Chapter 35

The sun was starting to set on what had been a rather long and emotional day for Fen. From finding Gervais dead this morning to spending the afternoon clearing out Rose’s clothes, well, it had left Fen far from fancying hitting the cold streets to go and meet up with Magda, who had telephoned just after James had left and asked Fen if she could make the time to see her.

Fen could hear the scream of a hungry or tired baby in the background, which she knew wasn’t Magda’s, plus shouts and general hollering, so Fen had assumed she was making the call from a municipal box in the hallway of her building. Although Fen’s feet still ached from squeezing them into Rose’s velvet high heels last night and she was desperate for a bath and bed, she had agreed. However hard done by Fen was feeling today, she had to remind herself that Magda and Joseph’s plight was far worse. At least if she went to see Magda tonight, she could take the bundle of clothes she’d set aside for her too; they might not be Atelier Lelong scarves or haute couture, but sometimes just something new was a treat.

Before heading out, Fen decided to run a bath, and enjoyed filling the deep steel tub up more than a few inches, which had always been the approved etiquette during the war. She decided to throw in some of Rose’s lavender-scented bath salts too – it wasn’t as if Henri was going to use them – and just before she undressed, she remembered the letter from Kitty that she’d picked up from the mailbox this morning. She fetched it from her coat pocket and eagerly opened the envelope before slipping into the hot bath.

Mrs B’s kitchen table, Midhurst,

Tiresome West Sussex,

October 1945

Darling Fen!

We are sitting here round the kitchen table with mugs of tea in our hands puzzling over your clues. Dilly got there first on the TRAIN one, swot, but I got PAINT, though really that was too easy.

I can’t believe you got to go to a real fashion house – how simply divine! I’m dying to hear more – please come home soon…and if some of those scarves accidentally fall into your luggage, promise I won’t tell!

We tuned into the wireless the other day and you’ll never guess what we heard? Josephine Baker singing just like you wrote about. I closed my eyes and imagined I was in a dark, smoky nightclub with you, wearing red lipstick and drinking hard liquor – then Mrs B stoked the fire (it’s perishingly cold here, you know) and the parlour was full of smoke, so in that way at least I didn’t have to imagine too hard. I’m sure you were with much more glamorous people than I was though: Mrs B has taken to wearing three cardigans and two pairs of thick stockings – Parisian fashion this is not!

Fen laughed at Kitty’s letter and could well imagine the scene in the old farmhouse. Kitty carried on with some local news and signed off.

Fen read the whole letter through again and then let it drop to the dry floor beside the bath as the steam filled her nose and the warm water soothed her tired muscles. She was just about to doze off when the buzz of the doorbell, and Tipper’s accompanying barking, roused her.

Fen listened as Simone answered the door and realised it was only James, returning from a brief freshen-up at his hotel to take Simone out. She got more of a shock when Simone breezily stepped into the bathroom, much to Fen’s embarrassment, to say a quick goodbye.

‘Oh, no need to cover up,’ Simone had said, sitting on the edge of the bath, ‘it’s not like I don’t see naked models all the time in the fitting room at Lelong.’

‘Ah, yes, well…’ Fen sat up a bit in the bath and grabbed a pink flannel to cover her slightly. ‘Anyway, have a lovely time tonight. Where are you two off to?’

Simone clapped her hands together once and held them in the prayer position, closing her eyes with excitement and anticipation as she replied, ‘The Ritz! A show and The Ritz! I’ve never been and I hear it’s where Madame Coco Chanel lived during the occupation, and I am obsessed by her designs.’

‘Gosh, lucky you.’ Fen hated to admit that she was rather jealous.

‘I think tonight could be the night,’ Simone said, winking conspiratorially and getting up from the edge of the bath to look in the mirror above the basin. It was steamed up, so she wiped her hand across it and Fen watched as she pouted her rouged lips into it.

‘For…?’

‘For a proposal! I mean, I don’t see the point in waiting until we are old, well, until I am old – he is already very old.’

‘He’s only…well, I don’t know how old James is actually.’

‘Thirty-six apparently. Ancient.’

Fen, who was twenty-eight, wondered if she was regarded as ‘ancient’, too. Simone’s next statement cleared that up though.

‘You should find someone to take you out, you know? You’re not getting any younger and I know you’re sad about Arthur, but life goes on.’ Simone pouted again and dabbed a finger to the corner of her mouth. ‘Got to fly now, lover boy is waiting!’ She winked and blew a kiss to Fen, then left in a flounce of skirts and confidence and Fen was alone once more, thinking about Arthur as the water around her started to cool.

A little while later and Fen had bucked herself up and dressed ready for heading out into the chilly evening. Simone had looked stunning in a dress that must have come straight from the atelier, while Fen settled for her woollen trousers and trench coat. As much as she’d loved dressing up for the Louvre last night, and would adore to be wined and dined at The Ritz too, she was relieved to be slipping into her sensible lace-up shoes for the walk over to the Marais tonight. As a nod to her and Magda’s trip to the atelier, though, and just to jazz things up a little, Fen fixed the Lelong scarf from Simone around her neck and tied it in a jaunty bow.

She set her hair in victory rolls and carefully pinned a rather natty red beret she had found in Rose’s cupboard to her head. ‘Lipstick…’ she mumbled to herself as she delved around in her handbag looking for her favourite Revlon shade.

Once pouted and puckered, she looked in the hallway mirror before she left the apartment. She may not have been dressed to the nines, but she looked relatively Parisienne and that made her smile. The Ritz though…lucky Simone. Perhaps James had decided to become a lion tamer after all.

Fen shook her head and brought herself back to the present. ‘You’re lucky to be alive and in the city you love, old girl,’ she said to herself. Being envious over something as trifling as going to The Ritz really wasn’t becoming.

With a deep breath, she picked up the clothes she’d put aside for Magda, opened the apartment door and headed out, determined not to let some petty jealousy ruin her evening.

As she walked out of the building and onto the street, the cool air of the autumnal night embraced Fen and she shivered. But the slight chill in the air only made her walk that little bit faster and soon enough she was crossing the river and heading north towards the Marais. By the time she was past the Louvre and almost at the gardens and arcades of the Palais Royale, she was starting to tire. The walk across the city was longer than she had remembered and she really should have tried to catch a bus.

Her pace slowed and she was about to pause to reassess the whole sanity of this evening’s adventure when a familiar face caught her eye. It was Henri Renaud, and like her he was wrapped up in a coat and hat. She was about to wave at him when she noticed he was carrying a large package, different to hers, a painting perhaps? It was tied up tightly with brown paper and string but Fen could see it was rectangular and quite slim. A convenient break in the old palace’s colonnades shielded her as she saw him cross towards the other side of the road.

‘Why are you carrying paintings around in the dark?’ Fen whispered to herself, thinking of those lists of stolen artworks that never made it to Germany. She watched as he continued south towards the Louvre and the river.

Fen knew that following him would take her in completely the wrong direction and she’d be letting poor Magda down awfully.

‘But,’ she whispered to herself as she crossed the road too, to follow Henri, ‘this might just be the three down I’ve been looking for.’

Fen followed Henri until they reached the Place du Carrousel, one of the road junctions outside the Louvre. She chided herself, What could be less suspicious than an art dealer, nay, a curator, carrying artwork back to his place of work?

She was about to hang back just in case she was spotted, as she hadn’t come up with an excuse at all about why she might be in the neighbourhood. But then Henri didn’t take any of the paths that led across the square to the great art gallery and instead he carried on walking south, crossing the river at the wide and cobbled Pont Carrousel.

A light drizzle started to fall and Fen wiped the moisture off her face as she followed on behind him, glad that she knew these streets fairly well, not just from the last few days of holidaying here, but from her childhood too. Her brother had once threatened to throw her over this bridge when she’d naughtily flicked one of his toy soldiers into the Seine. Her claims that the little fellow wanted to be a sub-mariner hadn’t cut the mustard and sibling relations had hit rather a low point.

Fen wished that she could stop and dwell on these sorts of childish reminiscences, but she felt pulled, almost magnetically, to keep following Henri. The drizzle was getting heavier and Fen could feel the splash of water off the pavement chill her ankles and calves. If she had been wearing Nylons, she’d be cursing the state they’d be getting into, but as it was, it was her woollen trousers that were taking a soaking from the now rather damp pavements.

Where are you heading to?she wondered as Henri took a sudden left-hand turn off the Quai Voltaire away from the river. She kept back a pace or two as Henri slowed. They were passing more art galleries, much like his and the ones on the Rue des Beaux-Arts where Rose’s apartment was. In actual fact, with all her criss-crossing of the river tonight, she was now only a few streets away from the école des Beaux-Arts and her temporary home in Paris.

Henri veered left into another narrow road, but by the time Fen had trotted along the pavement for the last few yards before the turning, and then subtly poked her head around the corner, he was gone. There was no sign of him at all. Instead, she found herself staring at the entrance to the elegant Hotel de Lille. It was a double-fronted building, with a large door in between windows; one on the left-hand side and two to the right. Fen sheltered under one of the canopies out front as the rain had become persistently heavier.

The Hotel de Lille…why did its name ring a bell?Fen puzzled it over, knowing that she’d heard talk of it recently, while also trying to peer into one of the windows to see if it was where Henri had ended up.

The inside of the window had started to mist up, and Fen could barely make out the internal layout of the reception area of the hotel. She peered closer and caught movement inside and wondered if it might be Henri and if this was her chance to see what he was up to with the painting-shaped parcel. She took a deep breath and decided to go for it – she’d come this far and there was no point standing out in the rain wondering who or what was going on inside. If Henri caught her following him she’d just have to think on her feet.

Fen pushed the hotel’s door open and cringed slightly as the bell above it gave a little tinkle, like entering a boutique. She quickly took in the scene. There was a desk in front of her and to the left, with a few sofas in front of it and a well-dressed receptionist sitting behind it, and disappearing up the staircase behind the desk, Fen caught sight of the tail of Henri’s overcoat.

‘Dash it all.’ Fen stood, dripping wet. She pulled off her beret and then looked apologetically at the receptionist as water dripped off it, and the parcel of clothes for Magda, onto the patterned tiles of the vestibule.

Fen turned to leave, she couldn’t very well follow Henri up the stairs without a very good reason to give both him and the receptionist, and was just about to pull the beret firmly back onto her very damp and frizzy curls when she saw two people she could have sworn should be the other side of Paris.

James and Simone were sitting on a velvet sofa in the bar area of the hotel, half shielded from view by a higher bar table and the stools around it. Simone’s cheek was leaning into one of James’s hands as he stroked her hair with the other.

Fen flushed and gave an involuntary gasp, which had the unfortunate effect of alerting James to her presence.

He looked up from where he was about to kiss Simone and then narrowed his eyes and withdrew from her. ‘Fen?’

‘Oh gosh, so terribly sorry. Had no idea, can’t think what I’m doing here now. Must dash. Cheerio, carry on, etcetera!’ Fen could feel the blush in her cheeks reddening as she wedged the hat down onto her head. She was out of the door and running through the rain before you could say ‘caught in the act’ and once again thanked her former self for knowing the route back to the Rue des Beaux-Arts so she could at least get home and dry quickly, if not ever shake off the embarrassment of catching James and Simone smooching in the bar of what must have been – she remembered why she knew it now – his hotel.