The Dress Thief (42 page)

The show over, she left Rue Cambon, taking the Métro to Pont Neuf. Crossed the river and walked to Rue Jacob on the Left Bank. Halfway along Jacob,
she turned into a cobbled courtyard, so hidden away that morning frost still lingered. She spent a moment appreciating the crystal mopheads on a hydrangea bush, then unlocked a yellow door, having rubbed mist off its name plaque.

The plate read ‘Modes Lutzman’.

She shouted to the accounts clerk who doubled as the doorkeeper, ‘Only me, Hubert. Any callers?’ Answered by a snore from the depths
of an armchair, she rapped the point of her umbrella on the floor. ‘Monsieur Hubert, wake up. You’re meant to be guarding the place.’

A voice muttered something about being perfectly awake. Mademoiselle didn’t need to be quite so military; he was only taking the weight off his ankles.

Miss Sprat handed him a roll of receipts. ‘Enter these into the books and please tidy yourself. You resemble
a basking
blancmange in mixed tweeds. Remember, you’re the first person customers see.’

‘You don’t pay me enough to look lovely.’

‘But I pay you and I give you a two-hour lunch break.’ Miss Sprat went upstairs. The door at the top of the stairs opened before she reached it, indicating that Hubert had found sufficient vigour to press the electric bell by his chair four times, which meant ‘bona
fide caller.’

‘How was it?’ the receptionist asked.

‘Sublime. Have we visitors?’

‘An English lady, new client. She’s having a fitting.’

Miss Sprat proceeded down a corridor and knocked four times on the door at its end. This was unlocked by an older woman whose eyebrows were obsidian black and whose grey hair was done in a chignon.

‘Ah, Mlle Sprat.’ She spoke English with BBC modulation,
as if she practised saying, ‘How now, brown cow,’ fifty times a day. She indicated a large lady, undressed to her slip and stockings. ‘May I introduce Mrs Hawkesley? She is from Manchester, England, and was kindly directed here by Mme Kilpin.’

Greetings were exchanged. Mrs Hawkesley, whose dimensions were being noted down by a fitter, observed that she would never have known this place existed
had not ‘Dear Mrs K.’ given her directions and drawn a map. ‘Rue Jacob is a teeny bit off the beaten path.’

‘Indeed, but Mme Kilpin sends many clients this way,’ said
the lady with the chignon. ‘Marguerite will complete your measurements, Mrs Hawkesley. After which, our new season’s collection will be shown by our house mannequin. Would Madam care for tea and biscuits?’

The courtesies done,
she and Miss Sprat went along a network of passages and let themselves out on to an iron walkway that linked the main building – owned in former times by a rich merchant – to a block that had housed the merchant’s servants and his stables. The smaller building had a derelict air, though, with its creeping vine tinged with frost, a romantic one. Neither woman spoke until they were inside the stable
block, the door clanking behind them.

‘Gawd-a-hell, we needed two tape measures for her arse – and would she stop talking? If she told me once her husband’s Mayor of bloody Salford, she told me ten times. You look as though you could drown in a cup of tea, Miss Sprat.’ Rosa Konstantiva went to the stove and turned on the gas. ‘How was it?’

‘Chanel’s collection? Beautiful, but I can’t help feeling
she’s letting off all her fireworks at once. Does she know something we don’t? Afterwards it was a cattle market for screaming harpies. Some of those buyers would eat human flesh to get hold of the models they want.’

‘Was it useful?’

‘Yes. I have to see these shows, Rosa, to remind myself why I’m in this world at all.’ Miss Sprat sat down at a dressing table and arranged porcelain dishes and
a wooden wig stand.
She removed her spectacles and said to her reflection, ‘Do it, Spratty.’ Holding the corner of one bushy eyebrow, she pulled it off with a sharp, ‘Ow.’ Same again on the other side. ‘Ow.’

Behind her Rosa said, ‘Takes me back to when I danced the Firebird – red feathers stuck on with gum arabic. Getting them off was liked being plucked. Nobody recognised you?’

‘I don’t recognise
myself.’ Kirby grips clinked into a china bowl. Miss Sprat tipped her head forward, and a moment later the rustic plaits were on the wig stand. Alix pushed her fingers through her own newly cut waves, lifting them at the roots. This was the shortest she’d had her hair since childhood. She wasn’t sure she liked it, but long hair itched under the wig. She smoothed her natural brows into a neat
line and, while Rosa brewed tea, hurled off her dowdy suit, removing the padding to breasts, belly and hips. Finally, she rolled off her thick English stockings. ‘I’ll be glad when the shows are over. Miss Sprat is becoming a bore.’

‘You’ll be able to visit the collections as yourself one of these days.’

‘Perhaps. If I tried it now, I’d be given a leg-and-a-wing in to the gutter.’ Alix sat down
and massaged her sore feet. ‘Do I really have to show clothes to Mrs Hawkesley?’

‘I can’t do it, love.’ Rosa put a steaming cup on the dressing table and picked up tweezers. ‘Close your eyes and think of England.’ Fast as bee’s wings, Rosa plucked the twenty or so bristles that created Dorothy M. Sprat’s moustache.

‘Wish I’d never started with those,’ Alix said. ‘They give me a rash. Lucky the
Rose Noire has subdued light.’

‘You’re going there tonight?’

‘Mmm.’ Alix savoured her tea. ‘It’s Serge’s life, that place.’

‘Love, I wish you’d leave him. You’ve changed this last year. I’ve watched you lose weight, and you don’t laugh so much.’

That was because she was running her own business, Alix reflected as she belted a silk wrap. Out of the devastation of her removal from Javier had
come something that had saved her life: Modes Lutzman. She was proud of her business, but running it alongside nights at the Rose Noire sapped her strength.

Following the raid on the premises in the Champs-Elysées, Una and Mabel had spent several days in police custody. In the end, charges had been dropped because nothing incriminating had been found. Mabel had been careful never to leave sketches
in the office overnight, and no pirate Javier models were there at the time, either. The police raid had uncovered a few fake Chanels and Lanvins, but without proof they’d been made on the premises, there was nothing on which to base a prosecution. Una’s husband had pulled strings. Una had confirmed later – ‘One of the things that makes Gregory so boring is that he knows everyone in government.’

Mabel, having feared deportation, found herself released without a stain. But the experience had rocked her and she’d sailed home in the autumn of 1937, bobbing up as a valuable customer as Alix went into business on her own. Through Mabel,
Modes Lutzman supplied Paris originals to the boutiques of New York. Not copies. Never again would Alix pirate. But because she couldn’t yet survive on her
own original work, she turned out clothes ‘in the style of’ leading couturiers. Nothing wrong in that, because everything that left her workrooms had a Modes Lutzman label sewn into it. The charade of Dorothy M. Sprat was necessary for now because, in the first week of opening, somebody had tried to sabotage Alix. The word ‘salope’ – ‘slut’ – had been painted on her building. Dog excrement had been
put through her letter box. Walking down Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, she’d been hit by a bag of flour hurled from a passing car. She never knew who was behind these attacks and if she’d seen the people involved, she’d probably have been none the wiser. They’d be in the pay of others who wished her ill.

Una had also suffered the discomfort of stares and whispers. Feeling that Paris needed a break
to appreciate her better, she’d followed her husband to England. ‘Manchester, would you believe, on the grounds that it is halfway between hell and Glasgow.’

Una sent customers to Alix and took a commission. After that dreadful day at Javier’s when she’d been escorted out in disgrace, Alix had vowed never to speak to the woman again. The new business she was planning would be hers alone – no
Una to goad her into betraying her principles. But just before the Kilpins left Paris, Una had sent a car to fetch Alix to Avenue Foch. The driver had given Alix a note: ‘Just get in, kiddo. Let’s part as buddies.’

Alix had paled at the sight of Gregory Kilpin in the flat, seated on a white sofa, a tumbler of whisky in his hand. She braced herself to be blamed for his wife’s disgrace and his
first words were not encouraging.

‘So, lassie, I hear you lost your job, but you’re having another go at it. You’re either brave or crazy. Whisky on the rocks?’

‘No, thank you.’ She’d gazed about, awed despite her determination to be coldly polite. The walls of the Kilpins’ living room were sheer beige. A closer look showed them to be covered with suede … suede on walls? It explained the lack
of pictures. The only ornaments were sculptures of blistered bronze on the floor. Stunningly avant-garde. Alix said, ‘I’d like gin, please.’

‘Oh, would you? Una had better do the honours then.’

On cue, Una appeared and mixed Gin Alexanders. ‘Take the weight off, kiddo. I’m happy you came.’

Sitting on the sofa, Alix found herself captured by such deep cushions she couldn’t keep her feet on the
floor. Nor could she lean forward to put her glass on the coffee table. Mind you, with its deer-hide top, it probably wasn’t designed to hold drinks.

‘See this.’ Before her astonished eyes, Gregory Kilpin flipped the tabletop, which must be on some kind of hydraulic hinge. It revealed an underside of polished copper with a cigarette box and lighter welded to the metal. And a third shiny object
 – a gold ingot, which Alix realised was the gold-plated tenement brick that reminded Kilpin how far he’d come in life.

‘I despise clutter,’ he said, lighting cigarettes for them all. ‘So – does this copying malarkey make money?’

Una nervously lifted the pearls at her neck, letting them fall with a clatter. ‘In the right hands, yes.’

Instantly suspicious, Alix cut in, ‘It’s not a hobby for society
women, and it ruins lives.’

‘So how will you make money now?’ Kilpin asked her, blowing smoke at the ceiling.

‘I intend to build a legitimate business, selling clothes to speciality shops in London and New York … if I can find the contacts. I’ll licence my designs to wholesalers. They may as well pay a small sum for them as go to the trouble of stealing them.’

‘Irony in one so young,’ Kilpin
said. ‘Una said you were smart. Go on.’

She faltered. Gregory Kilpin, admirer, was not an easy concept to swallow. ‘I, er, think there’s a business making made-to-measure without the price tag of the big couturiers.’

‘How do you get quality without cost?’

‘By staying small and doing a lot myself. By having premises in a cheap part of town. But it has to be done well, and that means employing
expert sewing women, taking a building and opening accounts with the fabric houses.’

Gregory Kilpin grunted. ‘It means capital.’

‘Money up front,’ Una translated.

Alix nodded. ‘Fabric manufacturers won’t extend credit to me. And a lease anywhere means six months’ rent in advance.’

Gregory Kilpin underwrote her lease in Rue Jacob and loaned her the seed capital to fund Modes Lutzman for one
year. It was not a gift. He was charging interest and he expected the capital back. He would watch Alix’s progress closely.

Alix guessed that Una was behind this uncharacteristic generosity. She’d persuaded her husband to fund Alix as a way of saying sorry.

At Rue Jacob, Alix had found premises that not only housed her enterprise – salon on floor one, design studio and sewing ateliers above
 – but also gave rudimentary living accommodation in the shape of the stable block. Rosa had agreed to work for her as a saleswoman ‘for a week or two’ because Alix couldn’t afford both a fitter and a vendeuse. Two weeks became three, by which time Rosa had discovered that selling clothes was more fun than sitting at home giving desultory orders to her maid. Now a fixture at Modes Lutzman, Rosa’s only
regret was putting on a posh voice which she now had to keep up. In just six months, Modes Lutzman had grown to a staff of ten, including a fitter, receptionist and première.

An application of lipstick completed Alix’s transformation from Sprat to Gower. She gulped her tea and said, ‘Aliki rises from the rubble.’ Taking the walkway back to the main building, she paused to smell the air. Tobacco
smoke. Another unexpected development – Bonnet lived here with them. Thrown out of his studio for not paying his rent, he’d moved into the old carriage lodge beneath Alix’s flat promising that it was only ‘for a
week or two’. Four months on, he showed no sign of moving out. But Alix liked having a man about the place. And so did …

You would never write life as a play, she thought. Nobody would
believe it. Two days after she’d left Javier, a letter had come from Le Cloître, summoning Alix urgently. Serge had driven like a madman, silent for once because Alix was crying so hard. She’d known in her bones she was on her way to say goodbye to her grandmother.

The matron had met them at the door and said gravely, ‘I thought you should know at once – Mme Lutzman is sitting up in bed, accusing
my nurses of having stolen her spectacles.’

Mémé liked having Bonnet around. Her old disapproval had melted. Bonnet was once again the amiable young man who’d mixed her husband’s paints. She often mistook him for her dead Alfred, which was not surprising as Bonnet painted with a new intensity and talked of Kirchwiller while Mémé dozed beside him in an armchair.

In a dressing room, Alix put on
silk stockings and a slip, after which Rosa buttoned her into a dress of toffee-coloured cashmere. This model was called No. 1. No fancy names for Modes Lutzman. It was mid-calf in length, fitted into the waist with a narrow belt of the same fabric, its only drama an embroidered neckline inspired by a tribal necklace Alix had seen at the newly opened Museum of Mankind. This, her first collection,
numbered thirty models, stylish ‘safe sellers’, because
whenever she considered anything more daring, Gregory Kilpin’s face appeared before her.