Chapter 5

‘Well, that just sounds incredible,’ Fen was listening to Simone talk about her work in the fashion atelier. She had slept all morning and most of the afternoon, and had finally roused herself as she’d heard Simone return home from work. Rose had been good enough to heat up the soup and fetch out the paté from the refrigerator and the three of them had eaten together.

Now the two younger women were washing up the dishes in the kitchen and Fen was running out of superlatives in reply to Simone’s stories. Hearing about the swathes of fabric in the cutting room had been ‘super’, the idea of modelling clothes for the wealthy aristocrats who came to purchase them was ‘simply splendid’ and Fen had even blurted out a ‘by Jove’ when Simone had told her about the possibilities of travelling abroad for photo shoots.

‘I swear, it is the most fun a girl can have, no?’ Simone asked rhetorically, describing a fashion shoot in which she had modelled recently.

‘A beautiful girl like you maybe,’ Fen blushed a bit. Her old land girl friends back at the farmhouse in Sussex would have died to be able to talk to a real-life model and hear about her day from the cutting room to the catwalk. Fen made a mental note to write to Kitty and Dilys and tell them all about this glamorous creature.

‘Fenella…’ Simone laid a slightly soap-sudded hand on Fen’s arm. ‘It is all a mask, see…’ She pouted her lips and raised her eyebrows and mimicked putting on lipstick, rouge and mascara.

Fen laughed at her, but didn’t disagree. Simone may be stunning, but Fen wondered if she was actually one of those quite plain girls underneath, who just knew exactly how to accentuate their best features. She took another sopping plate from Simone and started to dry it.

‘I can show you some tips. You have very dark eyelashes, which I would kill for…’ Simone winked at her and Fen smiled, ‘…and such good skin, if maybe a little weather-worn.’

Fen put down the plate she had dried and raised her hand to touch her cheek. She felt like she was on a slide under one of Madame Curie’s microscopes and wasn’t sure she entirely liked the scrutiny she was getting from Simone, who now pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes to fully gauge Fen’s pores and wrinkles.

‘A few too many days in the fields, perhaps,’ Fen agreed and turned her face back to the drying rack, hoping Simone would stop analysing her. At twenty-eight she wasn’t exactly old, and she did rather pride herself on her appearance, albeit not in an overly vain way. She did wonder, though, if her nightly ritual of just putting on Pond’s cold cream and hoping for the best would pass muster here in Paris among the ultra-chic urbanites.

Luckily, Simone turned back to the washing-up bowl and changed the subject. ‘Oh it was terrible though, you know, last week. We were posing on the steps of Montmartre modelling a new look, much fuller skirts, like this one,’ she swayed her hips at the kitchen sink to indicate the folds in the skirt, ‘and women – not men, mind you – women started shouting at us! Can you believe it? Every name under the sun!’ Her soft brown eyes looked imploringly at Fen, and Fen found herself just nodding along while she dried up one of the soup bowls. ‘It is a world gone mad. And you know why? Because apparently we flaunt the fabric. And it’s not de rigueur, you know, it’s not done. But it’s progress, it’s victory, that’s what we’re celebrating. Victory over oppression, victory over poverty.’

‘And victory over the Germans?’

Simone shrugged. ‘Yes of course, and that too. After all, fashionable people suffered like everyone else. Models and designers were going missing all the time. Like Catherine, my friend, she is only just back from Ravensbrück, you know, and the things she tells me, ooh la la.’

‘Ravensbrück…’ Fen knew of the concentration camp since its name had been splashed on the front of the newspapers back home when it was liberated by the Soviets in April.

‘A camp.’ Simone looked imploringly at Fen. ‘A death camp.’

‘Oh my word.’ Since news of the death camps had filtered through to the allied press, Fen had wondered what it must have been like to live in fear of being plucked out of your home, or from the street, and condemned to that terrible fate. She wasn’t so na?ve as to not realise that the grainy pictures she’d seen in the newspapers must have shown only a glimpse of what those ghastly places had been like. And to now hear of someone who had survived…Fen couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have survived such terror. ‘Is she quite well now? She must be traumatised after being held there.’

Simone fell silent for a moment, then said, ‘She is well. But she said God never showed his face inside the camp. She was on one of the last prisoner convoys out of Paris to that hateful place, but that only meant that the camp had had time to become a complete cesspool.’

‘It’s so hard to imagine.’ Fen shook her head, unable to visualise the horrors of a death camp.

‘We should count our blessings that imagination is all we need. Catherine still wakes in the night, she tells me, and screams out loud; she is not freed from the camp, not fully, not while she is still there in her dreams.’ Simone jabbed a slender finger against her temple.

Fen shivered.

Simone turned back to the sink and carried on. ‘But she survived, heaven save us, and she’s back at the fashion house now, though she’s not so quick to laugh or make a joke as she used to be. Her brother Christian is our chief designer. He tried all he could during the last months of the war to help his sister – we had the wives of Nazi officers shopping in our atelier, you see – and he asked all of them for help, but he couldn’t secure her release any earlier. It’s all very close to home, you know?’

Fen nodded, aware of how close to home losing someone really was. She almost couldn’t bring herself to ask another question, but it was out of her mouth before she had time to stop herself. ‘Why was she taken?’

Simone stopped washing for a moment and turned to Fen. ‘Resistance,’ she whispered. ‘As if they ever needed a reason. She was caught carrying a pistol by the Gestapo. She resisted their torture, so they sent her to what would certainly have been her death, if the Allies hadn’t marched in just in time.’

‘Poor, poor thing.’ Fen shook her head, her heart full of pity for Simone’s friend.

‘She could have betrayed us all, but she didn’t.’ Simone looked thoughtful.

‘Us all?’ Fen looked up at Simone, who slowly turned to face her. ‘Were you…?’

‘Oh yes…’ Simone said and Fen thought for the first time how much older her make-up and fine clothes made her look. She must only be in her early twenties, but she suddenly looked world-worn, the weight of experience heavy on her powdered brow. After a pause, she added, ‘I was in the Resistance, too.’