Chapter 25
Twenty-five
Patricia Landry’s apartment was on the third floor, reached via a narrow wooden lift which set them down directly opposite the apartment door.
They pressed the buzzer and the door opened almost at once to reveal a small woman in her mid to late sixties whose silver hair was cut in a flattering pixie style, showcasing the fine bones of her face and bright dark eyes behind delicately framed glasses.
She wore a dusty-pink short-sleeved ribbed jumper over a grey pencil skirt, and black ballerina-style shoes on her feet, a silver watch on her wrist and pink pearl studs in her ears.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said, extending a hand to each of them in turn as they introduced themselves.
‘Thank you for coming. I’m so glad to meet you.
’ Patricia Landry ushered them into a parquet-floored living room, and Romy saw that it was decorated in an eclectic style that managed to combine traditional and modern harmoniously.
A classic sofa and armchairs upholstered in golden-brown velvet were set around a smoked glass coffee table which stood on a beautiful blue Persian carpet.
Against one wall stood a tall, solid book cabinet, with rows of books behind glass double doors at the top and polished timber drawers below, while on another wall was a mosaic of what were obviously family photographs, including a series of rather beautiful black and white portraits.
Patricia saw them looking at the mosaic and said, ‘I had my own photography studio in Toulouse till the work started to dry up, after the advent of cheap digital cameras and then mobile phones. However, I still enjoy taking photographs for my own amusement, with a real camera. But please, sit. Would you like a cup of tea? Coffee? Or a cool sparkling drink—I have elderflower or lemon? Or perhaps something stronger?’
She was back in a moment, carrying a tray of glasses and a tall bottle of the elderflower they’d all chosen.
Setting the tray down on the coffee table, she had just poured the drinks when Audrey handed her the folder.
‘It’s a sketch from Alice’s notebook,’ she said. ‘I thought you might like to have it.’
‘Oh,’ Patricia said on a long breath of delight, gazing down at the drawing.
‘Oh my God, this is just so marvellous.’ She looked up, and Romy saw there was the shine of tears in her eyes.
‘Thank you so much. It means a great deal to me.’ She sipped her drink and took another look at the sketch.
‘Such a talent for drawing. But she didn’t continue with her career as an illustrator, did she?
My grandmother told me that after Alice met a certain dashing young Scotsman in a Montparnasse nightclub, her priorities changed. ’
‘Yes. It was love at first sight between her and my great-grandfather, Charlie McGregor,’ Audrey replied.
‘Everyone thought it wouldn’t last, but it did.
They got married, and as he came from a wealthy family, she didn’t need or indeed want to work.
But she never gave up drawing for pleasure.
And when my grandparents emigrated to Australia, they took her surviving sketches with them, as well as the notebook. ’
‘That’s wonderful,’ Patricia said. ‘What a legacy!’ Getting up, she went to the wall of photographs and pointed to one of the portraits.
‘This is my grandmother Mariette, when she was in her early sixties. I took it when I had just started out.’ They all went over to have a closer look, taking in the beautifully groomed woman who looked back at them from the picture with an expression that Romy could only characterise as a kind of humorous warmth, that seemed to speak of a woman at ease in her own skin.
‘She looks like she enjoyed life,’ Romy said quietly.
‘Oh, yes,’ Patricia said. ‘She was a wonderful woman, and a wonderful grandmother to me too. I loved her dearly.’ She motioned for them to go back to their seats.
‘And now, there is something of hers which I want to show you,’ she said, and went to the book cabinet, opened one of the drawers at the bottom and took something out which she brought back to the table.
It was a dark-coloured box made of very stiff cardboard, about the size and shape of a shoebox.
On the lid was a name printed in flowing, faded golden script: ‘Tissus Tellier’.
Romy knew from Alice’s notebook that was the name of the fabric shop near the Pont Neuf, where Mariette and her older sister had worked, and which had supplied Elisabeth Fontaine’s workshop. Excitement buzzed up her spine.
‘My grandmother left this to me,’ Patricia said. ‘She called it her memory box. Unlike my father or my aunt, I was interested in the past. She showed it to me when I was young and told me stories about it, things not even my father knew. She told such great stories.’
She wasn’t the only one, Romy thought, catching the others’ glances, her granddaughter had clearly inherited that gift.
‘Tissus Tellier frowned heavily on anything that could be construed as pilfering,’ Patricia went on.
‘Nobody could have walked off with bolts of cloth or boxes of buttons, but even remnants and deadstock were out of bounds. They kept watch pretty closely, and anyone caught breaking the rules was instantly dismissed. But a very junior employee like Mariette had to do chores such as tidying, sweeping and emptying bins, and that’s when she might find little bits and pieces.
Sometimes, if they interested her, instead of consigning them to the rubbish, she’d pick them up, put them in her pocket and take them home.
Nobody bothered about that. This is to give you the context of what I’m about to show you,’ she finished.
They all craned forward excitedly as she lifted the tissue paper off.
Under it were several clear cellophane bags of various sizes, lying on yet another layer of tissue paper.
Each bag contained many scraps of fabric, in a jewel-box range of colours, sorted into types.
There were velvets and silks, cottons and wool, and also a couple of small packets of bits of lace and tiny sequined or beaded offcuts.
All the scraps were very small, but together they made a strikingly harmonious picture, like a mosaic, or the pattern you get when you shake a kaleidoscope.
‘Are these all from the time Mariette worked there as a junior?’ Audrey asked, with a catch of excitement in her voice. Romy knew why she was asking what seemed an obvious question—to confirm if they were from the right period.
Patricia nodded. ‘Specifically, they are from one year: 1929. Mariette got another job in January 1930, in one of the big department stores. It was a step up for her, and better paid, but of course she lost access then to the bits and pieces in the fabric shop.’
Romy exchanged a glance with Audrey and Isabelle.
That meant Mariette had certainly not been working in the shop at the time Elisabeth Fontaine had sent her letter in March 1930.
‘Do you know if any of these were from bolts of fabric supplied to haute couture workshops of the time, such as Elisabeth Fontaine’s? ’ she asked.
‘It’s possible, but I don’t know for sure.
’ Patricia lifted out the cellophane bags one by one and put them on a glass side table, next to a pair of fine white gloves.
‘However’—she took off the next layer of tissue paper—‘the ones you see in this layer are certainly so. In fact, they are little souvenirs connected to the showing of Mademoiselle Fontaine’s first collection, which Mariette attended with Alice, as you probably already know. ’
‘Yes,’ Audrey said, a little faintly, as she looked down at the objects lying on the last piece of tissue paper. ‘It was in Alice’s notebook. She described it in glowing terms.’
‘Wow—oh—this is extraordinary!’ Isabelle breathed.
But Romy couldn’t speak. Her heart was pounding too much.
Last night, she had looked up the website of the museum in Biarritz devoted to Elisabeth Fontaine.
Isabelle had said that there were quite a few things there from that famous collection, and sure enough, they had illustrated magazines and a couple of photographs of that first collection, as well as ephemera such as posters and a program for the showing.
Most importantly, there were several sketches and three actual models from it: a smart striped jacket; a gorgeous day dress in fine blue cotton voile, with gauzy flutter sleeves and a hem embroidered with a cluster of white lilac flowers; and a beautiful evening wrap of pale pink organza decorated with white beading.
The rest of the collection had vanished—either lost when people who’d bought them died or moved, or else put on the market and sold into jealously guarded private collections, just like the surviving items from the aborted second collection.
The items owned by the museum had mostly been bequeathed to them many years ago by a wealthy French-Canadian woman whose mother had been a client of a number of Paris couture houses, including Fontaine’s.
But now, looking at the cellophane bags on the glass table, Romy thought, with a quiver of awestruck delight, that she and her friends were getting a direct glimpse into that long-ago day when a new fashion designer had stepped into the limelight with a collection that had taken le tout-Paris by storm.
The first few cellophane bags contained scraps of fabrics, like those in the first layer.
Each was neatly labelled: ‘Day dresses’, ‘Jackets and coats’, ‘Skirts’, and so on.
But the one Romy focused on was the bag labelled ‘Evening dresses’, for it contained magnificent snippets of silk fabrics: georgette and voile and chiffon, organza and satin and velvet.
Even after all these many, many years, the colours—silver, pink, blue, gold, indigo—seemed to shimmer and glow, or perhaps that was because of the way the glass of the table seemed to backlight them.
Romy thought back to her conversation with Mickael last night, when she’d told him of her idea.
‘May I?’ she asked, making as if to pick up the evening-dress bag, and Patricia nodded.
‘But please don’t open it,’ she said unnecessarily, as Romy was certainly going to do no such thing.
She understood the fragility of old fabrics.
Holding the bag carefully with the tips of her fingers, she gazed at the frail, lovely things inside it for a moment, then without a word handed it over to Isabelle, who then handed it to Audrey.
All three of us, Romy thought, know that this is the closest we can ever come to seeing into Elisabeth Fontaine’s mind as she decided on these particular fabrics for her very first evening dresses, the gowns that preceded the one that was to be her masterpiece, the gown that was so precious to her that she’d guarded its secret closely.
These bits of fabric represent the prequel to the legend, she thought, with a shiver of awe.
‘May I take a photo?’ she asked, and Patricia nodded. ‘Of course. You are most welcome to take photos of anything I’ve shown you. But there’s more you might want to see.’