The Designer(66)

‘I don’t see her,’ Dior said wretchedly, trying to peer through the fog. ‘She’s not there!’

‘She must be,’ Copper said, squeezing his hand. In his agitation, he had crushed the roses. She had brought her camera to record the great moment. She checked it now, making sure the film had been advanced and the shutter cocked.

After a wretched hour, the first arrivals had been processed and had started to make their way along the platform with their relatives. The crowd, which had been noisy, even belligerent, fell silent now, staring at the revenants. Who were these phantoms who shuffled in scarecrow clothes many sizes too big for them, and stared ahead with unseeing eyes set in dark hollows? Who did not speak, or who croaked with voices like rusty tin? A man uttered an exclamation of pity and disgust, and a woman burst into loud sobs.

There was not a sound on the platform now apart from the steady hissing of steam and the clank of cooling metal. The voices of the Red Cross officers could be heard calling out names.

‘Dior! Mademoiselle Catherine Dior!’

‘Here! I am her brother.’ Dior ran forward. But the figure that waited for him between two helpers hardly seemed like a woman at all. The gaunt skull was hairless; the body, like a winter tree, thin and frail. She held a little suitcase in one hand. With the other, she reached out to her brother, her lips stretching in the caricature of a smile.

‘Christian!’

Dior was weeping helplessly. He had dropped the bouquet of roses. They were trampled underfoot, unnoticed. Copper had forgotten to use her camera; it swung uselessly as they took charge of Catherine. Copper reached to take Catherine’s little suitcase.

‘Oh, thank you. But I am stronger than I look.’ A label with her name written on it had been fastened to Catherine’s coat. The photographs Copper had seen had shown a fresh-faced, pretty woman with a mass of curly hair. Nothing remained of that prettiness now; and only the beaky nose that was so like Dior’s bore out the name on the label. ‘Don’t worry about me, Tian. I’m sorry I’m so ugly. My hair will grow again.’

‘You are beautiful,’ Dior sobbed.

‘I told them nothing, you know,’ Catherine said, as they made their way through the staring crowd. Like the other survivors, she walked in a slow shuffle, her legs apparently barely able to support her. She was in her twenties but she seemed like an old woman. ‘They hurt me, but I told them nothing. You must tell everybody that. Even if they don’t ask you. Tell them I remained silent. I betrayed no one.’

‘Don’t worry about such things now,’ Dior replied. ‘Nobody will dare accuse you.’

Copper could feel that Catherine’s cardboard suitcase was very light. There obviously wasn’t much in it. ‘Do you have clothes?’ she asked.

‘Only what the Red Cross gave me. Nothing fits, but at least I was warm. They told me to bring my clothes to Ravensbrück when I was arrested, but they took everything away from us the day we arrived. And the Russians burned our prison clothes because they were full of lice. I would like to have kept them. I grew attached to them.’

Why hadn’t it occurred to either of them that Catherine would have nothing to wear? ‘I’ll bring you some of mine,’ Copper promised. ‘I’m about the same height as you.’ She forbore to add that Catherine was several sizes thinner.

‘Well,’ Catherine said, perhaps catching Copper’s thought. ‘This is what a year as the guest of the Germans did to me. Don’t cry, Tian. I’m much stronger than I look, I promise you.’

She kept repeating this phrase during the drive to the rue Royale. Dior had himself under control now and was kissing his sister’s hand again and again on the back seat. She stared out of the window with hollow eyes. ‘My God. How wonderful to see Paris again. It’s like a dream.’ She gave a little, uncertain laugh. ‘I’m not dreaming, am I?’

‘No, chérie, you’re not dreaming.’

She saw a kiosk. ‘Oh, can we buy a newspaper? We heard nothing about the war for months, only what people whispered.’

They stopped to buy a copy of Le Monde for Catherine. She did not try to read it, but pressed the newspaper to her face, inhaling the scent of newsprint and ink luxuriously. ‘This is what freedom smells like.’

Dior was talking cheerfully. But because she knew him so well by now, Copper could see how shocked he was by Catherine’s appearance. It wasn’t only her emaciated state; there was something brittle about her. She was trying hard to be bright, but beneath that was exhaustion and desolation. She was struggling to hold herself together, as though she didn’t know what would happen if she allowed herself to relax; as though she didn’t know how to be herself anymore.

Copper rushed home and selected some of her clothes for Catherine. Her wardrobe had swelled with Suzy’s generosity and she had spares. Some pretty underthings might be welcomed, she thought, and jerseys for that wasted frame, which must surely feel the chill. And a hat for that poor, naked head.

When she returned, Dior was in the kitchen, busy with the soufflé. Catherine sat at the window in a shawl, looking out over the rooftops. She turned with that crippled smile to look at Copper. ‘It’s so good to see the rooftops of Paris again. One grew so weary of the barbed wire and the distant trees one could never reach.’

‘I brought you some clothes.’ Copper held out the offerings. ‘Please help yourself to whatever you think you can use.’