The Last Dress from Paris(21)
“I’m about to close,” he says in perfect English, immediately identifying me as a non-native. He picks up a set of keys and turns off a light in the back room.
“Sorry, I thought you closed at noon?” I offer, trying to smile through such an unfriendly welcome.
“We do. You have six minutes, and it will take me that long to close up.”
He’s much younger than I’m expecting and looks almost as out of place here as I do, in his low-slung jeans and a Rolling Stones T-shirt, a camera swinging from his neck like some sort of style statement, me looking like Annie Hall in wide-leg cream trousers and an oversize Dad blazer that should have taken me to California or New York City, not this forgotten, dusty corner of Paris.
“This is a real long shot, but I am looking for a particular dress.”
He’s got his back to me now, bending down behind the counter to reach his backpack. He doesn’t respond, so I plow on.
“It’s not for me. It’s a dress that used to belong to my grandmother, and I think it may have been brought here some time ago.”
“How long ago?”
“I think back in the fifties.”
He looks at his watch, huffs, slides his bag off his shoulder, and dumps it onto the counter.
“My grandfather, who owns this shop, was a meticulously organized man. If it came in, he would have recorded it. Whether it is still here now is a different matter, but . . . what’s your grandmother’s name, and can you be more specific about the date?”
“It’s Sylvie Lord, and I think it would have been early fifties, but I can’t be sure.”
“I’m definitely going to need more details if I can help you. Otherwise we’ll be here all year, and . . .” He glances at his watch again. “You’re out of time today. Was it definitely your grandmother who brought the dress in?”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t! It was a friend of hers.” Only now am I realizing I don’t actually know Veronique’s mother’s name. “Her daughter is Veronique . . .” I’m waving a hand around, trying to insinuate the mother’s name will come to me at any moment, when I know full well it won’t.
“But it wasn’t the daughter who brought the dress in?”
“No.”
“So, we don’t have a date and we don’t have a name?” His eyes are over my shoulder on the door of the shop, clearly desperate to be heading out if it.
I place my hands on the counter, keeping my eyes fixed on him.
“Please, I’m not in Paris for long and I have to find this dress. It means so much to my grandmother and I promised her I would bring it back. It’s a Dior dress, if that helps?”
“Dior?”
“Yes. It had a name, hang on . . .” I rest my forehead in the palm of my hand and close my eyes, willing my brain to reach back inside itself and extract this one vital piece of information that might convince him to be helpful. That’s all I will ask of it today; come on, think, think. “The Maxim’s, that was it!” I triumphantly fling my arms in the air, as if to prove I haven’t made this whole thing up.
“Never heard of it, and I have to go. I’m late. We’re open again on Monday morning. Come back with some information that might actually help us trace it, and maybe we can have another go.”
I can see from the dismissive look on his face that he doesn’t expect to ever see me again.
“I’m not sure I’ll even still be here on Monday, but please, here’s my number.” I scrawl it on an old receipt pulled from the depths of my bag and place it on the counter, where it stays, because he’s already at the door. “Just in case you remember anything that might help.” Then I’m back on the pavement, and I watch as he throws a leg over his moped, yanks on his helmet, and speeds off without even the briefest look back at me.
What would Granny think if she could see me now? Incapable of holding a man’s attention long enough to convince him to help me. Not in possession of even the basic information to piece all this together. An hour’s painful walk back to the hotel ahead of me and pinning all my hopes on an old lady who once modeled for Dior and, with my luck, probably won’t remember the first thing about those days or how they might be relevant to this increasingly wild goose chase.
* * *
? ? ?
Nancy, unlike Mr. Friendly at Bettina, has got all the time in the world for me. I find her sat at a shiny wooden table in the bookshop, sipping a cappuccino. But as soon as I explain myself, she is up, out of her chair at a speed that belies her age, pulling books from the shelves and turning straight to the pages that feature her younger self—one gliding down stone steps as her long black woolen skirt flares out around her and another with her hips pushed forward, a white-gloved hand resting on the glossy black belt at her waist. Then she talks me through the couture dressmaking process in the richest detail, enlightening and confusing me in equal measure.
“Every piece of a new collection was made as a toile with a plain white cotton to gauge the cut, the line, and the shape. The seamstresses would pin the fabric to a dummy first to make sure the engineering was right.” She’s illustrating all this by pointing to the relevant photographs in the books, completely ignoring the queue of customers that have started to fill the room.