The Dress Thief (28 page)

‘I couldn’t get away.’

‘I was happy to wait.’

‘Your expression says otherwise.’

He nodded. ‘It’s
not your fault. I picked up this newspaper. Three days old – I’ve been having a rest from the news and I missed something calamitous. Another town was bombed in northern Spain. Guernica, in the Basque country. I have – had – friends there.’

‘I hate newspapers,’ Alix said fiercely. ‘They make me feel the world is a horrible place.’

‘It is, sometimes.’ He put his hand over hers. ‘But why should
you care about people utterly unconnected to you?’

Alix sensed his darkening mood. On impulse, she told him about meeting the Comte de Charembourg earlier. ‘He said the same thing you said the other day.’

‘Which was?’

‘That I was a clean page. Only you said “clean sheet”. Is that what I am? Blank paper, for people to write their opinions on?’

‘Maybe.’ He tossed the newspaper, which was
The
Times
, on to an empty chair. ‘I suspect it’s because your indomitable spirit reminds us that anything is possible, if we’re prepared to work at it. Not so bad when you put it that way, is it?’

Her wine arrived and the waiter put down bread and a bowl of olives. She dived on them, saying, ‘Sorry – my work makes me ravenous.’
Never tell me clothes don’t matter
, she thought. That time in the Deux
Magots, and last night in Una’s Lucien Lelong,
she’d felt the sophisticated equal of this man, but this evening, in her work clothes, she felt like one of the sparrows that hopped between boulevard table legs. Verrian dwarfed her, with his big-shouldered coat slung loosely about him.

‘Alix, the other day you spoke to me of your grandfather …’

Her hand stopped halfway to her mouth. ‘So?’

‘It
seems he keeps popping up. As do you.’

‘I live here,’ she retorted. ‘It’s you who pop up.’

‘You’re right.’ A smile softened his eyes. ‘My sister Lucy, who owns every book written by the palm reader Cheiro, would say it was written into our life paths to entangle. So, having got tangled, I did something that’s none of my business. Yesterday I asked a friend about Alfred Lutzman.’

‘But I saw
you last night. Why didn’t you say something?’ Alix asked through a mouthful of bread.

‘Because there were more pressing thoughts in my head than your grandfather. But I want to talk about him now. You said he died before his talent could flower …’

Watching him select an olive, Alix burst out, ‘You don’t have to pussyfoot. I know some bad things about my grandfather.’

‘Tell me.’

‘He left home
and went to England to study, leaving his father to manage his business alone. He didn’t write to his family until he was in London, and they thought he’d been taken away by the authorities. It made his mother ill. He broke promises. And he was mean.’

‘With money?’

‘There wasn’t much of that, but yes. He promised Mémé – that’s my grandmother – that he’d buy her a wedding dress, so she had one
made. But then he wouldn’t go to the bank, so she had to pay for it week by week herself. She took in mending to make ends meet, and after that he expected her to keep doing it. Sometimes he’d let his daughter go hungry rather than sell his work. When she speaks of him, I hear Mémé crying inside. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a great painter.’

‘Was the Comte de Charembourg your grandfather’s
patron?’

‘I don’t think so. He bought some paintings but he was very young then. Young men don’t collect art, they chase girls,’ she finished imperiously.

He squeezed her hand, not gently. ‘There’s another thing. I want to understand how you and M. le Comte know each other. How it is he sees you as a sweet, blank page.’

‘Because of Alsace, because of the war. My father fought alongside him.
At the outbreak of war they both joined the London Rifle Brigade. During a battle – near Arras, I think – the comte was thrown into the air by shell blast and my father ran forward to rescue him.’ She faltered because, after her conversation with the comte in Javier, she could no longer picture that heroic scene with any clarity. ‘When he heard both my parents had died, the comte helped grandmother
financially.’

‘Alsace … art … London … war … so many things link you.’

She snatched her hand away. ‘Is it the Comte de Charembourg you’re interested in?’

‘I’m interested in you.’ He pushed their chairs together so they fused at the leg. She shivered and he flung his coat around her.

She’d have liked to cuddle up but his probing questions had made things complex again. ‘Because of your job,
you can’t help prising out people’s secrets?’

‘Guilty.’

‘Let me save you some time. The comte isn’t my father, in case you’re wondering. People always think it, because he’s been generous to me.’ She picked up her wine, meaning to knock it back, but instead choked and grabbed a napkin. ‘They said it at school when they wanted to be mean. I asked Mémé, when she’d had a little to drink, and she
said I must never think it. She said I looked very like my true father and nobody who’s seen a photograph of John Gower would ever doubt it. Now see what you’ve made me do.’

He spread a napkin over the wine stain on the tablecloth and called for a refill. ‘As I said before, you don’t have to explain yourself to me.’

‘You’re trying to explain me to myself!’

‘I’m sorry.’ He touched the curls
at her temple. ‘Nobody’s stolen more of your hair, I hope?’

He was trying to sooth away the storm, but she felt idiotic because she had wine dripping into her shoe. People walking
by would think she was his younger sister. ‘I’m going to have my hair cut short,’ she said, reaching for a subject she knew often touched a nerve with men. ‘Really short, once Bonnet’s finished with me.’

‘Bonnet now?’

‘Finished painting me. I told you I was sitting for him. Light falling on my hair is the most important part of the composition, he says. He says, if he wanted me to be all neck and shoulders, he’d have asked me to put my hair up.’ Ah, a reaction. Like a spark from a locomotive wheel as it grates the track. She pursued it. ‘Bonnet was my grandfather’s pupil. Did you find that out too? That’s why
he’s a master of female flesh, like my grandfather. He paints slowly and has to be cajoled into completing his work. I get very cold sitting for him.’ There.

‘Alix, have you any idea what the image of you sitting naked for another man does to my self-control? If we were together in a hotel room, I would enjoy this conversation very much. It would have a very different texture and very different
possibilities.’

She looked away. Unable to say anything clever or remotely seductive in return, she snapped, ‘I told you we would argue.’

‘You did.’

She turned back to see him reaching for
The Times
, his expression closed. Obviously the bombing of a faraway town meant more to him than she did. Of course it did. Her ignorance would bore any intelligent man. She suspected that under Verrian’s
light manner lay a very serious character. To get his attention, she raised her glass in a toast. ‘Your health.’

He nodded. ‘Yours too. Though you should stop sitting around in the buff in Montmartre attics if you want to keep it.’ He folded up the newspaper and stood. ‘Time I took you home.’

*

She wouldn’t let him come into her building. ‘Our concierge snoops.’

‘Will I see a light go on, so
I know you’re safe?’

She promised to hold the apartment door open and switch on the hall light. Their stairwell bulbs had been replaced recently, after months of darkness, but they were blown again already. ‘You’ll see a glow right up there.’ She pointed to the mansard roof.

‘I’ll wait. I’m afraid I have to work over this weekend, but I’ll see you Monday. Same café?’

‘All right.’

He waited
for Alix to reach the top of the stairs and was rewarded with a wink of light.
The Times
wedged under his arm, he turned, sighing deeply. This was turning into a long, long day, but he didn’t feel ready for his bed. He was doing everything wrong. Problem was, there were so many versions of Alix he wasn’t ever sure which one he’d meet. He felt frustrated. The woman who had mesmerised him in the
Deux Magots was not the minx whose ears he’d wanted to pull tonight.

In a narrow street off St-Germain he entered L’Arancia, a
restaurant in the vaults of an ancient building, favoured by Sorbonne University students and the staff of the
News Monitor
. He needed company. He didn’t exactly
want
company, but knew he ought not to be alone. He nodded to the chef-patron, an Italian called Visconti
whose wife, Basque-born Arantxa, looked harrowed under the candle sconces. Verrian guessed Arantxa knew already of the bombing of Guernica.

Derek Chelsey sat at his usual corner table, editorial secretary Beryl Theakston beside him in a velvet hat. Three male journalists made the rest of the party.

‘Haviland, wail-fellow-hell-met!’ Chelsey bawled over the chatter of diners. ‘You’ve blown it
with the langoustine tails, but we’re having beef stew.’

As predicted, Chelsey had been quickly reinstated as editor of the French language
News Monitor
. Lord Calford had very soon tired of Verrian’s sardonic style and put Chelsey back in his post.

‘Arantxa my angel, get this man a chair. Hand that over – no desk work over dinner.’ Chelsey held out his hand for Verrian’s newspaper, snorting
as he recognised the typeface. ‘Reading the opposition? Suppose you can be forgiven this once. We were talking about it, “The Tragedy of Guernica”. None of these bright sparks knew where Guernica was.’ Chelsey damned his colleagues with a broad wave. ‘They do now it’s bombed to buggery. Just when we needed you in Spain, hey, Haviland?’

‘It’s awful, this war.’ The braid shook on Beryl’s hat. ‘German
pilots machine-gunning people as they run away. Beastly, wicked – pitting bombers against little children.’

‘Not bombers,’ Verrian corrected, ‘fighter planes.’ According to
The Times
’ special correspondent who had witnessed the smoking aftermath, bombers had begun the attack on the Basque town, dropping high explosives on its centre. Marketplace, churches, even a hospital hit. Fighter planes
had come in after, flying low to pick off the terrified survivors with machine-gun fire. He added, ‘It’s not war, Beryl, it’s murder. They even bombed farmsteads outside the town.’

The Times
article had revived memories Verrian had thought were locked away forever. His mind kept filling with one persistent image: a vehicle opened like a tin can, the boil of amber as a fuel tank exploded. Being
with Alix had briefly quelled those memories – he needed her. There, he’d admitted it. Without her, the only pacifier left was alcohol.

‘Damn good copy though. Whose work?’ Chelsey filled a fresh glass with wine from a jug.

‘Steer, I’d say.’

‘Don’t like the
Monitor
getting scooped. The good stories are all in Spain.’

‘And plenty of them. It’s become brutally easy, opening hatches over towns.
It happened yesterday when we were having tea.’

‘Oh, don’t, Mr Haviland.’ Beryl shuddered.

Derek Chelsey charged everyone’s glass. ‘It’s war, Haviland,’
he slurred. ‘If you feel you know so much about it, why are you here?’

*

Before finally falling into bed, Verrian wrote a letter to a friend in London who worked for the War Office. Alix’s comments about the Comte de Charembourg’s war service
had piqued his curiosity. Had they really been comrades in arms, an aristocrat and her father? Even Alix seemed to have her doubts, and call it professional cynicism, but to Verrian it also felt unlikely. ‘Both men apparently served in the London Rifles,’ he wrote. ‘All I can say of John Gower, to make him easier to trace, is that he married a foreign-born woman and had one child, a girl.’ He sealed
the letter, wrote a Whitehall, London, address on it and threw it aside for posting next day.

Then he lay on his bed and pondered Chelsey’s parting shot. Why was he lingering in Paris and not sharing the suffering in Spain?

*

It was the end of an equally shattering day for Jean-Yves de Charembourg, who had just read about the fate of Guernica in his mistress’s bedroom on Avenue Montaigne. Hearing
a bathroom cabinet click shut, he put the newspaper aside, because politics was forbidden between himself and Hélène after dark. He’d acquitted himself poorly this evening, and though Hélène was philosophical, generous even, he felt diminished. The mind was a great rationaliser, while the body was an ungovernable
child, unable to camouflage its needs and failings. After bumping into Alix – had
it really been only that afternoon? It felt like a week – he’d emerged from Maison Javier emotionally skinned. She’d stood before him in her penitent’s smock, accusing him of betraying her.
You lied
. If only he and Danielle Lutzman had told her the truth from the outset! If Danielle had allowed him to speak of his love for Mathilda, and the circumstances of their first meeting, a lifetime of fiction
could have been avoided. But … to be fair, when Alix was small, lying had felt comfortable and right. Nobody had guessed she’d grow up with questions in her blood. She blamed him unfairly, but she could hardly turn on her grandmother. Old Danielle was all she had.

And his blackmailer had been in contact again. Ninette had taken the call that afternoon, writing down a garbled message. She’d brought
the note to him as he walked through the door of his home, bewilderment in her face. Another five hundred thousand francs was to be placed behind the column in Notre-Dame-d’Auteuil.

‘Papa?’ she’d asked. ‘Is it true you owe somebody all this money? He was talking about a murder in Kirchwiller … he said he knows who did it. He made me write down names of others who know.’ She showed him. ‘You and
somebody called Lutzman, oh, and poor Mme Haupmann. What could Grandmother’s old housekeeper know about anything? She’s ancient! He said Grandmother knew all about it too, which is ridiculous. And then he said something that made my skin creep
– “Somebody pretty will get hurt” if you don’t pay up … Not me, Papa?’