The Hidden Wife Read online

  The

  Hidden

  Wife

  Joanna Rees

  For Tallulah, my party girl, with all my love

  Contents

  1: March 1928

  2: A Dare

  3: Fletch

  4: City of Lights

  5: An American in Paris

  6: The Slow Walk Home

  7: Madame Vertbois

  8: The Deathbed

  9: La Carte Postale

  10: The Fancy Car

  11: Shakespeare and Company

  12: Le Jardin du Luxembourg

  13: Champagne at La Coupole

  14: A Date with Fletch

  15: Chez Joséphine

  16: The Woman Behind the Hearse

  17: Sacré-Coeur

  18: An Encounter at Dreyfus

  19: The Champs-Élysées

  20: Madame Sacerdote

  21: Let’s Fall in Love

  22: Shadows on the Ceiling

  23: The Morning After the Night Before

  24: Chuchotements

  25: Old Friends

  26: Café de Flore

  27: The Mona Lisa’s smile

  28: St Hilda’s

  29: Pay Day

  30: The Wedding Dress

  31: The Photography Shop

  32: The Fluke Photograph

  33: Petite Protégée

  34: Irving King

  35: Daphne’s Problem

  36: Bricktop’s

  37: The Kindness of Strangers

  38: A Bad Patient

  39: The International Call

  40: Chocolate Eclairs

  41: The Men in White Coats

  42: Potions and Pills

  43: Sainte-Anne’s

  44: An Angel

  45: The Date with Irving

  46: Zelli’s

  47: Dancing

  48: Female Bonding

  49: Unwelcome News

  50: Cold-Shouldered

  51: Passport Issue

  52: Boys and Girls

  53: A Little Black Dress

  54: A Bittersweet Farewell

  55: The Package

  56: Le Procope

  57: Bal Tabarin

  58: Putting on the Ritz

  59: Sweeping the Cobwebs Off the Moon

  60: The Eiffel Tower

  61: Sillage

  62: The Studio

  63: Big Business

  64: The Much-Anticipated Wedding Night

  65: Lavender Fields

  66: Success in Nice

  67: Percy

  68: Cap Ferrat

  69: The Man on the Quay

  70: Lilly

  71: Moonlight on the Water

  72: A Hint of the Past

  73: The Library

  74: Fireworks

  75: At the Carousel

  76: Post-Honeymoon Blues

  77: Hermione

  78: The Pianola

  79: The Thief

  80: Bone-Tired

  81: Sowing the Seeds

  82: A Letter in the Sunshine

  83: The Girl with the Mole

  84: Alicia Returns

  85: A Visit from the Headmistress

  86: Pushed Out

  87: Pyjamas

  88: The Mannequin

  89: A Surprise at the Old Apartment

  90: Marie Tries to Explain

  91: News from Paris

  92: The Truth about Paul

  93: A Loved Grandchild

  94: America-Bound

  The Sister Returns

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  1

  March 1928

  Vita Casey stood in the wings of Les Folies Bergère, a couple of silk robes hanging loosely over her arm. She heard a collective gasp and leaned forward to see the bright platinum hair of Julianne as she flew in a languorous arc, her knees hooked over the trapeze. From the shadows, Vita could see only a small section of the enthralled audience, but the sheer joie de vivre – as the French reviewers put it – was palpable in the air. It was hardly surprising, Vita thought. Ever since Josephine Baker had performed her sensational dance two years ago, wearing nothing more than a skirt made of fake bananas, it was one of the Paris night-spots.

  Vita quickly ducked back as the new section started and the line of bare-breasted dancers ran in from the back, down the central aisle and up onto the stage, to the sound of the slurring, raucous trombones. The girls whooped now, high-kicking and moving shoulder-to-shoulder in their perfect line, and the audience – as many women as men – clapped and cheered. Vita saw her best friend Nancy whizz past, the red ruffle skirt revealing her toned legs. She winked at Vita, her cheeks highly rouged, her lips glossy, the giant white feather headdress bobbing.

  Vita waved dutifully, but she missed the Nancy of old – not this crazy Folies girl who was high every night, as if she had a duty to be the most daring . . . the most outrageous.

  Has Nancy always been like this? Vita wondered. She supposed she had, but she missed the days when it had been just the two of them against the world. Back then, when Vita had raced onto the train out of London at the last possible minute, running for her life from her crazed, vengeful brother, with only her friend Edith’s passport and the clothes on her back, her head had been in a complete spin. But Nancy, ever practical, had turned their terrifying flight to the continent into a real adventure.

  They hadn’t even stopped in Paris, which was as far as Vita herself had ever dreamt of going. Nancy had insisted that they go properly to ground for a while, and so they’d changed trains straight away at the Gare du Nord, to travel south with Mr Wild, Nancy’s little dog.

  They’d kept going all the way to Rome, and then on to a glorious villa of some old family friends of Nancy’s on the Amalfi Coast for Christmas and New Year – until, having drunk the cellar dry, they’d thoroughly outstayed their welcome. The pair had scrimped by on Nancy’s diminishing trust fund, although they’d never turned down a free meal from fellow travellers. And since Nancy was such an incorrigible flirt, and Mr Wild managed to make friends wherever they went, their self-imposed exile often bordered on something very much like fun.

  But then the money had run out, and Nancy had declared that the best place to re-establish themselves would be Paris. Vita didn’t want to go there, but Nancy was insistent. Vita was terrified that her brother Clement would still be looking for her, but Nancy had argued that after all these months Clement was almost certainly tired of hunting for her and Vita had nothing to be scared of.

  With her knack of putting a positive glow on even the worst situation, Nancy reasoned that they’d been on the run long enough, and Vita wasn’t Anna Darton any more – the girl who’d fled her abusive family. She didn’t need to be that downtrodden, scared little daughter of a Lancashire cotton-mill owner, but could fulfil her destiny as Vita Casey, a designer and all-round fabulous girl-about-town. ‘Because Paris, darling,’ she decreed in her American drawl, ‘is the only place to be.’

  So Vita had relented, telling herself that even though she’d changed her name once before, hidden in the heart of the metropolis and Clement had still managed to find her, Nancy was right and it wouldn’t be the same here in Paris, surely? Not in the heart of the most changeable city in the world. Besides, Nancy had been so good to her. Who was she to dampen Nancy’s dreams of taking Paris by storm?

  When they’d first arrived, fizzing with excitement, Vita had assumed that Nancy wanted to come good on the promise she’d made in London to help Vita establish a business here in Paris, the home of lingerie. She’d said she would pull in favours from her family contacts, but soon it became clear that none of these contacts were going to materialize, leaving Vita feeling that Nancy’s promises
had never been anything more than hot air.

  Instead Nancy had headed to Les Folies Bergère and, with puffed-up claims of their experience as dancers in the Zip Club in London, it wasn’t long before she had talked her way into the troupe. Vita herself wasn’t so lucky. She didn’t pass the audition, the director claiming that even though she had jolis blue eyes and golden-blonde hair, her breasts were far too large and she wouldn’t fit in with the current line-up of girls.

  Nancy, who firmly believed that everyone would eventually bend to her wishes, said this was nonsense, and it was just a matter of time before she could bring Vita in, too. She decreed that she’d done it before in London and would do so again in Paris. And then, once they’d saved some money, they could start thinking about Vita’s business.

  But now more than a year had passed and Vita was no closer to setting up her fledgling underwear business, Top Drawer, again, or joining the dancers, for that matter – not that she really dared to. Nancy seemed to have forgotten that Vita had never really been a trained dancer in the first place.

  Instead, Vita got by, helping the dressers backstage for a pitiful wage, under the watchful gaze of Madame Rubier; but for the most part her purpose was waiting in the wings: waiting for Nancy, ready to be at her beck and call. She knew that some of the other dancers referred to Vita unkindly as Nancy’s ‘wife’ – a joke that Nancy herself was happy to perpetuate – but Vita wondered, as she did more frequently now, how long she was going to be stuck as Nancy’s companion when she was longing to strike out on her own.

  She stepped back as the dance ended and the girls careened towards her, led by the Brazilian beauty Solange and the fiery Sicilian Collette, who tottered quickly past Vita so that the other ten dancers could bunch into the dark wings, their wide-armed poses deflating as soon as they were out of the lights. The girls brought with them a pungent smell of sweat and perfume, and a waft of the smoky electric lights.

  The applause from the audience was deafening, but the girls weren’t doing an encore tonight. Instead across the stage, Tibor, from Russia, was preparing to go on with his contortionist act.

  Vita quickly handed out the robes to the girls, with encouraging smiles and little words of congratulation: ‘Bien joué, Adrienne’, ‘Quel spectacle formidable’ for Rosa, ‘C’était magnifique’ to Madeleine and Simone; and the last robe held out for Nancy. But Nancy’s chest was glistening, her long strings of beads stuck beneath her pert bare breasts, and she shrugged it away. Instead she shook out the tall feather headdress and handed it to Vita, before flicking her fingers through her short black hair.

  ‘Get changed, kiddo,’ she said, looking up and down disparagingly at Vita’s neat shirt tucked into flared trousers, which Vita had no intention of changing out of. Next to the half-naked exotic dancing girls, she did look a bit urbane, but Vita liked her stylish look. She’d made these trousers from some material that Madame Rubier had been about to throw away, basing the style on an advert she’d seen for a similar pair by Coco Chanel.

  ‘What’s wrong with this?’

  ‘We’re going out first to Solange’s and then on to a club,’ Nancy said, with a raise of her eyebrow. ‘It’ll be so much fun. And he’ll be there . . .’

  2

  A Dare

  It was usual for ‘the gang’, as Nancy called their group, to go to a club to dance after the show. They often went to Nancy’s favourite, ‘The Rodent’ – or Le Rat Mort, as everyone else knew it – which was owned by the Corsican mafia and had a seedy late-night atmosphere, where they could all get drunk on cheap red wine and dance themselves into a frenzy. But Vita’s favourite was Le Grand Duc, which was known as Bricktop’s because of its red-headed owner, the larger-than-life Ada, who had taught anyone who was anyone in Paris how to do the Charleston. Vita loved the spontaneity of their late-night sing-songs at Bricktop’s and how Ada joined in with the girls, dancing across the sticky floor.

  Tonight they’d all congregated first at Solange’s apartment, which was conveniently located a few blocks away from Les Folies, at the bottom of the rue des Martys near the Notre-Dame de Lorette church, on the attic floor of what had obviously once been a grand – but was now a decidedly shabby – apartment block.

  Solange herself was still in one of the backless dancers’ dresses, a sequinned band around her coiled black hair, her garters and seamed stockings on show. She had exotic dark skin and was exceptionally supple, having joined the Ballets Russes when they’d been on tour to South America, before finding her way to Paris. She was petite, but had a fierce voice and an intense brown-eyed gaze that meant people usually did as she commanded.

  As usual, she was holding court in the midst of the crowd in the drawing room. Some of the dancers sat, lolling on the round, deep-pink velvet banquette beneath the crumbling plaster rose and dusty chandelier, which seemed to be hanging by a rather dangerous-looking wire. The others were on the fainting couch next to the floor-to-ceiling windows. Rosa was reclining, one long leg stretched upwards against the frayed curtain, the blue shot-silk fabric faded where it had been bleached by the sun. It seemed to Vita that even when they were supposed to be resting, the dancers were always moving – forever stretching and flexing.

  Maxwell, their friend, who looked very smart tonight in immaculate tails, was changing the record on the gramophone. There was a very large crackle as the needle started at the beginning of the next song.

  Vita suppressed a yawn. Unlike Nancy, who stayed in bed most of the day, she was an early riser – thanks to the demands of Mr Wild – and now, at coming up to midnight, she felt tired, longing for her bed, rather than a trip to a club. But leaving was impossible. Not yet. Not when Nancy was just getting started.

  Vita watched as her friend took a long slurp from the ‘coquetele’ she was holding: a 75, by the look of it, Vita thought – a lethal gin-and-lemon drink. To be fashionable, they all drank cocktails, with Nancy often leading the charge in ever more heady concoctions, and the 75 was one of her favourites. Vita couldn’t even have one without getting headspins.

  ‘You want some?’ Nancy asked, taking a long slug and then holding out the glass. ‘It’s not that strong, I promise.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Vita said, but Nancy was ignoring her. The music suddenly kicked in – an upbeat number, the clarinets and trumpets high above the banjo and bass. The girls all jumped up from the sofa with a collective shout and started dancing. ‘Oh, look – look, they’re here,’ Nancy trilled, flapping her hand towards the open door of the apartment.

  Six or so men were filing through the door, squeezing past the people chatting in the small foyer, and Vita recognized them as the Les Folies house band. Her heart did a little skip as she saw Fletch at the back, heaving Bobo’s double bass up the last flight of stairs.

  ‘Hold this, darling,’ Nancy shouted above the music, pressing the cocktail into Vita’s hand, before trotting across the parquet flooring, her arms out wide as she whooped with greeting. She got away with being so brash and loud, Vita thought, because she was American, but it was really who she was – an attention-seeker and fun with it, loving every second of it, as her skirt rode up. She kissed Bobo and then Fletch, who laughed at their effusive welcome.

  Vita had only had a few brief conversations with Fletch, the new trumpet player, but she liked his easy confidence as he stood up in the band in the orchestra pit in front of the stage, his trumpet raised towards the balcony. There was something so slick, so modern about him, and exotic, too. She saw him looking bashful as he rubbed Nancy’s lipstick from his cheek.

  As they all moved towards the drawing room, Nancy trotted back to Vita, dancing to the music. ‘Don’t look like that,’ she scolded Vita.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you want the floor to swallow you. This is not England – it’s Paris. It’s totally fine to like men of colour. What do the French call it? Négrophilie. A love of all things black.’

  ‘Shhh,’ Vita said, worried that someone would hear. Nancy
really did have no idea how to be subtle. She wished now that she’d never let slip how she was developing a crush on Fletch.

  ‘Don’t be coy, darling. It’s so obvious you like him. In fact I dare you to have a fling with him.’ She threw down the gauntlet, and Vita remembered their dares of old.

  Vita pulled a face at her. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because . . .’

  ‘It’s what you need, Vita. I’ve told you before, you need to get back on the horse and stop moping after that dreadful Archie Fenwick.’

  ‘I’m not moping.’

  ‘Besides, you know what they say about trumpet players?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The embouchure makes them good kissers . . . and other things,’ Nancy said, raising her eyebrows, her eyes flicking downwards to the crotch of Vita’s trousers.

  Vita gasped at her bawdy suggestion, but Nancy only smiled, grabbing the cigarettes and matches from beside the lamp on the table. ‘Now, shoo!’ she commanded, kneeing Vita in the backside so that she lurched towards the newcomers.

  Vita glared at her over her shoulder, annoyed that Nancy was following close behind, with that mischievous grin Vita knew so well plastered over her face.

  3

  Fletch

  Fletch was dressed in a black suit with an open-necked white shirt. He held his felt hat in his hand, along with a brown case.

  ‘Fletch darling, you remember Vita,’ Nancy said, waving a lit match between them, then lighting the cigarette between her teeth. ‘The one I was telling you about. She’s our costume girl,’ Nancy added suggestively, blowing out smoke towards the ceiling. ‘She’s quite the seamstress. She makes bras, and all sorts.’

  Nancy had spoken to Fletch about her already? And made her out to be so much lower down the pecking order than the dancers, Vita noted, feeling that all-too-familiar sense of being tethered to Nancy.

  ‘Hey, Vita, nice to see ya again,’ Fletch said in a rather charming old-fashioned way. He had an American accent – from the South, Vita guessed – and a disarmingly honest smile. He was probably no older than her, Vita thought, looking at his smooth young skin. He pressed back his oiled hair with his hand.