The Milliner's Secret (43 page)

‘Tuesday is a stupid day to launch a collection,’ she murmured into Dietrich’s shoulder. ‘People have hardly got their week started. But we know what’s ahead.’

‘Do we?’

‘Easter.’ Which came in early April, and after that, Hitler’s birthday on the twentieth. A rumour was circulating that the Führer intended to celebrate in Paris. Whether he came or not, parties and receptions would be held in his honour, and Coralie had planned her launch to give her workroom time to complete the commissions that were building up.

‘I shall come to see you late this afternoon,’ Dietrich said, against her lips.

‘No, come early.’

‘Ah, yes. The rules. Never the twain.’

‘It’s for everyone’s good.’

A regime had established itself at La Passerinette. German customers before lunch, French after. Many high-ranking German officers had brought their wives to Paris and these women expected precedence over the French. Coralie dared not offend them, and running La Passerinette resembled diplomatic hopscotch. It was why these last moments in bed were precious.

So why spoil them by picking at a scab she ought to leave alone?
‘Dietrich, this month, I’ll be depositing the last tranche of my debt to Ottilia. The bank manager is getting suspicious. He thinks I’m a black-marketeer. Which Swiss bank should I transfer it to?’

‘Good try, darling.’

‘I wish you’d tell me where she is.’

‘It is safer for you and her if you do not know.’

‘Because I keep imagining her on a train to Germany.’

Suddenly Dietrich was leaning on an elbow, looking down at her. ‘Why?’

‘Una and I were discussing it. All the Jews who were rounded up last year – the ones from the Marais and the Sentier – were taken away by train to Germany, but even Una can’t find out where exactly. She had a friend at the American Embassy who was going to make enquiries, but he skipped the country. We can’t bear the thought of Tilly being among the deportees. Some of Madame Thomas’s friends were taken.’

‘Madame Thomas?’

‘My bookkeeper, who Violaine lives with.’

‘She’s Jewish?’

‘Madame Thomas is, though I hadn’t known it. She’s frightened and keeps asking me if I think it will stop.’

‘What will stop? The persecution of Jews in France? Only when the French government puts its foot down, and when my country reverses its stratagem to rid the world of Jews. I think, all considered, that deportations will begin to increase.’

‘How can you be so—’

He kissed her into silence, then made the sound that meant, I
really
have to get up. Before throwing back the covers, he said, ‘Poland is where the deportees end up.’

Never did she feel more separate from Dietrich when they spoke of the human cost of occupation. He was not a cruel man, but he was pragmatic, seeing a degree of suffering as inevitable. And let nobody think he was anything but a proud and loyal German! Their perspectives were so different. She often visited Amélie Ginsler, and her friend would describe the arrests of Jewish men in the neighbourhood, which had begun as far back as 1940. Those between certain ages without citizenship had been taken to holding camps, and their families had waited in vain for them to return. ‘We keep our heads down,’ Amélie confided. ‘We’re afraid, though I often wonder, what if we stood shoulder to shoulder and said, “No”?’

Watching Amélie tend her daughter, Françoise, Coralie had absolved her friend of such responsibility. If the French government, police chiefs and others down the ranks refused to stand up for humanity, how could one mother? How could she herself? How, if she was being fair, could Dietrich?

Coming back in from the bathroom, seeing her sitting in bed with her arms linked around her knees, Dietrich said, ‘You are anxious about this collection?’

Was she ever! ‘I’ve taken a risk with the materials I’ve used.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘Not now.’ She got out of bed, nipping into the bathroom ahead of him. Later, buttoning the waistband of her cycling culottes, she promised, ‘All will be revealed at eleven o’clock. I’ll keep a standing space for you, so don’t be late.’

She arrived at the shop to find Violaine strewing paper chrysanthemums in the window display. They’d put the collection together in spite of the fact that many of the fabric warehouses of the Sentier had closed. Foreign straws, like sisal,
baku
and Leghorn were unobtainable. Fur-felt too, as the trade with America and Canada had fallen victim to sea blockades. Even wool-felt was a luxury, as its main producer, the Low Countries, was occupied and Germany took its output. There might eventually arise a domestic straw-plaiting industry, Coralie supposed, similar to that found in the English county of Bedfordshire, but until that happened, she and Violaine made do with whatever they could find.

She bade Madame Thomas good morning. ‘It’s kind of you to help out in the shop today.’

Jeanne Thomas was arranging chairs borrowed from the café across the street, placing them in two lines to create the effect of a catwalk. For an extremely short cat, Coralie admitted, but this show should still be an event.

Two
events, a morning and an afternoon one. Printed programmes being out of the question, she chalked the running order on a blackboard. Customers would be given a handwritten programme as they arrived, cut from discarded 1941 desk diaries, on which they might note down the hats they wanted to try later. They’d better have brought their own pencils.

Champagne would be served, canapés too: pastry parcels of minced veal and pine nuts, vol-au-vents filled with chestnut and goat’s cheese soufflé, the ingredients bought from a local black-market trader who was making a fortune supplying luxury provisions to the Germans. The promise of canapés and a Château Latour 1929 should guarantee a good audience at both sessions, Coralie told herself. She even had a professional mannequin. Solange Antonin, who had modelled for Javier and had a posture to rival that of Queen Nefertiti, had graciously agreed to lend her professional skills for one day, her fee the pick of the collection.

In spite of their unpromising start, Solange had won a grudging corner of Coralie’s heart. The girl had suffered. There had been a miscarriage in her past, an induced one, Coralie gathered, although Solange had never provided any details. Dashed hopes a-plenty, too. But what really brought them together was a shared dread of Serge Martel. His fine white teeth had torn off the top half of Solange’s ear.

The first parade was due to start at eleven sharp, and people were arriving. Coralie felt her first stage-fright. She had always modelled her own hats – there’d never been anyone else to do it – but today she would parade alongside Solange. She hoped it wouldn’t be a case of gliding swan and waddling duck. Violaine had already set up a table and mirror in the corridor. She’d help them into each hat and fix the numbered tags to their wrists, which was how the audience identified each model. Didi and Paulette would show clients to their chairs, or to the standing-room behind the chairs, and serve canapés while Madame Thomas poured champagne. Half a glass only per visitor, or there wouldn’t be enough.

‘I think this is our best collection so far,’ Violaine said as they waited for the audience to settle.

Madame Thomas popped her head round the door to report that the mainly German female gathering had taken their glasses without thanks. The finest champagne was their due, apparently.

‘So long as they order my hats, they can be as sniffy as they like.’ Coralie shivered in her summer dress. A cold March day, and she was promoting thoughts of sunshine and holidays. The spring–summer couture shows that had finished a month before had finally rung the death knell of the tubular, bias-cut styles of the 1930s. This year’s waistlines were nipped in. Not with belts – belts were ‘
Sooo
ante-bellum’, as Una put it – but with darts that followed the contours of hand-span waists.
We all have hand-span waists, these days
, Coralie thought, catching her reflection in the cheval mirror. Skirts were wide, sometimes with spare fabric bunched at the back, giving the illusion of a well-fleshed bottom. Necklines had been getting lower for a couple of years and both Coralie and Solange displayed cleavage. Short bolero jackets restored some modesty. With skirts shorter and fuller, jackets had shifted upwards, ending at the ribcage or just under the bosom. Hat design always followed couture, and this season’s were higher and blowsier to balance the new silhouette.

Madame Thomas called around the door, ‘Ready, I think.’

Coralie squeezed her coral bracelet for luck and slowed down her mind.
Do it any way you like
, Solange had said,
just don’t rush
. Four paces along the catwalk, pause and pose. Walk to the end, turn, pose, hold, giving each side of the room time to study her from all angles and note the model number on her wrist.

Taking her time gave
her
the chance to assess her audience. German officers’ wives always dressed conservatively and wore little makeup. Strong faces, bony brows, hairstyles resolutely old-fashioned. These wives, along with the female clerks, typists and telegraphers bulking up the German administration, had been dubbed ‘grey mice’ by Parisians, who, if they noticed them at all, did so with studied disdain.

Posing in a hat of stiffened chintz with gossamer-silk roses on a frame of millinery wire, Coralie acknowledged that the ‘grey mice’ took the business of fashion seriously. They were making notes. But whereas Parisian women craned forward, conferring with their neighbours, sketching outlines with their hands – sometimes breaking into spontaneous applause if something delighted them – these women wrote behind their hands as if in competition with each other. And just as they’d taken her champagne without appreciation, she suspected they wanted her hats, but not her.

The first twenty-four models were wide-brimmed Gainsborough styles, designed for sunshine, for race-days – and there still was racing at Longchamps – for outdoor dining or strolling beside the river. She’d created them from salvaged cottons and silks laid over foundations of buckram and tarlatan. Using short-runs of cloth meant she’d never be able to replicate these models exactly. The selection that she and Solange were about to show would be easy to reproduce, however, because Coralie had acquired quantities of raw fibre from an unexpected source.

A rather disagreeable source.

In the corridor, she let Violaine replace flowered chintz with a sun-hat in an understated shade of grey. As she listened for Solange’s returning footsteps, she stroked its crown. Not just the colour of smoke, every bit as light, too. This was the surprise element of the collection, the one she’d balked at explaining to Dietrich that morning..

The silk water-lilies around the brim had begun life as a parachute hooked on a tree somewhere in the Burgundy region. The more informed among the audience might recognise the hat itself as
crinolin
, which sounded romantic, but was derived from horsehair. A consignment had been destined for a furniture factory in Cologne.

‘Like the parachute, it’s courtesy of the British RAF,’ her black-market supplier had informed her, as he produced a whole horsetail. ‘The RAF flattened Cologne to stop the Germans enjoying the war too much and the factory I was supplying no longer exists. I’ve a truckload going spare, and I thought of you.’

Coralie’s first year at Pettrew’s had been spent in the plait room, stitching strip-straw into rosettes. Horsetail, similarly treated, proved as fine as sisal, and could be blocked just the same. Mixing the strands gave subtle variations in colour. After perfecting the technique, the Ginslers had gone into production, turning their doll shop into an extension of Coralie’s workroom.

She adored the result, but would Paris? From the silence that greeted the
crinolins
, Coralie feared not. Pencils bobbed, but eyes were doubtful. Perhaps the hats were too . . . restrained? Coralie de Lirac, restrained? One colour had been banished entirely from this collection: pink. As moderate applause greeted the end of the show, she felt like shouting, ‘If you want pink hats for summer, go to Lorienne Royer
at
Henriette Junot! She thieves my ideas and pumps them out six months later.’

What she actually gave was a polite little speech. The hush was so disheartening, she thought again of Henriette Junot, who famously never attended her own collections.

And Dietrich hadn’t come. Clearing her throat, Coralie finished in German, ‘If you would approach me or my assistants,
gnädige Damen
, appointments for fittings can be put in the diary. Thank you.’

The tight smile flew off her face as a pack of soberly clad women advanced on her.