The Dress Thief (41 page)

The dress was in the middle of the page, with small details reproduced in each corner. Each subsidiary sketch had another detail, or fabric idea, drawn at its corner, giving the page the symmetry of a Moorish tile. Javier always presented his ideas this way. Alix considered his
sketchbooks miniature works of art.

‘I don’t recall your ever making this, Monsieur.’

‘No,’ he acknowledged. ‘The medieval motif is too “Arts and Crafts”, too recently out of fashion to risk in these more stringent times.’ He picked up a sheet of art paper and placed it on the scrapbook.

Alix stuttered, ‘Oh, I – oh.’

It was her sketch of Rose Noire, the dress she’d thrown out for Mabel Godnosc
on a night when her head ached and she’d been longing to meet Verrian.

‘It interests me, Alix, how you absorbed my way of laying out ideas. You are a good pupil. Now let me explain what I know of this dress. It was created for Mme Kilpin who wanted to sell it to an American wholesaler as part of a summer line. That is nothing to me – she is entitled to be a dress dealer if she wishes. But also
she wished for some samples to be made here in Paris, for herself and friends. She approached –’ Simon Norbert came forward – ‘a friend of my good lieutenant here to procure the fabric. You were a little suspicious,
mon ami
, when your friend showed you this drawing?’

Simon Norbert’s mouth puckered, but for the first time he looked happy in Alix’s presence.

‘Most suspicious. First I thought it
was one of your drawings, Monsieur, but on closer inspection I realised it was a rake-together of lots of your ideas. The collar with the contrast revere, well, that was spring–summer 1934, and that lozenge insert defining the waist, we discussed that last winter before
she
 –’ he aimed a toxic glance at Alix – ‘arrived here. But we produced a fair few drawings trying it out. She must have leafed
through your sketchbooks and seen it.’

‘No!’ Alix cried. ‘I did no such thing!’

‘Thank you.’ Javier’s gaze was pure sorrow. ‘Did you think, Alix, you had come up with something strikingly original?’ He
shook his head. ‘Little in this world is truly original, but I commend you. The idea is fresh, it has verve and I had the pleasure of seeing the dress itself in the Spanish pavilion at the World’s
Fair. I remember thinking,
Even when evil stalks the world, the simple pleasure of a beautiful girl never wanes
. Please come forward, Mlle Lilliane.’

Alix thought she was going to faint. Anything to escape the humiliation that was coming.

‘You warned me not to employ this young woman,’ Javier said.

‘I did, Monsieur.’

‘I rejected your advice and now formally beg your pardon. It is a lesson
to me, that the instincts I have learned to rely upon may lead me wrong.’

‘Your intentions were good,’ Mlle Lilliane said. ‘I’m just sorry they were wasted. Just as I’m sorry that we ever thought Solange was a thief.’

‘Poor Solange indeed. Go now, if you please. Both.’ The two assistants left the studio, but Alix knew they hadn’t gone far. She could hear them in the corridor outside.

‘So …’
Javier raised his hands. ‘I know now that you were Mme Kilpin’s beetle, gnawing inside this great tree of mine, digesting the goodness and turning it over to her. You do not deny it?’

‘No.’

His silence was agony. At last he said, ‘It is because your grandmother is so ill that you did this?’

Alix could hardly see through her tears. In a moment she’d be weeping in that unstoppable way, like whooping
cough. A handkerchief was held out and she snatched it. She tried to tell him something of her shame; how copying had started out as a sideline, almost a game, that allowed her to buy clothes and make up the shortfall in hers and her grandmother’s income. How she was then pressured into stealing collections. His collections. How it had sickened her from the start, how she’d tried to stop.
‘But then my grandmother was attacked, and I’m all she has because my mother died when I was born, and I had to pay hospital bills and I couldn’t see my way out.’

Javier spoke gently. ‘Specialist care is so expensive and you have no father or family to help. You take it all on yourself, Alix. You steal because others –’ his voice grew hard – ‘see they can use you. They offer you money. You cannot
turn it down. In a way, you steal for love.’

‘For love?’ She met his eyes and, through tears, saw a match for her own misery. Javier needed to believe in her innate goodness and she wished she could say something to restore his faith. What could she say when the consequences of her behaviour were clear in his face? In the destruction of his life’s work? ‘Don’t be kind to me,’ she sobbed. ‘Don’t
try to see the best in me. But please believe that I respect you and care about you
and am so ashamed I would work for you for the rest of my life for nothing.’

‘Ah.’ He spread his hands in helpless regret. ‘I think that would be illegal and quite rightly so. Come, I will take you downstairs.’

M. Javier conducted her to the pavement as if she were a valued customer. He sent a subordinate for
her bag, handing it to her as she climbed into the rear of a taxi. The taxi had appeared from nowhere. Someone must have ordered it. So everyone knew. Marcy, Pauline Frankel, Mme Albert with her bobbin drawers, kind Mme Markova …

As the taxi inched through clogged streets, bumper grazing until they reached the artery of Boulevard de Magenta, Alix felt a lifetime’s misery swelling inside her.
All she could think was,
Now I know how Sylvie le Gal felt. I hate my life and I want to die
.

He lay stretched out on a hillside. Raised his head and a bullet sang over his scalp. An instant later a shell exploded above the shallow dip where he was sheltering. Missiles spattered his back and, thinking he’d been hit, he pressed his knuckles against his jacket,
testing for blood. Only stones and dry soil, he realised. He was still being lucky. Further down in the dip where he’d crawled for shelter, two comrades lay dead.

They’d been at this assault over six hours, and he was still unsure what his commanders were trying to achieve. Not that he was sure of much. The incessant slam of shells and remorseless rifle fire from nearby Villanueva had liquefied
his brains. Flies wouldn’t stay off him, crawling into his collar, over the backs of his hands. A hundred degrees of heat, no water to drink. Every now and then a whistle would blow and his unit would move forward, crawling in the dust on their bellies, firing as
they went. They’d get a little nearer the enemy and the street fighting they’d been promised – then they’d be pushed back by the shelling.
Those streets were never less than five hundred yards away.

With each advance, more men would fall. The hillside was a garner-floor of bodies. Another shell exploded and more dust rained on Verrian’s neck. As the shock of it died away, he heard the fresh crack of rifle fire, men shouting to each other in English. A new advance was imminent, and he must be part of it. He’d taken shelter while
his gun cooled because the barrel had been in danger of exploding from continuous fire. Then a comrade had been hit and he’d tried, in vain, to help. A second man had fallen nearby. A Welshman, who’d survived long enough for them to have an intriguing conversation.

Hearing Verrian’s voice beside him, the man had rasped, ‘You sound too posh to be on our side. What are you, a sodding Tory?’

‘I
have no politics. I was a newspaperman,’ Verrian had answered. ‘I see politics with its trousers down, which makes it hard to belong to any party.’

‘A reporter?
Duw
, you should have kept to it. Like I should have kept to delivering the
Socialist Worker
around Merthyr. What made you join up?’

‘Guilt.’

‘About what?’

‘A man I helped kill, and a girl.’

‘Now you’re talking. Pretty, was she?’

‘Very. Her name was Maria-Pilar.’

‘Spanish?’

‘From Guernica originally, though we met in Madrid. Are you married?’

‘I am. She’s a Mary too. Four children and she’ll kill me when I get home.’ The Welshman tried to laugh and it turned into a hideous gargling. ‘In my pocket – a letter. Will you –’

‘I’ll get it into the mail. And I’ll write to your Mary, tell her what happened.’

Verrian had searched
the man’s pockets, found a letter addressed to Queen’s Road, Merthyr, and identity documents which he also slipped into his own pocket. When it came time to leave this mangled country, he might find it easier to travel as a Welshman than as Miguel Rojas Ibarra, a Basque. If he didn’t first fall victim to a shell or a bullet or die of thirst. He’d give his soul right now for a pint glass of
iced water.
His soul
. Had war turned him religious?

‘You have no religion, no prayer. You are unmoved by the sacrament of marriage. What hope have you if there is no God in your life?’ Maria-Pilar’s words a few days after their wedding when she’d finally realised that he wasn’t going to embrace her Catholicism.

He did have hope. Though God was not much in vogue among the International Brigades,
every man here believed in an ideal as powerful as religion: the right of men and women to
live free from oppression. He’d put that in the letter he’d asked Ron Phipps to ensure reached Alix, and had felt the irony as he wrote it. He believed in freedom and was asking a girl he hardly knew to keep herself for him on the off-chance he might make it back to her. One day he hoped to tell Alix that
the thought of seeing her again had been his salvation in this hell on earth.

A whistle blew. He pushed his rifle over the top of the hollow and clambered out. Wishing himself continued good luck, he zigzagged towards occupied Villanueva.

The world of Paris couture first noticed the English girl at the mid-season shows in November 1937. She went from house to house viewing the collections and her card stated that she was a buyer for an exclusive department store in Manchester, England. As the winter closed in, she disappeared. When the spring–summer shows opened in February
1938, she popped up again. Saleswomen nudged each other and whispered, ‘How could such a girl end up working in fashion?’

Dorothy M. Sprat was broad-hipped and bosomy. Thick-lensed spectacles gave her a piggy stare, and her hair was plaited unbecomingly over her ears. Her eyebrows were shaggy and a few stray hairs sprouted from her upper lip. A vendeuse at the house of Lanvin had been heard to
mutter, ‘One look at her and I run for a razor and shaving soap.’

On this February day, a day of wet shoulders and umbrellas blown inside out, Dorothy M. Sprat squeezed into the House of Chanel, using her handbag to beat a path through the crowd
all shoving through the same door. She thanked the vendeuse who handed her a programme listing the models being shown that day.

As the show progressed,
her pencil touched the programme a few times. Those behind might see an underlining, a question mark. Miss Sprat never attempted to sketch a design, or scribble notes as to cut or fabric. When she purchased, which was not often, she paid in cash.