in the privacy of my own room in the flat upstairs.
I sort the rest of the mail quickly and then take it through to the office to hand it out. One of the account managers is in with Florence when I tap on her door. She beckons me in and both women smile at me. ‘Good news, Harriet,’ Florence says. ‘That press release you sent out? We’ve had a response from London. The buyer at Harvey Nichols is interested in seeing more of the range. It’s quite a coup.’
The account manager asks me to help draft the reply and I am kept busy for the rest of the day translating the technicalities of shoe design and construction from French into English.
At last the office closes and I run up the stairs to my attic room, clutching the white envelope. On my mother’s side of the family, both my grandfather and grandmother had died before I was born. My hands are trembling a little. Because apart from the photo of Claire with Mireille and Vivienne, this is the first tangible link I have had to that generation of my family.
I’m not at all sure I’m going to like what I find when I open the envelope. I’ve come to think that Claire’s relationship with Ernst was pretty shameful. And might there even be a chance that I am of Nazi descent? Is that legacy of shame and guilt part of my genetic make-up? My hands tremble with impatience – and just a frisson of anxiety – as I tear open the envelope.
The first certificate I read is dated, in a flowing copperplate hand, the 1st of September 1946, and is for the marriage of Claire Meynardier, born in Port Meilhon, Brittany on the 18th of May 1920 to Laurence Ernest Redman, born in Hertfordshire, England on the 24th of June, 1916. The name Ernest stops me in my tracks for a moment. Could this be ‘Ernst’? Did they move to England to make a new start after the war? But the fact that he was born in the Home Counties makes that extremely unlikely. So maybe I can assume that I’m not descended from a Nazi soldier after all. The thought allows a weight to slip from my shoulders, one less burden to have to carry through life.
I put the sheet of paper to one side and read the next one, the certificate of death for Claire Redman. It is dated 6 November 1989 and the cause of death is given as heart failure. So Claire was sixty-nine years old when she died, leaving her daughter, Felicity, alone in the world at the age of twenty-nine. How I wish she’d lived longer. She might have been able to change the course that my mother’s life took. She might have been less of an enigma. And if she’d still been around she might have been able to help me, giving me a sense of who I really am.
How I wish I’d known my grandmother Claire.
March 1941
‘Mireille, you are wanted in the salon.’ Mademoiselle Vannier’s lips were so pursed with disapproval that the creases around them were drawn into pleats as tight as smocking. It was virtually unheard of for seamstresses to be summoned downstairs into the territory of the vendeuses and their clients.
Mireille was conscious of the glances of the other girls seated around the table who looked up from their work and watched in silence as she carefully tucked her needle into the fabric of the lining she was tacking together to mark her place, then stood up and pushed in her chair.
A feeling of dread dragged at the pit of her stomach as she descended the stairs. Was she in trouble over some slip-up in her sewing? She was often distracted nowadays, thinking about her next assignment for the network, and constantly exhausted by the strain of keeping her activities a secret from the other girls. Perhaps she was being summoned for a scolding.
She tried not to imagine the even worse possibility, that she had been denounced by someone and that the salon might be full of Nazis come to take her for questioning.
She hesitated at the door to the salon, then tugged her white coat straight and held her head high as she knocked and entered.
To her surprise, the sales woman who was renowned for dealing with Monsieur Delavigne’s wealthiest clients came towards her, smiling broadly. Behind her, an assistant hovered with her tape measure alongside one of the