The following morning, Madame Sardeau buttoned herself into her black overcoat, wound a thick, rust scarf around her neck, stabbed her hat into place with two pins and set off for the refugee committee central office. She gave her name to the receptionist and waited in the small, crowded office. People hurried in and out; some were officials but some were obviously voluntary workers. After an interminable wait, she was shown into a cold little cubicle piled high with files of documents.
“You’re not the one I saw at the station last night,” Madame Sardeau said to the small, harassed woman who faced her.
“No, Yvonne speaks Hungarian so she had to go to the station to meet a new batch that we weren’t expecting. I’m sorry, madame, it is not our aim in life to inconvenience you, but everyone here suddenly has far more problems than usual. Now where is the child?”
“Ill in bed. Being attended daily by a doctor who says she must stay in bed for at least two weeks! Imagine the expense! What a way to start!”
“Oh, dear, we’re supposed to get the details directly, because we must try to trace the child’s parents. We’ll do the best we can for the time being, but when she’s recovered, you must bring her in to answer for herself. Now let’s try to get these forms filled in.”
And thus the forms were filled in, stamped and returned to the file, which was then placed in the V drawer of the filing cabinet.
When Lili was well enough, she sat up in bed with a coarse shawl wrapped around her chest and pinned at her back. Anxiously she asked what had happened to Angelina and Felix and her foster brother Roger.
“The refugee committee is trying to locate them. When you’re well enough we’ll go to their office and they’ll tell you what they can.”
“And does vraie maman know where I am?”
“Aren’t Monsieur and Madame Vago your real parents?”
“No, Angelina is looking after me until I can join my real mother in another land and Felix is looking after her and also Roger, although Felix isn’t Roger’s vrai papa of course. And Felix is called Kovago and I am really called Elizabeth, except I prefer Lili because that’s what Felix calls me. Everyone calls me Lili in Hungary, it’s only in Château d’Oex that they call me Elizabeth. I like Lili best and I like Hungary better than Switzerland, I think, only I wish I could speak Hungarian properly. I only know a few words.”
Was the child still delirious? Madame Sardeau wondered. Best to wait until tomorrow, until after the doctor’s visit and then ask again.
The next day Madame Sardeau took the kitchen notebook and a pencil into Lili’s bedroom and sorted out her story. “So you were the foster child of Madame Kovago and lived in Switzerland and were on a visit to Hungary when the revolution broke out? And you do not know any details of your real mother?”
“Yes, yes, yes, no. Can I go back to sleep now?”
Over their evening meal, Madame Sardeau discussed the matter with her husband.
“It’s not our responsibility to trace her family; it’s up to the refugee committee,” she said. “I’m not sure I believe such a muddled tale anyway. Doctor Dutheil said this afternoon that it’s possible she’s living in an imaginary world, in order to avoid the real one. He says it might be the only way she can face the sudden loss of her family.”
“In the meantime, my dear,” said Monsieur Sardeau, slicing into the crisp onion tart, “perhaps I should write to the mayor of Château d’Oex to inquire whether there is—as the child says—a family living there called Vago or Kovago. After all, if they escaped, then they would obviously return to their home and if they have, then we can return the child and ask them for the financial compensation that is our moral right. On the other hand, if they haven’t escaped, or if they’ve been killed, then the child might stand to inherit some property—the house perhaps. So I shall dictate a letter tomorrow morning.”
The winter of 1956–57 was bitterly cold in Paris. Doctor Dutheil would not allow Lili to leave the stuffy, overheated apartment until mid-February, when Madame Sardeau returned for the second time to the refugee committee office, this time accompanied by Lili. Again, they had a long wait in the small, freezing waiting room, although this time it was not crowded. Eventually, Madame Sardeau and Lili were interviewed by a voluntary worker whom she had not seen on her previous visit.
“Your name, darling?”
“Lili Kovago.”
Half an hour’s harassed search followed, thirty minutes spent burrowing under beige piles of paper that covered the desk and the tops of the filing cabinets, until Madame Sardeau thought to say, “Perhaps the file is under V for Vago; there was an initial mistake. Not my fault you understand.”
Indeed, the file was found under V. The interviewer then lost her spectacles and Madame Sardeau lost her temper. “It is intolerable that I should be kept waiting, that the documents should twice have been lost.”
The interviewer looked more harassed. “We have received no inquiries for a child of that name.”
“Idiot!” snapped Madame Sardeau. “Inquiries would have been for a child called Kovago or Dassin, which was the mother’s previous name, and they would be filed under K or D.”
So the interviewer again burrowed into the filing cabinet, looking under K and under D, but there were no files labeled Kovago or Dassin.
“You waste my time in this chaos,” Madame Sardeau snapped. “You waste your own time in this chaos. It is obviously a waste of time to sit here like an imbecile.” And she swept out, towing Lili in her wake.
The exhausted voluntary worker put Lili’s file—still labeled Vago—back into the V cabinet. Nobody searching for Lili would be likely to look under V because there was no reason to do so. Lili was now literally lost in a sea of misplaced paper.
The next morning, after hearing an indignant account of his wife’s visit to the refugee centre, Monsieur Sardeau dictated another letter, complaining to the president of the refugee committee. He received an apologetic, but otherwise uninformative, letter.
Six weeks after that, Monsieur Sardeau received a brief letter from the office of the mayor of Château d’Oex to say that, so far as he knew, there was no family called Vago in the town, but a Hungarian waiter called Kovago had lived in a rented chalet on the outskirts of the area. Unfortunately, he and his family had been on a visit to Hungary when the revolution broke out and the whole family had apparently been killed while attempting to escape.
The town archives held no further details.
“Don’t think we’re rich.” Madame Sardeau gave a dainty snort as she carried her shopping bags through the big doors and into the courtyard beyond. “This apartment is rent-controlled; we were lucky, after the war.”
“Don’t think we’re rich”, was a favourite Sardeau phrase. If Lili took an extra bit of bread or forgot to switch off the light in the old-fashioned, windowless toilet or asked for anything at all, this phrase came automatically to their lips.
The Sardeaus were childless. No tyrannical baby had ever shattered their sleep or their ornaments. They had never had so much as a cat to care for and clean up after, and they soon discovered that they didn’t care for the responsibility of looking after a little girl. Their reason for offering to adopt an orphan had been practical—they had no one to care for them in their old age, to push a possible wheelchair, to attend a bedside or collect a pension. They had never been able to afford a servant, Madame was now getting on in years and needed help in the home, and, yes, perhaps they could use some company, for Monsieur worked in a government statistics office and after twenty-seven shared years they had exhausted their conversation.
But although the child was small and thin, although she wasn’t nearly as strong as a fully grown worker, she ate as much as a maid would. Worse yet, unlike a maid, she was often not there when required because she was at school or dawdling over her homework. Certainly, for the moment, she did not justify the cost of her keep. And she couldn’t be trusted; she told lies. The child obviously had bad blood; they hoped she
was not Jewish.
A docile, obedient, pale-faced schoolchild, Lili had indeed started to tell little lies in self-defense, in order to have some time to herself in which to dream of what might have been. She lied about the time she left school and whether she’d been in the park—where she wasn’t supposed to wander; whether she’d been to church; whether she’d done the dusting or finished the ironing. As the Sardeaus forced Lili’s imagination along this gray path of self-preservation, she turned secretive, living a life of inner fantasy in which the lonely child was always adored and a scintillating heroine. Lili became increasingly subdued and withdrawn. Increasingly, she built up her mother’s identity into a romantic mystery—because the alternative was to face her mother’s brusque rejection.
The apartment on the seventh floor was small, dark, uncomfortable and spotlessly clean. Every ugly china knickknack had its preordained place, as Lili discovered when she dusted them daily. Lili lived in a cupboard-sized room off the dark kitchen that faced onto the inner courtyard.
Although her schoolwork at the lycee was hard, Lili soon realised that she preferred the cheerful, noisy school atmosphere to the claustrophobic, funeral-parlor atmosphere of the Sardeau home. Certainly, she had to work far harder at school than ever before.
Madame Sardeau had no intention of letting Lili have time off. In the holidays, she not only had to do all the light housework, but she also had to prepare the vegetables, wait on the table and do the ironing and sewing. Madame Sardeau soon discovered that Lili’s sewing was exquisite and piled more work on the child. After all, she thought to herself, watching Lili swiftly stitch, the devil makes work for idle hands.
After two years Lili understood—possibly better than they did—that the Sardeaus regarded her as a poor investment, which unfortunately couldn’t be liquidated in favour of something more promising. They were not unkind to the child; she was dressed, fed and given suitably improving gifts on anniversaries—a book on the lives of the saints, a sewing kit, a new vest—but the girl was never grateful.
Just before her ninth birthday, Madame showed her a newspaper picture of a huge-eyed, stick-limbed African orphan and said, “See what we saved you from!”
Lili was silent for a long time, then she said, “My mother wouldn’t have let me starve.”
“You know perfectly well that your mother is dead.”
“My other mother would have come for me.”
Madame Sardeau lost her temper. “You little liar, your fairytale stories of your other mother and sleighbells in the snow are just fantasy. The priest told me that many children have them, especially if their parents have to beat them for bad behaviour. You would do better to be more dutiful to us. You owe a duty to us. It is we who feed you, shelter you and spend money on you. Your mother and father are dead! Get that into your head.”
“But not my Kovago grandparents. They didn’t come with us that night. When I’m old enough, I shall go back to them.”
“You ungrateful little idiot! Even if they’re still alive, they are now behind the Iron Curtain. You will never see them again.”
Lili was silent, struggling with emotion and frustration. Then her anger and long-suppressed resentment surfaced and, with a glare of hatred, she spat at Madame Sardeau. There was a shocked moment of silence then—outraged—the woman yelled, “Such guttersnipe manners merely betray your low origins! I shall report your behaviour to my husband this evening and he will discipline you. Now get in your room!”
Lili fled, tears falling down her school pinafore. Lying face down on her lumpy bed, she longed for Angelina, Felix and Roger. Now she had nothing. No brother, no grandma or grandpa, no uncle, no father. And instead of two mothers, she had none at all. How would her vraie maman even know that she was in Paris? How could she now know where to find her, when the time came?
Lili felt as if an unseen, vindictive spirit was punishing her, crushing her, in this joyless apartment. Although she was only nine, she knew that her childhood had passed and that she now had to mark time through the gray days that lay ahead until she was old enough to run away.
21
MAXINE WORKED ALMOST NONSTOP for three years after the château opened. By 1959 she had discovered that business progress zigzagged, with one step backward for every three steps forward. The staff of the Château de Chazalle were learning their jobs day by day and Maxine—who was in charge of them—found it hard to cope with business problems that were on a far larger scale than those to which she had been accustomed in the rue Jacob shop.
In the first year they had 92,000 visitors and they grossed 30.8 million francs. In other words, they suffered a loss. O rage, ô désespoir, thought Maxine, grimly remembering Pagan’s oft-repeated schoolgirl wail. More days were spent with accountants, there were more anxious visits to the bank and—worst of all—more borrowing, which brought more sleepless nights.
In the second year they had 121,000 visitors and grossed 48.4 million francs. Success!
But would it last?
In the third year over 174,000 people visited the château, and in the fourth year they passed the magic figure of 250,000 visitors.
Yes, it was going to last. But could Maxine? Guy, worried, privately told Charles that he thought she was like someone running too fast downhill, forced on by her own impetus and unable to stop. Charles agreed, and repeated his original, overall instruction to Maxine’s executive secretary. Mademoiselle Janine was to keep as much work as possible away from Madame la Comtesse. She managed this so efficiently that eventually Maxine was able to delegate nearly everything except the weekly business meeting on Monday with the estate accountant, and her weekly Friday meeting in Paris with Christina to go over the design work.
Maxine no longer stayed at her desk until past midnight in order to clear it, only to be greeted by a new pile of mail the following morning. Instead of getting up at six in the morning, Maxine now had a leisurely breakfast in bed, went to her office at nine and had finished the serious business of the day by lunchtime. To her relief, she was able to see far more of her children; it was one of the advantages of living over the shop, she thought, as every cold afternoon she played in the firelit nursery with her two charming little boys and every warm afternoon they all romped around the park with the dogs. Maxine had never expected to find such simple happiness with her children, and sometimes, looking at her sons, she felt a sudden pang of guilt; she felt that perhaps she didn’t deserve them, it was all too good to be true; she sometimes shivered as the thought crossed her mind that perhaps Fate was going to demand some dreadful penalty for her almost ruthless practicality and success.
Partly because of the huge success of the château, Paradis was also steadily building a reputation for rescuing and converting historic houses. After the Château de Chazalle had opened in a blaze of publicity that proved what Paradis could do, potential clients streamed into the office. Maxine had successfully restored twenty-six buildings since then.
Paradis converted historic buildings into showplaces for the public, into hotels or small apartments for several families to live in. It now employed four full-time designers. Although Maxine expected everybody to work hard, she saw to it that her designers enjoyed their jobs and frequent bursts of laughter would issue from the main studio when she was working there; but Maxine still approved every scheme at the sketch stage before it was presented to a client. Nothing, no matter how minor, could escape her eye for detail.
Maxine was also irreplaceable in one other very important area. Sometimes the investment needed for the Paradis projects could be as high as fifty million francs, sometimes it was considerably less. Maxine’s expertise lay in presenting a scheme to a possible source of finance. “You go off with your eyes lit up, like a bullfighter about to go into the ring,” observed Charles.
To Maxine, work was fun, but this was partly because she had never had a major setback.
Then, in spite of knowing that Charles would be furious, Maxine did something that she’d been
secretly wanting to do for a long time. For years she had hated her breasts. They hadn’t diminished when the boys were born, so one day, without telling Charles, she slipped anonymously into a hospital for breast reduction.
Maxine and her Dior vendeuse hoped that she would emerge with the silhouette of Audrey Hepburn, but although her breasts were resited four inches higher, they still remained ample. As always, the operation was very painful and Maxine was left with a semicircle of blanket stitches under each breast and another jagged little row from beneath the breast up to the nipple. They were ugly. They would never disappear.
Charles was furious. He had particularly liked her breasts. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me what you were going to do? You know that there’s always some danger with a full anesthetic!”
“Because I thought you might stop me.”
“Damn right! They’re not your breasts, they’re our breasts. How would you like it if I decided to have an inch or two snipped off?”
But on the whole, Maxine’s life passed excitingly and successfully until she was nearly thirty years old, when two things happened—Maxine became pregnant again and Charles fell in love with another woman.
At first Maxine knew only of the first event and not the second. She was not pleased to be pregnant again. Two sons were enough. She had just got on top of her job again and for the first time in years she was enjoying her position. She felt in charge of what was happening, rather than just keeping up with the daily treadmill of work. Her organization was now highly efficient, and she was paying off the château bank loan much faster than anticipated.
Then one morning, as she handed Maxine her mail, Mademoiselle Janine said, “I noticed that Madame de Fortuny was here again yesterday. For a copywriter, that one is certainly devoted to her job. She’s always on the telephone to Monsieur le Comte, and I notice that she’s on the list of guests for lunch today. Myself, I find that she always smells too strongly of carnations. Too much perfume can be overpowering.”