The Milliner's Secret (11 page)

Grabbing a station porter’s arm, she’d gasped, ‘Boat train?’

The porter indicated the furthest end of the vast railway terminus. ‘Platform eight. The queue’s moving – you’re cutting it fine.’

She’d hurtled towards the longest line. Was that tall figure at the barrier Dietrich? Belted summer coat, Homburg hat? It had better be. She forced a last effort from her legs. ‘It’s me, Coralie, wait!’ At least she’d remembered to call herself ‘Coralie’.

She’d thrown herself into his arms, hardly noticing the male attendant staring down a distinctly put-out nose. Dietrich had held her, panting, at arm’s length.

‘Like Mid-day Sun, forty miles an hour. Brownlow, give me your ticket. You’re taking a later train.’

Dietrich hadn’t rejected her, but he might after her performance just now. She’d seen it in his eyes.

Expecting him to return with a milliner in the style of Miss McCullum, Coralie was astonished when an elegant woman of about twenty-five preceded him into the salon.

‘This is Mademoiselle Royer,’ he told her. ‘Privileged friends call her Lorienne.’

The woman’s hands were alabaster-white against a black linen dress, nails long and polished. Not really milliner’s hands at all. She wore three strands of black pearls around her left wrist, and Coralie saw an echo of Ottilia, but in the negative. Her most extraordinary feature was her platinum-blonde hair –
peroxide, buckets of it
– though there was nothing of the tart about her as the hair was twisted into an effortless pleat. Deep brown eyes, high cheekbones and a voluptuous mouth completed a beautiful woman.
Knows that pouting gets her further than smiling
, Coralie judged.
With men, anyway.

Lorienne Royer placed her hip against Dietrich’s leg, but even as she welcomed Coralie to La Passerinette, her words were aimed at him. ‘We can do something with this. A lofty brow and Saxon colouring. Natural straws will suit Mademoiselle de Lirac perfectly.’

Coralie butted in, ‘I’d rather have pink.’ The brief desire to appease Dietrich had faded. That was half her problem in life. Her resolutions were not colour-fast. They ran in the wash, but damned if she was going to be topped off with a boring bit of straw. If the marquise could rebel at eighty, she could do it at twenty-two.

Lorienne shook her head. ‘Those are special-occasion hats. Will Mademoiselle please come to a mirror?’

At the table previously occupied by the marquise, Coralie was confronted with her own face from three angles. She looked away, and saw the assistant with the thick glasses standing outside on the pavement, staring sadly towards her. Or perhaps just staring as she must be too shortsighted to make anything out. As the girl came back inside, a thought flashed through Coralie’s mind:
She hates this place
.

‘Would Mademoiselle de Lirac please look into the mirror?’ A buffed nail brushed Coralie’s chin. ‘So I can take a long look?’ Without breaking her study, Lorienne asked the assistant, ‘Was the marquise in a tolerable mood?’

‘No. I’m afraid she was in one of her queer tempers.’

‘Did she decide upon her new hat?’

‘Yes, Mademoiselle Lorienne. The biretta. The
coque
in wild-rose pink? Only she called it “calamine”.’

‘What?’

‘Calamine.’

Coralie yelped as a fingernail dug into her jaw. After a hasty apology, Lorienne turned to the girl. ‘You sold the rose pink biretta to the Marquise de Sainte-Vierge? What a triumph. You’ve excelled yourself. No – don’t say anything, just fetch me straw shells for this customer.’

Coralie flashed a look of sympathy, but the girl’s head stayed low as she edged past, flinching as Lorienne raised an arm – to shake down her bracelets, as it turned out, not to hit her. Coralie risked turning once more to see if Dietrich had witnessed the moment, but he was staring at the window, or through it, turning a silver key in his fingers. The key had a tag tied to it. She frowned.
Why did he have a house key on him when he lived in a hotel?

‘You are lucky,’ Lorienne said, after studying Coralie’s reflection for a good five minutes. ‘Most shapes will suit you, so long as we stay away from narrow crowns.’

‘No witch’s hats, then?’

Had that stab at humour been a ball, it would have rolled into a corner.

‘The crown of a hat should be as wide as, or wider than, your cheekbones. Yours are the broadest part of your face, and you have a small chin. Too much hat overshadows
gamine
features. Too narrow will make your face seem lozenge-shaped. You understand?’

‘Perfectly. The sort of hat I like is—’

‘Your complexion is fair, but there is colour to your cheeks, which is why Violaine will bring straw in shades tending towards grey, not yellow. Yes?’

No, actually
. Coralie’s irritation swelled until she realised that the ‘Yes?’ had been fired towards the doorway, at the assistant, who was waiting with a selection of unblocked straw bodies, known as
capelines
.

‘Shells, I said!’ Lorienne then explained for Coralie’s benefit, ‘She presumes we’ll be blocking from scratch, but that’s not possible as you need your new hats quickly. When your clothes arrive from Javier, you will perhaps come back for hats to complement them, blocked to your precise measurements.’

Coralie hid her surprise. At Pettrew’s, hats had come in three or four standard sizes, with in-betweens created by varying the thickness of the inner band. This shop must serve wealthy women if bespoke blocks were in use. Lorienne turned to address Dietrich. ‘Mademoiselle de Lirac has an air and style different from other ladies you have brought here, Herr von Elbing.’

The reply came back instantly. ‘Mademoiselle de Lirac is entirely original. Comparing her to others is like comparing a graceful building to a fine painting. It would miss the point of both.’

Coralie left with three hats: a Panama, a broad-brimmed sisal and a gypsy bonnet that made her look like a blonde Vivien Leigh, all eyes. She adored them all but she wasn’t going to say so. In La Passerinette, she’d felt like piggy-in-the-middle of a lovers’ tiff. Something existed between Lorienne and Dietrich; this idyllic Paris existence had a serpent in it, after all. The Good Book said you should leave serpents in peace, but she didn’t think she could.

‘How do you feel?’

How did she feel?
Enveloped, with Dietrich’s legs wound around her. She had a double heartbeat, or perhaps it was his adding to hers. Where had it come from, their ferocious passion? On leaving La Passerinette, they’d lunched in a restaurant close by, and he’d been preoccupied. She’d worried she’d let him down again by having the wrong-shaped head, or asking for pink hats too often. Or perhaps her ‘Prince Charming’ reference rankled still. So, to return to the hotel and be flung on the bed, her clothes almost torn off, had been briefly stupefying. And then the clocks had stopped as she turned into the woman Dietrich seemed to want her to be – a creature of claws, teeth and uninhibited appetite. Sometimes dominant, sometimes yielding, discovering the power of mastery when it came to love. It was nothing to do with strength. It was in the mind, and that made it intoxicating. Best of all, there would be a next time, and a next time.

So, how
did
she feel? Nothing poetic offered itself, so she found images. She felt as light as beaten egg white, and weak as spinach dropped in boiling water. ‘I couldn’t walk from here to the window.’

‘I will take that as a compliment. You know that between five and seven in the evening half of Paris is in bed together? It is the time set aside for love.’

‘Is that why the chambermaids never come tapping at the door?’

‘They may well be in bed themselves.’

‘I hope the cook isn’t. I’m starving again. That’s why I keep imagining myself as food.’

Dietrich sank his teeth gently into her shoulder. ‘You are ice-cream and honey, with a skim of salt.’

‘That’s nice . . . I was thinking of myself as some kind of omelette. Can we eat early?’

‘You may order room service for yourself as I have to go out tonight.’

‘Oh, Dietrich, why?’

‘Business.’

‘Can I come too?’

A little silence. ‘Stay here and rest. Today you seemed tired.’

‘I’ve got things on my mind. Things I have to tell you. See, I’m not exactly what you think I am.’ There, she’d said it.

Another silence. The same? Colder? Longer? ‘Go on.’

‘I’m not really a milliner. I pretended I was, but I’m—’

‘Playing at it.’ He placed her hand on his belly so she felt the rise and fall of his breathing. ‘Like Ottilia, who bought La Passerinette because she found herself in Paris, bored, and decided a hat shop would be the thing.’

‘Wait, La Passerinette
belongs
to Ottilia?’

‘Entirely. And listen to this: once she decided she would be a concert pianist so the most expensive piano in Berlin was delivered to her house. Three lessons later, she gave up. Why be a milliner, Coralie, when very ordinary girls can do it better?’

She let out an exasperated breath. Ottilia was like a bad dose of measles, all over her and up her nose. And if she never got a clear run at a confession, she’d never do it. She couldn’t go on letting Dietrich think that she was a rich London girl, playing at a career, free of family ties, when the reality was so different. Sordid, even. ‘Dietrich . . .’ his breathing was growing shallower ‘. . . I want to tell you about . . . ’

‘Mm?’

She’d been going to say, ‘Cora Masson,’ but her courage ran out. She asked instead, ‘What do you know of Lorienne Royer?’

‘Too much, certainly, for her good.’

‘That girl of hers – Violaine, was that her name? I’m damn sure she gets knocked about.’

‘That’s quite an allegation. What makes you say it?’

‘I know the signs. There’s a kind of posture you – people adopt after they’ve been clumped a few times. They know where the fist or boot comes from, but not when, so they’re always in fear. I’d love to give the poor girl tips on how to fight back. Grabbing hold of somebody’s eyelids stops a whole bunch of trouble, in my experience.’ She was astonished to hear laughter.

‘Take the fight to the enemy? But, Coralie, if Violaine is twenty-nine, she isn’t a girl. She can fight her own battles.’

‘I’m not so sure. I don’t like Lorienne. D’you mind me saying?’

‘Do I sound as if I do?’

‘La Passerinette’s your favourite hat shop, so I supposed you and she must be friends.’

‘My love, I go to one tailor in Berlin, to another in Zürich, and always to Henry Poole in London. I don’t necessarily like the gentlemen who measure me up.’

‘But you wouldn’t want me to punch them.’

‘No – or to hang on to their eyelids.’

‘I’d punch Lorienne if I caught her swiping at that poor girl. I hate bullies.’

Dietrich wound his fingers through hers. ‘Let me stop being obtuse. I thoroughly dislike Lorienne Royer, though I hardly know her. She turns out lovely hats, and as it is Ottilia’s shop, I take friends there when I can. Happy?’

‘I suppose “obtuse” means being a clever-clogs,’ she said crossly.
How many ‘friends’ did he take hat-shopping?
‘How can you dislike somebody without knowing them?’

‘Do you like Sir Oswald Mosley?’

The question bewildered her. What had that got to do with Lorienne? ‘Mosley the Fascist? I hate Fascists. They’re ignorant. Once, we ran out of silk ribbon at Pettrew’s because those daft sods burned down the warehouse supplying it because it was owned by Jews. Three weeks we were laid off—’ she ended, on an intake of breath. God help her, she’d just accidentally spat out that she was a factory girl.

‘So you don’t like Oswald Mosley, even though you don’t know him, which proves that disliking a stranger is sometimes more than unexamined prejudice.’

She waited for Dietrich to catch up with her error but he went on, ‘Lorienne Royer was Ottilia’s lady’s maid before the present one. Lorienne wanted to go on to better things and Ottilia handed La Passerinette to her to run. They are supposed to share the profits fifty-fifty. Mademoiselle Royer is efficient, but I don’t consider her particularly talented.’