many of the other refugees who’d been mown down on the road that day as they’d fled Paris.
She tried to stem the flow of her thoughts and focus on her work, but even with the windows pushed open as wide as they would go, she had to pause frequently to wipe her hands and brow so that the drops of sweat didn’t stain her work. Silk was the worst for showing water marks, but the new artificial fabrics that they often worked with these days, now that silk was so scarce, were almost as bad.
As the afternoon wore on, Mireille felt the heat wrap itself around her like a heavy cloak that she couldn’t shrug off. She glanced around. Many of the other girls seated at the table looked as if they were struggling to stay awake, exhausted by hunger and hard work and the ever-present fear of the enemy’s iron grip on the city in which they lived. A weariness had crept into Mireille’s bones, sapping her body and her mind of their characteristic energy. This was another reality of the war, she realised – the quietly toxic corrosion of the spirit. The garments that the girls worked on in the atelier seemed grotesque, suddenly, rather than the beautiful creations that she had taken such a pride in before. Circumstance had transformed them into tastelessly ostentatious declarations of wealth in this time of hardship and deprivation. The women who visited the salon these days were the frumpy ‘grey mice’ or the hard-faced wives and mistresses of Nazi officials, or the greedy, self-obsessed ‘queens of the black market’, as the models called them behind their backs. All of them sought to cover the ugliness of reality with a fine gown or an elegant coat. When had it happened, wondered Mireille as she let out the waistband of a satin evening skirt, the tipping point when French fashion had changed from being perceived as something the country could take pride in to something grotesque and vulgar, tainted with shame?
At last, Mademoiselle Vannier told the seamstresses to begin clearing away, signalling the end of another working day. The thought of sitting upstairs in the cramped apartment, which would be even stuffier than the sewing room up there under the roof of dark slates which had been baked by the sun all day, did nothing to lift Mireille’s spirits. So instead, she headed out into the streets and made for the river. With no real sense of where she was going, she crossed the Pont Neuf on to the Île de la Cité in the middle of the stream, turning away from the busy hub around Notre-Dame and made her way towards the downstream end of the island. And then she realised what it was that had drawn her here. Unseen by the stream of homeward-bound workers and the truckloads of soldiers that sped past, intent on other prey, she slipped into the narrow stone stairway which led down to a small patch of trees and grass below. Apart from a boatman who was busy making fast his boat for the night, that end of the island was deserted. As if beckoned by the graceful arms of its branches, Mireille walked to the very end point where a willow tree trailed its green fingers in the waters of the Seine. She’d noticed it there, from afar, as part of the scenery along the river, but only now did she seek refuge beneath it. Some instinct drew her to it, an instinct which the weight of her despair couldn’t crush.
Just as she would have done if she’d been at home with her family, Mireille settled herself under the canopy of willow leaves, leaning her back against the trunk. She kicked off her shoes and rested her weary head against the rough bark, letting the tree’s bulk take her sadness and cast it out on to the ever-flowing river. She wished her family were there with her: her parents would reassure her and lend her some of their quiet strength; her brother, Yves, would make her laugh and help her forget her cares for a while; and her sister, Eliane, would listen and nod and understand so that Mireille wouldn’t feel all alone in the world. Blanche – Esther’s baby – would gurgle and busy herself making mud-pies in the earth that sustained the tree, and she would chuckle as she was hugged and loved by the family that had taken her in. Mireille’s longing