I bet she won’t. She’d have to admit in open court that the designs for the last two years were mine and nothing but mine.’
For a while they worked, Gabriel rapidly changing clothes; she had made every dress with her own hands, cutting and stitching, and she knew exactly how to wear them.
The photograph session was taking place in Charley’s South London studio which was in the loft of an old stable attached to Belmodes. Rose Hilaire was, in fact, his landlady. She also owned, although he did not know it, the terrace house in Mouncy Street which he was considering renting, and another she had already sold. Meanwhile, Charley was camping out in his studio which he was renovating himself. At present he was working on the splendid oak floors, sanding and polishing them. When life got too uncomfortable he stayed with a friend he had living in the district. Or, at odd times, he slept in the van he kept in the access road between Mouncy Street and Decimus Street.
Finally Charley said: ‘That’s it. Let’s dismantle the show.’ He started to take down his lights. ‘I think she’ll beat you: she’s got armour plate all round her.’
Slowly Gabriel said: ‘She’s got one big hole in that armour.’
They looked at each other.
‘You mean the boy?’ said Charley in a low voice.
Gabriel nodded. ‘That sad boy.’
Sadness might be infectious, perhaps it had spread from Rose Hilaire to her son, emptying his eyes and his mind, a kind of family infection that might spread outwards to Gabriel herself.
Another reason for getting away. Bad luck did brush off so, everyone knew that.
‘Do you think he might kill her?’ He’s only a kid, Gabriel thought, for heaven’s sake what are you saying? But she had said it. And not such a kid. Fourteen, wasn’t he?
‘Oh no. It wouldn’t be like that.’ Charley sounded as if he knew.
‘Do you think she might kill him?’
Charley shook his head. ‘Oh no. Not because I think neither are capable of it. Anyone could be – but because there has to be love to kill.’
‘She’s up to something.’ The speaker was a tall sturdy woman with a crest of bright golden hair just turning grey. She was wearing her coat ready to go home. ‘Rose, I’m telling you. Am I your friend or am I not?’ A waft of garlic sped across her employer’s desk.
Rose Hilaire, born Rose Lee, once married, and mother of Steve, whose whole life was hidden, unspoken and out of sight, an underground boy. She firmly believed that he was in no way different, that tucked inside him was a mental giant, but he just WOULD NOT SPEAK. Not to her. Sometimes he wouldn’t even look, only turned his head away to stare at the wall. She knew he understood, though; she could see. Oddly enough he performed well at school even though in an average kind of way. Whatever Steve was he was not average, she told his teacher so. And of course she mentioned that he would not talk to her.
Sometimes, at bad moments, she thought he liked her new motorcar, the Porsche, more than her, and that if anything happened to her, he would find it a good mother substitute. She had caught him sitting at the wheel, playing with the gears. He’d even tried to drive it away.
In anger, she’d hit him, and then was ashamed because you should never hit your child. So she’d promised to give him driving lessons, on the quiet, when no one could see. But the anger was still there between them, this time it had transferred itself to him. It came out in the way he held the wheel, as if the car was his anger and his weapon. This frightened her. So she’d dropped the driving instruction. It was illegal, anyway.
At that moment, the end of her working day, the day after Gabriel’s photo session, her mind was about equally divided between Gabriel, whom she knew to be a problem but did not yet know how big a one, and Steve. Here again, was he a real problem or just a tiny little one that she had let get out of hand?
One day, she thought, he will walk out of this house and I will never see him again. Fourteen years old and already she felt she was writing his obituary. Only underground boys like Steve did not have obituaries, they just wandered off and one day there was a tiny paragraph in the daily paper about a boy being found. Or perhaps not even that. Just silence for evermore. But silence was what she had now.
One day she might find out why he hated her, if that was what it was, and not some family sickness to which she might one day succumb herself. But no, the bad blood was on his father’s side of the family.
At this moment she had a letter in her desk from Steve’s teacher praising his dramatic ability and suggesting he ought to go to theatre school. Rose thought she knew all about his dramatic powers, having been only too often a reluctant witness.
Although he would not talk to her, Steve had no intention of going short of his needs and he could mime. He could get across what he wanted all right and Rose never had any difficulty in being convinced he meant it. She wondered if he really wanted to go to drama school? So far he had made no such signal to her, which probably indicated he had no such intention. On the other hand, sometimes he liked to keep her in the dark until the last possible moment.
Small wonder that with such a training in body language she had no difficulty in reading Gabriel’s mind: she knew that Gabriel was keeping something from her, could make a pretty good guess what it was and did not, in spite of what Gabriel might think, even mind very much. She had a simple philosophy of all being fair … and the rag trade was a kind of war. She even liked Gabriel, but that didn’t mean she would let her get away with anything. Far, far from it.
‘I’ll kill that girl if she really screws me up.’
She was older than Gabriel, but not as much older as Gabriel thought. Nevertheless, in her career she had seen a good many Gabriels come and go. Some had more talent than others and stayed the course better. Character came into it too, you needed toughness in this trade. Gabriel was one of the smartest and the most talented. Perhaps the most talented. Rose respected that talent even while she knew very well that Gabriel would not stay with her for ever, or even for much longer. But while she was under contract, Rose meant her to abide by it.
Unluckily, she herself had no creative talent worth talking of. She had a good head for business combined with an intuitive grasp of what the market wanted. In other words, she understood fashion as interpreter. She needed someone like Gabriel and meant to hang on to her if she could. Usually she was content to let her young designers drift away; few of them were heard of again. Perhaps contact with Rose Hilaire had sucked them dry. But in the case of Gabriel she could foresee a long and profitable relationship, if not a particularly happy one. If Gabriel examined the small print of her contract she could see that Rose had allowed herself a ten-year option on her services.
Now she said: ‘I don’t trust her, Dagmar, but thanks all the same.’
Dagmar Blond buttoned her coat. ‘How long have we known each other?’
Rose did not answer because she knew from experience that Dagmar was about to tell her.
‘I worked for your aunt when she was running the business, and I was with your grandfather before that, God rest his soul.’
Grandfather Hilaire’s soul received frequent benedictions from Dagmar Blond who found him a useful seal of approval, although in life she had been no more than an errand girl in his workshop whose face he barely knew. Still, it proved
