She picked up a programme as Paul flicked imaginary dust motes from the candlelit mirrors. The Party had put its stamp on the language the salon could use as strongly as it had dictated who sat in the audience. The new directives, which detailed how German collections could be described, had sent Helena into as much of a fury as the seat allocations. Berlin, not Paris, was now considered the centre of the fashion-world – in the Party’s eyes, at least. Hauptmode was therefore the mandated phrase, not haute couture; schick not chic the stamp of approval. Nobody could fit the clumsy terms comfortably across their tongues, but there they were in the programme, exactly as ordered. New faces and new words: small changes, but enough to trip them. Tension trickled through the building like sand through an hourglass.
Paul had finally stopped pacing. He stood in the centre of the room, his hands raised. Liese craned forward, her neck prickling, as he clapped three times in quick succession. No matter how many times she played a part in them, the show-day rituals had never lost their magic. On his final clap, the door reopened. Two of the youngest seamstresses scurried in, wrapped in white coveralls like Christmas sugar mice. They paused, one to the left of Paul, one to the right, crystal atomisers wobbling. Liese’s nose twitched. A finger click and they were off, releasing the scent from the bottles in precision-timed bursts. The perfume puffed out in a fragrant mist which hung in the air like chiffon. Her father’s eyes darted after the girls as they hopped from corner to corner. Even when he was silent, Liese could hear him declaiming.
Only fools think what we do is make dresses. This is fashion, this is a feast for the senses: it demands far more from the audience than their eyes.
One of his best-loved pronouncements, reserved for the journalists and the would-be designers trying to winkle out his secrets. Paul wove impossible mysteries for them, but never for his daughter. With no son to succeed him, Liese was the salon’s heir. Her birthday, her age, what she cared about, or feared, might pass Paul by, but not her fashion education.
Each collection forms like a rose: each petal, no matter how tiny, is an essential part of the mix.
Liese had trotted behind him, hanging on his every syllable, since she was eight years old. Watching and listening; soaking up his smiles and his pats when she asked the right questions. As she grew older, taking note of everything that made sense, and everything that didn’t, and practising her sewing skills until her fingers bled, not caring as long as she impressed him. Liese was a model pupil, a ‘little sponge’ as Paul called her. Drinking in every detail during the day and then, as she sat alone in her room night after night while her parents ran round Berlin’s glittering parties, refashioning her father’s lessons until she had caught Haus Elfmann down to its essence.
Everything danced to the rhythm of the salon’s two annual collections. The rites the Haus observed reached their peak on the day each of those was launched. Whether it was the length of the owners’ silent embrace, or the number of flowers allotted to a vase, or the order the outfits appeared in, every decision and every moment held weight. And not only did each show have its own carefully calibrated theme, each show carried its own unique scent. The curtain-opener, Paul called it, the palate-tease. There were certain constants: Spring and Summer should be sweet with flowers or citrus-sharp; Autumn and Winter heavy with spices. Beyond that, no one but Paul and the perfumiers knew. Now, this show’s fragrance filled the room and Liese’s test was coming.
She let the scent swirl. As she breathed it in, she walked her mind back to the workrooms where the costumes had blossomed, floating from the flat planes of a pinboard onto a dummy’s soft contours. She pulled up the colours and the tightly coiled fabrics, whose details she had memorised for just such a moment. Berry red and deep mossy green, old gold and royal purple; satin and velvet, stiff guipure lace and fur soft as a kitten’s. She ran through the names pinned to each dress, the countries and stories their pleats and drapes sprang from. Now was the moment to make sense of it all.
Paul turned to her, his foot tapping. Liese wasn’t quite ready to surrender her thoughts: once this task was done, he could easily forget her until the next cycle started.
‘Do the audience understand it, Papa? How the perfume talks to the clothes?’
‘Not like we do.’
We. Liese’s skin fizzed.
‘But if we missed this step out? Then they would feel the lack. The lighting would grow harsh, the flower arrangements dull. The clothes would enter to coughs not gasps and the models would falter, even your mother. Our scene would not set, Liese. Why?’
‘Because this is theatre.’
A nod; he was too tightly wound to smile. Besides, how else would she answer? Other children grew up stuffed with fairy tales and nursery rhymes: Liese’s magic kingdoms were fashioned in the workrooms and showrooms she had learned to toddle and speak in.
You said the words ‘satin’ and ‘silk’ before Mother and Father. Delightful, but hardly a surprise. Minnie Elfmann, her much-missed grandmother, had woven that anecdote into family lore and never heard the sadness in it that Liese did. Minnie had been Liese’s shining light, a vision in feather-trimmed wraps and waist-length pearls; adored and never remote. And never Grandma.
‘Minnie, my sweet – nothing but Minnie. So much kinder for little mouths.’
‘And for old faces.’ Margarethe’s stage whispers had always been carefully pitched.
Mother and wife had circled each other since Paul had spotted Margarethe commanding the audience at a Paris salon and whisked her back to Berlin. Any kindness between the two women had been reserved for public use.
‘She’s as jealous as a cat!’
They both had hissed it.
As Liese grew older and more tuned to the spats, the root of their competition became clear: her father and his constant need to stand centre stage. Not that it mattered anymore who had scratched first at who. Minnie had blazed out four years ago, dying before anything as dull as old age could catch her, and left a hole Liese had struggled to climb out of. Now, there was no more Minnie to cover her with kisses, and no one else inclined to. There was no more Grandpa Nathan either, although he was so stern it was hard to miss his presence. Since Minnie’s death, he had shrivelled away like a hermit into his shuttered mansion, unable to step inside the fashion house that her flair had helped him found. One set of grandparents gone and neither Paul nor Margarethe had any brothers or sisters to offer. As for Margarethe’s parents – they were lost somewhere in the rural corners of Alsace on the French–German border, their country ways long cast aside by their elegant daughter.
‘So, our clan is a small one – what does it matter? Everyone in Berlin knows who we are.’
Another of Paul’s pronouncements. As if the public’s admiring gaze could make their sprawling mansion in Bergmannkiez any less echoing or empty.
Such a perfect family. Liese wished she could see it, or find it.
She had haunted friends’ noisier houses when she could. She had devoured books that described what she longed for. Stories filled with sisters who shared secrets, whose passionate squabbles collapsed into tearfully ecstatic declarations. Whose pretty heads were watched over by mothers with wide hearts and wide laps and spoiled by fathers whose pockets bulged with candy.
Not one of those stories resembled her own life. A mother and father wrapped up in themselves, aware of their daughter only as a part of the business. Uncle Otto, who was the salon’s Technical Director and not really an uncle at all. And Michael, Otto’s son, who was two years older than her and hovered somewhere between brother, friend and serious annoyance. As soon as she could toddle, Liese had stuck herself firmly to Michael. She had adored him, he had adored her and their business-breathing parents had been very grateful for the bond. Michael’s hand holding hers had been Liese’s anchor on the world; his grin a promise of adventure. They had built dens together, raided the kitchens together, dug up the gardens in search of buried treasure together. The Michael she had grown up with could collapse her into giggles with a look and spin a story out of thin air. His ‘just imagine if…’ had become her childhood’s favourite words. At twelve, even at fourteen, Liese would have said that the two of them knew each other inside out and everything was brighter when they shared it between them. Now, his life was outrunning hers, leading him to places she wasn’t ready to follow. There were days when loneliness sat on her like a second skin.