A haven for foreign refugee artists, the Lutetia had been very much Teddy’s kind of place. But as she climbed out of the car, she saw that it had suffered the same fate as other grand hotels. From its windows spewed elongated swastikas, like stair carpet spat out to dry.
In the marble foyer, icons of Nazism were everywhere, superimposed on the lush decor. An immaculately suited man was being walked towards them in the grip of two soldiers, and for a moment, Coralie thought they’d collide. His face was sheened with sweat. She’d seen such a face once on Tooley Street, when a man had been knocked down by a tram. Shock. Shock and a haywire heartbeat. As he was dragged past, the stranger mumbled in a strong Spanish accent, ‘This is wrong! So wrong!’
‘Come.’ One of her escorts urged her forward. From the heart of the building came the clink of crockery, the growl of voices, alerting her to the fact that the dining room was nearby and she was hungry – until the smell of baked fish collided with the recent memory of Violaine’s shopping basket. Those flies. Her gorge rose and she wasn’t sure she’d hold it down if they took her nearer the kitchen.
No – they were ushering her up the central staircase, then up another set of stairs, and another, to where the decor was plainer, the corridors narrower. She felt every passing stranger’s scrutiny and wondered how she looked to them. Flushed pink, probably, to match her outfit. She’d walked, then run, on a hot June day and sat in a stuffy room without a mouthful of water. And another thing – ‘Gentlemen, if you don’t mind, I need the Ladies.’
Instead, she found herself in a room whose single window was blanked out with brown paper. One of the men switched on a light, revealing two chairs and a desk. Not wasting money on furniture, obviously. They hadn’t even run to a lampshade.
A moment later, the door closed and she was alone.
Locked in. Hammering, she shouted, ‘My friend is dying. Let me out!’
She was still shouting when a key turned and Dietrich came into the room. He was still in uniform, his cap under his arm. ‘Sit down,’ he said.
What happened to ‘please’? She’d comply when he asked nicely.
He took the seat at the far side of the desk and laid a book in front of him. It reminded Coralie of the ledger they’d compiled together in rue de Vaugirard.
He said in French, ‘Stand, if you like, but you will be here longer.’
‘Did you call an ambulance?’
‘Sit down, Fräulein.’
Fräulein? Had he forgotten their hours in bed together? But she sat, making a show of smoothing her skirt so he’d think she was irritated, not scared. Dietrich leaned forward, clasping his hands in front of him. He had on the same watch as before, an aviator’s watch, with its well-worn strap. Bare light sucked definition from his face and she couldn’t tell if he’d aged in the thirty-five months they’d been apart. Only that his hair seemed a little greyer.
‘Who’s going to start the conversation?’
‘This is not a conversation. Your full name, Fräulein.’
All right. Silly games it is. She opened her bag, to extract her identity card. The bag he’d bought her, from Hermès.
‘I said, state your name.’
Shocked, she stammered, ‘Coralie de—’ No, stop. He meant her real name, the one he’d invented for her. ‘Marie-Caroline de—’ Stop again. Her card bore a different identity, these days. ‘Cazaubon. I am Madame Cazaubon.’
Hazel eyes that had so often laughed with her, so often dilated with excitement or softened in passion, bored into her. ‘You are married but you wear no ring.’
Stupid to look down, as if a gold band might materialise. ‘It lives in a drawer. We’re separated.’
‘Your husband’s name?’
Ah . . . was this about Ramon’s political affiliations? Some of the groups he’d supported in Paris had been quite extreme. ‘I told you, we’re not together.’
‘If you don’t tell me his name, it will be easy enough to find out, but it might take several hours. If you are content to remain—’
‘Ramon. Ramon Cazaubon.’
‘Has he a middle name?’
‘Course he has. He’s French, isn’t he?’ She hadn’t meant to sound quite so insolent, but her mouth was so dry she could taste her tongue. A glass of water would be nice, if a cup of tea was out of the question. ‘Maurice André.’ Or was it the other way round? She’d only heard Ramon’s full set of names on their wedding day and when registering Noëlle’s birth.
Dietrich unscrewed the top of a fountain pen and wrote down her reply. ‘Your date of birth?’
‘I shouldn’t have to tell you that.’
‘Date of birth.’
‘Eighth of November, 19 . . .’ Her mind went blank. In the end, she had to look at her identity card. ‘1915. You’re making me nervous and I’m worried about Mademoiselle Beaumont. I need a drink, too. I mean, a glass—’
‘Your place of birth?’
‘Um, Nivelles.’ Or was it Tubize? ‘Nivelles, in Brabant, Belgium. But you know that already, Dietrich!’
‘Address me as Generalmajor von Elbing.’
She stared at him. Were they playing a game of pretending to be strangers?
More rapid questions followed. Her parents’ professions, her place of baptism, her schooling, her training. After that, questions about Ramon. Age, date of birth – thank God that was easy to remember, being 31 October, All Saints’ Eve. Hallowe’en. She’d often told Ramon he was her nightmare.
‘His profession?’
‘Um . . . the army, just now.’ Ramon’s civilian job had carried a long-winded title which she’d never managed to capture. ‘Before, he worked for SNCF – for the railways? He was an engineer. To do with bridges and tunnels.’
‘A maintenance engineer?’
‘He . . . No. He made drawings with calculations . . . I didn’t really understand it.’
Something touched Dietrich’s lips. A smile? ‘Shall we say he is a structural surveyor, Frau Cazaubon?’
‘Yes. Sorry. I don’t know where he’s posted, I swear it. We don’t hear from him.’
The shutters fell back down. ‘We?’
‘I have a daughter.’
‘Name.’
‘Noëlle Una.’ Watching Dietrich’s pen, fear spread to her nerve endings. Her child’s existence was now on paper. ‘Why are you writing that down? Who are you now?’
‘What I always was.’ Dietrich wrote on for a minute or so, then laid down his pen. ‘Why, if you live south of the river, were you at the Hôtel de Crillon?’
She told him that La Passerinette now belonged to her. ‘You know it’s on Madeleine, so when I needed a working telephone, I ran to place de la Concorde. I told your people that.’
‘You bought La Passerinette from the Baronne von Silberstrom? Where is she?’
A warning bell tolled. Dietrich’s features remained smooth, but what of the soul within? As Teddy had once brutally pointed out, she knew nothing about this man.
This interview might not be about Ramon at all. Perhaps Dietrich wanted Ottilia, who had been on a Nazi death-list since the mid-1930s. Stranded in Paris, Jewish and a refugee, her situation was fragile. We’ll get her out, Coralie decided there and then. Back to England, God knows how. ‘I’ve no idea where she is.’
Dietrich’s gaze roamed to Coralie’s neck, then her face, then to ‘Daytime Seduction’, so named because its silky tassels entwined with the wearer’s curls. ‘So you did not buy the hat shop from her?’
‘No, from Lorienne Royer. She’s moved away, though.’ And could therefore not be roped in to contradict. ‘Can I have a drink of water, before I faint?’
Dietrich leaned back in his chair and she waited for the words that would bring the interrogation to a close, and allow her to escape to the lavatory, which was becoming even more urgent than the need for
water. The silence went on so long, she broke it.
‘What else can I tell you? My shoe size? You already know how many sugars I put in my tea and which side of the bed I like to sleep on.’
A twitch. A reaction. So, he wasn’t a completely frozen fish. Without taking her eyes from him, she summoned a picture of their Duet bed, placed herself on it wearing nothing at all, and brought him into the scene. She remembered how he had sighed her name as she caressed his body from breastbone to navel and lower . . . She watched the real Dietrich and knew that he was fighting arousal. The muscles of his face and neck were taut as piano wire. She leaned across the desk, laid her hand over his and said, ‘Boo!’
She waited for the smile, the surrender. It was so close. When he picked up his pen, she wondered that it didn’t snap in two. But all he said was ‘Let us go through these questions again.’
*
‘How utterly dreadful. Oh, darling, how fearfully humiliating. Dietrich von Elbing did this to you? Ottilia’s hero? Should we tell her?’
Coralie gulped down the tea Una had made for her. ‘I don’t want to think of him ever again. Though I say it myself, I performed one of the great heroic walks of history. I finally got through to him that I was about to burst, and never did a man shift so fast.’
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 Seventeen
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 t
o 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 replaced. 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.
The Girl Who Dreamed of Paris Page 22
