The Dressmaker's War Read online

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  APRIL, BLACK RAIN fell in torrents and drummed on the slate roofs of Dover Street. Scooped from the oceans and let loose from the heavens, it thundered down to earth and soaked deep into the cracks between the paving, fell in dark rivers along the gutters, eddied in dips in the pavements and in the areas of the tall, stuccoed houses. It splattered off the umbrellas and somber hats of the pedestrians and soaked the trouser legs below the raincoats. It seeped into the leather of the shoes.

  Ada reached for her coat, a soft camel with a tie belt, and her umbrella. She’d have to bite the bullet today, turn left right away, pick up the number 12 in Haymarket.

  “Good night, madame,” she said to Mrs. B. She stood under the doorframe, then set out into the sodden street. She walked towards Piccadilly, looking down, sidestepping the puddles. A gust of wind caught her umbrella and turned it inside out, whipped the sides of her coat so they billowed free, and snatched her hair in sopping tentacles. She pulled at the twisted metal spokes.

  “Allow me, please,” a man’s voice said as a large umbrella positioned itself above her head. She turned round, almost brushed the man’s face, an instant too close but long enough for Ada to know. His face was slim, punctuated by a narrow, clipped mustache. He wore small, round glasses, and behind them his eyes were soft and pale. Duck egg blue, Ada thought, airy enough to see through. They chilled and stirred her. He stepped back.

  “I apologize,” he said. “I was only trying to protect you. Here, you hold this.” He passed over his umbrella and took hold of hers with his free hand. He sounded continental, Ada thought, a sophisticated clip to his accent. She watched as he bent it back into shape.

  “Not quite as good as new,” he said. “But it will take care of you today. Where do you live? Do you have far to go?”

  She started to answer, but the words tangled in her mouth. Lambeth. Lambeth.

  “No,” she said. “Thank you. I’ll get the bus.”

  “Let me walk you to the stop.”

  She wanted to say yes, but she was frightened he’d press her on where she lived. The number 12 went to Dulwich. That was all right. She could say Dulwich, it was respectable enough.

  “You’re hesitating,” he said. His eyes creased in a smile. “Your mother told you never to go with strange men.”

  She was grateful for the excuse. His accent was formal. She couldn’t place it.

  “I have a better idea,” he went on. “I’m sure your mother would approve of this.” He pointed over the road. “Would you care to join me, miss? Tea at the Ritz. Couldn’t be more English.”

  What would be the harm in that? If he was up to no good, he wouldn’t waste money at the Ritz. Probably a week’s wages. And it was in public, after all.

  “I am inviting you,” he said. “Please accept.”

  He was polite, well mannered.

  “And the rain will stop in the meantime.”

  Ada gathered her senses. “Will? Will it? How do you know?”

  “Because,” he said, “I command it to.” He shut his eyes, stretched his free arm up above his head, raising his umbrella, and clenched and opened his fist three times.

  “Ein, zwei, drei.”

  Ada didn’t understand a word but knew they were foreign. “Dry?” she said.

  “Oh, very good,” he said. “I like that. So do you accept?”

  He was charming. Whimsical. She liked that word. It made her feel light and carefree. It was a diaphanous word, like a chiffon veil.

  Why not? None of the boys she knew would ever dream of asking her to the Ritz.

  “Thank you. I would enjoy that.”

  He took her elbow and guided her across the road, through the starlit arches of the Ritz, into the lobby with its crystal chandeliers and porcelain jardinières. She wanted to pause and look, take it all in, but he was walking her fast along the gallery. She could feel her feet floating along the red carpet, past vast windows festooned and ruched in velvet, through marble columns, and into a room of mirrors and fountains and gilded curves.

  She had never seen anything so vast, so rich, so shiny. She smiled, as if this was something she was used to every day.

  “May I take your coat?” A waiter in a black suit with a white apron had appeared.

  “It’s all right,” Ada said, “I’ll keep it. It’s a bit wet.”

  “Are you sure?” he said. A sticky ring of heat began to creep up her neck, and Ada knew she had blundered. In this world, you handed your clothes to valets and flunkies and maids.

  “No”—the words tripped out—“you’re right. Please take it. Thank you.” She wanted to say, Don’t lose it; the man in Berwick Street market said it was real camel hair, though Ada’d had her doubts. She shrugged the coat off her shoulders, aware that the waiter in the apron was peeling it from her arms and draping it over his. Aware, too, that the nudge of her shoulders had been slow and graceful.

  “What is your name?” the man asked.

  “Ada. Ada Vaughan. And yours?”

  “Stanislaus,” he said. “Stanislaus von Lieben.”

  A foreigner. She’d never met one. It was—she struggled for the word—exotic.

  “And where does that name come from, when it’s at home?”

  “Hungary,” he said. “Austria-Hungary. When it was an empire.”

  Ada had only ever heard of two empires, the British one that oppressed the natives and the Roman one that killed Christ. It was news to her that there were more.

  “I don’t tell many people this,” he said, leaning towards her. “In my own country, I am a count.”

  “Oh my goodness.” Ada couldn’t help it. A count. “Are you really? With a castle, and all?” She heard how common she sounded. Maybe he wouldn’t notice, being a foreigner.

  “No.” He smiled. “Not every count lives in a castle. Some of us live in more modest circumstances.”

  His suit, Ada could tell, was expensive. Wool. Super 200s, she wouldn’t be surprised. Gray. Well tailored. Discreet.

  “What language were you talking, earlier, in the street?”

  “My mother tongue,” he said. “German.”

  “German?” Ada swallowed. Not all Germans are bad, she could hear her father say. Rosa Luxemburg. A martyr. And those who were standing up to Hitler. Still, Dad wouldn’t like a German speaker in the house. Stop it, Ada. She was getting ahead of herself.

  “And you?” he said. “What were you doing in Dover Street?”

  Ada wondered for a moment whether she could say she was visiting her dressmaker, but then thought better of it.

  “I work there,” she said.

  “How very independent,” he said. “And what do you work at?”

  She didn’t like to say she was a tailoress, even if it was bespoke, ladies. Couldn’t claim to be a modiste, like Madame Duchamps, not yet. She said the next best thing.

  “I’m a mannequin, actually.” She wanted to add, An artiste.

  He leant back in the chair. She was aware of how his eyes roamed over her body, as if she was a landscape to be admired, or lost in.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course.” He pulled out a gold cigarette case from his inside pocket, opened it, and leant forward to Ada. “Would you like a cigarette?”

  She didn’t smoke. She wasn’t sophisticated like that. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to take one and end up choking. That would be too humiliating. Tea at the Ritz was full of pitfalls, full of reminders of how far she had to go.

  “Not just now, thank you,” she said.

  He tapped the cigarette on the case before he lit it. She heard him inhale and watched as the smoke furled from his nostrils. She would like to be able to do that.

  “And where are you a mannequin?”

  Ada was back on safer ground. “At Madame Duchamps’s.”

  “Madame Duchamps. Of course.”

  “You know her?”

  “My great-aunt used to be a customer of hers. She died last year. Perhaps you
knew her?”

  “I haven’t been there very long,” she said. “What was her name?”

  Stanislaus laughed, and Ada noticed he had a glint of gold in his mouth. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “She was married so many times, I couldn’t keep up.”

  “Perhaps that’s what killed her,” she said. “All that marrying.”

  It would, if her parents were anything to go by. She knew what they would think of Stanislaus and his great-aunt. Morals of a hyena. That was Germany for you. But Ada was intrigued by the idea. A woman, a loose woman. She could smell her perfumed body, see her languid gestures as her body shimmied close and purred for affection.

  “You’re funny,” Stanislaus said. “I like that.”

  —

  IT HAD STOPPED raining by the time they left, but it was dark.

  “I should escort you home,” he said.

  “There’s no need, really.”

  “It’s the least a gentleman can do.”

  “Another time,” she said, realizing how forward that sounded. “I didn’t mean that. I mean, I have to go somewhere else. I’m not going straight home.”

  She hoped he wouldn’t follow her.

  “Another time it is,” he said. “Do you like cocktails, Ada Vaughan? Because the Café Royal is just round the corner and is my favorite place.”

  Cocktails. Ada swallowed. She was out of her depth. But she’d learn to swim, she’d pick it up fast.

  “Thank you,” she said, “and thank you for tea.”

  “I know where you work,” he said. “I will drop you a line.”

  He clicked his heels, lifted his hat, and turned. She watched as he walked back down Piccadilly. She’d tell her parents she was working late.

  MARTINIS, PINK LADIES, mint juleps. Ada grew to be at ease in the Café Royal, and the Savoy, Smith’s, and the Ritz. She bought rayon in the market at trade price and made herself some dresses after work at Mrs. B.’s. Cut on the bias, the cheap synthetic fabrics emerged like butterflies from a chrysalis and hugged Ada into evening elegance. Long gloves and a cocktail hat. Ada graced the chicest establishments with confidence.

  “Swept you off your feet, he has,” Mrs. B. would say each Friday as Ada left work to meet Stanislaus. Mrs. B. didn’t like gentlemen calling at her shop in case it gave her a bad name, but she saw that Stanislaus dressed well and had class, even if it was foreign class. “So be careful.”

  Ada twisted rings from silver paper and paraded her left hand in front of the mirror when no one was looking. She saw herself as Stanislaus’s wife, Ada von Lieben. Count and Countess von Lieben. “I hope his intentions are honorable,” Mrs. B. had said. “Because I’ve never known a gentleman smitten so fast.”

  Ada just laughed.

  “WHO IS HE then?” her mother said. “If he was a decent fellow, he’d want to meet your father and me.”

  “I’m late, Mum,” Ada said. Her mother blocked the hallway, stood in the middle of the passage. She wore Dad’s old socks rolled down to her ankles, and her shabby apron was stained in front.

  “Bad enough you come home in no fit state on a Friday night, but now you’ve taken up going out in the middle of the week. Whatever next?”

  “Why shouldn’t I go out of an evening?”

  “You’ll get a name,” her mother said. “That’s why. He’d better not try anything on. No man wants secondhand goods.” Her mouth set in a scornful line. She nodded as if she knew the world and all its sinful ways.

  You know nothing, Ada thought.

  “For goodness’ sake,” she said. “He’s not like that.”

  “Then why don’t you bring him home? Let your father and me be the judge of that.”

  He’d never have set foot inside a two-up, two-down terrace that rattled when the trains went by, with a scullery tagged on the back and an outside privy. He wouldn’t understand that she had to sleep in the same bed with her sisters, while her brothers lay on mattresses on the floor, the other side of the dividing curtain Dad had rigged up. He wouldn’t know what to do with all those kids running about. Her mother kept the house clean enough, but sooty grouts clung to the nets and coated the furniture, and sometimes in the summer the bugs were so bad they all had to sit outside in the street.

  Ada couldn’t picture him here, not ever.

  “I have to go,” she said. “Mrs. B. will dock my wages.”

  Her mother snorted. “If you’d come in at a respectable time,” she said, “you wouldn’t be in this state now.”

  Ada pushed past her, out into the street.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” her mother yelled for all the neighbors to hear.

  —

  SHE HAD TO run to the bus stop, caught the number 12 by the skin of her teeth. She’d had no time for breakfast and her head ached. Mrs. B. would wonder what had happened. Ada had never been late for work before, never taken time off. She rushed along Piccadilly. The June day was already hot. It would be another scorcher. Mrs. B. should get a fan, cool the shop down so they weren’t all picking pins with sticky fingers.

  “Tell her, Ada,” one of the other girls said. Poisonous little cow called Avril, common as a brown penny. “We’re all sweating like pigs.”

  “Pigs sweat,” Ada had said. “Gentlemen perspire. Ladies glow.”

  “Get you,” Avril said, sticking her finger under her nose.

  Avril could be as catty as she liked. Ada didn’t care. Jealous, most likely. Never trust a woman, her mother used to say. Well, her mother was right on that one. Ada had never found a woman she could call her best friend.

  The clock at Fortnum’s began to strike the quarter hour and Ada started to run, but a figure walked out, blocking her way.

  “Thought you were never coming.” Stanislaus straddled the pavement in front of her, arms stretched wide like the wings of an angel. “I was about to leave.”

  She let out a cry, a puppy whine of surprise. He’d come to meet her, before work. She knew she was blushing, heat prickling her cheeks. She fanned her hand across her face, thankful for the cool air. “I’m late for work,” she said. “I can’t chat.”

  “I thought you could take the day off,” he said. “Pretend you’re sick or something.”

  “I’d lose my job if she ever found out.”

  “Get another,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. Stanislaus had never had to work, couldn’t understand how hard she’d struggled to get where she was. Ada Vaughan, from Lambeth, working with a modiste, in Mayfair. “How will she find out?”

  He stepped forward and, cupping her chin in his hand, brushed his lips against hers. His touch was delicate as a feather, his fingers warm and dry round her face. She leant towards him, couldn’t help it, as if he was a magnet and she his dainty filings.

  “It’s a lovely day, Ada. Too nice to be cooped up inside. You need to live a little. That’s what I always say.” She smelled cologne on his cheeks, tart, like lingering lemon. “You’re late already. Why bother going in now?”

  Mrs. B. was a stickler. Ten minutes and she’d dock half a day’s wages. Ada couldn’t afford to lose that much money. There was a picnic basket on the pavement beside Stanislaus. He’d got it all planned.

  “Where had you in mind?”

  “Richmond Park,” he said. “Make a day of it.”

  The whole day. Just the two of them.

  “What would I say to her?” Ada said.

  “Wisdom teeth,” Stanislaus said. “That’s always a good one. That’s why there are so many dentists in Vienna.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “It’s a toff’s complaint.”

  She’d have to remember that. Toffs had wisdom teeth. Somebodies had wisdom teeth.

  “Well.” She hesitated. She’d lost half a day’s wages already. “All right then.” Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

  “That’s my Ada.” He picked up the picnic basket with one hand, put his other round her waist.

  —
>
  SHE’D NEVER BEEN to Richmond Park, but she couldn’t tell him that. He was sophisticated, traveled. He could have had his pick of women—well-bred, upper-class women, women like the debutantes whom she clothed and flattered and who kept Mrs. B. in business. Ahead of her the park gates rose in ornate spears. Below, the river curled through lush green woods to where the distant, dusty downs of Berkshire merged into slabs of pearl and silver against the sky. The sun was already high, its warm rays embracing her as if she was the only person in the world, the only one who mattered.

  They entered the park. London was spread before them, St. Paul’s and the City cast in hazy silhouette. The ground was dry, the paths cracked and uneven. Ancient oaks with blasted trunks and chestnuts with drooping catkins rose like forts from the tufted grassland and fresh, spiky bracken. The air was filled with a sweet, cloying scent. Ada crinkled her nose.

  “That’s the smell of trees making love,” Stanislaus said.

  Ada put her hand to her mouth. Making love. No one she knew talked about that sort of thing. Maybe her mother was right. He’d brought her here for a purpose. He was fast. He laughed.

  “You didn’t know that, did you? Chestnuts have male and female flowers. I guess it’s the female that gives off the smell. What do you think?”

  Ada shrugged. Best ignore it.

  “I like chestnuts,” he went on. “Hot chestnuts on a cold winter’s day. Nothing like them.”

  “Yes.” She was on safe ground. “I like them, too. Conkers, and all.”

  And all. Common.

  “Different sort of chestnut,” he said.

  How was Ada to know? There was so much to learn. Had he noticed how ignorant she was? He didn’t show it. A gentleman.

  “We’ll stop here, by the pond.” He put down the hamper and pulled out a cloth, flicking it so it filled with air like a flying swan, before falling to the earth. If she’d known she was going to have to sit on the ground, she’d have worn her sundress with the full skirt, enough to tuck round so she didn’t show anything. She lowered herself, pulled her knees together, bent them to the side, and tugged her dress down as best she could.

  “Very ladylike,” Stanislaus said. “But that’s what you are, Ada, a real lady.” He poured two beakers of ginger beer, passed one to her, and sat down. “A lovely lady.”