The Last Dress from Paris(71)
“How did you . . .”
“Well, I didn’t know at all, until just a few moments ago when you shared the name your grandmother used to go by. We now know that she was Alice and not Sylvie when she lived in Paris. She was very close to my maman, who, at that time, worked at the British embassy, so I just put those two pieces of information together, and here we are.”
We both lean over the computer screen, and my eyes flicker across every image, back and forth, unable to comprehend quite how beautiful, how refined she looks, the setting so wildly different from the one she inhabits today. Veronique leans closer, studying the screen more intently.
“Why are there so many images of her?” I ask, overjoyed that there are, that technology has allowed me to step back into a life that has eluded me until now.
Veronique sits back in her chair, silent just long enough for me to feel a prickle of concern.
“Perhaps because she was married to someone very important at the time.”
“Sorry?” I really need to stop drinking in the middle of the day—it is seriously hampering my ability to grasp plot twists that seem so clear to Veronique.
“Look at some of the picture captions. Alice Ainsley, and according to this, the wife to the British ambassador to France, Albert Ainsley.”
My mouth drops open, my brain refusing to accept what I am hearing. “She couldn’t have been.” I pull the laptop closer to me and scan the words Veronique has read for myself. “It must be wrong. The internet is full of inaccuracies. What site are we even on?”
“They all say the same, Lucille. Look. A lot of these images are from official government sites, both British and French. I don’t think it’s wrong.”
“Are you telling me my grandmother was some sort of diplomat? That she was married to another man before my grandfather?” While I’m saying that aloud, I look back at the screen, running the cursor up and down, allowing my eyes to skate back across every image again, still not quite believing what I am seeing. One man is present throughout.
A man who is decidedly not the grandfather I grew up with.
“I guess this is Albert?” I point to a giant of a man with noticeably large hands and who, despite the regularity of his appearance, does not seem to fit with my granny at all. If you didn’t know they were married, you would never guess it. They are the opposite of the image of Veronique and her mother. They don’t work together. There is no intimacy. I’m struggling, in fact, to find a shared smile. He dwarfs rather than complements her, and in some of the images, he rudely angles his back to her, cutting her out of an introduction or conversation.
“Yes, it looks like it. In her position, she would have lived at the official residence—the H?tel de Charost on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré—just around the corner from where you have been staying in Paris, in fact.” She points to an image of the building on her screen. “It was right under our noses all along.”
I slump back into the seat and help myself to another mouthful of fizz. “I saw that building, Veronique! The taxi to the station took me past the embassy buildings. I saw where she lived; that must be the location of dresses number one and seven, the Cygne Noir she wore at home and the Mexico she wore in the garden. It must have been there, at the embassy residence. What was it the later note said?”
Veronique beats me to it: “?‘I can make all this go away.’?”
My mind is racing. Granny was also having a love affair with a man I now know was called Antoine. Her marriage to Albert obviously didn’t last, it couldn’t have, because she married my grandfather—a man who feels a very, very long way from this story. The fact she married him is indisputable, but my belief that he is my grandfather . . .
I feel the moisture inside my mouth evaporate. “We’ve tracked them all. What happened behind those giant black doors I saw this morning?”
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel good.” She’s still scanning through pages, pulling information off the sites.
“You’ll have to take some time to read through it all, Lucille, but from what I can see, the story goes frustratingly cold in the winter of 1953, which is when I assume she must have left the embassy. Look, her departure seems to coincide with Albert being posted to America in the new year, and I suppose that would have been the focus of all the interest at the time. Not what happened to Alice. Why would it? She was only his wife, which probably didn’t count for a great deal in the fifties.”
I’m not sure either of us knows quite how to feel. Elated that there are solid answers, finally? Or slightly rocked by the significance of Granny’s former life and what it might mean?
I pause for a moment to take it all in, allowing the view outside the window to flash past while my own mind skids back over the lost years, searching for clues. Has Granny ever mentioned the embassy in Paris or an Albert? I don’t think so. She said my grandfather was the only person she confided in, and he took it all to the grave with him. My own thoughts are frustratingly muddled by the realization that it has once again taken Veronique’s intervention to piece this story together. I’ve hardly been the roving reporter, too distracted by Leon to allow myself the headspace to move these nuggets of information into position so I can see them all from above—the connection of nearly all the dots that are starting to shape Granny’s story for me.