high. Even Florence, who gives the impression of always being cool, calm and collected, has been seen to hurry through the office. The South of France launch is scheduled for the second week of July, immediately following the Haute Couture Autumn/Winter Shows which are always held in Paris then. Simone has told me that, with staff stretched so thin, there might be a bigger role for the two of us in one or other of these events.
And while the Haute Couture shows would be nice, we’re keeping our fingers crossed for Nice!
1943
It was another bitterly cold winter. On the increasingly infrequent days when there was coal for the boiler, the seamstresses huddled over the cast-iron radiators during their breaks, attempting to warm cracked, frost-nipped fingers that were reddened and stung with angry chilblains. Mireille wore a pair of fingerless gloves that her mother had sent, knitted from an old jersey of her brother’s. She’d sent pairs for Claire and Vivi too at Christmas time. Once again, the girls wore as many layers of clothing as they could fit under their white coats, padding their gaunt, bony bodies just as the snow padded the angular rooflines and gables of the buildings in the streets around the Rue Cardinale.
Whenever they could afford it, the three friends would go and sit in one of the cafés on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in the evenings after work, where it was warmer than in the apartment above Delavigne Couture. They’d order a bowl of watery cabbage broth, crumbling pieces of hard bread into it, and try to make their supper last as long as possible so that they could delay the moment when they’d have to go home and climb between bedsheets that felt damp with cold. From a corner in one of the cafés, Radio Paris declaimed reports of the latest German victories. Back in the safety of the apartment, Vivi whispered that many of these were lies. The radio station was German-controlled. In reality, their armies were suffering more defeats than successes these days, stretched across many fronts. Mireille took heart from that, and didn’t ask Vivi how she knew these things. But, at the same time, she was aware that the three seamstresses were taking greater risks than ever in their Resistance work. A new French police force had been set up, known as the Milice, and they were intent on capturing as many members of the Resistance as possible. It had been announced that there would be a twenty-thousand-franc reward for denouncing a Résistant, a strongly tempting incentive for citizens who were starving and one that was already proving horribly effective.
It had taken a while to re-establish the lines of communication through the network after the losses of last year. Everything seemed a lot less stable these days. Safe houses were changed frequently and Mireille was instructed to use different routes for each ‘delivery’ she did, to try and avoid the possibility of detection by the Milice and the Gestapo.
She shivered as she stood beneath the clock at the Gare de l’Est, watching its hands tick slowly round to the half hour. The train she’d been instructed to meet was overdue, but there was nothing unusual in that. Timetables were less and less reliable and often trains were cancelled completely if the rolling stock or the line was needed by the German forces for other purposes. It was another bitterly cold day and her winter coat provided little protection against the easterly wind that cut through the worn fabric. She looked up as a train pulled in at one of the platforms, but it appeared to be an empty freight service as no passengers got off.
Then a shouted command made her jump. ‘Out of the way! Stand aside!’ She pressed herself against the brick column that supported the clock as two soldiers waved their rifles to clear a way though. Behind them, escorted by more armed soldiers, a line of female prisoners were marched across the station concourse and over to the platform where the empty train waited.
Some of the women were smartly dressed, others were dirty and dishevelled; some of them wept, while other faces were blank with shock. But Mireille could smell the fear on all of them as they passed close to where she stood – a mixture of sweat and urine and breath that was stale with dread.
One woman reached out to Mireille and thrust a folded scrap of paper into her hand as she was hurried past.