The Milliner's Secret (68 page)

I am well known for only ever wearing hats by de Lirac, even in Paris, and have done all a woman can do to persuade Coralie de Lirac to reopen in the City of Light. She is adamant that home is now London.

DERBY DAY, EPSOM DOWNS, 1961

They had a horse running in the big race. An Irish thoroughbred called Whiter-Than, bought as a two-year-old and in training at Epsom.

‘I don’t know what made you buy a grey,’ Coralie said to Donal. ‘Grey horses are never properly white, so even if he wins, it’s a bad advertisement for the launderette king of South London.’

Their son, Patrick, eleven years old and now grown up enough to join his parents on a works outing, said, ‘I wish you’d called him Scrub-a-dub, Dad. I’d like to have heard that over the loudspeaker. “Scrub-a-dub goes into the straight like a bar of soap off a lino floor.”’

Their eldest son Derek, sixteen, wearing a suit with narrow lapels and even narrower trousers, gave his brother a friendly clip round the head. ‘The Jockey Club wouldn’t let an idiot like you think up a name.’

Their father agreed. ‘Even horses need their dignity, Pat. Imagine running as Scrub-a-dub with Her Majesty and the Queen Mother looking on. Did you put my bet on, Cora?’

‘Fifty quid each way on the lad.’

‘I said “on the nose”.’

‘I heard. Whiter-Than might come in the first three, but he’s not going to win. When we visited the yard yesterday, I didn’t feel a thing.’

‘Who did you back?’

‘Psidium.’

‘The one I can’t pronounce? You’re mad, you know.’

Maybe. Psidium was running at sixty-six to one. ‘He’s got a French jockey and he’s owned by Madame Plesch, who not only has the virtue of being a woman, she’s a friend of Ottilia’s. And I felt a little whoosh when I saw his name.’

‘Your mother’s a witch.’

Coralie kissed Donal’s cheek, and asked him to go around the red double-decker party bus, making sure their guests all had a drink. Derek was supposed to have done the honours, but he found the giggling millinery girls too much, interpreting their coy looks as teasing. Give him a year or two, Coralie thought, and he’ll work it out.

They’d hired the double-decker for the mostly female staff at Coralie de Lirac. Donal’s washeteria staff were also on board, as were the various accountants and secretaries who kept their two businesses on the rails. Everyone was mingling happily.

A windless day. Sun shimmered off white rails and the air was a cocktail of crushed grass, frying meat and car exhaust. How could such a brimming place be so full of ghosts? Yet it was.

There was her father shouting, ‘Manna from heaven. Our girl has picked the winner!’

And her mother, saying, ‘I’ve had enough,’ and leaving.

There was the ghost of Dietrich, hopping with pain because a cocky girl in a stolen hat had stamped on his foot. There was Ottilia, ashen-faced and remote. Donal, cradling hot sausage buns and ginger beer, telling her she was mad to back a horse called Mid-day Sun.

Taking off her gloves, sending silver and coral bracelets clashing down her wrist, she extracted a powder compact. She checked her makeup, moving the mirror an inch at a time to reflect eyes, lips, cheekbones. ‘Forty-six. Where does it go, the time?’

She still had good bone structure and a tight jaw line, but close up, lines and liver spots recorded the starvation of Ravensbrück. She patted on powder to disguise them. A careful diet, expensive creams, a decent hairdresser and dentist made the best of what she’d brought home with her.

At least she could afford good clothes. Today it was an ivory silk suit with a pencil skirt and box jacket, round-necked with big, same-fabric buttons. The hat, from her spring–summer offering, was a straw bowler, high-crowned and shallow-brimmed. She’d gone Una-esque, wearing only white, cream and black nowadays. It wasn’t a neurosis, it was a form of discreet and perpetual mourning.

She’d tracked her mother down a decade ago, just in time to say goodbye. Florence had not gone to New York with a fellow actor. That had been a ruse to put Jac off her trail. She’d gone up north, to ‘old York’, taking her savings. She’d called herself Mrs Mason, given birth to a daughter conceived from a short-lived affair and lived by running a boarding-house for theatrical folk. When Coralie found her, she was in the last stages of pneumonia and pleurisy, being cared for by Coralie’s half-sister Gwendolen. A strained meeting, full of emotion and robbed of a resolution because Florence had forgotten so much, and could not speak easily.

She’d cleared up one mystery, however. ‘You ran after me at the racecourse, and I didn’t wait. You poor little kid.’

The memory that had, for years, spooled through Coralie’s head, like a broken cine film, gained its missing segment. When Florence’s control had snapped, little Cora had slithered off her father’s back and slogged through the mud, begging her mother to come back. Cora had turned her ankle, and the heel had broken off her shoe. Her heel, not her mum’s. Florence had bought them matching shoes, two pairs for the price of one, because Cora had been a gangly child with the same size feet as her pint-sized mother. Just ten years old, she’d stuffed the heel into her pocket and struggled on, shouting, ‘Mum, come back!’ until she realised she was shouting at strangers.

Gwendolen was nice, if sometimes a little ‘actress-y’; she’d followed Florence on to the boards. They wrote to each other once a month, and Coralie sent Gwendolen a hat from every collection.

Talking of which, over on the other side of the course, in the members’ enclosure, Noëlle would be soaking up the sunshine and, hopefully, buckets of admiration. Coralie had made her daughter a coolie hat of white sisal with hot-pink daisies for this gala race. Worn with a sleeveless white dress, it perfectly suited Noëlle’s exotic, elfin style. Donal had put Whiter-Than in Noëlle’s name, as a surprise Christmas and twenty-second-birthday present. So it was Noëlle, accompanied by Ottilia and her second husband, who was rubbing shoulders with the racing elite today. If in the extraordinarily unlikely event the horse won, Noëlle would lead him out in front of the Queen.

Coralie didn’t grudge her daughter the honour, and Donal preferred being on a bus, ladling out the champagne. He was never wholly at ease among public-school types – too much the self-made barrow boy – whereas Noëlle had grown up among intellectual refugees and expatriate aristocrats. She spoke four languages, attended university in Zürich and weekended in Paris. It hadn’t hurt her prospects in life that she’d also inherited much of Teddy Clisson’s wealth on his death. Ottilia’s husband, an American called Tom Finkelman, who had replaced the vain wastrel Frantz Lascar, had encouraged Noëlle’s intellect. He’d foreseen a career for her in industry or international diplomacy. Good thing she has a sweet nature, Coralie often thought, or she might have floated away from them, like a helium balloon. Though family life in Coralie and Donal’s London home assaulted her refined senses, Noëlle visited several times a year. Maman, Papa-Donal, Derek, Patrick and the twins, Amelia and Donny, were her ‘other family’. We share her, Coralie acknowledged. The price of sending her away.

It was Patrick who announced that the big race had begun. ‘Mum? Can’t you hear everyone shouting?’

‘I was miles away. Here, borrow my binoculars.’ She clasped the front rails of the bus, aware of her girls crowding behind her. Tipsy. They must be, or they wouldn’t be getting so close. Her staff lived in awe of her. Not because she shouted or found fault. The loudest noise she ever made was to rattle her bracelets, her way of making sure they always knew she was coming so she didn’t catch them talking about boyfriends, or making cheeky remarks about her. They kept their distance because she worked in a quiet bubble, impenetrable except by loved ones. They knew nothing of what she had survived because she never talked of it. They didn’t know that she’d been taken away in a car by the Gestapo, or what those beasts had done to her. They didn’t know about Ravensbrück. This clean, modern world screened out such things.

She carried the memory in limbs that could not dance, in a fear of elevators and a terror of Alsatian dogs. A Gypsy not half a mile from there had told her she would kill, back when her idea of evil was her dad’s drunken fists. Back when the notion of a loving execution lay beyond her mind’s boundaries.

‘Whiter-Than didn’t make a good start, I’m sorry to say.’ Donal pushed through the press of shrieking girls to put his arm round her. ‘You’re not using your binoculars.’

‘I gave them to Pat. They make my mascara claggy. You do the commentary.’

‘All right. They’re round the first big bend, careering down towards Tattenham Corner. A whole lot of brown horses are in the lead, and there’s a white one at the back, taking his time. I think the jockey’s getting forty winks before the next race.’ Donal let the loudspeakers take over. Later, when the winners were written up, his jaw dropped. ‘Psidium first? Sixty-six to one? How do you do it, Cora?’

‘If you have to ask, you’ll never know. Don’t look glum.’

‘This is the face of a man who just lost a hundred pounds.’

‘Fifty, you said.’

‘I put another fifty each way on that bloody white horse.’

‘Then it’s a good thing you’ve got me, Donal Flynn.’ She put her hands to his face. Her left hand carried her wedding band and pearl engagement ring. On her right, she wore a heavy gold ring with a ruby, and one of coral in memory of Ramon Cazaubon, who had been killed at Mont Mouchet, in the Auvergne, in June 1944. Of those dear, Paris friends, only Una and Ottilia remained part of her life. Louise Deveau had survived the war, but now lived almost as a recluse in her flat on rue de l’Odéon. Arkady Erdös had died upon a bed of leaves, as his mother had foretold, falling in the Tronçais forest while fighting with the Maquis d’Auvergne. His fellow Vagabond, Florian Lantos, thrived. He lived in Brittany with Micheline and their children, having taken over his father-in-law’s farm. Coralie had visited a few years before, and had found Florian looking and sounding almost like a native Breton. Only the dulcimer gathering dust on top of a cupboard linked him to the hungry, nervous lad who had come to her for shelter.

‘Where are you, my love?’ Donal asked anxiously. ‘I sometimes think your mind is in Paris, along with your heart.’

She held his gaze until she found the words that expressed what she felt for the man who had mended her, married her, taken her firstborn son as his own. He was still handsome, though his black hair was flecked with grey and his frame had filled out with good living. ‘My heart is here, with you. You are the best of fathers, the best of friends, the best of lovers.’

‘There’s a “but”. There’s always that with you, Cora.’

‘But . . . you’re a lousy picker of horses. Leave that to me, Donal Flynn.’

THE DRESS THIEF

Alix Gower has a dream
: to join the ranks of Coco Chanel to become a designer in the high-stakes world of Parisian haute couture. But Alix also has a secret: she supports her family by stealing designs to create bootlegs for the foreign market. A hidden sketchbook and two minutes inside Hermès is all she needs to create a perfect replica, to be whisked off to production in New York.

Then Alix is given her big break - a chance to finally realize her dream in one of the most prominent Parisian fashion houses - but at the price of copying the breakthrough Spring Collection.

Knowing this could be her only opportunity, Alix accepts the arrangement. But when a mystery from her past resurfaces and a chance meeting has her falling into the arms of a handsome English war reporter, Alix learns that the slightest misstep - or misplaced trust - could be all it takes for her life to begin falling apart at the seams.

The Dress Thief is OUT NOW.

WHAT REVIEWERS ARE SAYING ABOUT THE DRESS THIEF…

‘The Dress Thief goes way beyond a story of Parisian fashion. It is a story of mystery, romance, friendship and the everyday struggles of life.
Right from the start this book will grip hold of you and draw you into Alix’s story and it won’t let you go till the very last page…’
That Thing She Reads

'
A delicious treat of a novel.
I loved the setting in 1930s Paris - a place of intrigue, exquisite silk frocks, and dangerous secrets. And I was utterly charmed by the story's delectable heroine, as she struggled to make her mark in this seductive but perilous world' Margaret Leroy

'A
truly accomplished and delicious
debut novel' Laurie Graham.

'
A fascinating evocation of a great fashion house
and the knife-edge the designers live on. Natalie Meg Evans is a born storyteller' Sara Craven

‘A charming novel that totally transported me to the Paris fashion houses of the late 1930s.’
Trip Fiction

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Second novels have a reputation for being hard to bring into the world, and while I dislike clichés, or indeed, being a cliché, I have to say that there were some tears wept over the keyboard. You have all your life to write book one. Book two comes with deadlines attached and not a few expectations, so thanks to everyone who helped me through it. The Milliner’s Secret would never have been revealed had I not had support on the way.

Firstly, my agent Laura Longrigg and editor Kathryn Taussig for being stalwart champions of my writing. Thanks to Nikki Dupin for the beautiful cover design and to Hazel Orme for her exemplary copyediting.

Heartfelt thanks to the Suffolk friends and neighbours who have hauled me through some pretty tough stuff this last year. Rusty and Amber have honourable mention, for being unconditionally loving Labradors and getting me off my chair at regular intervals. To Sam L.E., thanks for being yourself. To Chrissie, my sister Anna and Mel Hayman-Brown for always being at the end of a telephone. And to Mattie, Benita and Travis, three beautiful souls who will always remind me that life is best when it’s lived simply, in the present and with friends.

Natalie Meg Evans

Suffolk 2015

ABOUT THE AUTHOR