The Dress Thief (25 page)

The next morning, Alix flew down the stairs, the Lelong dress, in its cover, over her arm. A handbag stuffed with the day’s necessities bumped the wall as she jumped the last four steps. She’d overslept.

‘Late night?’ Mme Rey dragged her mop bucket into Alix’s path, using the mop as the steering mechanism. ‘Heard you come in well after witching
hour.’

Alix kept her eye on the exit. ‘Sorry if I woke you.’

‘No. I don’t sleep well, always half awake. New man with you, was it?’

Alix gave a clenched smile. ‘Yes.’

‘Bit older than you I’d say, from the sound of his voice. Nice voice though.’

‘He has a very nice voice. Sorry, I have to—’

‘Took you right upstairs, did he? That’s the sign of a gentleman. My mother used to tell me, if a man
doesn’t see you to your door, forget him.’

‘Very wise, Madame. I really have to—’

‘Hang on, dear, I’ve got newspapers for your grandmother. I’ll just fetch them.’

Alix bent forward. Her period was due to start in a day or two and it felt as if somebody were twisting her innards on a stick. When Mme Rey eventually returned with copies of
Le Petit Parisien
, Alix said, ‘I’ll leave them on the
bottom step and take them up when I come home.’

‘That won’t do, dear. Those oiks across the way will have them. I caught a couple of the little toerags in here yesterday, though they scooted fast enough when they saw me. Anyhow, I’m sure Mme Lutzman would like to read them with her breakfast, but I can’t manage all those stairs more than once in a day.’

Cursing roundly, though still under her
breath, Alix hurtled upstairs.
He’s got a nice voice
 … How close had that grimy old ear been to the door last night?

Reliving the feel of Verrian’s arms around her made her stomach flip. So much to dream over when she wasn’t in a hurry.

*

‘Alix, are you feverish again?’

‘No, Mme Frankel.’

‘Only you were late, and now you keep staring the way Javier does when he’s getting one of his migraines.’

Alix reassured the première, who replied, ‘Good, because it’s every hand to the pump and I still don’t know how we’re going to get the mid-season ball gowns finished for showing in two
weeks’ time. We’ve just thrown away yesterday’s work on Oro too. I wish I could start this year again.’

‘She says that every time,’ Alix’s companion Marcy whispered later. They’d been sent down to help one of the
assistant designers, a solid young man called Simon Norbert who had spent twenty minutes ignoring them. They could hear him in his office, voice rising as he complained to some caller – ‘Only eight of the fourteen complete, the mid-season show fixed for 12
^th
May. And all Monsieur does is lament in Spanish. As for that bitch Oro, I said from the start that underpinning was never going to work.
There’s only so much you can ask of a length of tulle. Wire! I said it would have to be wire, though I warned Monsieur, “It’ll look like a lampshade, you’ll never get it to float like feathers.”’

Alix, in love with Oro even in its unfinished state, had complete faith in Javier and Mme Frankel. She was shocked by this show of disloyalty. Without thinking, she shouted, ‘Just because you’re a dumpling
does not make Oro one. She will float!’

Marcy shushed her. Simon Norbert stood in the doorway of his office. ‘Dirty little cockroach,’ he yelled. ‘When I want you, I’ll send for you.’

‘Norbert has a point, you know,’ Marcy said as they crept away. ‘M. Javier conceives a look and asks Mme Frankel to devise the technique. Norbert’s people get caught in the middle and Javier can be hard on them
if they don’t interpret him perfectly. We’d better go back to Mme Frankel.’

Alix and Marcy were working together in a capacity that had no name. If they were called anything, Alix reflected, it would be ‘donkeys’. They fetched fabrics from storerooms and liaised with the workrooms, withstanding the howls of harried supervisors who couldn’t see how shaving another hair’s breadth off a seam could
improve anything. They also handed offcuts to the matchers, which gave Alix the chance to trim off slivers of cloth. She had a treasury of samples, along with five detailed drawings from the mid-season line which tonight she’d hand over to Una Kilpin and the New York businesswoman who was Una’s associate. Those two would turn stolen sketches into real-life copies.

‘You like busy?’ Mme Albert
asked when Alix was sent to the thread room to pick up a box of white bobbins.

She did like busy. She was learning a trade she loved. And in Marcy Stein, a gentle girl from the suburb of Batignolles, she’d found her first friend at Javier. But tonight, when all she wanted was to meet Verrian and hold hands over a table, she had to take one step deeper into a world she already regretted entering.

‘Alix? You’ve been ten minutes fetching those. I said I needed them at once.’ Anger showed for the first time in Pauline Fran-kel’s face. ‘If you don’t want this chance, go back to your sewing bench.’

‘I’m sorry, Madame. It’s –’ she looked around to check that none of the male staff were near – ‘my time of the month. I feel dreadful.’

Pauline Frankel’s features evened out. ‘Ah. I understand
that well enough. If you want to lie down –’

‘I’d rather work, take my mind off things.’

‘Very well. Go and see if Javier needs you, but, please, no tragic faces. All that tulle you sewed under Oro’s skirt? He’s had someone unpick the lot and I only just stopped him from throwing the dress out the window. We cannot afford theatricals. We need finished clothes. We need cash and custom.’

*

In
the top-floor studio, Solange Antonin held a pose in a gown destined to be No. 14 of the mid-season collection. ‘
Lune de Minuit
’ – Midnight Moon. It had a body of black velvet with alternate flounces of ivory and black lace. During his trip to Spain, Javier had watched Flamenco dancers and this mid-season collection reflected it. Arms and shoulders were bare. Bodices were boned like basques, skirts
flared in fishtails. It was, thought Alix, enchanting. But … again, as with Oro, something about this dress felt not quite right.

Poor rejected Oro looked like a burst balloon with her underpinning removed. And Simon Norbert had a point, Alix mused, wire would be wrong. What it needed was something strong as wire yet light as silk. Something with movement. Something alive … She stared until the
dress melted into flame and cried, ‘I know!’

An assistant shushed her, nodding towards Javier, who stood cupping his chin. Simon Norbert mirrored his pose, his pot belly
pushing in and out as he strove to contain his anxiety. Up on the pedestal, Solange bore the signs of a late night. Noticing Alix, she jerked as if an electric current had hit her.

‘Keep still,’ Javier snapped. ‘How can I judge
a dress if you squirm?’

Solange flung a look of hatred at Alix, and Javier said wearily, ‘I can see you too,
petite
. What do you want?’

‘Mme Frankel sent me to see if I could be of any use.’

Simon Norbert sniffed. ‘Hardly likely.’

Javier opened his arms. ‘Wave the magician’s staff, make me love my collection.’ His hands danced. ‘I who could once make a poem out of a bundle of sheeting have
lost my gift. We might as well shut down. I am a spent force.’

‘Monsieur, I’ve an idea about Oro, how to make it float.’

Simon Norbert snorted.

‘That mule of a dress.’ Javier shuddered. ‘She has defeated me. I have given up. Now I am instead in anguish over Minuit. It is the couturier’s fate, Alix, to be speared through the heart by those you love.’

Alix could see that beneath the melodrama
lurked desperation. She walked towards Solange, then took five steps back, narrowing her gaze. Any other day she’d have kept her mouth shut, but this was not any day. Last night in the Rose Noire, Serge Martel had told her ‘We’re going to be lovers.’ Minutes later, another man had snatched her away. A man whose touch made her feel dizzy and abandoned.

She said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with any
of your gowns. Your collection is a triumph of grace.’

‘Shame yours is the least important opinion in the building,’ Norbert muttered.

‘Dummies, M. Javier.’ Alix pointed at the wooden mannequins that kept silent witness against a far wall. ‘You’re seeing your clothes on dummies. It’s all wrong.’

Norbert blustered, ‘You’ve no right to a point of view.’

‘You are saying …’ Javier engaged her
in visual combat, ‘my designs are for wooden dolls, not women?’

Like a roulette player hurling everything on black seventeen Alix dared to continue. ‘Have you a gramophone?’

Javier blinked. ‘I have.’

‘Have M. Norbert fetch it and some records. Romantic ones. Do you have anything by Hildegarde or Lucienne Boyer?’ She turned to Norbert. ‘Would you bring them?’

‘I will not, cheeky little article.’

Javier formalised the instruction and Norbert strutted away.

‘I know what you’re about,
petite
, and I am indulging you. Make a fool of me, I might throw you and the gramophone out of the window.’

‘All the mannequins are here by two o’clock? With your permission, I’ll have Mlle Lilliane send them up. They should be prepared to wear one gown each. I’d like a taxi to fetch a friend of mine. And
I’d like to send a matcher to my home.’

‘Why?’

‘May I tell you later?’

*

She drew curtains, had candles brought and, with Marcy’s help, moved the furniture to the wall. Javier watched, going along with it all because he was in a hole and as a man in a hole will accept the hand of a passing madman, he was accepting hers. Each time the door opened, Alix looked for the one person she wanted to
see. But it was usually somebody sent up by Mlle Lilliane to enquire if the design studio was ‘still intent on wrecking the smooth schedule of the afternoon’.

Alix wound the gramophone and chose a disc. The first of the mannequins arrived, asking, ‘Are we having a special showing? Who’s coming?’ Followed by two more who laughed like children given a break from lessons. A couple more sauntered
in, blankly incurious. Each girl carried shoes and evening gloves and was followed by a dresser carrying a calico bag like a gigantic puffball.

‘The salon showing starts promptly at three and the girls will have to get downstairs and change.’ Javier consulted his pocket watch. ‘Ten past two. Alix, tell us what we’re to do.’

The matcher came back and gave Alix a package, along with a message:
‘Your grandmother says, this was weeks of work when her fingers were nimble and she still feels the pain each morning when she wakes.’

Thank you, Mémé
, Alix transmitted silently.

Nearly ready to begin, Alix reflected that she had gambled on one other person, and it looked as if she’d overstretched her luck … until Marcy rushed into the studio followed by a man. Alix ran forward. ‘Paul, you came.
Oh …’ He was wearing an old shirt and building-site trousers. ‘Didn’t you get my message? Black-tie evening suit. Like last night.’

‘You know it wasn’t my suit.’ Paul looked about in resentful wonder. One of the mannequins giggled and his mouth turned stubborn. ‘You had me woken, Alix. What do you want?’

‘Your services, for an hour. But you have to be properly dressed.’ She looked at Javier
who raised an eyebrow.

‘No good asking me. My evening clothes would not fit him. We are wide in completely different places.’

She turned to Norbert, silently begging. He pretended not to notice, then finally huffed and told her, ‘I don’t keep evening clothes here.’

‘You do, M. Norbert,’ Marcy said. ‘You always keep a suit in your room. You’ve asked me to sponge your jacket and press your shirt
on numerous occasions. Shall I fetch it?’

‘As you please.’ Norbert didn’t quite stamp a foot, but still raised it and put it down with a decided snap.

*

The suit was very ‘just’ on Paul. A belt had to be found, and the jacket was so tight he looked like a scarecrow with a broom handle through both sleeves. The mannequins, who had changed
into their gowns, tried to help. Laughter bubbled up all
around, but it was not malicious.

‘I can’t wear this jacket,’ Paul told Alix, ‘so stop trying to shove me into it. I’ll dance in shirt and waistcoat.’

That brought an appreciative ‘Ooh’ from the girls. Only Solange remained untouched by the fun. She sat at a remove, her eyes rarely leaving Alix.

The waistcoat buttoned over a white ruffled shirt and – with the addition of a sash and some breathing
in – the effect was as Javier said, ‘The “
morillo
”,’ which, he explained, was a term for the neck and shoulder muscles of a fighting bull. He took out his pocket watch and swung it in front of Alix. ‘Time, he ticks.’

‘Heloïse?’ Alix beckoned a Titian-haired girl whose luminous beauty had inspired a gown of ivory velvet with an overskirt of chiffon, ‘here is your dance partner. Paul, the watchword
is smooth, fluid and romantic.’

‘That’s three words.’

‘Just dance.’ She set the gramophone going and Lucienne Boyer’s ‘Parlez-moi d’amour’ spilled into the room.

*

Whatever he was by day, on the dance floor Paul was a fish returned to water, and Heloïse began to dance like a woman in love. Her dress shaped to her, the skirt flicking, the overskirt fanning, making sense of the dress’s Spanish
name: Seguidilla – That Which Follows. Shadow-work appliqué – Mémé’s work, Alix was sure – winked in the light. They danced again, and then
it was Marie-Josèphe’s turn, then Arlette’s, then Claudette’s, then Nelly’s, then Zinaida’s. Alix hoped Javier was seeing what she was seeing, that his designs gorged on light and came to life with movement.

*

The clock said five minutes to three. The dresses
were snatched away, the mannequins sent downstairs. All the gowns had been danced – except one.

‘Solange?’ Javier clapped his hands. ‘You aren’t ready.’ Solange had taken off Lune de Minuit and donned a robe. She said, ‘I have a bad head. I can’t dance.’

‘Then you must take a taxi home. Why did you not say?’ A little hardness crept into Javier’s tone. Solange walked out.