The Dress Thief

by Natalie Meg Evans

Genres: Historical Fiction; Historical Romance; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

Alix Gower has a dream: to join Coco Chanel. But Alix also has a secret: she supports her family by stealing designs to create bootlegs for the foreign market. When Alix is given the chance to finally realise her dream - but at the price of copying the Sp

Release date: June 25, 2015

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 494

Sample

The double crash that echoed through the timber-framed house killed one man and damned another. The first blow was metal against skull. The second was the crack of the victim’s head against the corner of a stove.

Afterwards all was still but for whirling motes of dust and the sputtering of an oil lamp low on fuel. The young man dropped the iron bar he held. He wanted the victim at his feet to move, to make a sound, but Alfred Lutzman’s eyes were frozen in their last emotion. The portrait on the easel would never be finished.

He wanted to get out. Why should he pay – perhaps with his life – for the madness of a moment? A muffled cry stopped him at the door. The artist’s wife stood, immobile, beneath a skylight blanketed with snow. She seemed unaware of the blood trickling from her left temple, but aware of his desire to leave. She said something in Yiddish, her voice rising. He cut her off in the crisp German that was their common language. ‘Frau Lutzman, listen to me. This tragedy –’ he glanced at the body and nausea passed through him – ‘was a terrible accident.’

She whispered, ‘No accident. We must go to the police.’

‘Absolutely not.’ He spoke harshly, copying his late father’s way of dealing with inferiors. ‘They’d send us to trial. I wouldn’t be afraid, but could you stand up to questioning? D’you know the penalty for murder? The guillotine. Then what would become of your child? So … we must think of something else. A story that removes suspicion from us both. I will deny I was here.’

‘And throw me to the wolves?’

‘We’ll say your husband was shut away up here, finishing a painting. Which is true. You were … You were in your kitchen cooking dinner, with the door closed. You saw nobody, heard nobody. You will not mention my name, ever.’

Danielle Lutzman stared at him, repeating his words soundlessly. In the winter light, she looked younger than he’d originally thought, lithe under her ragged dress, her glossy black hair escaping from her headscarf. Was there understanding as well as desperation in her eyes? It seemed an age before she nodded. ‘I heard nobody, saw nothing.’

‘Keep to that, Frau Lutzman, and I will do the rest. Never tell the truth to a living soul. You swear?’

She nodded once and he saw his chance to leave. The smell of death and lamp oil was growing unbearable. But it seemed he’d underestimated his own shock – he could not take the first step. Then, from below, came the clash of a door. Their eyes locked in fear.

A voice piped – ‘Mama! I’m home.’

Danielle Lutzman gasped, ‘It’s Mathilda. It’s my daughter. Don’t let her come up! She must not see – I beg you, stop her!’

He could not move.

‘Mama, Papa, where are you?’ Wooden soles clumped upstairs. ‘I’m early. They closed school because of the snow. Papa, I’ve brought a drawing I did for you.’

‘Stop her!’ Danielle pleaded.

He found his will to move too late. The door burst open and a small figure, all hair ribbons and bouncing plaits, burst into the studio.

Mathilda’s daughter emerged from the Continental Telephone Exchange wearing an ivy-green suit, the severity of which contrasted with her youth.

A tilted trilby and shoes of black glacé leather suggested a young lady of means, as did silk stockings accentuating slim calves and ankles. She carried a black handbag and wore matching gloves. As she went down Rue du Louvre at a fast clip, admiring looks met her – and more than one smile of invitation.

Alix Gower forced herself not to react. Eighteen months in this city had taught her that ‘style never smiles back’. Ice-cool Parisiennes take admiration as their due. She was learning how to emulate such women, to avoid the gaffes that reveal too much of a person’s roots. Hers were in London, where she’d lived for the first eighteen years of her life.

Her father had been a Londoner too, a working-class man who’d survived a war only to lose to tuberculosis. Her mother had been Alsatian Jewish. Fought over for centuries by France and Germany, Alsace bred fatalistic people. It bred refugees. Though she’d never known her mother, Alix had inherited the fugitive’s cunning. Right now, she was escaping a shift at the telephone-company switchboard. She was on an errand that could get her arrested, but was doing it with the panache of a debutante on her way to the Ritz bar.

On Rue St-Honoré, her pace slowed. She loved the exclusive 1st arrondissement and though it was already quarter to five and she had a distance to go, she stared into every window she passed. It wasn’t just the clothes that drew her. She loved the hotel fronts with their uniformed doormen, the trees in pots, the flower displays. The patisseries with their glistening platters. She’d arrived in Paris eighteen months ago and it had set her senses ablaze.

There was one shop on St-Honoré she never could resist. Zollinger’s was a heaven of handmade chocolates, pyramids of them topped with gold leaf and crystallised flowers. Her favourites were the violet creams, which had been her mother’s favourite and that alone made them desirable.

Everything Alix knew of her mother had come second-hand and she hoarded details, not really caring if they were true or not. She knew that Mathilda had settled in London aged nine and left school at fourteen to work in a department store, because she had her mother’s school attendance and leaving certificates. And she knew Mathilda had served as a nurse during the war. There was a photograph and a Nurses’ Catechism to prove it. She believed Mathilda had possessed an eighteen-inch waist, because she’d inherited a fragile petticoat whose drawstring was knotted in that impossible circumference. The notes and faded flower labels Alix’s grandmother kept in a box proved that dozens of people had attended Mathilda’s funeral in 1916. And she had her parents’ wedding photograph, a snapshot of frozen hope. The rest Alix invented. Her grandmother, who might have put flesh on the bones of the story, chose not to.

Counting the francs in her purse, Alix went into Zollinger’s, coming out an absurdly long time later with a tiny package. She checked her watch. Five past five. St-Honoré was long and she had to get to the yet more exclusive Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré. An object of rare worth was on display there, and if she didn’t hurry, it might be taken away. Or sold.

She’d paid dearly for this afternoon’s freedom. ‘Mémé – I mean, my grandmother – has sprained her ankle and has to go to the doctor’s,’ she’d told Mademoiselle Boussac, her supervisor. ‘May I have leave of absence to take her?’ Behind her back, tense fingers betrayed the lie but the supervisor saw only a modest, dark-haired girl with her eyes cast down. A girl who seemed younger than her twenty years, but who dressed like a model girl in a fashion house and did her work well. Who had a command of English the telephone company needed.

‘I will understand if you say no …’ Alix lifted sable eyes that must have contained true desperation because Mlle Boussac sighed and said, ‘Very well’ – Alix could leave her shift early, but she would not be paid for the time missed and such absence must not become a regular occurrence. ‘The company cannot accommodate every family illness. If you become unreliable, your seat here can easily be filled.’

That sounded like a dream to Alix, to turn up for work and find her seat filled. Today’s errand was part of a plan. A step towards a future which included a flat in a tree-lined boulevard and free expression of her ambitions. Those ambitions had flown ahead of her. They were waiting at No. 24, Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré.

‘Oh, no!’ Alix stamped her foot. She was at No. 24. At Hermès, the leather and silk craftsmen. The object for which she’d lied and forfeited precious wages was where she’d hoped it would be – in the window – but it was twisted through the straps of a handbag which in turn leaned against an exquisitely stitched saddle. She needed to see it flat.

‘It’ was a square of silk, the first scarf to come out of Hermès’s new factory in Lyon. Well, from what she could see, it was predominantly white, the edges oversewn by hand. It had small trees printed on it, or perhaps they were bushes, and wheels and horses’ heads and what seemed to be a man in a wig. She glanced down at herself. Did she dare go in, ask to see it?

Her suit was notches above anything her work colleagues owned, but it was not Faubourg St-Honoré standard. What if the staff took one look at her and turned her out? Or guessed her mission?

They wouldn’t, she persuaded herself. It was no crime, wanting to see something new and beautiful. Marie Claire magazine, brand new on the stands this month, insisted that ‘confidence begins inside’.’ But then, so did self-doubt and indigestion.

The purr of a car made her turn. A Rolls-Royce was pulling up, sand-gold panels gleaming. A chauffeur stepped out, straightening his leather gloves before opening the rear passenger door.

A woman decanted herself with the grace of a ballerina. Definitely not French, Alix judged. She was learning the codes of French society and knew that rich Frenchwomen tamed their hair for daytime. This woman’s locks flowed in corn-yellow waves under a fox-fur hat. Her lips were crimson, her eyebrows pencil strokes. A film star? Whoever she was, the doors of Hermès opened before she was halfway across the pavement.

The chauffeur put a cigarette to his mouth, flicked a lighter and winked at Alix. ‘Window shopping, sweetheart? You and me both.’

Alix returned a snooty look and followed the lady inside.

‘Mademoiselle?’ A young saleswoman, a vendeuse, blocked her path. Alix could feel the girl mentally pulling stitches out of her jacket, assessing its cut. Searching for the secret signs of wealth. Clearly she didn’t find them, because she repeated in a sharper tone, ‘Mademoiselle?’

‘Gloves,’ Alix replied wildly. ‘I – I’d like a pair of gloves. And a scarf.’ She glanced towards the window but didn’t dare move that way.

‘Gloves for the spring season?’

‘Er – yes. Brown?’

Brown for spring? Tut-tut. The vendeuse gestured to a seat well away from the window. ‘Mademoiselle will please follow.’

The lady from the Rolls-Royce was being attended by an older vendeuse and Alix heard her exclaim in American-accented English, ‘Oh my! So this is Mr Hermès’s new baby? Won’t we all go wild for it! I suppose it has a name?’

Alix hesitated. They were talking about that scarf.

The vendeuse replied, ‘Monsieur Hermès has named it, “‘Jeu des omnibus et dames blanches.”’

‘My blazing stars, you’re going to have to translate that for me.’

‘It refers, Madame, to the game of omnibus played in the eighteenth century and dames blanches, which are the horse-drawn carriages for the people in the towns, which are also called “‘omnibus”. It is a little joke.’

‘Well now, it’s a joke beyond my comprehension,’ said the lady, holding a square of silk up to the light, ‘but I can’t wait to have it around my neck. Am I allowed to own such a precious trifle?’

‘We at Hermès are always honoured to serve Madame Kilpin.’

Alix inched closer. ‘Madame Kilpin’ wasn’t a film star. Film stars always called themselves ‘Miss’. Nor a diplomat’s wife. My blazing stars. A flat box lay open on the counter and it struck Alix that there must be more of these scarves in stock. Of course there would be. The minute news of them spread, there’d be a run on them. All the more reason to absorb the design, the colours. Black, burnt orange, blue …

The motif of a horse-drawn omnibus was repeated in a double circle. Alix counted the images, noting their direction. The centre was a cartouche of ladies and gentlemen of the late-eighteenth century playing a game at a table. She counted the figures, noted their dress and hairstyles. A complex design.

‘And who are you, Miss Wide-eyes?’ The American twisted on her seat. ‘You are staring at me.’

Alix backed away. ‘I’m sorry, excuse me.’ She fled out on to the street, though not before she heard –

‘I dare say she’s a journalist and will sell a story about me to the newspapers. What a bore. Still, six out of ten for effort.’

The light was fading as Alix crossed the River Seine at the Pont Marie and descended to the Quai d’Anjou. This was on Ile St-Louis, the smaller of the two islands that formed the ancient hub of Paris. St-Louis was an enclave of graceful streets and mossy wharfs and Alix had promised herself that, one day, she’d live in one of its crumbling mansions. She’d walked fast from Hermès, fuelled by humiliation. Six out of ten …

Her heels clicked on the cobbles as she came up alongside a rusty Dutch barge tied to an iron ring. The boat’s name was ‘Katrijn’, though from ‘r’ onward the name disappeared into the dent of some long-ago collision. It was home to her best friend. She called, ‘Paul? It’s me, Alix. Are you in?’

Identical fair heads poked through the wheelhouse door, then two little girls in cotton frocks scampered on to the stern. One of the girls held a scaled-down violin in one hand and its bow in the other.

Alix hailed the girls. ‘Lala, Suzy, is your brother home? May I come aboard?’

Lala, the one with the violin, made a ‘hush’ motion of the lips. ‘He’s sleeping. He was at the market at four this morning.’

‘Were you at school today?’

‘Some of it. I had my violin lesson and Suzy went to her talking-lady.’

‘You mean her speech therapist?’ Alix laughed. ‘Will you give me a glass of wine? I promise I won’t wake Paul.’ Her feet burned and she needed to sit down to record what was buzzing in her head. The girls threw down a gangplank – little more than a ridged board. Crossing it, Alix knew she shouldn’t look down, but could never stop herself. Fate insisted that whenever she was halfway across, another vessel would chug past and the wash would make Katrijn buck and sway. She could take her shoes off, but stockings cost half a week’s wages …

A chuckle made her look up. A broad hand was reaching down to help her, the arm above it tanned and bare. As was the torso beyond. ‘Paul, you’re naked!’ she said.

‘I can be,’ said Paul le Gal, showing strong, uneven teeth. ‘Have you come to make love to me?’

‘Shush! The girls will hear.’

‘No they won’t. Listen.’

From the galley came a nightingale harmony – Suzy telling Lala to fetch a bottle of wine, Lala telling Suzy to find glasses. Though Suzy never spoke, she often sang. They’d lost their mother a year ago in harrowing circumstances and they reminded Alix of little ducklings, bobbing along in the wake of the tragedy. Swimming and swimming because the alternative was to drown.

Paul helped her scramble over the gunwale, caught her in his arms and kissed her as she brushed rust off her skirt. ‘Don’t,’ she chided. ‘I’ve come to work – I’ve got a copy, scorching hot, but I have to get it on paper.’

‘I was asleep but heard you in my dream,’ Paul said against her mouth. Twenty-two, he wasn’t much older than her, but he seemed so because his work as a porter in the fruit market kept him muscular and smoking roughened his voice. Alix let him kiss her, knowing it wasn’t fair to either of them. They were friends and business partners, and tonight was business.

She pushed him away firmly. ‘I have to sit down, or I’ll lose what’s in my head.’

A circular table with four mismatched chairs filled the barge’s prow. Paul pulled up a seat, lit a lantern and watched Alix take a sketchbook and crayons from her bag. Stillness came over him, lending him beauty despite the scars on his face and the bump of a broken nose. ‘I’m always afraid you’ll find a rich man and forget about me.’

‘I saw a rich woman earlier,’ Alix said as Suzy wobbled towards them, wine glasses and a carafe on a tin tray. ‘She was drizzled in furs the same colour as her car.’

Suzy poured wine with the solemnity of a head waiter while Lala set two glasses of milk on the table, which was actually a cable drum with ‘PTT’ stamped on the top. Paul, Lala and Suzy sat in silence as Alix sketched, discarding page after page as she tried to reproduce the Hermès scarf. It was sharp as a photograph in her head, but her pencils wouldn’t understand. Dusk fell. Lights came on in the Hôtel Lambert above them, casting golden playing cards on to the quay. On the far bank, Port des Célestins threw flares over the water. Her audience was fidgeting, but Alix didn’t mind, because she knew they were rooting for her. They were all cut off the same cheese. All survivors. Lala protected Suzy and practised her violin so one day she could put a hat down and play to tourists. Suzy chopped vegetables for each night’s supper, standing on a box, until she had a huge pile of equal-sized pieces. Paul worked all hours to feed them and school them. Alix understood their sadness as she’d lost her mother at birth. Losing the one you’d had all your life must be even worse.

‘Nearly forgot –’ she dug into her handbag for the Zollinger’s package. ‘One each, girls.’ Lala and Suzy stared at the chocolates until Alix, laughing, gave them permission to unwrap them.

‘Can I smell the paper?’ Paul asked.

‘I couldn’t afford four. D’you know, the assistants wrap each chocolate in little pleats and twist it? It’s mesmerising – except I was hopping from foot to foot with impatience—’ Alix shushed Paul as he began an answer. ‘Let me get on.’

The tip of her tongue poked through her teeth. Like the twins making luxurious inroads into violet cream, she slid into a far-off state. ‘I will get this damn scarf and we will get paid. Six out of ten? One day, fox-fur ladies will come to my shop and beg to be allowed to buy my designs.’

It was nearly nine o’clock when Alix finally closed her sketchbook, realised how long she’d been sitting and exclaimed, ‘I’m late, I’ll have to run.’

Paul saved her the trouble by taking her home on the crossbar of his bicycle. Alix lived on the Left Bank, on Rue St-Sulpice in the 6th arrondissement. Crossing the Seine at the Pont de Sully, they careered down Boulevard St-Germain in the middle of the road. Alix gasped as headlights streamed towards her. Just as her nerves were failing, Paul swerved off St-Germain and there were the table-leg spires of St-Sulpice, her home church.

‘Paul, you can – ouch!’ He skimmed a drain cover. ‘I’ll walk the rest.’

‘Don’t you want me to pedal you up your stairs?’

‘Very funny. Mme Rey would come out and batter you with her mop.’ The concierge of Alix’s building was a put-upon soul who used her mop more in warfare than cleaning. ‘I’d better go up, Mémé will be so worried.’ She took a step back, knowing Paul would want to take her in his arms.

‘Two minutes won’t make any difference to your grandmother.’

‘You don’t know my grandmother.’

He groaned. ‘Why do I always have to say goodbye to a closed door?’

She pecked him on the cheek. ‘You’ll let me know about the Hermès sketch? You’ll sell it?’

‘I’ll take it to my usual contact with my fingers crossed.’ What he always told her. No names, no promises. ‘Goodnight, then?’

‘Goodnight. You’d better get back to the girls.’

She watched him wheel around a couple of parked cars and cycle away into the shadows of the great church.

The door to Alix’s courtyard stood ajar. She closed it quietly, then sniffed. Urine. Getting worse.

New tenants had recently moved into some former wash-houses behind Alix’s apartment building. She sometimes counted up the adults and felt there must be at least five families crammed in. Other residents complained about the newcomers’ cooking smells and their plaintive singing. Alix was intrigued by them, but she’d never dare approach them. Moustached men looked at her with hooded fascination, their womenfolk staring between wings of black hair. Mme Rey called them ‘foreign vermin’ – ‘Not a scrap of French among them, no effort to learn.’

Alix never joined in the condemnation. If she’d come to Paris with her own kind, she wouldn’t have improved her schoolgirl French very far either. Being dropped in at the deep end, nobody standing by with a lifebelt, that’s what made you fluent in a language. Her job at the telephone exchange demanded clear, correct French, and at some point, she couldn’t pinpoint when, she’d stopped mumbling and begun speaking. Meeting Paul had helped because he’d corrected her errors without judgement, though he’d also taught her Parisian slang and numerous swear words.

‘If you want to be mistress of a language, get a lover.’ One of the first things he’d said to her, accompanied by that rogue of a grin.

Entering the lobby, Alix whispered a familiar incantation: ‘Six flights of steps, blessed Providence, may our next apartment have a lift.’ With luck, her grandmother wouldn’t have realised how late it was. But when she reached the top landing, their door flew open and a voice rimmed with anxiety cried, ‘Vey ist mir, Aliki, you didn’t notice the sun go down and the moon come out? I have to pull out my hair, thinking you’ve been killed or worse? Where have you been?’

‘Sorry, Mémé. I lost grip of time.’ They spoke English at home, or what Alix called ‘Mémé’s English’.

‘Go to the table. Don’t move. I’ll get your food.’ Danielle Lutzman let her granddaughter work out the contradictory commands before adding, ‘You can tell me what kept you while you have your soup.’

Their apartment, hunkered in the mansard attic of a once grand house, could never conceal its kitchen smells. Alix knew at once it was onion soup with thyme, cooked in beef-bone stock with a sprinkling of parmesan. Served with a crusty baguette … which would be stale by now; it needed to be eaten fresh from the oven.

She took off her jacket, substituting a thick cardigan. The flat was chilly. They paid for coal with their rent, and the heating was supposed to be on twice a day, but it was twice a month, if they were lucky. In winter, they were forced to use kerosene heaters which gave off fumes. When they complained about the cold, Mme Rey would explain that they’d used up their allowance of coal, or she’d claim the boiler was playing up. ‘My son Fernand will poke it when he’s here next,’ she’d promise. Ah, the elusive Fernand. She cheated them, but a concierge had power. She was the eyes and ears of the landlord.

Alix looked about her as she waited for her soup, realising that just ten minutes inside Hermès had re-calibrated her ideas of elegance. Their serviceable sitting room now looked shockingly bleak. The linoleum was cracked, carpets worn in places to the warp. Stains on the walls told depressing tales of kerosene. The only charm was a small collection of paintings by the Impressionist painter Alfred Lutzman, landscapes and views of his home town of Kirchwiller in Alsace. Mémé had salvaged them from her pre-London life. Lutzman had been Mémé’s husband, Alix’s grandfather.

Alix longed to know more about her Alsace roots, but her grandmother was touchy about those days. She’d just mutter, ‘It was a hard, harrowing time,’ then change the subject or find Alix a job to do. It made Alix all the more determined to get a sense of who, and what, she was.

They’d arrived in Paris in September 1935, foreigners in a city wounded by riots and unemployment, nervous of German remilitarisation just over the border. Alix had lost count of the times she’d been challenged about her nationality. It was a question with only one right answer: ‘French.’

She was English, of course. Germanic Alsatian. Jewish, though not in a religious way. She could technically claim French heritage as Alsace had been grabbed back by France in 1918. A mixture, in other words, and without a story to go with it. Paris had laid bare her ignorance and, weary of her grandmother’s evasions, she’d reached out to someone to fill the gaps. She’d gone in search of Raphael Bonnet.

Raphael Bonnet was one of ten thousand painters living in Paris, but had the distinction – in Alix’s eyes – of having been her grandfather’s apprentice. Following Alfred Lutzman’s sudden death, Bonnet had helped Mémé and her daughter Mathilda relocate to England, an episode her grandmother had described as being like ‘amputation without opium’.’ Alix could only imagine how essential Bonnet had been to someone as fearful as her grandmother. Mémé often spoke of him, a smile touching her lips, but during their eighteen months living in Paris, she’d never visited his studio in Montmartre … and Bonnet never came to the flat.

When asked why, Mémé would reply, ‘He’s busy! Always working on his next exhibition, which of course he never finishes. He should waste time with us?’

Yes, Alix thought, he should. If people liked each other, they met for lunch, went to museums, walked in the park. Her best guess was that Bonnet was a piece of Alsace that Mémé had taken to exile in England, cherishing the friendship because he represented a bridge between the home she’d left and that new place where she would always be a stranger. When Bonnet returned to France, letters and Christmas cards had kept the bond alive. And when London began to feel dangerous, Mémé’s thoughts had leaped to Paris and her old friend. Having come here because of Bonnet, Mémé now stubbornly avoided him. Was it because years had gone by and each would be an old version of the person they remembered?

They still wrote to each other, though. His letters, which Mémé let her read, had whetted Alix’s appetite to meet the man. He sounded irreverent, a little wicked, his word-sketches of the people in his world cruel as well as hilarious. He dropped tantalising references into his letters of his Alsace past, and only the river and a few arrondissements separated them. Paris was small compared to London … it would be foolish not to search him out … no?

So one afternoon Alix had crossed the river, striking north along the grand boulevards, climbing ever-narrower streets to Paris’s hilltop village: the Butte de Montmartre. Asking at a tobacconist’s for ‘M. Bonnet, the artist?’ she had been directed to the Place du Tertre, to a café in the shade of an acacia tree. Her informer had grunted, ‘Grey beard, paint on his waistcoat. Make your way to the bar. He’ll be propping it up.’

When she located a stocky, bearded man who matched the description, and told him her name, he’d blinked for long seconds before engulfing her in a bear hug such as she’d not felt since her father was alive.

‘Alix? Danielle’s granddaughter? Mathilda’s girl? Mon dieu, who else could you be? Mathilda come to life, and I see the old man in your eyes! Everybody –’ Bonnet had invited first his intimate friends then the entire tavern to embrace Alix – ‘Alfred Lutzman has come at last to his spiritual home in the person of this lovely girl. Let us drink to a miracle!’

A friend, a past, an identity in one shot: Raphael Bonnet told her more about Alsace and her family in an hour than Mémé had in her whole life. He’d introduced her to red wine too, and to a lusty crowd of artists’ models, erotic dancers, musicians and those he termed, ‘artistes of the jug’. Drinkers. Quite an awakening for a young woman whose experience of sex, alcohol and men could be written in the margins of a museum ticket.

Bonnet had wanted to visit them at the St-Sulpice flat, he confided, but Alix’s grandmother had forbidden it. ‘She thinks me an unsuitable acquaintance and she’s right.’ He’d gestured to a crowd of men and women clustered around a piano where an African man was banging out jazz. ‘My tastes shock her, my friends would deafen her. Besides, I know too much. Your grandmother likes the past to stay in the past, so, alas … it is perhaps hello and goodbye.’

But Alix wanted the friendship, wanted more than one sip of this heady bohemian life. ‘I shan’t give you up now I’ve found you, M. Bonnet,’ she told him. They still met at least once a month. Mémé never suspected; Alix made sure of that.

And the more Bonnet drank, the more he talked. Over a jug of Beaujolais, Alix learned the shocking fact that Alfred Lutzman had not died in his bed; he had been killed.

‘How? Who did it?’

Bonnet had become uncharacteristically vague. An unprovoked attack, by thieves who broke into the house and were probably disturbed. ‘Best ask no more – your grandmother wouldn’t like it.’

No indeed, especially as Mémé had always claimed that Alfred had died of a heart seizure, in his sleep. Since that day, Alix had tried to wring more from Bonnet, but it was hard to make him concentrate. His anecdotes spun off into surreal realms and changed with every retelling. He’d hop over the decades, throwing out names like exploding chestnuts. He could be bawdy too.

‘Remember fat Fiametta, the snake-dancer who comes in here with a big, covered basket? You know where she keeps her red-and-black asp?’

After a bottle or two, Bonnet would always try to borrow money from Alix. But she loved him all the same. He listened to her, really listened. He also agreed passionately with her that, had he lived, Alfred Lutzman would have been a leading artist of his generation. Accord