Chapter 27
Twenty-seven
Poor Annie, Isabelle thought, with her life cut so short and never knowing that such an important secret had been entrusted to her.
If she had known, she would have safeguarded the copies, and maybe, in time, once she was over the shock and grief of Elisabeth’s death, she might even have been persuaded to reveal them to the world …
Patricia handed back her phone, and said, ‘It’s sad that she never got the letter, yet it is a tribute to her that it was written at all.’
A small silence followed before Isabelle said, ‘This is a long shot as the copies probably vanished long ago—but do you have any idea what the orphan box might be? Do you know what it might have referred to? Was it perhaps something that Elisabeth might have given Annie?’
Patricia shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I really don’t know.’
Then Romy, who had been very quiet, said, ‘I was thinking about what you said earlier, Patricia, about how tight-fisted Tissus Tellier were with remnants and deadstock and so on. They wouldn’t let staff take them, they couldn’t sell them, they wouldn’t throw them away.
But then they would have had to store them in a backroom, and some of them would have been in trunks or boxes.
An orphan box could then, I suppose, be one where they put random bits and pieces, odd buttons, outdated scraps of fabric, redundant trimmings—the kind of thing no one ever looks at … ’
Patricia’s eyes widened and she put a hand over her mouth.
‘Of course—why didn’t I think of it …’ She looked at them all, her eyes very bright.
‘You see, Tissus Tellier closed down in the late 1990s, and in their last couple of weeks, they held a sale of everything in the store—fittings, remaining stock, patterns, paperwork, the lot. The owners had been complete hoarders and hadn’t thrown anything out.
Anyway, I happened to be in Paris the last couple of days of the sale so I thought I’d go, see if I could pick up anything, even if it was from long after my grandmother and Annie had worked there, because for me it was a living link to their past. Not as strong as the memory box, of course, which had the things my grandmother had chosen to keep, but just as part of the general background. ’
‘And?’ Isabelle prompted. She could hardly bear it, could scarcely breathe; the suspense, the wild hope was so strong that her pulse was racing, and she could feel the same tension from the others as they leaned forward, as if to better capture Patricia’s words.
‘And, well, most of the stuff was gone,’ Patricia said, her voice shaking.
‘All the good stuff, I mean. No more nice bolts of cloth or patterns or sketches or anything like that. They only had a few things left, boxes filled with boring old paperwork—none from my grandmother’s time—some ugly bits of furniture, a few lengths of fabric that weren’t very usable, and so on.
In the end, all I took were a couple of dusty boxes of random objects whose age and type were completely mixed up, and which clearly no one could be bothered with, so they were sold as a job lot with a derisory price tag. ’
She paused, and Isabelle, who was unable to restrain herself any longer, burst out, ‘Please, Patricia, tell us! Did you buy the boxes? Do you have them still?’
Patricia smiled. ‘I did. And I do. Please come with me.’
She led them to a small room that clearly functioned as her study, and went to a filing cabinet, pulling out a drawer.
‘Most of the stuff in those boxes I left in storage in the basement, because the vast majority of it wasn’t very interesting, but I did select some bits and pieces, a few buttons I found appealing, advertisements from vintage fashion newspapers, a couple of packaged home sewing patterns—and then this …
’ Patricia drew on protective cotton gloves and pulled out a small tight roll of soft fabric.
Then she went over to the desk, and unrolled it very, very gently.
They crowded around her, craning to look, and as the fabric slowly peeled back to reveal what was inside, Romy could feel the impact of it hitting her full in the chest. For there in front of them were two sheets of tracing paper, rolled up together so that all you could see of what was on them were very faint outlines.
Copies of sketches—tracings that had lain undisturbed for decades.
It was a solemn moment. But more was to come. Patricia lifted the outer tracing, unrolled it and held it gently at opposite corners, an image appearing on the inside, faded with age, but still visible, for stored as it had been, it’d been protected from the ravages of sunlight.
It was a drawing of a willowy woman wearing a sleeveless long dress with a round neckline which was separated from the bodice by a curved band of darker material that went across the tops of the shoulders and then across the back.
The bodice fell softly to the waist, the skirt skimming the body till it flared out at knee length, falling to the ankles in several graceful folds, producing a small train on either side which would swish beautifully as you walked, without impeding movement.
Both bodice and skirt featured fine flower-like patterns on what looked otherwise like solid material.
There was even a trace of colour left from where the copy had been made by tracing over the original sketch.
Romy thought the base material had been a fairly light yellow, but both the neckline band and the patterns looked darker, though it was unclear exactly what colour they would have been on the original.
She thought the flower patterns had a vaguely Japanese look to them, and that made her remember that in one anecdote in Alice’s notebook, the girl had mentioned meeting the artist Foujita, who had been prominent in the Paris art scene of the time.
Perhaps Elisabeth Fontaine had been inspired by his work?
Whatever the truth of that, the design, despite the faintness and fragility of the tracing, despite the impact of age, breathed an air of such beauty, such elegance, such true, heart-singing grace, that she felt flooded with a sense of gratitude at the utter privilege of being here to view it.
‘You must understand,’ Patricia said, as they all gazed in awe at the image, unable to tear their eyes away, ‘that Tissus Tellier didn’t just sell fabric to couture houses, all kinds of people went there.
And some of them took sketches of what they wanted.
They needed advice, perhaps a pattern made, or toiles, or even a full garment.
There had been some of those types of sketches in the sale; none from any named designers, just simple drawings that had been done for clients or brought into the shop.
And they’d all been sold by the time I bought the box, anyway.
Plus I bought the box as a job lot, so I didn’t examine it until I was home.
And even then I had absolutely no idea, even when I unrolled the fabric and saw it.
I mean, there was no signature, just that—’ and she pointed to the faint word ‘Paname’ written in a scrawled hand, at the edge of the paper.
‘I knew Paname was a slang term for Paris—people still occasionally use it even today—but I just assumed some client had taken it to the shop, and that it had been mislaid, forgotten or discarded. It was attractive, I could see that, but it was just a tracing after all, just a copy, not an original, so clearly not of much importance.’ She saw their expressions and gave a faint smile.
‘I know what you’re thinking, but at the time I didn’t have the information I’ve learned from you and the thought it might be a Fontaine never crossed my mind.
Besides, I couldn’t really tell its age—it was somewhat faded, so I had no way of knowing.
It didn’t scream a particular period, either.
I felt it was a design that could almost have been from any period. ’
‘Yes,’ Romy heard Audrey say in a dreamy tone. ‘It has an incredibly timeless look, doesn’t it?’
‘You could certainly wear something like this now,’ Isabelle said. Romy could see her eyes were moist and absolutely understood why.
As for her, she couldn’t speak or move. Never in her whole life had she imagined anything like this feeling, looking down at the last, lost design of Elisabeth Fontaine that had lain undiscovered, unknown for so long.
Patricia quietly set the first drawing aside and picked up the other tracing.
And there was the back view of the dress: part backless, with a deep vee falling from the neckline band onto the bodice, the skirt following the same line as at the front, but without the flower patterns.
It was perfect, designed to give just as wonderful a view from the back as the front.
Romy could imagine the design coming to life, the woman wearing it feeling the silk on her skin—it would have to be silk, although what type Romy wasn’t sure—hearing the swish-swish of the skirt, and most of all experiencing an exhilarating sense of inhabiting something truly beautiful, something that didn’t eclipse you or use you as a mere clothes horse but that made you shine brighter than ever before.