gesturing towards a tray. ‘We will sit in the garden.’
She takes my arm and I help her outside. To one side there’s a neat bed of vegetables, the well-worked soil as dark as chocolate, nourishing a rich treasure trove of ruby tomatoes, emerald green courgettes and the amethyst and silver thistle-like heads of artichokes. Pea plants scramble up a bamboo wigwam, the last of the summer stems clinging on with their thread-like fingers. We make our way to the shade of a lime tree whose leaves are just beginning to be edged with gold, and sit down on a bench beside a little tin table.
Mireille reaches for a thick, leather-bound photo album which sits on the table, moving it to make space for Simone to set down the tea tray. ‘As you can see I like a proper pot of tea, in the English style.’ Mireille smiles. ‘I had an English neighbour who taught me to appreciate such things.’ She gestures towards the sprawling stone house that we passed on our way here, where Simone’s cousins live, just visible beyond the oak trees that surround it. ‘My friend is gone now, alas. But her niece is married to my second-youngest son and they live in the house these days, so happily I can still visit for tea sometimes. It’s funny, isn’t it, how the strands of our lives interweave themselves in unexpected ways?’ She tilts her head to one side, her bright eyes shooting me another piercing glance.
‘Fate is a strangely complicated thing, is it not?’ she continues. ‘But I have lived so long now that very little surprises me. When Simone told me that Claire’s granddaughter was sharing the apartment with her in the Rue Cardinale, I had a premonition that you would come here one day. Although I had no idea that you would do so having saved my granddaughter’s life. And so we come full circle, n’est-ce pas? If I hadn’t gone to save Claire that night when Billancourt was bombed, you would not have been there to save my Simone all these years later. So it seems that fate still has a few surprises up its sleeve, even for someone of my advanced age. Which is just as it should be.’ She chuckles and pats my hand.
‘Pour the tea for us, Simone. And I will show Harriet the pictures of her beautiful grandmother.’
She heaves the album on to her lap and begins to turn the pages until she comes to the pictures she’s looking for. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m looking at. There’s a bride, in a beautiful dress whose full skirt emphasises her tiny waist. Her dark curls are tied back loosely and woven with starry flowers. The lines of the dress are breathtaking. It’s a perfect example of Dior’s New Look, the style that made him world-famous in the post-war years.
And then I look at the figure standing next to the bride: her maid of honour. Her white-blonde hair is caught up in a smooth chignon and she holds a posy of pale flowers which match the bride’s more lavish bouquet. There’s something fragile about her, something almost other-worldly. But it’s her dress that makes me gasp. It’s midnight blue, cut on the bias, draping softly over the thin lines of the young woman’s body. And just visible where the light catches them, I can make out a scattering of tiny silver beads along the neckline which sits beneath the sharp wings of her collarbones.
‘Wasn’t she beautiful?’ Mireille turns the page, showing me more photographs from her wedding day. ‘Your grandmother Claire . . . and that’s Larry, your grandfather, of course. A very handsome couple they made. Do you recognise the dress, Harriet?’
I nod, unable to speak, my eyes shining with tears of joy and sadness. ‘It’s the one she made,’ I whisper at last. ‘The one pieced together from scraps.’
‘When I moved out of the apartment in the Rue Cardinale, I found the dress in Claire’s wardrobe. I packed it up and brought it home with me. I told her I had it but when she came for my wedding she didn’t want to look at it at first, wanted to tear it to pieces and throw it away. She said it was a reminder of her vanity and naivety, and she’d prefer to forget. But I told her she was wrong to think that way. That it was a triumph. A thing of beauty that she’d created