The Dress Thief (17 page)

It was while travelling on Métro line eight the following day that Verrian realised he’d found a reason to stay in Paris. A sweet, husky voice which, though it had taken him time to realise it, had haunted him from first hearing. Alix Gower had been the disembodied voice of the telephone exchange. How extraordinary that they kept meeting. Some
people would call it fate. There were so many fascinating ingredients to Alix Gower. Like oil and water in a jar, a vigorous shake would emulsify into a rather perplexing girl.

As the train rumbled into Bonne Nouvelle station, sucked in more passengers and closed its doors, he weighed up his feelings. He was physically attracted to Alix, but she sounded – and had felt – quite young. Kissing her
last night had been an irresistible impulse, but not the act of a responsible grown man. Had he not been stirred up from his conversation with Jack, he wouldn’t have done it. He hoped not, anyway.

Why was he so drawn to her? The first time he’d met her,
she’d been slathered in tears. Last night she’d been soaked to the skin. But … the voice and hair and near-black eyes.

Or was he seeing another
face? Was he reaching for Alix because he longed for somebody lost to him?

‘Penny for them?’

‘Scrap – I’m sorry.’ He’d temporarily forgotten the two women opposite him in the first-class carriage. Studying them again, Verrian felt the same jolt he’d experienced when he’d first greeted them off their train half an hour ago. While he’d been in Spain, his sister – ten years his junior and known
as ‘Scrap’ – had evolved from a tomboy in jodhpurs into a young woman with professionally waved hair and a grown-up suit.

His mother had altered too. Somebody had taken the confident woman he’d kissed goodbye a year-and-a-half ago and replaced her with a nervous matron. Both now rocked with the motion of the train, handbags clasped in tweed laps. Jack’s wire had arrived first thing that morning.
Not at Verrian’s lodgings, at the
News Monitor
building. ‘
Ma and Lucy on way Paris, meet Gare du Nord, elevenish
.’

Luckily the
Monitor
’s editorial secretary was so devoted to her duties she came in on Saturdays. She’d shot a boy-messenger to Place du Tertre and Verrian had woken to the realisation that his squiring duties began in three hours.

Bloody Jack must have known last night that the
women were already on the boat train. Verrian wondered how he was
going to juggle his mother and Lucy and still manage to meet Alix that afternoon.

Lucy was a good face-reader. As the train stopped at Rue Montmartre, she said, ‘We’ve been sprung on you, but don’t worry – Ma and I will spend hours in Printemps and then we’ll collapse into bed. Just so long as you have dinner with us and take us
somewhere nice, we’ll be fine. We’ve missed you.’

‘Is the old girl all right?’ he asked Lucy in a whisper. Their mother was staring into the blackness of the train window, locked in thought.

‘That depends on you. What you drop in her lap this time.’

The doors closed, wheels rolled. Explanation was impossible.

*

He took them to Printemps, the famous department store on Boulevard Haussmann,
and bought them lunch in the café under the cupola. Watching his mother poke doubtfully at her pink beef, turning a slice over to see if it was better done on the other side, he reflected that you could take the English landed classes out their country, but you could not take the country out of them. His mother’s philosophy was utterly simple: everything she’d learned during her Edwardian childhood
represented Truth in all its forms. Whether the topic was food, politics or marriage, there was a right choice and a wrong choice. And if one came from a good family, one simply knew what the right choice was.

Lucy, catching Verrian’s expression, imitated the Haviland
family cook: ‘Don’t you let them Frenchies palm you off with raw meat, Madam!’

Their mother glanced up, gravely surprised at
the comment. ‘Underdone meat is dangerous, as you’d know if you were Chairlady of the Sussex School Visitors’ Trust. Half the malnutrition we see in rural children comes from intestinal parasites.’

‘Mummy, honestly,’ Lucy reproved.

‘Continentals don’t get them,’ Verrian said, rolling a slice of beef around oiled lettuce. ‘Get school dinner ladies to add garlic to everything, problem solved.’

‘They’d be more inclined to add brimstone.’ His mother was cutting the darker meat away, pushing circles of pink to the side of her plate.

Verrian couldn’t abide waste. His mother’s malnourished Sussex brats would look peachy compared to those he’d seen in Spain. In Madrid, a rumour had spread in that jittery, bombarded city that local con-men were catching cats and selling the meat as rabbit.
It had made those plates of
olla podrida
his hotel had served, a stew of stringy meats cooked with red cabbage, seem a culinary lottery.

‘What’s your plan for today?’ he asked.

‘Anything but grey,’ Lucy said. ‘I need a couple of suits for my secretarial course and something glam for –’ She broke off so abruptly she might have sketched an exclamation mark in the air.

‘For?’

‘… Um, parties and
things. And this one –’ she pinched her mother’s arm, ‘her wardrobe is a coffin of old tweed. The poor girl’s still wearing dropped waists.’

‘Only for gardening. Dear –’ Verrian’s mother patted his hand – ‘you might like to visit the men’s department?’

She’d been eyeing his jacket and tie-less neck since the ticket barrier. ‘I bought three shirts the other day and a suit and tie,’ he told her.

‘But you are not wearing them.’

‘True.’ He’d put on the clothes he’d left on his chair the night before, the priority having been to shave before meeting his mother. ‘Some women like the flung-on look.’ An African lady, walking towards them in that undulating way of people used to the Tropics, threw him a smile on cue. He responded and she returned a twinkle. ‘See?’

Lucy giggled. ‘That’s the
third woman you’ve flirted with since we sat down.’

‘You’re counting?’

‘You are a flirt though. And such an egalitarian. That poor old fright, begging on the station concourse? She had her skirt tucked into her bloomers but you still called her “Madame”.’

‘It’s how they’re wearing bloomers in Paris this year.’

‘Enough,’ said their mother. ‘Not a subject for airing at lunch. Lucy, you should
be glad your brother has manners. Verrian, take care you don’t become too foreign.’

Verrian surreptitiously checked his watch. Skip cheese and coffee, and he’d have time to go home and change before meeting Alix for tea. If she meant to turn up, of course.

*

At the Deux Magots, he took an inside table because the spitting wind outside ruffled his newspaper. Might as well find out what the French
press were saying about developments in Spain following the Durango bombing. Four o’clock and no sign of Alix. He was betting she wouldn’t come.

Shame. She’d miss the debut of his new suit, unique for being the first he’d ever bought off the rail. It was stone-coloured linen, a size too large because the Spanish heat had given him a horror of anything tight-fitting. Under the jacket he wore his
shirt open, a breezy Left Bank style that in his hometown of Heronhurst would bring cars to a halt and probably cause bicycle tyres to spontaneously deflate. In Heronhurst, gentlemen buttoned their coats and wore their collars starched even on the hottest summer day.

He ordered coffee, folded the newspaper into a comfortable shape and tried to read. But his attention refused to fix, so he studied
the crowd instead. The Deux Magots was a writers’ den. Smoke hazed every straight line. Leather banquettes were occupied by men and women whose pencils worked furiously over notepads held down by their cups. Here one could write all day over one cup of coffee without being moved on or charged for air.
The French let culture breathe
, he thought, looking up at the
wooden statues attached to a corner
pier. Those were the
magots
, the Mandarin wise men that gave the café its name.

‘Maggots?’ Lucy had echoed when he’d announced where he was going. ‘You’re meeting someone at “two maggots”? Can we come?’

No, Scrap, you can’t
. The waiter brought him his coffee, but after a sip or two he decided it was making his heart race. It couldn’t be nerves he was feeling. He was only meeting a dowdy and
unsophisticated girl about his sister’s age. They were palpitations of embarrassment, he told himself, because what had seemed right yesterday in the dark now felt hideously ill-judged.

A man and woman entered. The man wore a sloping beret, a cigarette between his lips. He was talking fast with big, self-reverential gestures. The man’s companion, a tall girl way out of his league, was ignoring
him. Verrian watched, amused, until he realised who she was. Then he stood up so clumsily he knocked his newspaper to the floor. A waiter picked it up, standing in his way long enough for him to master his confusion and say her name.

This was not the girl who’d scrambled out of a window into his arms. Nor the one he’d rescued in Place du Tertre. In a purple dress whose nipped-in middle gave her
an hourglass figure, this was a fantasy he might have created out of the raw fabric of Alix Gower. Her hair was a cloud of curls under a devastatingly chic hat. She wasn’t seventeen or eighteen, he realised. She was about twenty, and that made him feel a lot better.

She reached to shake his hand with a grace that drew stares. The man in the beret gave a Latin shrug and plodded back to his outdoor
table. She asked, ‘I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?’

You have, and I expect you meant to
. ‘Teatime is fluid in Paris. Thank you for coming. I’d told myself you wouldn’t. Please sit down.’

She sipped water while she waited for her coffee. He discussed the weather, the April showers, the tourists crowding the métro. ‘You’re looking beautiful today. May I say that?’

‘You mean, I looked a ragbag
yesterday.’ A smile softened the reproach. ‘They were my work clothes. This is something I bought because I liked the colour.’ She gestured towards the dress – its neckline was nun-like, but black, Indian-file buttons insisted the eye follow the contours of her body down to her midriff.

Verrian gulped water. ‘I’m one up on you then, having bought something entirely new to impress you.’

‘I noticed.’
She gave his lapels and shoulder line a tilted inspection. ‘It’s a good suit and I hope you keep Mme Konstantiva’s cat away from it.’ Two fresh coffees arrived. He noticed that she stirred a lot of sugar into hers. Kept stirring longer than necessary.

‘How are you,’ he asked, ‘after your ordeal?’

‘Leaping out of a window? I was very angry with my colleagues this morning because I know they locked
me in. I should have risen above it, but I put pins on their chairs instead.’

‘Sharp side up?’

‘Of course. Only one each,’ she added when he raised an eyebrow.

‘Actually, I meant your ordeal on Place du Tertre. You never really told me who hurt you that day or why.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t remember what I said to you – I expect I burbled a lot of nonsense. I’m all right now, except where he
cut my hair –’ she indicated a curl over her left ear. ‘It wants to stick out like a turnip top.’

Verrian was glad she could laugh at herself, a rare commodity in attractive women, but he didn’t believe that shrug or her claim of forgetfulness. ‘In the car you said your attacker had demanded a lot of money. Doesn’t that mean he’ll come back?’

‘I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. Everything’s
sorted.’

‘You mentioned needing to “find the comte”. May I ask who that is? Your father?’

‘No, just a family friend. Well, a sort of neighbour. Well, a kind of guardian. In Alsace, long ago, the Comte de Charembourg and my grandmother …’

He leaned forward. ‘This is gripping.’

She laughed. ‘They lived in the same town. The comte owned the castle and all the land.’

Now he saw the fellow as
a music-hall villain, complete with black cloak and curling moustache. ‘How is the mysterious Comte de Charembourg connected with your being scalped in Place du Tertre?’

She frowned slightly and he supposed he’d pushed too far. It was early to be demanding the identities of other men, but he’d had a flash of jealousy at the first mention of the name. ‘I’m a journalist,’ he explained. ‘I live
in a sea of questions, and if they’re not quickly answered, I get a twitch. I want to know why a young woman, apparently sober and well-bred, should be threatened by a thug on a Montmartre staircase. I’ve no right to know,’ he added, taking her hand because she’d begun stirring her coffee needlessly, ‘but I’m good at discretion. I’m also quite good at thumping people, if I think they need it. What
I’m saying, Mademoiselle, is if you want to confide in someone, I’m a good bet.’

‘Call me Alix.’

‘Well, Alix, I’m willing to help or just listen. I owe you a favour.’

‘Do you? But I owe you … for rescuing me twice?’

‘You broke the rules to get me a line to London. It was important, that call. Hang on … you’re working for Javier. Does that mean you’re no longer employed at the telephone exchange?’