen because she washed it in soap flakes.
When she finally returned to bed, Ramon was sitting up. ‘I’ve a favour to ask.’ Laughing at her response, he said, ‘Not that. I need lodgings for some friends. That’s really why I came to see you.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘They won’t stay for long and they’ll sleep on the floor. Soon as they get new papers, they’ll be gone.’
‘What kind of friends?’ He always referred to himself as an anarchist, pledged to smash the corrupt framework of society. ‘Friends’ could mean anything. ‘What are you mixed up in?’
The Girl Who Dreamed of Paris Page 17
