The Dressmaker's Gift

by Valpy, Fiona

  ‘But what will happen to them in prison?’

  He shrugged. ‘We can’t be sure. I have a contact on the inside, so I’m hoping to get some more news soon. Mostly they use Fresnes as a holding place for political prisoners before moving them on to one of the prison camps in Germany. If they are deported it won’t be easy to keep track of them. The people who are taken to those places . . . they tend to disappear.’

  She studied his face for a moment. Outwardly, he was trying to maintain his usual calm facade. But the shadows beneath his eyes and the lines of pain etched around his mouth betrayed the depth of his anguish. Vivi was clearly more to him than simply another agent in the network that he controlled. Perhaps she really had been his mistress. And perhaps those other rumours about him made more sense now, too. All those women he’d been cultivating – had they had other uses as well? Did he convince some to become agents, persuading them to take on roles within the network as he had done with Vivi? And were others the ‘contacts on the inside’ he spoke of, the ‘grey mice’ he’d wined and dined and clothed in couture, feeding him with intelligence from inside the Avenue Foch and the prison at Fresnes? She’d always warmed to him and had trusted him with her life. But now she wondered whether there might be a ruthlessly cold and manipulative side to him as well. Were Vivi and Claire simply expendable pawns in a horrific game of chess being played out across Europe?

  As if reading her thoughts, he said quietly, ‘You know, I always believed that the network was more important than any individual within it. But losing Vivienne and Claire has proven me wrong.’ For a moment, his whole face crumpled as he tried to stop himself from breaking down. A single, terrible sob wrenched itself out of him, from deep down inside, and he covered his eyes with his hands.

  Quickly, Mireille set down her cup and moved across to him. She knelt on the floor at his side and took his hands in hers. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the pain in their depths made her feel ashamed for having doubted him even for a moment. It was clear that he cared as deeply about Claire and Vivi as she did.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re not wrong. You know as well as I do how determined the two of them were – are – to play their parts. They’d be furious if they thought the network had fallen apart because of them. If . . .’ She stopped, then corrected herself. ‘When they come back, do you want to be the one to tell them that we gave up because of them? Of course not! We have to keep going. Because we have to put an end to the terror and the arrests and the disappearances. We have to win.’

  As she spoke, Mireille felt the strength of her conviction return, flowing through her veins with a heat that seemed to thaw the icy grip of the winter.

  He squeezed her hand, then let go of it in order to fish in his pocket for a handkerchief with which to mop his face. Once he’d regained his composure, he said, ‘You’re right. Of course, you’re right. We can’t give up. We have to keep fighting, even if it takes the last breaths in our bodies.’

  ‘Good,’ she replied. ‘That’s agreed then. I’ll start my duties again, as soon as you can get the links re-established.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, Mireille, I’m afraid we can’t use you any more, neither as a courier to replace Claire, nor as a passeuse. And we certainly can’t have another wireless operator located here. As I told you, they’ll be on the lookout for you and if you’re picked up out there on the streets it’ll be the worse for the others, as well as for you with everything you now know.’

  Mireille’s hand went to the locket around her neck and her fingers tightened into a clenched fist. ‘Please, Monsieur Leroux, I have to do something. I can’t just sit here while they’re out there, enduring . . .’ Her words trailed off.

  Then she spoke again, more quietly this time but with an undertone of determination. ‘One of my friends who lived in this apartment was shot down in cold blood by the Nazis. Now two more have been arrested and tortured and deprived of their liberty. Their rooms stand empty, and I can’t bear to look at them. So let me use those three rooms to shelter others who need them. This whole building is deserted when the salon closes and the other seamstresses go home. I’m the only one left. If we run it as a safe house for the network, it will mean that those rooms don’t stand empty any more. And it will stop me from going crazy. Because I’ll be doing something for people like Vivi and Claire. And then, when they come back to us, when all of this is over, I’ll be able to tell them that I was brave like them. I’ll be able to look them in the eye and say that, like them, I never gave in.’

  Monsieur Leroux raised his gaze to hers. He shook his head again, but this time it was more in admiration than in defeat. ‘You know, Mireille,’ he said, ‘you three young women are some of the bravest people I’ve ever met. And one day, when all this is over, I hope we will all be reunited in a better world. That really is something worth fighting for.’

  The door slammed shut and Claire’s prison cell was plunged into darkness, apart from the letterbox-like slit in the door which allowed a glimmer of light to slip beneath its ill-fitting cover. As her eyes adjusted, she could just make out the narrow bed with its coarse blanket and the bucket in one corner of the room.

  She sat down on the hard mattress and covered her face with her hands. Defeat crashed over her like a breaking wave, an overwhelming force that knocked her feet out from beneath her and held her under for a moment so that she felt she could hardly draw breath. Until now, she’d always known Vivi was close by. In the back of the truck that had brought them here, swaying and swerving through the streets, she’d crouched on the floor beside the stretcher and held Vivi’s hand. Gently, she’d brushed the hair away from Vivi’s face, being careful not to touch the swollen, bruised skin around her eyes and jawline. As she slowly regained consciousness, Vivi had begun to shake uncontrollably and Claire had hushed her and soothed her with those same words that her friend had used to reassure her when her nightmares had woken them both. She repeated them over and over until they became more of a prayer than a statement: ‘Hush, now. I’m here. We’re together. Everything will be alright.’

  Vivi’s hair and clothes were damp. Through swollen, broken lips she managed to whisper that they’d filled a bath and held her head under the water repeatedly until she was certain that she would drown. ‘But I didn’t talk, Claire. They didn’t break me. I knew you weren’t far away and that kept me strong.’ She reached a hand up to touch Claire’s blackened eye. ‘And you were brave too.’

  Claire nodded, unable to speak.

  Vivi squeezed her hand, weakly. ‘I knew you would be. We will stay brave together.’ She closed her eyes then and slept. Claire sat watching over her for the rest of the journey until the truck pulled up with a jerk at the prison gates.

  They’d been taken to separate rooms inside the prison. With support, Vivi had managed to stand and then she’d been half-carried by guards into a room where the door was shut firmly behind her. A female guard escorted Claire down a long corridor. She’d hobbled, trying to use only the outer edges of her feet where the pain was just about bearable. Then the guard had made her stand, while she herself sat behind a desk and filled in a pile of paperwork with Claire’s details. And finally, without a word, she’d led Claire here, to this darkened cell, in the solitary confinement wing of the prison.

  Sitting on her bed in the cramped darkness which filled her nostrils with the stench of mildew and urine, it was some minutes before Claire registered the tapping noise. It seemed to be coming from the wall behind her. At first, she thought it might be rats or mice. Then, as she listened, she realised there was a more regular rhythm to it. Perhaps it was air trapped in the pipes concealed beneath the brickwork, she thought. But the noise persisted.

  She raised her head from her hands, to listen more carefully. And then she realised that someone was tapping out a pattern, repeating it over and over again. Three quick taps, and then a fourth with a longer pause, then two more quick taps. And then the same pattern was repeated for a second time, fo
llowed by a silence for a few moments before the whole sequence began again. The tapping was muffled by the brick wall, but the repetition was distinct. It had to be a code, spelling something out.

  She tapped back on the wall, copying the pattern. The code came back immediately from the next-door cell, repeated more quickly this time. And then she realised that she recognised the first part of it. She’d heard it at the beginning of the radio broadcast that her father and brother had tuned into that evening when they were waiting for the coded BBC message to tell them that the operation was to go ahead to get Fréd to safety. The first four notes of the Beethoven symphony: V for Victory. It was Morse code! And there was another letter added in between. Two quick dots . . .

  She tapped the pattern back again, more fluently this time: the letter ‘V’, then two quick taps, then the letter ‘V’ again and two more quick taps. There was a flurry of answering knocks, like a round of applause.

  It was Vivi! She was there, on the other side of the wall. They were still together, side by side. She wasn’t alone.

  And now that Claire knew that, somehow the cold and the darkness of her prison cell wasn’t so unbearable after all.

  Mireille had grown accustomed to the ringing of the doorbell late in the evening, shortly before the hours of the curfew, and to slipping down to open the door and receive the next escapee from the hands of the latest passeuse to be recruited by the network. Sometimes there was a single ‘guest’, other times there might be a couple of people making their perilous journey out of France, grateful to spend a night in the apartment under the roof of 12 Rue Cardinale where they were concealed by a young woman with a mass of dark curls, whose warm brown eyes held a look of sadness in their depths even when she smiled. But one night she opened the door to find Monsieur Leroux standing there.

  She pulled him inside and shut the door quickly. ‘You have news?’ she asked.

  ‘There is news, yes. They have left the prison.’

  She gasped. ‘Where are they? Can I see them?’

  His hazel eyes were clouded with sorrow. ‘They’ve been taken on one of the transports. To a camp in Germany. That’s all we know. We have lost them now, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No!’ The word was wrenched from Mireille, her pain making it sound shrill in the darkening hallway.

  He put an arm around her and hugged her as she cried out for her friends, raging against the cruelty of the world in which they’d all found themselves.

  At last she grew quiet, regaining control. ‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

  ‘Now?’ he repeated. His voice was soft at first, but as he continued speaking the words grew stronger and more resolute. ‘Now we keep doing what we’ve been doing. And we do it every single day for as long as we can. Because that’s what they would want us to do. There is hope, you know, Mireille. The tide of this war is turning, I’m convinced of it. The Germans suffered a very bitter defeat when the Russians managed to take back Stalingrad in February. Their armies are stretched on all fronts now and the Allies are making headway. You know, even couture is becoming a victim of the war – there’s just been an edict in Germany that fashion pictures are to be banned from magazines. So you see, the pressure is having an effect at every level. And that makes it all the more important that we keep our contribution going, because each small act of defiance chips away a little more at the foundations of Hitler’s power. Most importantly of all, we have to do it for Vivienne and Claire. Because the sooner there is an end to this war, the greater chance there is that they may still survive it and come back to us.’

  She looked at him and saw that his face was drawn with anguish. ‘You love her very much, don’t you?’ she said.

  He couldn’t speak for a moment. But then he answered her. ‘I love both of them, Mireille.’

  The next day, she walked to the island in the middle of the river and crept in beneath the branches of the willow tree at its downstream end. Once again, she leaned her head against the tree’s rough trunk and let it support her, taking the weight of her worries and her fears for a while. Despite Monsieur Leroux’s words of hope yesterday, it felt as if the war would never end. And if it did, would it still be too late for Claire and Vivi . . .?

  As the river flowed past, she saw the faces of the people she loved reflected in its depths. Her mother and father; her brother and sister; baby Blanche; Vivienne; Claire; and the man whose name she still held in her heart, keeping it secret for now. Would she ever be able to say it out loud? Would she ever see him again?

  Would there ever be an end to this war?

  The journey to the camp was a long one, but Vivi and Claire reassured one another and tried to keep each other’s spirits up, helping the other women crowded into the jolting cattle car as best they could. The train seemed to move slowly, like a snake awakening from its winter hibernation, sluggishly uncoiling eastwards, apparently in no great hurry to get them to their destination.

  The carriage was filled with an atmosphere of fear and anguish, as cold and clammy as the fog that engulfed the train for much of the day. Many of the women wept uncontrollably. Some were in a bad way physically, the traumas they had suffered taking their toll.

  One morning they woke to find the spring sunshine creeping through the slatted sides of the car. But the slight lifting of spirits that Claire felt at the sight of it was short-lived. The rays of light illuminated the face of an elderly woman who had died in her sleep. ‘If only the rest of us could be so lucky,’ muttered another woman as she helped Claire and Vivienne to cover the body with the old lady’s coat and gently move her to one corner of the carriage. The next time the train stopped, later on that day, a guard slid open the door of the cattle truck and told them they could get out to stretch their legs for a few minutes. Noticing the body, he casually pulled it from the corner and dragged it out to lie beside the tracks amongst the bright tangle of fireweed and poppies that had grown up there.

  The others stood watching in silence. One or two crossed themselves and muttered prayers for the lost soul.

  But then one woman bent down and took the coat from the corpse, draping her own more worn one back over the body. She looked around defiantly. ‘Well, it’s no use to her now,’ she said.

  Some of the others turned their backs on her then, but soon the guard shouted at them to get back on board the train and then they were all crammed in together again, with no room for anyone to turn her back on her neighbour, even if she’d had the will to do so.

  The time spent in the prison at Fresnes had allowed Claire and Vivi to recover a little – physically, at least – from their treatment at the hands of the Gestapo. Claire could put weight on the soles of her feet again now, the scars from the beatings she’d endured having healed over leaving white wheals of thickened skin, and her toenails were starting to grow back where they’d been wrenched from the nail beds. Vivi’s face was healing, although her smile remained lopsided from the damage done to her jaw and the loss of a tooth. She had a cough that rattled in her chest especially in the mornings, having suffered from the dampness of her prison cell after her near-drowning at the Avenue Foch, but she insisted to Claire that she was fine. The two of them, together, kept each other going. Each night, as the train rattled onwards, the two friends would curl up side by side. And in the darkness, when the nightmares and the terror made Claire cry out, as she did in their attic bedrooms, Vivi would take her hand and whisper, ‘Hush, now. I’m here. And you’re here. We’re together. And everything will be alright.’

  After several days, the train disgorged its surviving passengers at last, and the women clustered together on the platform of a strange station. The jagged, Gothic script painted on to the wooden signs read ‘Flossenbürg’.

  Claire blinked in the late spring sunshine, lifting her light-starved face to the faint warmth of its rays. Although she was frightened, dreading whatever unimaginable trials might be coming next, she managed to muster a little inner strength, reminding herself that they had su
rvived this far, that perhaps now the worst was over, and that – most importantly of all – she and Vivi were still together.

  The train’s cargo – men, women and a few terrified children – was herded into long lines by SS officers and then they were ordered to begin walking. Hungry, thirsty and exhausted, the prisoners stumbled along a dusty road for almost an hour, with any stragglers being ordered back into line at one end or the other of a guard’s rifle.

  Soon, Claire’s feet burned with flames of shooting pain that made her hobble. At one point, she faltered as her legs, which were unaccustomed to bearing her weight for such a long stretch of time after the months spent in a prison cell and cattle car, were seized with searing cramps and felt as if they would give way beneath her. But then Vivi linked an arm through hers and the reassurance of that contact helped Claire walk on.

  At last they came to a forbidding-looking gatehouse and passed through a black metal gateway. To either side there stretched a high, razor-wire-capped fence which had guard towers set into it at regular intervals along its length. The muzzle of a machine gun, trained towards the interior of the camp, protruded from each one.

  Claire lifted her bowed head to read the inscription set into one of the brick gateposts as they passed by: Arbeit Macht Frei. She frowned, trying to puzzle out the meaning. Vivi nudged her. ‘It says, work will set you free.’

  The sickening irony of the message, as it hung over the heads of the frightened and exhausted prisoners, forced a gulp of astonished hysteria to escape from Claire’s mouth. It might almost have been laughter, had it not sounded so strangled and bleak amongst the scared whispers and shuffling footsteps of the crowd, like the involuntary yelp of an animal in pain.