The Dressmaker's Gift

by Valpy, Fiona

  To cover her friend’s slight confusion, Mireille said, ‘I love that colour. They’re calling it Schiaparelli pink. Mademoiselle Vannier thinks it’s common though.’ She smiled. ‘Sorry to have disturbed you. I just thought I’d come and see if you needed a hand. I know you’ve been given extra work to cover for Claire. I’m not as good as you two at beadwork, but I could hem that for you, if you like?’

  Vivi smiled, but shook her head. ‘That’s so kind of you, Mireille, but I’m very nearly finished.’ She held up a corner of the fabric – although Mireille noticed that she kept the white silk square carefully concealed beneath it – and said, ‘See, just one more panel to go. I’ll be up soon.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Mireille. ‘There’s a little bit of rabbit stew left from the other night. I’ll warm it up for you if you like?’

  Despite the lines of tiredness that pinched Vivi’s features, her face glowed as brightly as her hair when she smiled her thanks. ‘I’d love that.’

  Mireille turned to go, but stopped as Vivi spoke again, resting her hand on the fabrics which covered the table in front of her. ‘And Mireille? Thanks.’

  The look that passed between the two girls said far more than those few, terse words. It was a look of understanding: a mutual recognition of so much that needed to remain unsaid.

  Harriet

  If Mireille hadn’t had the courage and the determination to pedal so furiously towards the bombing raid over Billancourt that night in 1942, I wouldn’t be here now. Claire would have been one of the many thousands of people who perished in the bombardment – mostly civilians like Christiane, who lived in the accommodation that had been built to house the workers close to the Renault factory. Claire would never have married Laurence Ernest Redman and they would never have had the daughter that they named Felicity. As I trace those fine, fragile threads of fate back across the years, I am more and more astounded that I am here at all.

  Life can seem so very tenuous sometimes. But perhaps that fragility is why we treasure it so. And perhaps it is our profound love of life that makes us so terrified of losing it. Mireille didn’t hesitate to go back and find Claire. Vivienne would have gone in an instant as well, if she hadn’t had to stay behind. And I can only imagine the dogged determination that kept Mireille going as she gritted her teeth and practically dragged Claire, dazed and bleeding, from the other side of the city back to the safety of the apartment in Saint-Germain.

  So, if we cling on to life so hard and value it so much, how deep do depression and despair have to drag someone before they reach a place where they can’t bear to go on? It must have been a slow descent into hell that my mother endured before she could bear it no longer and ended the pain with a couple of handfuls of sleeping pills. She washed them down with the remnants of a bottle of brandy that had sat on a shelf in the kitchen for several years, bought by my father in happier times and used to set light to the pudding on the Christmas table.

  When I’d managed to break free of the hands that held me at the front gate, that day when the blue lights of the police car illuminated the dusk in front of my home, I ran inside and saw the empty bottle on its side on the floor, next to the sofa where a paramedic in a hi-vis jacket bent over my mother’s body. As more hands grabbed me and pulled me away, all I could think of, at the sight of that bottle, was having been entranced by the will-o’-the-wisp blue flames that danced around the dark mass of sticky fruit, transforming it into something magical. Blue flames that flickered like the blue lights of the police car which someone gently lifted me in to, while I waited for my father to come and get me. I knew that he would take me to a house where I wasn’t really wanted, a house where I certainly didn’t want to be. My mother had abandoned me to that fate. All of a sudden, I felt those flickering blue lights burning me, engulfing me in flames of shock and anger and pain which felt as if they would consume me completely. A police woman crouched in front of me, beside the open car door, holding my hand, trying to soothe me. I leant forward and threw up into the gutter, narrowly missing her neatly pressed trousers and shiny black shoes.

  I see now that it’s one of the paradoxes of life that if we love it so much that we are frightened of losing it, it can make us live a half-life, too scared to get out there and live whole-heartedly because we have too much to lose. In the same way, I think I protect myself in relationships, too scared to love whole-heartedly because then there would be too much to lose there too. I think of Thierry, of how drawn I feel to his calm, quiet presence and yet I feel myself drawing back, not letting myself fall in love because I’m afraid that there’d be too much to lose. I wish I had the courage of Claire, Vivi and Mireille. Then maybe I’d be able to live – and love – wholeheartedly.

  To shake off these morbid thoughts, I head to my usual refuge in the elegant sixteenth arrondissement. The trees are bare now, in the park that surrounds the Palais Galliera, and the ribbon-like flower beds that surround the fountain are planted in shades of deep purple and dark green. There’s an exhibition about one of France’s oldest fashion houses, Lanvin. I immerse myself in the world of its founder, Jeanne Lanvin, drinking in her beautiful creations. I stand for a long time in front of an evening gown in the iconic deep blue that was one of Lanvin’s trademarks. It has a heavy embellishment of silver beadwork on the sleeves. I wonder whether Claire ever saw a dress like this and whether it could have been the inspiration for the midnight blue gown she created from offcuts. It’s the off season and the museum is almost deserted, so I am startled out of my reverie by the sound of footsteps on the mosaic-tiled floor behind me. A silver-haired woman in a tailored black jacket comes to stand beside me in front of the exhibit.

  ‘It is beautiful, is it not?’ she says.

  I nod. ‘The whole thing is stunning,’ I say, sweeping a hand at the rest of the exhibition.

  ‘Do you have a particular interest in Lanvin?’ she asks.

  I tell her that my grandmother worked in another couture house in the war years and so I am drawn to designs from that era. But this dress, especially, reminds me of what I’ve heard about her.

  She smiles. ‘I’m glad. Fashion lives on to tell the story of those who created it and wore it. It is one of the reasons I am drawn to it too. Imagine how pleased Jeanne Lanvin would be to know that seventy years after her death we still remember her. Her designs live on, inspiring today’s designers. That is a sort of immortality, I think.’

  We both gaze at the dress in silence for a few more moments and then she says, ‘Well, I must be getting on. Good day, mademoiselle.’

  Her footsteps fade and I am alone in the gallery once more. I stoop to read one of the information sheets displayed alongside the dresses and my eye is drawn to a simple black and white image. It’s the Lanvin logo, a line drawing of two figures. A mother and child hold hands, as if they are about to begin to dance or to play a game. They are dressed in flowing robes and wear crown-like headdresses.

  The image is distinctive and, I realise, curiously familiar. It must be my imagination, but the scent of flowers seems to fill the air around me. And then I remember where I’ve seen this mother-and-child image before. It was on the black flagon of perfume that sat on my mother’s dressing table.

  I read on, and learn that Jeanne Lanvin created the logo to represent her close relationship with her only child, a daughter named Marguerite. And it was Marguerite who chose the name for the famous floral perfume with woody undertones that her mother created: Arpège. She named it for the arpeggio of scents – each note following the next – that brings harmony to the perfume.

  The room around me seems filled, suddenly, with the sound of a piano playing and I am transported back to my childhood.

  It must be the memory of the scent and of my mother’s fingers moving gracefully over the keys of her piano that makes me remember that other photograph that I found in the box of my mother’s things, the one with the light shining on her face as she gazed into mine, like a Madonna and child.

  Standi
ng there alone, in the exhibition hall surrounded by Jeanne Lanvin’s creations, I experience a moment of complete happiness, a memory of what it feels like to be filled with joy that bubbles up from somewhere deep within me. As it fades, it leaves in its wake the knowledge that I don’t feel so alone after all. It’s as if the logo depicts not just Jeanne and Marguerite but all mothers and children: my own mother and me, holding hands, full of love, preparing to dance together through our lives.

  The woman’s words echo in my mind: ‘That is a sort of immortality, I think.’ And it dawns on me that perhaps there are very many different ways to keep someone alive in your heart.

  1942

  Since the bombing of the Renault factory in Billancourt, the war had made its presence much more keenly felt in Paris. The city streets echoed with the sounds of marching troops and the rumble of military vehicles, as the rumours continued daily of Jewish citizens being rounded up in increasing numbers and held in segregated camps at Drancy and Compiègne.

  One evening, Mireille arrived back in the Rue Cardinale to find the bicycle that she’d borrowed from her neighbour on the night of the bombing raid propped against her door. There was a note tied to the handlebars, and a sob caught in her throat as she read it.

  For the mademoiselle with the dark eyes. I have to leave, so I want you to have my bicycle. It will be of use to you – and none to me, where I am going. Best wishes, your neighbour Henri Taubman.

  Recalling the yellow star pinned to his coat, she fervently hoped that he was making his escape, rather than being sent to one of those camps in the suburbs.

  A sense of profound unease spread through the city from one quarter to the next and spilled over into a demonstration one day when the Communist women of the Rue Daguerre took to the streets to protest against the now severe shortage of food outside warehouses that were filled with food for soldiers on the German front. Shots were fired, arrests were made and, Mireille heard on the grapevine, the instigators were sent to those same camps. They did not return. Against this backdrop the girls often lay in their beds listening to the thuds and cracks of explosions as the Allied bombing raids continued sporadically. And the Germans clamped down harder than ever with road blocks, barriers at the Métro stations that remained open, arrests and shootings to keep the local population in check.

  Mireille’s missions for the underground network felt even more dangerous but, at the same time, even more vital. Visiting the dyer one day to collect some bolts of silk, he handed her a small packet for Vivienne, wrapped in brown paper, and then gave her a set of instructions of her own for that evening. She was to meet a man on the north side of the city and accompany him safely to the Arnauds’ house in the Marais, avoiding using the main Métro stations where the Germans were doing frequent spot-checks.

  And so it was that she sat at a table at a café on a sloping, cobbled Montmartre street and sipped on her cup of ersatz coffee as she waited for her next ‘visitor’ to turn up. She was expecting a shabbily dressed refugee, perhaps, or another foreigner whose grasp of French was tenuous at best, so she was surprised when a young Frenchman slipped into the chair across from hers. He pulled a blue and white spotted handkerchief out of his pocket – the sign that she’d been told to watch for – and blew his nose; then he asked whether ‘Cousin Cosette’ was well, using the code word she’d been told to listen for.

  ‘Her leg is much better these days, thanks for asking,’ she replied, repeating the confirmation code that the dyer had given her. She downed the dregs of her coffee, making a face at the bitter tincture of roasted chicory and dandelion roots, then got to her feet and the young man followed her out into the street.

  As they walked down the hill, she slipped him the false papers she’d been given for him and he tucked them into his pocket without looking at them. She took him to the Métro station at Abbesses and they stood on the semi-deserted platform waiting for a train. Cocooned underground and under cover of the noises of the railway, she felt able to talk to her charge a little more freely than usual, as long as they kept their voices low. The clatter of distant trains, the dripping of water and the sound of other passengers’ footsteps echoing off the tunnel walls, muffled their conversation.

  His eyes, which were almost as dark as her own, held a gleam of determination in their depths, and the day’s growth of stubble etched on his chin helped to define its strength. His black hair sprung back from his forehead with a vitality which was mirrored in the confident spring of his step and the interest with which he watched her face as she talked. They didn’t exchange names – they both knew the dangers involved – but she recognised his accent as being from the far south of the country with the twang of a native of Provence or the Languedoc. He told her that he’d grown up near Montpellier, the eldest in a sprawling family of sisters and brothers, and that he’d signed up in 1939. He was one of the lucky ones in the French army who had been evacuated from Dunkirk, and he’d joined the Free French in England, continuing the fight under the command of General De Gaulle.

  Mireille nodded. She’d heard from the dyer that sometimes messages were broadcast from England by the exiled General, rallying the troops that were left to him and trying to raise the morale of the people he’d had to leave behind.

  ‘I was parachuted in last week. Dropping off a few gifts for the folks in the homeland.’ He grinned as he said this and Mireille guessed that the ‘gifts’ were probably wireless sets or weapons or orders for covert operations, although she didn’t ask him to elaborate.

  ‘Got held up on the way, though. Turned out there was a Boche unit camped out in the town so we couldn’t risk getting the plane back in. It’s easy enough parachuting in to France but getting back out is another story. So they fixed me up with your lot. Told me I’ll be enjoying a holiday in the Pyrenees in a few days’ time. But they said I’d need a specialist to get me across Paris. I can’t say I was expecting one as beautiful as you, though.’

  Mireille shook her head and laughed. ‘Flattery will get you nowhere! But yes, I’ll try and get you through the city safely. I don’t know exactly which way they’ll be taking you after that, though – the routes change all the time to try to keep one step ahead of the Germans and the police.’

  She kept her eyes on the tracks, watching the mice that scurried among the rubble between the sleepers when the station was quiet, aware that he was watching her closely and that it was making her cheeks flush. Shaking back her curls, she met his gaze boldly and said, ‘I know we’re not supposed to ask questions. But I do have just one: what happened to your parachute?’

  He laughed, surprised. ‘I buried it in a turnip field, as instructed. Why do you ask?’

  ‘It just would have made a nice blouse and a few pairs of camiknickers too, for me and my friends.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, gravely. ‘Well next time, mademoiselle, I will be sure to keep it with me and bring it to you here in Paris. I’m sure General De Gaulle and the rest of the Allied Command would be delighted to know army equipment was being put to such very good use!’

  All at once, the mice on the tracks scattered and a few seconds later they heard the sound of an approaching train, silencing them both.

  They sat side by side, and Mireille was acutely conscious of the man’s arm touching hers through their jacket sleeves as the carriage swayed and jerked. They didn’t speak, as there were other passengers sitting within earshot, but she couldn’t help feeling the powerful undercurrent of attraction that passed between them.

  She was jolted out of this pleasant reverie when the train drew to a stop at a station well before their own and a guard shouted that the train would terminate here. They followed their fellow passengers, some grumbling, some silently resigned, up the stairs to the exit.

  As they reached the top of the stairs, Mireille’s heart beat against her ribs like a trapped bird. At the barrier, half a dozen soldiers were pulling people out from the crowd of passengers who’d been turned off the train. A few yards ahead
of them, one man hesitated, looking around for another exit. His momentary delay caught the attention of two of the soldiers and they unceremoniously pushed the other passengers out of the way and seized the man by his upper arms, marching him off. Mireille noticed that they were stopping anyone who wore a yellow star pinned to their clothing. She drew the young man’s arm through hers, pulling him close so that she could mutter in his ear, ‘Don’t hesitate. Don’t look left or right. Just walk with me.’

  When it was their turn at the barrier, Mireille forced herself to look relaxed, although her shoulders were stiff with tension. Through the sleeve of her coat she could feel the muscles of the young man’s forearm harden as he clenched his fist.

  One of the soldiers looked them up and down and seemed about to stop them. But then he waved them through and turned his attention to the couple behind them, demanding to see their papers. Mireille breathed again, allowing her shoulders to relax just a little.

  Outside in the street, a truck was parked on the pavement. A pair of guards leaned their rifles against the tailgate as they smoked cigarettes. Mireille glimpsed the pale, anxious faces of the people who’d been made to board it, as she and the young man walked on in sickened silence until they were out of earshot. Then Mireille withdrew her arm from his and tucked her hair behind her ears, her hands shaking with equal measures of fear and anger. She noticed that the young man’s fists were still tightly clenched and his jaw was set in a hard line.

  ‘So this is what they do,’ he said, looking as sick as she felt. ‘Herd people into trucks like cattle and send them to those so-called work camps where they treat them like slaves. We’ve heard the reports, back in England, but seeing it happening right in front of me . . .’ He tailed off, swallowing his frustration.

  ‘I know,’ she replied, leading him towards the river. ‘It’s grotesque. What’s even more horrible is that half the time it’s the French police who man those barriers, not the Germans. It’s getting worse all the time.’