hands had ever carefully pieced together offcuts of midnight blue crêpe de Chine with stitches so tiny they couldn’t be seen, and held delicate silver beads in place as she sewed them around the neckline, creating her own constellation of tiny stars in a night sky.
She was still weak from the fever that had overwhelmed her the day after she’d watched Vivi’s body being laid in a hastily dug mass grave, alongside so many others. Even though it was April, the grip of winter had seemed loath to leave Dachau that day and it had snowed, lining the grave with ermine and drawing a soft, white shroud over the piles of corpses that lay stacked beside the muddy trench.
Typhus had swept through the camp and even after its liberation the few thousand remaining prisoners who had been too sick or weak to set off on the death march to the mountains with their fellow inmates, continued to die in their hundreds, in spite of the ministrations of the international Red Cross and the US army doctors. Claire was one of the lucky ones. When the fever had seized her in its brutal grip, she’d been treated promptly and had been well cared for in the makeshift hospital.
And yet, as her strength slowly began to trickle back into her veins, she wished she had died with Vivi. Instead of a liberation, it felt like a lifetime’s sentence: she would live with the knowledge of having been unable to save her friend. And she knew that her life would be filled, every day, with the guilt. It was her fault Vivi had been captured; Vivi had looked after her and protected her, but she hadn’t been able to do the same. She hadn’t even been there when Vivi had taken her last breath.
She had wanted to lie down beside Vivi’s body in the snow-lined grave and sleep for ever.
A nurse, taking the pulse of a patient in the bed opposite, noticed that Claire was awake. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘let me help you sit up a little.’ She plumped the pillow and said, ‘Drink this.’ Claire obeyed, too weak to protest even though the tonic tasted bitter and made her want to retch.
She drifted in and out of sleep and each time she woke she opened her eyes expecting to see Vivi’s smile, dreaming that she would hear her whisper that Claire wasn’t alone, that they were together, that everything would be alright. But she saw only the clean, white sheets that covered the broken husk of her body and an empty chair next to her hospital bed, and the only voices she heard were those of the nurses as they went about their duties. And she would drift off to sleep again, thinking – hoping – that perhaps this time she wouldn’t wake up . . .
The next time she awoke there was someone sitting in the chair. The figure bent towards her, and for a moment her breath caught in a gasp as she looked into Vivi’s clear, hazel eyes.
But then, as she focused, she realised it wasn’t Vivi.
It was a man, who reached for her hand and held on tight, as if he would never let it go.
Harriet
The office at Agence Guillemet is once again a frenetic hive of activity. The usually quiet hum becomes a crescendo of ever-more-frantic conversations as Paris Fashion Week approaches and the pressure mounts on the account managers to handle last-minute crises (models going AWOL, a shipment of shoes stuck in French customs, requests for radio and press interviews . . .). Simone and I are run off our feet, helping get everything ready and keeping the coffees coming. We work all through the weekend and barely stop to grab a sandwich for lunch on the Monday, the day before the official launch of Fashion Week. My year-long internship is up, but Florence has asked me to stay on for an extra few weeks to help with the busiest time of the year. I’ve put off thinking about what I’ll do next. I’d love to stay on in Paris, but I haven’t had a chance to talk to Florence about the possibility of a full-time position at Agence Guillemet. I know it must be a long shot, though, or she’d have suggested it before now. Maybe I’ll have to go back to London and try to get a job there. Every time I think about leaving Paris, I feel a wrench of sadness, as if