The Designer(65)

The news had come from the Red Cross. The prison where Catherine had been held had been liberated by the Russians. A pitiful handful of survivors had been found. The rest had been massacred by the SS, starved or frozen to death. But Catherine, as Madame Delahaye had always predicted, had survived. She was one of the first to be sent home. She would be on a refugee train arriving the following morning at the Gare de l’Est.

All this Dior told her in a state of trembling excitement as they left the apartment together. ‘We must prepare her room,’ he said. ‘And eggs. We need eggs!’

‘Why eggs?’ Copper asked, half-laughing at his earnestness.

‘To make her a cheese soufflé. It’s her favourite dish; she will expect it. And they say she is thin. We’ll need to feed her up. A cheese soufflé is the most nourishing of dishes, you know. We always had it when we were sick as children.’

‘All right, we’ll find some eggs.’

‘And flowers. We need flowers!’

They raced around Paris. Eggs, butter and milk were still scarce in the city. Only a few shops could obtain them, and there were long queues at all of these. They waited in line at two, Dior beside himself with anxiety and frustration, only to be told after an interminable procession to the counter that none were available.

At the third, however, they struck lucky, and were able to buy six precious eggs and a pat of butter; and at the fourth, a small jug of milk and a piece of cheese just big enough to make a soufflé.

‘She was right,’ Dior kept repeating. ‘Delahaye was right. They all tried to tell me Catherine was dead. But Delahaye knew. She knew. I’m going to cover that woman with gold.’

At the market on the ?le de la Cité, under the shadow of Notre-Dame, they found spring flowers for sale.

‘Those won’t all fit in her room,’ Copper warned Dior, who had gathered armfuls.

‘Then we’ll put them all around the apartment,’ he replied, barely visible behind the bouquets. She was half-expecting him to buy one of the little birds that were also on sale, hopping and chirping anxiously in tiny cages.

Together, they prepared Catherine’s room. Dior lit the stove to start warming up the air. Copper prepared the bed, making it as pretty and warm as she could. There were not enough vases for all the flowers Dior had bought, so he had to run downstairs to his neighbour to borrow a couple more. He kept bursting out laughing with sheer joy, or exclaiming aloud. It was indeed a miracle. As the full horror of the Nazi extermination machine had been revealed to the world, it had seemed less and less likely that Catherine could possibly have survived. After all, millions, as they now knew, had died, either killed out of hand or worked to death in the appalling conditions of the camps.

‘I am trying to find Hervé, her fiancé. He must be told she’s coming back. Oh, I won’t be able to sleep tonight,’ Dior said, when the place was finally to his satisfaction. ‘How will I close my eyes?’

‘You must try,’ Copper said gently.

In the event, it was she who could not sleep, imagining the joy of the reunion to come the next day. Dior had passed a year of the utmost anxiety since Catherine’s arrest; and what Catherine had passed through, God alone knew. The little clairvoyant had been right, after all, however. Catherine Dior was alive. And that was all that mattered.





Eleven

The Red Cross train was due in at nine in the morning, having set off from Germany the previous day. The Gare de l’Est, like all Paris stations these days, was crowded with troops and civilians passing through Paris from all parts of Europe. It was a rainy day and a dim light filtered through the vast barrel roof of steel girders and dirty glass, barely reaching the depths of the echoing station below, where crowds heaved to and fro in abysmal confusion.

Dior was in a pitiable state, trembling with nerves and filled with apprehensions. ‘What if she has missed her train?’ he kept asking. ‘What if she was taken ill? What if we miss her in this dreadful mob?’ He was carrying a bouquet of roses, which in his agitation he was almost crushing against his chest. ‘What if—’

‘None of those things will happen,’ Copper said, determinedly steering him towards the right platform. ‘Look where you are going, Tian!’ He had almost been run down by a porter pushing a trolley piled six feet high with trunks.

The train was late. They waited among a group of people in a similar state of anxiety to their own, seething around the group of Red Cross officials who were obliged to keep repeating that yes, the train was coming, that yes, delays were normal in these times, and that no, nobody had been left behind. Now and then, someone would dart to the very edge of the platform in order to peer down the line and be chased back by an elderly stationmaster.

At last, approaching mid-morning, a singing of the steel tracks announced that a train was coming. A cheer went up. The train trudged with painful slowness into the station, as though the journey had been too much for it and its wheels were hurting. It came to a halt at last. Clouds of steam, released from the boiler, poured from the locomotive, condensing on everything. Dior was clutching Copper’s hand as the doors began to clatter open and figures, dimly visible in the billowing steam, emerged from the compartments.

The Red Cross officials had erected a barrier to keep the crowds away from the passengers. This arrangement was causing much anger. People were calling to their relatives and trying to reach those they could recognise. The officials were steadfast. The refugees were to be released to their families one by one, their names ticked off on lists.