jar of rillettes this weekend, if the butcher has any in,’ Mireille whispered to Claire under cover of the chatter.
‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be out to dinner on Saturday evening,’ Claire replied, turning away from Mireille towards the light, the better to concentrate on stitching some intricate beadwork on to a chiffon bodice.
‘But we never seem to see each other, apart from at work these days,’ Mireille said sadly.
Claire shrugged. ‘I know. You always seem to be out on the evenings when I am not.’
‘Well, one of these days we’ll have an evening in together and you can tell me all about this new man of yours.’ It had recently become public knowledge in the atelier tha t Claire was ‘seeing someone’, after one of the girls in the flat had seen her slipping out one evening wearing a pair of silk stockings, which must have cost far more than any of them could afford on their wages. Under close questioning, Claire had admitted that they were a gift from an admirer. The same admirer she had been seeing since New Year’s Eve.
Mademoiselle Vannier clapped her hands to quell the murmuring of the girls. ‘That’s enough now, everyone. The excitement is over. Don’t expect you are all going to be invited downstairs so that clients can give you tips. That sort of thing only happens once in a blue moon. Quiet, please! Pay attention to your work and save your gossiping for your breaks.’
Mireille reached for the lining that she’d left on the table and began, once again, to tack it together with careful, quick stitches. As she sewed, she reflected that she’d had no idea that some of the clothes she was making were commissions for Monsieur Leroux. That had been a woman’s coat that the model was wearing, and it was a woman’s suit that he had pointed to on the mannequin. Did he have a wife? Or a mistress? Or both perhaps? How strange it was to be linked to so many people through the network and yet to know nothing about them, even though they each held one another’s lives in their hands.
It was only the following day, when she went to fetch some more silk from the dyer, that Mireille heard why last night’s operation had had to be cancelled. Madame Arnaud, from the safe house, had been picked up outside the baker’s shop and was found to have more than her ration of bread in her basket. That sort of black market activity was, fortunately, not enough to have her deported and she had been lucky to be released with just a severe reprimand. But then she had realised that their house was being watched, and had managed to get a message through to Monsieur Leroux to cancel the previous evening’s assignment. The Arnauds would need to lie low until they were no longer under suspicion. So activities would be suspended for a while, the dyer explained, until they worked out which other houses could be used to hide the network’s cargo. He would let her know when it was safe to begin again.
Claire had spent her Saturday morning in the usual way, standing in queues outside shops in the hope of picking up that week’s food rations. Two women, who’d been gossiping just ahead of her when she’d joined the line, had turned and given her a scornful glance, taking in her silk scarf and fine stockings. She’d met their look with defiance, holding her head high: so what if she had a German boyfriend who loved to pamper her? Just because she wasn’t a scrawny old bird with varicose veins like them was no reason for her to deserve the filthy looks that they shot at her as the queue shuffled forwards, inch by inch.
Walking home, as she turned into the Rue Cardinale, she swung her shopping bag, planning the bean stew that she would make for lunch, flavoured with a precious morsel of pork belly that she’d managed to find at the butcher’s.
And then she noticed the young man sitting in the doorway of Delavigne Couture who scrambled to his feet when he caught sight of her. She didn’t recognise her brother at first. When she’d last seen him, his hair had been long and unkempt and he’d been wearing his thick fisherman’s jersey, the wool heavy with a mixture of engine grime and fish oil. He looked different – older, somehow, but ill-at-ease and surprisingly vulnerable in a workman’s cotton