The Dress Thief

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘Muddle through. People tell him to hand them over to the church orphanage. But then the river would have won.’

  ‘You talk nonsense.’ Mémé knotted her fingers. Because her speciality was fine needlework, she kept her hands soft with paraffin cream and from her slender earnings paid a local woman to do the rough work in the house. For all that, her knuckles seemed ready to break through the skin. ‘I wouldn’t take them to the nuns either,’ she conceded. ‘When I was young I went to Strasbourg to work in the lace mills. The nuns would visit, but they never asked about us Jews. Only the Catholic virgins mattered to them.’ Mémé rapped on the tabletop. ‘Eat. Finish your soup.’

  Alix obeyed and Mémé said, ‘You’ve a good job at the exchange, money every month. You might become a supervisor, catch a man who wears a suit to work, with a house in a nice suburb. Instead you want to get into trouble by a market boy?’

  ‘Paul and I are just friends.’

  ‘Pfah! Drinking wine in the dark, that’s “just friends”? Not in my day.’

  ‘Things are different now.’

  ‘And some things never change. Men chase, girls get in the family way and lives are ruined. You are all I have, Aliki. I want you safe.’

  Alix hovered on the brink of confessing her visit to Hermès. There was a speech ready in her head: I don’t want to spend my life in the telephone building – “I’ll put you through, sir, please stand by.” I don’t want to marry a man in a dull suit. I want to learn the fashion trade and eventually open my own studio. Be the new Chanel, Vionnet, Jeanne Lanvin … open a shop in the 1st arrondissement. A glance at the sewing table warned that rhapsodies would fall on stubborn ears. Out loud she said, ‘I want to go into the couture business.’

  ‘Work sixteen-hour days and get crab’s claws?’ Mémé held up fingers bent like river weed. ‘Believe me, Aliki, go into that trade, you might as well put your life on a roulette wheel.’

  Chapter Three

  It was all very well for Mémé to tell her to stay safe, Alix mused a few days later as she crossed the Jardin du Luxembourg on her way to meet Paul, her hands deep in her pockets, her head bowed against a bitter wind. After all, there’d been no sign of caution the day Mémé announced they were moving to Paris.

  July 1935, they’d been sitting at the kitchen table of their home in south London. The day was sticky and hot, an open window letting in the noise of tradesmen’s traffic. It was also Alix’s once-a-month afternoon off from Arding & Hobbs, the department store where she’d worked since leaving school. She’d intended to spend her free time on Clapham Common, making a sketch for her portfolio. Back then her unstated ambition was to go to art school, starting with evening classes, then full time if she could ever afford it … somehow progress from there to being a dress designer. An ambition not helped that day by Mémé’s demand that she stay home and trim a bucket of runner beans a neighbour had given them.

  As Alix de-stringed and Mémé sliced, her grandmother had announced, ‘I want us to live in Paris.’

  Alix had laughed without looking up.

  ‘I mean it, Aliki. I’m sick of London.’

  ‘Why Paris?’

  Mémé waved her paring knife. ‘The other day I took lace collars to a place in Portman Square. Hours I’d spent on them! The buyer – dummkopf slattern – picks them up as if they are a bunch of watercress.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with Paris?’

  ‘In Paris, such girls are not given the job of buyer. In Paris, such girls sell watercress. I know I shall be happy in Paris.’

  ‘You won’t. You don’t know anybody there.’

  ‘My friend Bonnet is there.’ Then Mémé had stopped, as if astonished by her own words. Before Alix could question her, however, she added quickly, ‘He lives in a rough quarter and keeps strange hours, so we won’t meet him. What I mean is, half of Alsace lives in Paris. I will see people who look like me and sound like me.’

  ‘But I won’t know a soul.’

  ‘What will you miss? After all, I don’t see any school friends calling.’

  ‘Because they’ve all gone to finishing school in Switzerland.’ She silently added, I never had real school friends, none who would visit me here. ‘What about my job?’ Alix continued. ‘I got a good report last month and there’s a vacancy coming up in the silks department that I’m certain to get.’

  ‘In Paris, you’ll have fifty silk departments to choose from.’

  The truth eventually came out, though it took a few days. It was nothing to do with dummkopf buyers really: Mémé was frightened by the rise of anti-Jewish feeling in London. She told Alix, ‘While you were tucked away at school in the country, Moseley’s Blackshirts were taking lessons from Hitler. Jews are being attacked now in the East End. London is not safe.’

  ‘Nobody round here supports them. Nobody with any sense.’

  A neighbour, who was taking tea with them that afternoon, took Alix’s side: ‘They won’t come over the river, Mrs Lutzman.’ She’d winked at Alix. ‘No Blackshirts in Wandsworth.’

  ‘No?’ Mémé’s logic was offended. ‘I was on the bus. I went to Spitalfields to buy silk thread and some boys got on and shouted at us old women. They knew we were Jewish. They were Black-shirts.’

  ‘Spitalfields is east London, Mrs L.’

  ‘And now they know which bus I get on, so they can find me.’

  Nothing would dissuade Mémé. In her mind, London had become a nest of Nazism: of window breaking, of beatings and attacks. Always thin, by the time the August heat arrived she resembled a bundle of sticks. Alix caved in. She handed in her notice and spent August organising travel papers. She sold their furniture and acquired the addresses of accommodation agencies from the French embassy. By the time the leaves were falling, they were on the boat train heading for Dover, their household possessions packed for freighting on. Alix was coming to terms with a new future.

  Once in Paris, Mémé got piecework from an embroidery atelier, but was paid less than in London. It was a shock, the low wages of Paris’s luxuries industry. Yet another was having to pay six months’ rent in advance for a tiny flat, six floors up, with no hot water. Alix wore out her shoes looking for work, but either she didn’t have the right permit, or her French was inadequate, or she was at the back of a queue reserved for ‘French citizens only’.

  They were facing destitution when the job came up at the telephone exchange. That godsend followed fast on the heels of another – her meeting with Sylvie le Gal and through her, Paul. While Sylvie taught Alix to foxtrot, shimmy and tango, Paul gave her lessons in fashion piracy and corrected her French. Every accurate sketch Alix made of a couture outfit before its launch earned them two hundred black-market francs. She and Paul split the money – it kept the bailiffs from the door. That was another part of Alix’s life Mémé knew nothing about.

  Where was Paul this evening? He wasn’t usually late. Alix took an illegal shortcut across an area of lawn, keeping a sharp lookout for the park-keeper who would blow his whistle if he saw her treading on the sacred grass. Paul always waited for her by the lion statue, bathing its proud underbelly in the smoke of his Gauloises cigarettes. Nearly a week had gone by since she’d been aboard the Katrijn, so it must have taken him longer than usual to sell the Hermès sketch. That worried her. Paris was full of copyists like herself, swarming around the collections each season. March was a quiet month, the spring–summer collections already history. There’d be a brief flurry in April with the mid-season launches, then nothing till the frenzy of the autumn–winter shows at the end of July. But even in quiet months, you couldn’t slack. It had to be your sketch on the fast boat to New York if you wanted to make money.

  A familiar figure in a mariner’s jacket suddenly emerged from behind the lion’s plinth. Alix ran forward. ‘Paul, you were hiding.’

  ‘Sheltering – I didn’t realise you’d got here. You look like a cold princess,’ he told her as they kissed cheeks. ‘I like your coat.’

/>   ‘Flea market,’ she said, twirling so he could appreciate the generous fullness of the black cashmere skirts. ‘Rue des Rosiers.’ Not quite Schiaparelli, but almost – clearly copied from the Italian designer’s spring offering. The coat had a belted waist and had originally been ankle-length, but Alix had shortened it and embroidered roses on the collar, so it was now an original Alix Gower. ‘Shall we go for coffee?’ Alix thought Paul looked tense. ‘Tough day?’

  ‘No more than usual.’

  She didn’t press. ‘Who’s looking after the girls?’

  ‘Francine.’ He meant the old barge-woman who moored alongside him at Quai d’Anjou. ‘I can’t be long. She’ll be half drunk by now and showing her bloomers to the men on passing coal barges.’

  It was said without humour and Alix took his hand. ‘Think on the bright side – maybe tonight she won’t have her bloomers on.’

  Paul gave a bark of laughter. ‘That would clear the wharf! Come on, let’s stroll like the lovers we aren’t, eh? Good day at work?’

  She answered in BBC English, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I cannot place your call as there is washing on the line.’ Switching to French: ‘Now what? You’re glaring.’

  ‘I can’t understand that bloody language. You know that talking English to me is like throwing a ball too high for a dog.’ Gem-green eyes glinted – Paul was fair like his sisters, rough-hewn, typical Frankish descent. But touchy as a cavalry officer.

  ‘So I got an education, somebody paid for me,’ she soothed. ‘You respect learning, or you wouldn’t break your back sending your sisters for extra lessons. When Lala’s lead violin at the Paris Opéra or La Scala, it’ll be because of you.’

  They walked on, scattering pigeons. The park was almost empty, children and their nannies long gone. The writers, poets and students who haunted this Latin Quarter niche would be in the cafés on Boulevard St-Michel. Paul stopped once to light a cigarette, hunching around the flame until the tobacco lit. He drew heavily, his eyes lowered.

  ‘Tell me before I burst,’ Alix finally prompted. ‘How much did you get for the Hermès?’

  Paul blew out a stream of smoke. ‘Nothing. My contact couldn’t do anything with it. Not enough detail.’

  ‘Not enough detail?’ Along with bitter disappointment came fear. If this trickle of income dried up … she didn’t want to think about it. ‘Show me anyone else in Paris who remembers detail as I do, who can reproduce as perfectly—’

  ‘Nobody doubts you, Alix. Well, I don’t. But that’s not the point. They need the real thing.’

  ‘Half a day’s pay down the plughole! What does he expect, your contact? If somebody gives me the money, I’ll buy the scarf myself.’

  ‘I expect somebody already has. It’ll be zipping off to New York, to be turned into ten thousand fakes in a month. I’m sorry, Alix. For me too. I needed that commission.’

  ‘They could have worked from my drawing.’

  ‘She said not.’

  ‘She? Your contact’s a she?’

  ‘Stop it.’ He tried to smile, but squeezed out a frown instead. He kept her away from his ‘contacts’ and the backstreet bars where he did the deals. Paul had been involved in the black market since he was old enough to outrun the law, but reckoned Alix was too innocent for that world. ‘You smile at policemen,’ he’d tease her. ‘First sign of madness.’

  Now he shrugged. ‘You win some, you lose some.’ When she stopped and stood in front of him, he misread her, pulling her close. ‘I don’t want you to waste your life stealing.’

  Their lips came together in a leaf-soft kiss. Alix tipped her head back and replied, ‘I don’t steal.’

  ‘All right, copying. Thanks to people like you, New York ladies get Paris originals the same time as Frenchwomen do. You offer a social service, right?’

  ‘Right. Everyone gets what they want.’

  ‘Except the designers who create the clothes. They’d like to string you up.’

  ‘You got me into it,’ she reminded him. ‘We’d only known each other a week and you smuggled me into Longchamps races to see the rich women’s outfits. You said you had a friend who sold fashion drawings to a New York magazine, a dollar a sketch, who was looking for artists with a quick hand. You seduced me.’

  ‘I know. God, Alix, I wish I didn’t need you so much.’ Paul kissed her hungrily and Alix wriggled away, thinking he’d no right, that she disliked it … then realised that she didn’t. In fact, she liked the pressure of his mouth, the feel of his evening-rough chin against her skin. Even the taste of Gauloises didn’t alter the feeling.

  She broke the kiss. ‘Are you telling me there’s no more work?’

  ‘If we get caught, who’d care for my sisters and your grandmother?’ He sighed. ‘Yes. No more. That’s right.’

  ‘There’s another job, isn’t there?’ Paul never could lie.

  He groaned. ‘You’ll fly at me, or snap my head off.’

  She pulled his sleeve, kissed him briefly, then provocatively. ‘Tell me, then I’ll decide what I do.’

  Paul told her.

  *

  Steal the spring–summer 1937 collection from Maison Javier, a couture house on Rue de la Trémoille, close to the Champs-Elysées. Steal from the house for which Mémé was currently working … Steal the whole collection?

  Paul nodded. ‘My contact wants every last ribbon and buckle.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ Paul raised her wrist, checking the time by her watch. They’d retired to a café, ordering the cheapest wine, both conscious of family waiting for them at home. ‘People are wild for him in America, this Javier. It’s to do with that American woman who slept with the English king.’

  ‘Mrs Simpson wears Javier?’ Alix thought a moment, then nodded. ‘Maybe that’s why she looks so tall in her photographs. Javier pulls women straight, like a stick of rock.’

  Paul shrugged impatiently. ‘All I know is, American women queue down the street for copies of his dresses. My contact wants somebody at his spring show, sketching every outfit.’

  ‘Tell your contact she’s too late.’

  ‘But that’s it.’ Paul leaned forward, runkling the cloth. ‘Javier’s showing in April.’

  ‘Nobody shows spring–summer collections in April.’

  Paul opened his hands palm up. ‘Javier is, this year. Don’t ask me why.’

  Alix’s mind whirred. A whole collection, from one house? ‘You’d have to be in the workrooms. You’d have to rob his atelier. Take everything: garments, sketches, samples … or kidnap Javier himself.’

  ‘Can’t you get into the salon and take notes? They have parades every day, don’t they?’

  ‘Not until the collection is launched. I get into couture shows by pretending to be a lady’s maid. I follow a well-dressed woman inside. Or I pretend to be a titled English girl, desperate for her first Paris outfit. “What spiffing frocks! How do you people do it?” They fall for that. On a good day, I can memorise five or six designs. For a whole collection, I’d need three brains or a camera.’

  Paul rubbed his nose, out of his depth. ‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘my contact has wholesalers on standby. They have sweatshops in New York, full of what they call “table monkeys” – people who work all night at sewing machines to meet demand. American women want the fashion they see in the magazines. They want Javier. They want what Mrs …’

  ‘Simpson.’

  ‘– what she wears, and they want it yesterday.’

  Alix was shaking her head. ‘I’ve pushed my way into the collections too often as it is. The saleswomen circle like buzzards and drop on you if they see you making so much as a line with a pencil. Paul, you were correct when you said it was wrong. We should stop.’

  Paul looked down at his fingers. The skin around the nails was snagged from rough work, from biting. ‘Yes, I agree, but … you see, my contact, she knows an American speech therapist on Rue du Bac who’s had incredible results, who could get Suzy talk
ing again. But he’s expensive.’

  Alix sighed. ‘Everyone is, except you and me. I’m sorry, Paul.’

  Paul drained his glass. ‘Don’t look so wretched. I’ll tell my contact the job’s too big.’

  ‘No. Paul … tell her I’ll do it.’

  ‘You will?’

  She drank her wine. ‘Just after I’ve learned to make myself invisible. How much was offered, by the way?’

  ‘Oh …’ Paul counted coins on to the table, and named a figure that made Alix’s jaw drop. ‘I know. Rather like putting a year’s wages on a dark horse in the Prix de Diane and scooping the lot.’

  Chapter Four

  Seven hundred thousand francs. Enough, even split two ways, for Paul to refit the Katrijn, turn her into a home fit for small children and engage a dozen speech therapists. For Alix … freedom from that swivel chair and the eternal clicking exchange.

  She strode home, battling dreams and demons. She so wanted to help Paul. And she’d love to wake in the mornings free of financial worries. But … the couture industry employed thousands of women like her grandmother. ‘Steal a collection, you steal from people like Mémé.’ But then again … seven hundred thousand francs.

  But what if they were caught? They warned each other of the danger all the time, even joked about it. But what if it really happened? What if she felt a hand on her shoulder as she was sketching? Or a stern voice stopping her outside a shop – May I see inside your handbag, Mademoiselle? Paul had been in police custody numerous times, and his descriptions made Alix squirm. You were put into a windowless cell stinking of the last occupant’s sweat, or worse. They took your shoes and your top clothes and those came back with lice in them. They searched you, right down to your underwear. Women were meant to be searched by female personnel, but it didn’t always happen.

  In the lobby of her apartment building she walked past Mme Rey, too immersed in thought to see the woman.

  ‘Ants in the pants?’

  Alix whirled round. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Been with your nice-looking boy?’