Chapter 4 #2
She could do nothing but wait until the rainstorm eased.
Peering out at the street, trying to think of anything but Alex, she realised she was right near the mosaic tile set in the pavement which commemorated the once-mighty presence of Callot Soeurs, a design house created by four extraordinary sisters in 1895, which from 1900 onwards had risen to become one of the most successful fashion design houses of the time, not only in France, but also abroad, especially in America.
They had been particularly famous for their glorious evening dresses, whose exquisite detail, rich palette of colour and superb fabrics made them the toast of high society in both Europe and America, and their success also emboldened a whole new generation of female fashion designers to make their mark.
Hard times after the crash of 1929 ended with the closure of the business in 1937, but the influence of Callot Soeurs was felt for quite a long time after.
Audrey had already woven in a mention of them in the first chapter of her book, and now, looking out at the graceful mosaic figure embedded in the tile, with its blue evening gown and bobbed fair hair, she felt it was a good omen.
Slowly, her thoughts began to ease in tandem with the rain, as she turned away from the painful memories of the past and back towards her pleasurable plans for the future.
Just then, her phone buzzed in her bag. She almost didn’t answer, suddenly afraid Alex had somehow tracked her number down.
But it was James, and the sound of his brisk voice was suddenly so reassuring that she almost burst into tears.
He asked briefly about how the research for the book was going and she told him it was fine, adding that she couldn’t wait to see him on the weekend—he had suggested he might fly over to Paris for a few days.
‘Sorry,’ he said, not really sounding sorry, ‘I can’t now.
A situation has blown up at work and I can’t get away.
’ That was why he’d rung, she knew, not really to ask about her research, and normally she’d have accepted that, but today felt different.
She didn’t ask what the situation was; he would never say, anyway.
As a senior partner at a large New York legal firm which dealt with corporate law, much of James’s work was completely confidential.
She had got used to it by now, though at first she’d joked it was like living with an undercover police officer or a spy—a comment James didn’t seem at all amused by, and which she didn’t repeat.
She didn’t try to persuade him now, but she couldn’t keep the disappointment from her voice when she told him she looked forward to seeing him when he could get away.
But if he noticed, he didn’t comment, other than to say that he’d try his best to come later, and then launching into a long-winded recounting of some law society dinner he’d been at with his twin sister, Elinor, who was also a top-flight lawyer, but specialising in criminal law.
Audrey listened patiently and made the right noises but was very glad she hadn’t been there.
She felt out of place at such functions, and even more so if Elinor was there.
James’s sister was polite to her but there was no warmth in it and they had never clicked.
Audrey knew that Elinor thought being a fashion writer, even a fairly famous one, was a frivolous occupation compared to what she and James did, at best just a whimsical second fiddle to their own important work.
Audrey hadn’t discussed this with James, because not only could his twin do no wrong in his eyes—unlike his ex-wife!
—but he also wouldn’t even have noticed Elinor’s snide little barbs.
Besides, Audrey didn’t want to probe his own opinion of her work.
He didn’t read her articles because he said he wouldn’t know how to evaluate them.
You don’t need to evaluate, she’d told him, it’s not a legal case, just read for pleasure.
But that wasn’t something he had time for.
She hadn’t told him when she first pitched the book idea to her agent Debbie Malkin; she didn’t want to jinx it and she also didn’t want him to ‘evaluate’ this new direction of hers.
When she did tell him, he was encouraging, even if he expressed some concern about whether people still read books much anymore.
Elinor, he said, had read some survey which showed that Americans’ reading habits had steeply gone down.
That had been a bit of a downer, but Audrey managed not to overreact.
She knew the worth of her idea. And so did her agent and publisher.
And that was what counted. Besides, James and Elinor were hardly the target audience for the book.
Yet now, as the call ended, she felt deflated.
Surely just this once he could have passed on the management of the ‘situation’ to someone else?
Surely he could have shown more than a perfunctory interest in what she was doing?
She would have liked that and would have been grateful to have his company here too, shielding her from the shockwaves of the past. But that was pathetic, she told herself, crossly.
She didn’t need to be shielded. She was a strong, successful, capable woman running her own life and facing her own demons—like the women she was going to depict in her book.
It had stopped raining. Squaring her shoulders, she left the shelter of the tree and headed to the Metro station, concentrating her thoughts on the prospect of a hot shower and dry clothes back at the hotel.
Extract from the draft of
The Looking Glass World by Audrey Oliver
As a child, my great-grandmother Alice lived with her widowed mother, Eugénie, in Biarritz, the famous, fashionable Atlantic seaside resort where the society crowd from all over Europe rubbed shoulders with colour-seeking artists, glamorous actresses and exiled Russian aristocrats on the crowded promenade by the beach.
Biarritz was also full of beautiful couture shops, including branches of Callot Soeurs, Jean Patou, Madeleine Vionnet, Jeanne Lanvin and Coco Chanel.
The latter’s store, however, wasn’t just a sales centre; at the time, it was also Chanel’s first headquarters, incorporating the haute couture workshop which employed hundreds of people.
The store was situated close to the beach, on the corner of a smart avenue that swept up from near the Casino, and Alice remembered going in with her mother, who spoke with a young saleswoman named Elisabeth.
This young woman was, of course, to become famous as the designer Elisabeth Fontaine.
She was working in her first real job which she would later leave to try her luck in Paris.
Eugénie was one of Biarritz’s most sought-after modistes, or milliners, but she wasn’t only interested in hats.
A hat was a work of art in itself but also the final touch, even perhaps the crowning glory, of the fashionable tenue, or outfit.
You needed to understand clothes, too, and in fact some of the great couture designers, like Jeanne Lanvin and Coco Chanel, had started as milliners, their eye trained to see the whole effect as well as the particular.
So twice a year, Eugénie would make the long train trip to Paris to take a personal look at the latest trends and ideas in fashion.
There, she visited the establishments of the great couturiers as well as the great milliners of the time, but she knew it wasn’t enough just to gawk at the models in the high-end places.
Her scope had to be broad. She browsed in department stores, gazed in at the windows of small boutiques, examined new materials in fabric houses, visited workshops specialising in embellishments, and spoke with fashion illustrators working with magazines.
And sometimes, she just sat in the window of a restaurant in a busy street and watched the everyday fashion parade of life go by, noting details of women’s tenues, including, of course, their hats.
While her mother was away, Alice had to stay at home with her nanny, but the year she turned eleven, her mother decided she should come too.
This trip changed everything for her. A major highlight was visiting the famous premises of Callot Soeurs, where in a backroom Alice caught sight of the most beautiful dress she’d ever seen.
It was an evening dress made of a fine silk gauze the colour of moonlight, printed with a delicate blue design whose lines had been embroidered and beaded in such an exquisite way that it caught the light whichever way you looked at it.
The dress had just been finished and was hanging on a mannequin, for it had been made for a special order for a special customer.
In her notebook, she writes that there was something truly magical about it, as if it had been conjured out of the air by a fairy godmother, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off of it.
She already dreamed of being a fashion illustrator and so she tried to capture that dress in her drawings, then and again many times later, but failed.
Yet it stayed bright in her memory for ever after, that glorious dress by Callot Soeurs, and the atmosphere of the happy creative bustle around it.