Orphans of War (46 page)

Maddy sat in her dressing gown, staring at her face in the mirror. She looked like a panda with huge made-up eyes–like a ballerina on stage. This look was all the rage in the
cabines
of the London mannequins. Other model girls in full make-up were sitting around waiting for something to happen, chewing gum, smoking with elegant holders, sizing each other up like race horses in stalls ready for the off. She’d been lucky enough to be taken on trial to see if she suited and now she was part of Mr Raoul Henry’s stable of fillies.

It seemed months, not weeks, since her first nervous arrival from Leeds clutching her portfolio of photographs, bedding down with Bella’s dizzy cousin Fay in a pad off Marylebone High Street.

She’d spent days traipsing from warehouse to warehouse, up rickety stairs and over bomb sites around Great Portland Street, in the heart of the fashion industry, hoping to find a job showing off the latest designs to buyers.

Now that clothing coupons were finally abolished there was a dash to feed the frenzy of women looking
for a new wardrobe after years of making do with drab and dreary sludge. Rouge Dior was the big colour in Paris and London, and being dark, Maddy suited the striking deep scarlet and always wore a scarf in that shade around her neck to highlight her pale skin.

Maddy had scoured her
Vogue
magazines eagerly, looking for ways to groom herself to the highest standards. She wore gloves, hat, perfect stockings, knowing she must provide her own accessories, with shoes–pretty pumps and smart court shoes–all lugged around in her holdall. Coming south was a huge gamble, but she couldn’t stay north after what had happened. It was too painful to stay in the town where she’d been so happy only a few months before.

Her hair was getting longer and she practised sweeping it into an elegant chignon anchoring it down with precious kirby-grips and combs. She mustn’t look like someone up from the country when she went for interviews, lugging her heavy portmanteau containing all her
batterie de beauté.

Along the busy streets she trundled, around the heart of the rag trade, Great Portland Street, Margaret Street, up and down, until her legs ached in her scuffed shoes and she despaired of ever getting work.

The ballet look was everywhere. The film
The Red Shoes
had seen to that, but she was no Moira Shearer even if she scraped her hair into a bun and pulled in her waistband, trying to look as if she’d just stepped out of the stage door.

‘You’re more a ballroom girl,’ said one owner, looking her up and down. ‘Débutantes and society
weddings, that’s your look. Why don’t you try Hardy Amies in Savile Row? They do glamorous evening wear for the rich and famous.’

She found no joy there, but one of the
vendeuses
took pity on her and gave her another address. ‘Try round the corner. Go and see Mr Henry’s salon, but don’t say I sent you. I know one of his models has just got married to a lord; she’s now on her honeymoon in the South of France. Try there and good luck!’

With aching feet and heart, Maddy followed her instructions, climbed to the elegant steps to ring the bell. The brass plate by the side of the door said: ‘The House of Raoul Henry’. Eventually the door opened to her.

‘I’ve come to see if there’s a vacancy for a house model,’ she said smiling, hoping they wouldn’t noticed the dust on her shoes, the grubbiness of her white gloves or her tired face. It had been a long day.

A woman in severe black ushered her in, ‘Are you from the agency?’ she snapped in a heavy French accent, ushering Maddy up the stairs quickly. ‘This way. Mr Henry is going out shortly.’

They left the glamour of the marble hall behind and climbed up indeterminable steps towards the attic hubbub of the workrooms with a rainbow of cloth bolts lining the stairs, and the smell of fabric and sweat and perfume all mixed together.

‘Your name?’ said the woman.

‘Madeleine Belfield. I’ve brought my portfolio,’ she said, holding it up, but the woman didn’t even give it a glance.

‘Wait here,’ she ordered, and Maddy waited for what seemed hours, wondering what fate lay in store, praying that the girl from the agency wouldn’t turn up and queer her pitch.

A small man in the doorway stared and eyed her up. ‘Let me see you…stand…walk this way. Your height?’

‘Five foot ten,’ she offered, adding half an inch for good measure, trying to look sophisticated and used to inspection. She smiled.

‘I don’t want smiles, I want haughty,’ he commanded. ‘You’d better strip behind the screen and let me see your shape.’

Maddy did as she was told and strode out in her underslip as she had been taught.

‘Good,’ said the man. ‘Long limbs and a straight back for once, but can you move? Hortense, put her in the gold brocade and call me back when she is respectable.’

He disappeared while the woman in black fussed over her and brought up a ballgown that barely fastened up the back.

‘You’ll have to get rid of some of this,’ she said pinching her hard in the back. ‘There’s too much muscle. Mr Henry likes straight-up-and-down gals. At least you have no bust; he likes to create that within his gown.’

Maddy stood as they fixed her straggling chignon into the nape of her neck and someone produced a pair of enormous earrings for her to clip on.

‘A swan’s neck is desirable in our girls. Yours will
do, just about. Take the stairs slowly and make an entrance.’

Maddy lifted the front of the gown. There were yards of brocade to lift. She was trying to look elegant as she drifted into the drawing room with the beautiful chandeliers and Louis XIV chairs, gold paint and elegantly swagged curtains. There was a mirror facing her and she remembered to straighten up like a swan, lift her neck and glide slowly, extending her back until she felt she was seven feet tall.

Remembering all those training sessions in Leeds at Marshfields, she stared ahead as if down a long corridor, trying to feel like a princess…Cinderella at the ball.

There was a prince of sorts waiting, watching her every move. He was not the handsome prince of her dreams but a middle-aged man with a moustache and dyed black hair. ‘Turn, walk this way…name?’ He’d forgotten her already.

‘Madeleine,’ she said, not deigning to break her pose. Haughty she must be.

‘Well, Miss Madeleine, I think I can use you but I want to see no smiles, no attitude. I create the shape, the look. You are nothing. You will either inspire me or not. Where are you from?’

‘Yorkshire, sir.’

‘Where’s that?’ He turned to Hortense who shrugged her shoulders. ‘No matter. You have something, but hair and make-up alone will not do. I want no tanning; keep out of the sun–smoke if you must–and punctuality. You’ve a lot to learn but you are fresh and young.
I can mould you…Now I am busy, off you go and wear some decent shoes next time. I want high heels. I like my girls as tall as guardsmen, proud and stiff in the back.’

‘Yes, Mr Henry,’ Maddy croaked, hardly able to believe this stroke of luck. The head of the couturier house had deigned to speak to her himself!

She didn’t even dare to ask about money. Was she paid by the hour? How could she manage on piecework? To have a place here, however humble, a place in a couture house in London, was a wonderful break. If only she could feel some joy in her success.

At night she’d lain awake on her makeshift sofa bed, worrying if she’d done the right thing. Greg had not come back and tried to change her mind. Even Gloria hadn’t bothered to write to her. Could it really be possible that the loss of that baby was her own fault? That made her feel so sick and scared, all she could do was smoke cigarette after cigarette until she lay back and fell into a fitful sleep. Better to leave. Out of sight was out of mind, so they said.

Then she thought of all the shining moments she and Greg had shared, the cuddles, the kisses, the promises of a future together, all the things she’d given up in coming to London. She just had to succeed and make a future here, salvage something from the mess that was her life.

The Henry collection was top secret and only his most trusted workers knew the final style. It was down to fewer than a hundred garments from hundreds of sketches, designed over his dummy or favourite model.
Pieces were worked on separately to keep the secrets safe from prying eyes. Details of buttons, trimmings, lace had to pass his eagle eye. After weeks of thunder and lightning in the fitting rooms, tantrums as gowns were flung across the atelier floor in rage at a dropped stitch, Mr Henry was almost satisfied.

Now the deb season was back in full swing, there was a demand for couture presentation gowns and wedding dresses, cocktail gowns and theatre outfits.

‘No one is born to a ball gown like my English girls,’ he smiled, satisfied when the night of the fashion show at last arrived.

The moment of truth was upon the House of Raoul Henry. Would his designs be snapped up by eager buyers, wanting to reproduce them quickly for their customers, or would the orders be slow to arrive?

The gilt chairs were lined up in the salon, waiting for the invited guests to grace the House with their glittering presence. The season would soon be under way and a row of débutantes and their mothers would be eyeing the ball gowns for their coming-out parties and balls. Who would be there? The duchess…the marchioness and the American film star who thought Mr Henry was a genius, able to disguise her heavy bust and thick waist with the cut of his design?

Then there were the ladies of the press, eyeing up any new collections for their magazines and, of course, the buyers from department stores, who would purchase a sample to be unpicked, or a cotton toile, a mere sketch and pattern outline for a large fee. Nothing must be left to chance: not fittings, rehearsals
nor last-minute alterations. No wonder nerves were frayed.

Each model must work like fury, slithering in and out of her gowns at speed to sparkle before the audience, whether she be Barbara Goalen, Jean Dawnay or the lovely Bettina:
la crème de la crème.
One of Mr Henry’s troupe, Alannah, thought she was above the rest, notorious for getting to the rack of dresses hung high, grabbing the pole, and snatching the most glamorous gown for herself. She would make snide remarks from behind the screen about the others as if they couldn’t hear. ‘Why has the old man picked her for the finale? She’s hardly been here five minutes!’ she sneered, waving her talons in Maddy’s direction. Her mushroom-black hat was already in place while she was sitting in a waspie-waist corselette and stockings.

‘Bitch!’ whispered Charmaine Blake, who’d taken Maddy under her wing. ‘Take no notice of her. She’s always bad-tempered. That one’s in love with herself…She lives on cigarettes and black coffee before a show so her waist is smaller than anyone else’s. Her breath is toxic. Watch your back, though. She’ll steal your best exit if she thinks she can get away with it.’

Maddy’s dress fell down on the ground just as she was about to make her exit, but Hortense smiled. ‘That is good luck. Now the show is bound to please our customers…’

‘Kick me down the steps, kick me down the steps, Charmaine!’ Maddy whispered, knowing from her days at Marshfields that it was good luck to get a shove
on your first exit. Serene on the surface but bubbling like a volcano underneath, Maddy fell into a trance as she stepped from the curtain to the catwalk…Don’t forget the five points: glide, slide off the jacket, then trail the mink across the laps of the important customers in the front row, pirouette at the corners to show the swing of the skirt, pause, pose, look aloof. The customers in the front row were the most important guests to impress. One nod from them was worth twenty from the back.

They’d had a pep talk from Mr Henry. ‘You are my girls,’ he ordered, wiping a pink silk hanky across his brow. ‘The gown is what is on show, not you. You don’t wear it…it wears you. Do honour to the cloth, to the design. I don’t want any
prima donnas
here,’ he warned, looking straight at Alannah Bateman. ‘If it goes well we will all be happy. If not, some of you will be out of work. It’s as simple as that. So go forth, my beautiful swans, and glide, don’t rush. Give them time to see what beauties I have created. Let them hear the rustle of silk and satin, swish those yards of tulle and lace. Let them feast their eyes. Wear the jewels like a queen, as if you were born to them. Stare ahead like thoroughbreds you are. The House of Raoul Henry expects…and Madeleine, don’t forget, no smile from you. I want that disdainful look again. You must give them your disdain, a tinge of arrogance and sorrow.’

Maddy hadn’t a clue what he was talking about so she turned to Charmaine, whispering, ‘What look?’

‘That faraway look you have in your eyes. You always look a little sad as if you might burst into tears any
time. Just stare ahead, fix your eye on a spot on the opposite wall and go for it. You’ll be fine.’

Do I look sad? she thought. Her intention was always to put everything together and not make a mistake. Just the mere thought of sitting on the train back to Leeds with her tail between her legs was her motivation.

‘What are you waiting for? It’s your exit now! Don’t think about it. Just go!’ Charmaine gave her a shove. ‘You look gorgeous. Fancy some dinner after the show with my sister and me?’

Off Maddy sailed in a huge magenta ball gown with a diamond necklace slung around her neck at the last minute as if it was paste from Woolworths. What a life! What had she landed into? It was hard not to smile with satisfaction. If they could see me now…but all she could think about down that long catwalk was keeping one step in front of the other and trying not to trip.