The Milliner's Secret (25 page)

He took the linen basket from her and carried it downstairs. He had true musician’s hands, like a lute-player’s in a Renaissance painting. He’d carried his violin intact from Hungary, preserving it through battle and bombardment between 1936 and demob in October ’38. It had survived Gurs, a place of pigsty dormitories and mud. ‘Because he sleeps with violin,’ Florian explained. ‘He is his baby.’

Florian’s ‘baby’ was a hammered dulcimer. That was what had been in the suitcase, padded under a few items of clothing. Coralie watched, fascinated, whenever he hung it round his neck like an ice-cream vendor’s tray. When played with metal hammers, it sang like a harp and Noëlle would go into a trance. When Arkady added accompaniment, it was like no sound Coralie had ever heard. Noëlle would grab Coralie’s hands, squealing to be danced on her feet.

Two weeks flashed by, filled for Coralie with washing, cooking and conversation. Laughter, too, all the better for being unexpected. It eased her frustration over La Passerinette. She’d returned to boulevard de la Madeleine a couple of days after her moonlight visit, and pressed the bell marked ‘Beaumont’. Getting no answer, she’d pressed the one above. An older woman had come down and told her that Violaine certainly had the keys to the shop. And, no, it had not been sold. Violaine had been put in temporary charge by the Baronne von Silberstrom, but neither woman was available.

‘Poor Violaine collapsed. Nervous exhaustion and I’m not surprised, the way that woman, Royer, drove her. She is recovering her health in a clinic outside Paris and, before you ask, I don’t recall its name.’

Without Ottilia von Silberstrom’s London address, Coralie was defeated. Taking over La Passerinette had become a need, a dream with a pragmatic lining. She knew she could shake the place up, and she also knew she could never again work for another woman. Those closed blinds! They taunted her, as had a glimpse, on her last visit, of a white-clad female leaving the place. Red-gold hair, an enveloping fur collar, it had to be Ottilia.

Grinding her teeth, because the traffic was too dense even for a suicidal dash, Coralie had watched the figure climb into the back of a taxi which disappeared round a corner into rue Cambon. Coralie had later telephoned Una McBride.

‘If you hear that the Baronne von Silberstrom is in Paris, will you find out where she’s staying? I tried the Ritz on rue Cambon, but she isn’t there.’

Una had promised to keep her ear to the ground.

‘I met her in London once, but I can’t say we’re well acquainted.’

To fill her time, Coralie started teaching the boys ‘proper’ French. Julie joined in. Nineteen, with long brown hair and full lips, she enjoyed having two young men vying for her attention and Coralie grew uneasy. Duelling musicians would be bad enough. Enraged parents, demanding the identity of their daughter’s seducer would be more dangerous than neighbours or policemen. As she couldn’t turn the boys out, she tried, gently, to point Julie towards alternative employment. She couldn’t afford a nanny at the moment, she said – but the girl burst into wild tears. ‘My parents’ house is so gloomy, nobody talks, and you need me. I am Noëlle’s second mother!’

Was she? Not a wholly welcome idea, but perhaps inevitable, considering the long hours Coralie had always worked. She relented. Julie could stay on reduced hours, but could she please not wear those tight little cardigans? And please not speak in that breathy way so the boys had to lean close to hear her. ‘Arkady and Florian have been starved of female company for months. You know the facts of life, Julie.’

Julie continuted to act as if she knew them all too well and eventually Coralie asked Ramon to find alternative accommodation for the boys.

‘It isn’t that easy,’ Ramon retorted. ‘As for Julie, let her have a lover.’

‘When she’s under my roof, I’m responsible for her.’

‘No – you only think you are.’

Her anxiety made some impression, however, and Ramon arranged for the boys to audition in nightclubs where he knew the management. Once they got work, they’d be able to get lodgings of their own. From Pigalle to Clichy they played short sets every night for free in the hope of winning a permanent job – and came home with ever longer faces, the evening suits Ramon had acquired for them ever baggier on their frames.

Arkady explained, ‘When we offer our homeland music, clubs say already they have quota of foreign talent. When we say we can play American swing music, clubs say we are not black enough.’

‘Or white enough,’ Florian chipped in.

‘Or American enough. But in our own country, we are always too much Gypsy.’

A month into their stay, Ramon delivered their new identity papers, with sleet on his shoulders. November had arrived, but the coal had not. Ramon explained that it was easier to steal the wheels off trains than coal out of the freight trucks. Depots had armed guards, these days. So, they huddled around a two-bar electric fire and made the acquaintance of two new human beings, Arkady Erdös and Florian Lantos.

The boys had been reinvented as wild-boar trackers and itinerant musicians, the former to explain their battle scars. Ramon insisted that boar tusks left similar puncture-marks to bullets. They’d elected to keep their given names, taking surnames that would mark them out as ethnic Hungarians, but not Romany. Arkady believed that changing the name your mother gave you brought bad luck – ‘Besides, I could drink one day and forget it.’

‘What you need is a gimmick.’ Coralie was combing Noëlle’s curls. Curls black as a beaver’s pelt. The little girl’s eyes had an exotic up-tilt and in them Coralie saw Rishal, her sailor lover. Everybody else saw Ramon. Even those who had known her for a long time assumed that Noëlle was his. As an impatient Noëlle squirmed away, Coralie offered her comb to Arkady, whose corkscrew hair was tangled like a fisherman’s net. ‘You need something to make you stand out.’

‘We are not a variety act.’

‘You are. As immigrants, you have to play folk music and dress up as a novelty act. It’s the law. I’ll put my mind to it.’

On 8 November, they all crammed around her small dining table, toasting her birthday. Her official birthday, the one Dietrich had chosen for her. Arkady and Florian, Julie and Ramon, they all sat so close that no one could move unless everybody did. Noëlle was on Ramon’s knee, her cheek flat against his shoulder. Someone had put a spray of pink flowers into a tin mug. Cutting her cake, chasing off thoughts of Dietrich, which always came on this day, she made a wish: ‘Health and happiness to all!’ Then a private one:
A bunch of pink roses, from someone who has the guts to stay faithful
. Her thoughts veering, she suddenly said, ‘What about the Rose Noire?’

Everyone looked at her.

Ramon caught on: ‘The place on boulevard de Clichy? They shooed us out. It’s in chaos. The man who owns it was locked up in La Santé.’

Coralie nodded. ‘Seven years’ jail for ripping the ear off his American singer. Got carried away making love, m’lud.
She
says he attacked her when she gave in her notice. But listen . . .’

Coralie had heard that the Rose Noire needed musicians. Struggling under the management of its elderly sommelier, Félix Peyron, they couldn’t get decent bands to play. ‘They have an outfit called Les Hot Boys, but the trumpeter’s seventy, and it’s never the same line-up two nights running. The club’s desperate for a resident band.’

‘But we are not Hot Boys,’ Florian said sadly. ‘We are cold boys, often.’

‘Teddy goes there,’ Coralie said, ‘and he told me they’re running an open night. You get up, play a short set, and the band that gets most applause wins a six-week contract.’ The boys were straining to follow her French. ‘You’d have to find a couple of other band members.’

Ramon answered for them. ‘You can’t take a piss in Paris but you’re standing next to a refugee with a guitar on his back . . .’ His expression clouded. ‘How would you fix the biggest round of applause?’

Coralie stood up and demonstrated enthusiastic clapping.

‘Very funny, Coralie. There’s only three of us, even assuming we drag Nanny along.’ He winked at Julie, whose chair was so close to Florian’s, their thighs must have been touching.

Julie said, ‘I’ll come. I like to dance.’

‘Well, I was joking,’ Ramon answered. ‘You’re too immature for the Rose Noire – and who’d look after Noëlle?’

He was trying to sink her idea, Coralie realised. Mentioning Teddy had done it. Her friend’s elitist profession and country château were sandpaper to the eyeballs as far as Ramon was concerned. Well, Ramon could have his politics, but she
really
wanted her flat back, her life back. Being unable to settle down to work was akin to being in a boat without paddles, drifting ever further from the shore, a feeling that had intensified when she read a piece in
Marie Claire
praising Henriette Junot’s ‘astonishing and witty line of equestrian-inspired hats’.

‘I’m sure Julie’s mother would mind Noëlle. She’s offered before,’ she said, ignoring Ramon’s objection. ‘As for an audience, I’ll rent a rabble and Teddy knows people . . .’
Don’t ever play poker, dear estranged husband, because your face gives you away
‘. . . and I’ll get Una McBride to join us. Some of Henriette’s girls might come, too, if I promise them half-decent men to dance with. You boys,’ she put on a face that drew nervous laughs from Arkady and Florian, ‘must play up the Romany look or it’ll be the same old moan – “Foreign players putting French ones out of work.” That means costumes, untamed hair and eyes a-flashing.’

Julie giggled.

‘We have no costume.’ Arkady plucked at his clothes.

‘And I don’t have time to run round finding them.’ Ramon gnawed his thumbnail, meaning he wanted a cigarette. At any moment, he’d lead an exodus to the stairs, where they’d disappear in a fug of Gauloises.

‘Costumes are my department.’ Coralie held up ten fingers. ‘These haven’t held a needle for over a month. We’ll have white shirts and red sashes. You and I,’ she turned to Julie, drawing the girl into her excitement, ‘will wear matching hats. Hats for everyone. Why not?’ she demanded, as Ramon scraped his chair back. ‘I could launch you and re-launch myself on the same night.’

CHAPTER 13

The streets glittered with freezing frost on the last Saturday of November but the Rose Noire’s dance floor was as hot as a bread oven. Coralie was dismayed – and not just because her dress was sticking to her. Having confidently predicted an easy victory for ‘Arkady and His Vagabonds of Swing’, she was discovering there was stiff competition. Ten bands at least were vying for the chance of a long-term booking. War had hit nightclubs hard. Half the men of dancing age had been mobilised into the armed forces. Clubs had closed their doors rather than struggle on. Singers and jazz musicians were falling out of work. Of the American bandsmen who had once flocked to Paris to feed the passion for jazz, the better-off had sailed home. The rest were saving up to buy third-class or steerage tickets. Meanwhile, they needed to eat and were willing to hustle.

Una McBride had already sent her Alabama-born maid, Beulah, home and bought passage for a couple of jobless drummers as well. ‘Paris won’t be a ball for black men and women if the Germans arrive,’ she said, following Coralie’s gaze to the stage, where the first competitors were tuning up. ‘But don’t start feeling sorry for
them
. You have your boys to look out for.’ Una was scintillating in a backless sequined sheath, her hair styled in a single wave that broke on her forehead in a hundred kiss-curls.