Her mother raised a shaking hand as if to stop her speaking. ‘The past is the past. You have no right.’
‘But Maman, you lied. All these years you lied. How did my English father feel about it? How? And how could you do that to him if you didn’t love Friedrich?’
‘That is enough! You will not speak of this. You will never speak of this again!’ Claudette’s voice was harsh as she spoke through gritted teeth and then delivered such a flood of angry bitter words in French that Florence burst into tears.
‘Stop it. Stop it. Don’t speak like that. Please don’t speak like that.’
Claudette raised a hand as if to strike her. Florence recoiled, stepping back and stumbling at the rage distorting her mother’s face.
And then her mother, who still held the trowel in her other hand, threw it with all her force at the wall. It hit the kitchen clock and as the glass casing shattered and fell to the floor, she marched towards the back door.
‘Please. Isn’t it time we talked?’ Florence called after her, but her mother had already left the room.
Florence ran up to her room where she picked up apile of her clothes and threw them into her case. Shattered by the depth of her mother’s fury, tears streamed down her face but, angry and confused, she wiped them away with her hands. How could Claudette be like this? How had she never fully recognised her mother’s capacity for rage before? And what did that make her, for not realising? She remembered Élise’s arguments with Claudette. Once, she’d yelled at their mother, calling her a harpy, a hideous monster of Greek mythology. A terrifying bird woman. And Claudette had risen from the sofa as if to spread her wings and lunged at her daughter, wild with bitter laughter. But Florence had always blamed Élise for being so unkind to Maman. Now, for the first time in her life, she saw what her sister had been getting at and felt ashamed. She should not have judged Élise. And deep inside her now a little voice was whispering. Had her mother ever loved any of them?
One thing was clear – if Claudette would not allow her to speak about what she had found out, she, Florence, couldn’t stay here. She felt too hurt and too upset. She flung her hairbrush on top of her clothes in the case, snapped it shut, then ran down the stairs, glancing into the sitting room for anything she may have left behind. The front window was open and everything was still but for the breeze lifting the corner of Rosalie’s last note as it lay forgotten on the coffee table.
CHAPTER 6
Rosalie
Paris, 1925
Rosalie Delacroix hurried south-west of the Jardin du Luxembourg and down the shabby darkening streets of Montparnasse, glancing in at the bright windows of the Café du Dôme, as she passed. The glittering café, recently renovated with mirrored walls and accents of scarlet and gold, was the place where people went to see and be seen. She could smell the Gitanes cigarette smoke mixed with drains, gas from the few remaining gaslights, and hints of the animalistic scent of Shalimar drifting from the café.
She loved bohemian Montparnasse where the sound of jazz came flooding from the dark cafés and bars.Le jazz-hot, they called it. Raw, passionate, earthy; to Rosalie it spelt liberty.
When she arrived at her destination, she pushed open the smoked glass door and was met by the owner, Johnny Cooper.
‘Okay,’ he said in a bad American accent and grinned at her.
With awful teeth he didn’t look a bit American, and she was sure his name was an affectation aimed at pulling in more American tourists in the fabulous ‘City of Light’. Johnny was even serving a ‘hamburger steak’, something Americans were fond of apparently, and he had a waiter from London called Norman with whom Rosalie was planning to practise her English.
‘Fine,’ she replied to Johnny as she heard a girl calling her name.
‘Took your time,’ the girl said and took a last drag of a Gauloise before stubbing it out on the tiled floor. ‘Come on.’
‘Couldn’t leave until they went to bed,’ Rosalie said.
The other girl was dark-haired, dark-eyed Irène, who lived in one of the slums where there had been a flood of wartime refugees. ‘You think it’s hard for you, you should try my life,’ she said.
Rosalie knew poorer Parisians were crowding into ever smaller living spaces, and while she longed to escape the constraints of her bourgeois background, Irène wanted to escape a harder one. Irène was one of the small troupe of young cabaret dancers whom Rosalie would be joining in the back room tonight, wearing a puff of pink flamingo feathers and not much else.
‘You okay?’ Irène asked. ‘Your first time and all.’
Rosalie nodded, but in truth she felt almost delirious with nerves.
In the dim light of the tiny changing room, she revealed the golden costume she’d secretly made herself, copied from an outfit she’d spotted worn by movie star Marion Davies in her mother’s latestVoguemagazine.
‘Pretty good,’ Irène said as she looked her up and down with narrowed eyes, ‘but you need more make-up.’
Rosalie frowned but Irène pointed at a chair. ‘Sit.’ And she opened the box of communal make-up resting on a small table. ‘Scarlet lipstick, chérie. And lots of it, with a perfect bow. Sensational with your red hair. And I’m giving you smoky eyes. You know you have amazing eyes, right?’
‘Do I?’
‘You know you do. Such a deep blue. Different colouring but you do look like Leila Hyams.’
‘Who?’
