Natasha Lester worked as a marketing executive for L’Oréal, managing the Maybelline brand, before returning to university to study creative writing. She completed a Master of Creative Arts and in her spare time loves to teach writing, is a sought after public speaker and can often be found playing dress-up with her three children. She lives in Perth.

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ALSO BY NATASHA LESTER

A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald

Her Mother’s Secret

The Paris Seamstress

The French Photographer

The Paris Secret

The Riviera House

SPHERE

First published in Australia in 2022 by Hachette Australia

First published in Great Britain in 2022 as an ebook by Sphere

This edition published in 2023 by Sphere

Copyright © Natasha Lester 2022

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Quote on page 1 from Penelope Rowlands, A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters, Atria Books, New York, 2005.

Quote on page 7 from Christian Dior as told to Elie Rabourdin and Alice Chavane, translated by Eugenia Sheppard, Talking about Fashion, Hutchinson, London, 1954.

Quote on page 85 from Elizabeth P McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS, Naval Institute Press, Maryland, 1988, used with permission.

Quote on page 145 from Marie-France Pochna, Christian Dior: the Biography, Overlook Duckworth, London, 2008.

Quote on page 237 as quoted in Scott Miller, Agent 110: An American Spymaster and the German Resistance in WWII, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2017.

Quote on page 275 from Penelope Rowlands, A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art and Letters, Atria Books, New York, 2005.

Excerpt on page 355 from Crusade in Europe by Dwight D Eisenhower, copyright © 1948 by Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Quote on page 369 from Christian Dior as told to Elie Rabourdin and Alice Chavane, translated by Eugenia Sheppard, Talking about Fashion, Hutchinson, London, 1954.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7515-8227-7

Sphere

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk.

Contents

Prologue: Paris, 1937

Part One: Paris, December 1946–January 1947

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Part Two: Washington DC and Bern, Switzerland, 1942–1943

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Part Three: Paris, 1947

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Part Four: Switzerland and Italy, 1943–1945

Twenty

Twenty One

Twenty Two

Twenty Three

Part Five: Paris, 1947

Twenty Four

Twenty Five

Twenty Six

Twenty Seven

Twenty Eight

Twenty Nine

Thirty

Part Six: Bern, April 1945

Thirty One

Thirty Two

Part Seven: Paris and New York, 1947

Thirty Three

Thirty Four

Thirty Five

Thirty Six

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

To Kevan Lyon

Thank you for welcoming me to the pride,
for being the agent of my dreams,
and for loving this book from the very first moment of its existence.

PROLOGUE

Paris, 1937

I’ve always been attracted by what I can, by some kind of Irish clairvoyance, foresee in an artist . . .

– Carmel Snow, Harper’s Bazaar

‘I’m not coming with you,’ Lillie said to Alix on the day they were supposed to leave their Swiss finishing school and travel to Paris to truly begin the adventure called life.

Alix laughed. ‘You mean you’re too lazy to pack and want me to do it for you?’ She pulled Lillie’s suitcase out from under the bed of the room they shared at Le Manoir.

But Lillie shook her head. ‘I promised Mother before we left LA that I’d come home after a year. She wrote to remind me.’

‘But you let me think—’ Alix cut herself off and sank onto the bed.

Lillie was lying on her back staring at the ceiling. In her hand – gripped so tightly it was starting to crumple – was a photograph of Lillie, Alix and their friend Bobby, taken at a county fair in LA the week before the girls left for Switzerland. The mangling of that cherished image of the three of them told Alix that Lillie was hurting more than Alix, right now.

Alix slid onto her knees on the floor so she could stroke her friend’s hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

Her words made Lillie start to cry – no, to sob. ‘I’m sorry too.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ Alix said softly, swallowing all the other words – You let me think for this whole year that you were coming to Paris when the entire time you knew you weren’t. Because she could see in Lillie’s tears that the plans they’d made of renting a room in a pension and taking French lovers and walking home at dawn from a night out in Montmartre via the Eiffel Tower had been a wish Lillie had made herself believe in, as if an enchantress was going to divide her in two, sending one part back to her mother and Peter Brooks – the man Lillie’s mother wanted her to marry – and the other half on to Paris with Alix.

For the first time, Alix was glad no one had ever expected anything of her, that the only path she had to follow was the one she made for herself. Affection, a mother’s caress, a father’s pride were her losses, but Lillie’s losses – the ability to trust herself and to choose – were substantial and painful too.

‘I’ll miss you so much,’ was all she said. Which was true. She’d seen Lillie every day of her life since she was thirteen years old. But when Alix went on to Paris and Lillie home to LA, who knew when they’d see one another again?

‘Take this.’ Lillie thrust the creased photo of three smiling, happy people into Alix’s hand. ‘I have another one at home. And Bobby has one too. I always meant to give one to you because . . .’ She stopped, and Alix knew Lillie didn’t want to say it aloud: Because you couldn’t afford to buy one yourself.

‘The Three Musketeers,’ Alix said, trying to make Lillie smile.

‘No.’ Lillie was adamant. ‘A band of people can change their mind about one another. The three of us never will. We’re . . .’ She thought for a moment. ‘The three points of a triangle. Without one, the triangle doesn’t exist.’

Which only made Alix pick herself up off the floor and throw herself onto the bed, where everything disintegrated into a teary, soggy embrace.

Then Lillie drew back and smiled at Alix, ‘You’re like the sidekick in a movie,’ she said, which didn’t sound especially complimentary. Until she added, ‘Everyone thinks the star is the one they should watch, the one they should love. But sometimes the sidekick steals the show. And everyone wonders why they hadn’t noticed her before. That’s you,’ she said very firmly to Alix, who did not believe this prophecy at all. ‘You’re the one worth watching.’

Only the truest friend would say such a thing while she tucked her own dreams away and watched the person she’d always called her sister pick up her suitcase and go off and live them instead.

‘I love you,’ Alix said, her eyes leaking tears again.

‘Until triangles don’t exist,’ Lillie said with a grin that had them both sniffing in a very un-finishing school-like manner.

Two days later, Alix St Pierre stood in the very centre of the Pont Alexandre III between two nymphs that were poised and ready to dive with utter abandon into the water. Above her head, orb-shaped Art Nouveau lamps shone like a strand of full moons bejewelling the dawn. Adorning the bridge to her left and right were cherubs and flying horses and lions and scallop-edged seashells – everything that was spirited and wild and impulsive and impossible. But it was all right there in front of her, so it wasn’t impossible – not now.

A smile burst onto her face and she leaned forward like the nymphs, her upper body stretching out over the Seine as far as it could. She opened her arms wide, embracing Paris, her delight too much to keep inside her. And she began to laugh.

How would she ever stop laughing now that she was in Paris?

As daybreak became morning, she straightened, opened her purse, took out the list of names Lillie’s parents had sent her from LA, and threw them into the nearest garbage bin. Alix might have only a high school education to go with the introductions Lillie’s family had wished to grant her via that list, but she couldn’t – and wouldn’t – live off the van der Meers’ largesse forever. Besides, the names on the list were high society types who did little but spent a lot, and Alix would always be an outsider in that crowd. Here in Paris – in the country of her parents’ birth – she would find people she belonged to.

She strode determinedly north to Printemps and spent ten minutes gaping at the grand façade: the Four Seasons sculpted dramatically onto the wall above the heads of the shoppers who streamed in and out, arms accessorised with bracelets of shopping bags. How could they be so unaffected by art, everywhere? By beauty all around? By Paris!

Alix almost took hold of the elegant collar of the woman stepping around her and exclaimed, ‘Look!’ Instead she took hold of herself and vowed never to be so hardened to beauty – or so old as to forget that awe existed.

Inside, she purchased the largest cocktail shaker she could find. At a grocery store, she bought gin, vermouth and olives, retraced her steps south and took a seat on a bench in the Jardin des Champs-Élysées – if she walked this much every day, she’d soon be able to find her way around without needing her breathless copy of So, You’re Going to Paris!

Into the cocktail shaker she poured the gin and vermouth, added six olives and checked her watch. Half past twelve. Enough time to reapply lipstick, check that her hair was behaving as hair should when in Paris – stylishly and flawlessly – straightened her neat little teal hat, which, she was pleased to see, was at the height of fashion here, unlike in the States where the dull and heavy fedora pretended to be à la mode. Finally, she adopted the posture that Lillie’s mother had always insisted was the most important thing a girl should learn: to imagine that an extraordinarily long pencil was fastened to the back of her head and Alix wished to draw with it upon the ceiling. This pretence was supposed to pull up her chin, lift her chest – but without throwing it audaciously forward – and, somehow, shrink her waist. The only part of Lillie’s mother’s advice that she ignored was to keep her eyes cast shyly downward; Alix threw hers up to the sky.

Her martini shaker accompanied her to 18 Rue Jean Goujon and the Paris studio of Harper’s Bazaar where she waited in the lobby, eyes fixed on the rackety iron-cage elevator. Soon after one o’clock, it emitted a blue-haired woman with blue glasses and the kind of figure acquired – like Lillie’s mother’s – by never eating, or else by a studied reliance on a liquid sort of lunch. It was Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, in Paris for the collections – and the doyenne of the liquid lunch, or so Alix had heard.

‘Bonjour,’ Alix said, smiling wide – her smile was her best asset according to Lillie, who meant it kindly, and also according to Lillie’s mother, who meant for Alix to wonder about the shortcomings of all her other features.

She held up the cocktail shaker. ‘I heard you like a three-martini lunch. So I’ve brought one right to you. I’m hoping that, in exchange for an afternoon’s worth of martinis, you’ll take a look at my portfolio.’

Carmel laughed, a big and effervescent sound.

Alix took that for encouragement and extracted one very expensive martini glass from her shopping bag. ‘Shall I pour?’

‘You’d better,’ Carmel said, vowels cradling her Irish accent and imbuing her words with warmth. ‘But in my office.’

Once there, Carmel glanced at Alix’s treasured illustrations then deposited them in the wastepaper basket. ‘Your destiny is PR,’ she said. ‘You draw as if dresses were meant to shackle a body, rather than move with it. Give up on illustrating for now.’

Alix tried not to wince, but she hadn’t the fortification of vermouth, had only eighteen years on the earth and a dream of working in fashion in Paris, and it was, therefore, impossible not to flinch.

Carmel didn’t withdraw her gaze and allow Alix the opportunity to have her hurt undiscovered. She marked it, and then indicated the cocktail shaker. ‘You know how to get someone’s attention and deliver what they want. Which means the Service de la Presse is your calling. The best way to learn public relations is to write – understand how the press works before you try to seduce it. You start tonight at Marie-Louise’s Thursdays – where you’ll meet le tout-Paris – and then tomorrow, more officially, here at Harper’s Bazaar as junior fashion editor.’

Alix couldn’t help whooping like a cheerleader.

Carmel raised her glass. ‘I wish they bottled and served your brand of spirits at the Ritz. It’d be better for me than three martinis – and its effects might be more long-lasting.’

And then Alix was laughing with Carmel Snow in her office in Paris, an astonishing situation that made her believe for the first time in her life that it didn’t matter that she was an orphan who’d grifted her way through life since she was thirteen, a girl who’d relied on the guilt and charity of Lillie’s parents for the last five years, and who’d spent every last dollar to get herself to Paris. It also made her believe that Paris was the place where she would finally be the Alix St Pierre she was supposed to be, the one she’d had to subdue in Lillie’s hushed and highly polished mansion. That Alix could, at last, be unshackled.

PART ONE

Paris, December 1946–January 1947

This is my zero hour.

Ten minutes pass.

It is up to me to give the signal to open the doors.

The show is about to begin.

– Christian Dior

One

Only if ladders and tins of paint were now being worn by fashionable Parisians could Alix possibly be standing in the doorway of a couture house. She ducked to avoid a passing plank and wondered – for at least the one hundredth time since she’d broken her contract and boarded a ship in Manhattan on the basis of just one scant telegram from Suzanne Luling – if she’d done the right thing. The salon was in a state of total déshabillé with nary a gown or mannequin in sight, and Alix’s first and overwhelming apprehension was that this new couture house would probably topple off its pumps at its very first showing.

She should turn and run. But a chandelier was forcing its way in behind her, blocking the exit. She was trapped.

‘Alix!’ Down the staircase came Suzanne Luling, who pointed an imperious finger at the men hefting the chandelier, directing it onwards. Then she proceeded to the ground floor and placed a precise but affectionate kiss on each of Alix’s cheeks. ‘It’s been too long.’

‘It has,’ Alix said warmly, before adding, ‘When you were so busy convincing me to work for this new couture house, you forgot to mention that the house itself was still getting dressed.’

‘Monsieur Dior wanted everything to be new,’ Suzanne explained, sweeping an expressive arm around her, making Alix see the graceful curve of the staircase rather than its absence of carpeting. ‘Including the house itself. I think it’s the best way to begin, don’t you – to bring nothing of old with you.’

Bring nothing of old with you. Alix occupied herself with removing her hat to stop the shiver that was most definitely from old, from the past she kept thinking she’d discarded only to find, at moments like this, that it was still there – a gown with a stuck zipper, one she would never be able to take off.

Judging by the uncharacteristically serious look on Suzanne’s face, Alix was certain she too was thinking of the last time they’d seen one another, on an incoherent night in April 1945 at Suzanne’s sumptuous apartment on the quai Malaquais. It had been a stop on Alix’s journey home from Switzerland to New York, and Alix had said very little but she knew the uncontrollable tremor in her hands had said much.

‘Show me around?’ she asked now, wishing to focus only on the new and the present.

‘Bien sûr, chérie.’

Suzanne linked her arm through Alix’s and they ascended the stairs. The older woman wore her typical uniform of black skirt and jacket which, combined with her statuesque build, seemed to act like armour, repelling all planks and paintbrushes. Alix, whose patience for suits had expired with the ration years of the war, wore a pair of cream and green tweed high-waisted, wide-legged trousers and a red silk blouse. Her only warning that she was about the meet the couture house’s namesake was Suzanne’s murmur, ‘I’ll make sure le patron forgives you for the trousers.’

Then Suzanne had vanished and Alix found herself standing in front of a man seated on the top step, sheaves of paper spread around him.

Le patron – Monsieur Christian Dior, Alix’s new employer. Her first impression was of an endearing roundness. His head was domed like the Invalides, his mouth a circle of concentration. He wore a white protective coat over ordinary trousers, shirt and tie. Nothing marked him as someone who understood the hearts and minds of women so well that he would be able to transfix them with his dresses. But Dior had worked with Lucien Lelong, President of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, and his prewar Café Anglais dress for Piguet had been one of the most talked about dresses that season. He had talent. And he obviously wasn’t averse to getting the work done in whatever space was available, given where he sat now.

‘You like the view from up here?’ she asked, indicating the curve of wrought-iron balustrading that stretched down to the construction chaos on the ground floor.

Monsieur Dior cast dismayed eyes over her trousers. Alix didn’t quail or apologise; she was too used to men’s judgements by now and had learned to withstand them – or at least to appear to.

‘I like the spaciousness,’ Dior said at last. ‘There isn’t enough room for my thoughts in the studio. Which you’ll see for yourself, soon enough.’

‘Will the staircase be my office too or is there a closet somewhere I can squeeze into?’ she said, risking a joke because maybe a man who worked on a staircase would be different to every other boss she’d worked with – besides Carmel Snow.

Le patron’s reply was such a rush of words that Alix wondered, nonplussed at the idea, if he was actually a little bashful. ‘You will need that sense of humour in the coming weeks,’ he said. ‘Especially when you learn that a fortune-teller convinced me to establish Maison Christian Dior. J’ai la frousse – I was going to pull out.’ He paused. ‘I suppose now you know I rely on fortune-tellers, you’ll return to New York.’

She was working for a man who not only didn’t need an office the same size as his ego, but who also consulted fortune-tellers. She grinned and sat down beside him. ‘The fortune-teller must have said something encouraging, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. So I think I’ll stay. Just to find out how accurate fortune-tellers are.’

Dior’s mouth lifted into a petite smile. ‘Despite your trousers, I like you, as Madame Luling said I would. But what will you say if I tell you I’ve scheduled the first showing of the House of Christian Dior for February twelve?’

Alix’s reply was blunt. ‘The American fashion editors always leave Paris before then – you know the shows are scheduled to finish the week prior. And if you want to be anything more than a specialist dressmaker with a few faithful clients then you need the American press.’

‘If that’s true,’ le patron said contemplatively, ‘then you will have to persuade the American fashion editors to stay on for my show.’

Which would be a task more difficult than convincing the American fashion editors to never drink champagne again.

By now, each would have booked their passage to Paris for late January, a journey that would have them departing France prior to 12 February. Alix would have to persuade them to ask their editors-in-chief to pay for several more days accommodation, as well as the cost of amending their transatlantic bookings – and all for the sake of an upstart who didn’t care about the inconvenience he was causing by showing so late in the season.

Except that Dior was neither upstart nor careless, she thought. She studied him with the same degree of shrewdness he was applying to her own countenance.

‘You chose to show late deliberately,’ she hypothesised. ‘Show when everyone else does and you risk being lost in the crowd or overlooked by exhausted editors. Show late and, on the one hand, you might be saying you’re a sight worth staying for but, on the other, that you’re an ignoramus or an egoist. It’s my job to foster everyone’s belief in the former. And if I can’t – well, then I’ll be the ignoramus and you’ll be the designer whose Directrice of the Service de la Presse failed to allow his talents to be discovered. It’s lucky I enjoy challenges.’

‘Suzanne said you did.’

‘Suzanne owes me a drink,’ Alix muttered.

But a challenge like this – cajoling every single American fashion editor to book an extra week in Paris to witness Dior’s first show – would take up all her time and energy, leaving her no unfilled hours for reflection. Which was just how she liked it, and why she’d come to Paris – to start anew, just like Maison Christian Dior. It made them kindred spirits.

So she nodded – as if there had ever been any chance of her doing otherwise given her purse now held only a few francs and she’d used all her savings to buy her third-class steamship ticket to get herself here.

‘Spend today settling in and meet me here tomorrow morning at ten and I will show you the studio,’ Dior said.

Perhaps it was because she’d never before had a boss who sat beside her on a step, but Alix couldn’t resist a parting jest – the kind of thing she might have said almost ten years ago when she was an exuberant eighteen-year-old. ‘I’ll be sure to wear my trousers again as I don’t think skirts and top steps are a very elegant combination.’

With her sixth sense for knowing everything, Suzanne reappeared to conduct Alix away, eyes twinkling in a manner that told Alix she’d eavesdropped on the entire conversation. They climbed more stairs and, once at the top, the sounds of busyness particular to a fashion house began to filter into Alix’s ears: the whisper of silk unfurling onto a worktable, the slicing of scissors into calico, the tinkle of pins spilled onto a floor.

‘The ateliers are in the attic,’ Suzanne said.

Alix took in the rolls of fabric crowding the landing, leaning towards the attic as if desperate to be permitted entry. The sounds she could hear emanated from there and in seconds she had bypassed the disappointed lengths of taffeta and found herself in a workroom so full of energy she could almost see ideas dancing in the air.

The petites mains – the seamstresses – sat lined up in rows on stools at school desks from beneath whose lids they extracted a thimble or a découd-vite or a pincushion. They worked elbow to elbow, heads bent over needles, fingers delicately manipulating fabric that entered their hands in a flat and lifeless state and exited having been transformed into a sleeve, a sash, a swirl awaiting a skirt.

‘This room is for the flou,’ Suzanne said. ‘The evening gowns in silk and chiffon and fine wool. Whereas this one,’ she walked through a doorway, ‘is for tailleur – the heavier fabrics for suits and daywear.’

Alix’s head swivelled from the bravura red of a bolt of silk-satin lounging on a worktable to the undulating silhouette of a half-finished gown standing theatrically to one side as if awaiting its cue. A ghostly collection of toiles lingered expectantly, ready for life to be breathed into them; indeed, there was an étincelle of magic in every corner. Alix’s disbelieving hand reached out to touch it all: the silk-satin, the sketches, the gowns – and her own awestruck smile.

By midnight, the tiny space off the entryway that Alix now inhabited – and that must once indeed have been a closet – resembled something more like an office. Suzanne’s half was as elegantly tidy and attenuated as its owner, despite housing an assistant, a dozen card indexes containing the telephone numbers of Paris’s style-makers, two telephones, an outfit to change into at day’s end, a bottle of brandy and several crystal tumblers. In contrast, Alix’s portion housed only one desk, two chairs, one bookshelf and no decorative objets whatsoever. It had been a satisfying day’s work clearing away a great deal of clutter.

Despite the late hour, there was still work to be done – but not at the maison. Alix and Suzanne walked along the sparkling Champs-Élysées, crossed through the too-quiet Place de la Concorde where the postwar automobile shortage was most apparent, then turned north towards the undiminished glamour of the Ritz, which had survived the war like a true diplomat, keeping all sides happy.

Along Temptation Walk, Alix ignored the glass display cases filled with expensive things she couldn’t afford, and smiled when they reached the Little Bar, which was discreet, and either tranquil or exuberant, as one’s mood required. Tonight, Alix wanted the exuberance: just one celebratory toast to herself for coming to Paris – her third chance to do everything right.

‘I’m buying,’ Alix told Suzanne, even though it would further deplete her tiny reserve of francs. ‘To thank you for the job.’

‘Then I will find us a seat,’ Suzanne replied, gesturing to a small table crammed tight with the Parisian editors and journalists Alix would need to charm into writing about the House of Christian Dior. ‘It’s always best to begin work proper at almost one in the morning and with a drink in hand.’

Alix laughed. ‘Maybe it is.’

Once Suzanne was safely out of earshot, she turned to Frank, the American barman.

He smiled at Alix. ‘Bonsoir, mademoiselle. It’s been a long time.’

‘It has.’

‘The usual?’

‘Yes, and a cognac for Suzanne.’

She watched him take out gin, sugar syrup and a lemon, flourish the cocktail shaker a few times, pour the concoction into a coupe and top it up with champagne. ‘Voilà,’ he said to her. ‘Un soixante-quinze.’

‘You have an excellent memory, Frank,’ she said with a smile.

‘It works well enough for the things that need to be remembered, but not so well for the things that don’t. Especially wartime things. And your drink’s on the house. Always will be.’

His reply was everything she needed to hear. Which meant she was ready to reacquaint herself with le tout-Paris.

She slid in beside Suzanne, whose talent had always been to know not just who everyone was but their individual stories as well. She gave Alix a useful and exact précis.

Many Alix knew already – Michel de Brunhoff from Vogue, fashion illustrator Christian Bérard – but there were some new faces amongst the British and Americans, two of whom were doing what they could to keep up international relations, if the man’s arm slung around the woman’s shoulder and the giggles of the woman were anything to go on.

‘That’s Becky Gordon,’ Suzanne said. ‘English. So brand new she squeaks. She’s with The Times – the goddaughter of someone or other who owns the newspaper. And looking as if he’s about to swallow Becky for his evening digestif is Anthony March, third and profligate son of Montgomery March – the American newspaper baron. Anthony, now that his two older brothers are buried somewhere in France, has had to curtail his amusements somewhat and actually work. He’s the editor of the international edition of the New York Journal and very louche and luscious, as you can see.’

Alix wrinkled her nose, watching Becky follow Anthony to the elevator. ‘He’s too . . .’ She searched for the right word to describe his handsome but deliberate air. ‘Contrived,’ she settled upon. ‘Like he thinks he’s about to be photographed.’

Across the room, Becky’s hand reached up to touch her hair, then her fingers worried at the cuff of her jacket.

‘She thinks she’s going to disappoint him,’ Alix guessed.

‘A man like that, she probably will.’

Alix wanted to take Becky by the arm and whisper a warning in her ear because, once upon a time, Alix had been as shiny-new as Becky. But there was no chance Becky would listen to Alix, a total stranger. So she said goodbye to Suzanne, leaving behind both her unfinished drink and the memory of a shiny-new girl who had had a lot to learn.

Outside, she saw a man leaning against the wall and smoking a cigarette as if he’d needed both the slap of the December night air and the solace of a solitary Gauloise. It was Anthony March, who couldn’t possibly have finished with Becky that quickly. Perhaps Becky had been wiser than she’d looked and had gone up to her own room instead.

That thought put the smile back on Alix’s face and soon she was at her tiny pension on Rue du Cirque where she sank into bed. She’d begun again – had sailed through a day and a night back in Europe, had consumed only one mouthful of champagne, and would be asleep in time to have around four hours rest, which she’d learned was enough.

Alix chose her clothes carefully for her meeting with Christian Dior the following day. No trousers, despite what she’d said. Instead, a Schiaparelli suit several years old that she’d bought from Carmel Snow, who used to sell her hardly worn couture to her ‘girls’ at Harper’s Bazaar for a price Alix could just afford. The suit was black, and had the requisite peplum and padded shoulders, but was accented with a red trompe l’oeil waistband. Schiaparelli had meant for it to be worn with red gloves and a red hat, but Alix knew that was de trop. She opted for black for both, and crossed her fingers girlishly behind her back.

Le patron’s forehead rumpled even more than it had yesterday when he saw her. ‘One of the premières will have to make you a suit so you don’t have to rely on my competition.’ Then he gave her one of his compact smiles.

Alix grinned. It was what she’d been hoping for, and his smile told her he’d guessed. Which meant she wouldn’t be able to use a trick like that again. But a girl on a minimum wage in a city like Paris – where inflation was higher than the Eiffel Tower – had to use every advantage at her disposal.

Dior led her through the rooms in the maison that she hadn’t seen the day before: the cabine where the mannequins would dress, the six petite fitting rooms for les femmes, or the clients – which was Suzanne’s domain as Directrice of Sales – and the studio, which was in direct competition with Alix’s own office for the smallest space in the building.

‘As you saw yesterday, the workrooms are small. The maison is small,’ Dior said as he ushered her inside. ‘Why? Because I want to practise the best traditions of couture, and to the highest standards. And to help me, I have the “three mothers”.’

At his words, three women entered.

‘This is Madame Raymonde,’ le patron said, indicating the severest of the group, a woman who had come with Dior from Lucien Lelong. She possessed the demeanour of a person who spoke little, but who was always pointedly accurate.

‘I don’t sew,’ Monsieur Dior explained. ‘But I need to sketch only what can, somehow, be made. Madame Raymonde,’ he smiled, ‘is Reason. She makes my imagination possible.’

He moved on to the next woman, Madame Bricard, who seemed to exhale seduction rather than air. With her leopard-print turban and a scarf of the same pattern tied at her wrist rather than her neck, she was the reason the word flamboyant had been invented.

‘Madame Bricard lives for elegance alone,’ Dior said. ‘She is my inspiration.’

The muse, then. Men seemed unable to exist without them – why should Dior be any different?

The final woman was Madame Carré, the house’s technical director. She passed le patron a sketch, which he placed in Alix’s hands.

The first thing she noticed was the line of the shoulders, soft sloping and seamless, curving gently over the body. It made her see that all the jackets women had been wearing – many of which had been reconfigured from men’s suits due to fabric rationing – had, over the past few years, made women look rectangular, sharp-cornered. But women weren’t. The bodice of the dress in the sketch didn’t change a woman’s shape; it revealed it.

‘I can almost feel it move,’ she said, running her hand over the glorious swell of the pencil-drawn skirt, shaped like the coupe she’d drunk from at the Ritz.

Madame Bricard, obviously not yet convinced of Alix’s credentials, enquired coolly, ‘Where would you wear it?’

‘Where wouldn’t I wear it? To the Ritz for a drink, to work, to dinner at La Méditerranée, or even to stroll through the Jardin du Luxembourg. Not that I’m one for strolling,’ Alix amended.

‘Everywhere one wishes to be elegant,’ Madame Bricard said succinctly. ‘Which is anywhere.’

Madame Carré spoke now. ‘Do you see how the skirt falls, like a . . .’

‘Coupe.’ Alix spoke her earlier thought.

Madame Carré laughed. ‘Just like a coupe. When I first saw the sketch, I thought it couldn’t be done. We’ve had to relearn old couture techniques that time has stolen from us. We’ve used the entire width of the roll of silk, from selvage to selvage, but running horizontally around the mannequin. The bowl of the coupe is shaped just so because, folded under at the waist, is all the pleating of a thirteen-and-a-half-yard seam allowance.’

Alix’s eyes widened as she understood that what she’d thought must be some sort of intricate system of petticoats to make the skirt achieve the wonderful fullness was nothing of the sort – it was from hidden padding that the dress blossomed into its extraordinary shape. Alix coveted this dress as she’d never before coveted anything in her life.

‘Suzanne calls it her dress. I’m told the seamstresses do the same,’ le patron said. ‘I’ve decided to call it Chérie. I heard Suzanne call you chérie yesterday. That means it’s your dress. But,’ he added, speaking sternly now, ‘not until after February twelve.’

It was impossible not to smile the same way she had yesterday in the atelier. Dior gestured to her face. ‘That’s why I do this,’ he said. ‘I hope to make women happy.’

The quick rush of tears to her eyes was so unexpected. Alix hadn’t known she could still cry, or that a couturier, of all people, would be the one to make her do it. But what man in the world wanted to make women happy? Men wanted so many things from women, Alix had learned in Switzerland during the war, and most of them aimed to steal away their happiness, not gift them joy. That was why she almost wept now, over a dress.

That night, Alix didn’t go to the Ritz. She returned to her pension, took out notepaper and pen and began to write.

To Lillie,

From Paris

I have so many thoughts flying around my head, like skirts in the wind. If I was back home, we’d go out for dinner and by the time we got to ice cream, everything would make sense. These letters will have to be a substitute.

I’ve only been at Dior for two days but I can already see how different it is to every other job I had in Manhattan after the war. There was the War Department, where I was supposed to make posters telling women to give up their jobs to the men returning from overseas – the women could just find husbands and be perfectly happy making roast dinners, they said. I never told you that was why I quit – you wanted to marry Peter so badly I worried you’d think I was critiquing your choice. Actually, I didn’t quit. I told my boss the only thing I planned to roast was him and he fired me. Carmel Snow offered me a job after that but I knew that daily proximity to martinis would be too tempting. I didn’t tell you that either.

So I took the job at Glamour, where I found out that negotiating with men for two and a half years of war had made me seem pushy – wilful and obdurate were the words they used. That was why I threw myself back into the world of men; I thought it was the only place I fitted. And I used my talent for obduracy every day at Goldman and Sachs, a world where women were meant to be either secretaries or wives – and I left it because my boss appeared in my office late at night with a bottle of brandy in hand and an unsubtle offer to make me a Between the Sheets. By then I was so tired of using all my wits to escape versions of that scene that I told him I had a gun in my purse and could shoot straighter than his pinstripes, and the only thing he’d be doing with his brandy would be pouring it over my contract and setting it on fire. Writing it down now, I can almost see the humour in it – but it wasn’t funny at the time. Another thing I never told you.

Here at Dior, nothing like that would ever happen. I’m wanted, Lillie. You have no idea how good that feels. And at last I have a goal that goes beyond surviving and forgetting. Dior is a genius. I’ve never seen a designer like him, whose pencil captures the divine. Just wait till you see his gowns. Suzanne believes he’ll blaze a trail. And I’m going to throw myself headlong into that fire.

Love and bisous,

Alix

Writing it down conjured it up, that night almost two weeks ago when Alix had decided at three in the morning to run away to Paris. She could see herself escaping her boss and returning to her apartment to be greeted by a newspaper proclaiming that the Nuremberg Trials of Major War Criminals were finally over and the judgements would be handed down within a fortnight.

And she’d known that in just a couple of weeks, justice would be served and that she should feel the guilt unclench itself, maybe even slip away. But it laced tighter still, as if telling her that even justice wouldn’t free her – which was something she hadn’t considered until then. No, justice was supposed to end it all.

So she’d met Carmel Snow at the Colony Club and tried to match her drink for drink. But Carmel’s sorrow must have been more resistant to martinis than Alix’s and the night had ended with Carmel wrapping liquid fingers around Alix’s wrist and introducing her to someone as ‘my protégé’. And Alix had seen, through a spinning haze of gin, how easily she could become just like Carmel. Numb enough not to feel her heart ache. For one moment, she’d been so very tempted to let it happen.

Which was the worst thing of all.

She’d hurtled back to her apartment and re-read Suzanne’s telegram and discovered she had just enough of her meagre salary saved to afford a steamship ticket. She’d been at the dock the very next day.

But she couldn’t tell Lillie any of that, didn’t want to relive that tantalising moment of wanting to succumb to insensibility – didn’t want Lillie to be as ashamed of Alix as Alix had been of herself.