She was jealous of Harriet’s success, of course, but cheerfully, supportively so; and she was openly and intensely proud of her. ‘She always had the brains,’ she would say, ‘and the drive and the energy. She’s the new woman. Bit of an anachronism I am.’ And she would smile at whoever was listening, and they would hasten to assure her that she was nothing of the sort, and if her audience included any of the older generation (particularly if it was male) they would frequently say something that implied it was she who had actually got it right and Harriet wrong.
Harriet could never quite remember when she decided she wanted to get into the fashion business, but she was certainly still quite small. She would wait for her mother’s Vogue and Harper’s to arrive each month (for a comparatively unfashionable woman, Maggie was an avid consumer of the glossy press) as eagerly as if they were a present for herself, and by the time she was eleven or twelve was making dresses for herself with astonishing skill. What was more, she made up her own patterns; she kept a store of old basic Simplicities (a dress, a skirt, a shirt) and worked on them, adding and subtracting with huge ingenuity. She raided her mother’s wardrobe, the village drapery shop, jumble sales for fabric and old clothes; her greatest triumph was a party dress she made for Annabel Headleigh Drayton, aged three (when Harriet had been only fifteen herself), a gloriously simple Kate Greenaway creation, puff-sleeved and high-waisted, out of an old 1940s print dress she had found at a village sale. It had been a surprise Christmas present for Annabel, who loved it so much she wore it night and day for months. With a final touch of inspiration Harriet had used the leftover fabric to cover a pair of Annabel’s dancing shoes.
Janine had been her great ally in those early days, not only having her to stay in Paris, walking her tirelessly round the shops (Harriet especially loved the stock shops on the long, dull-looking rue d’Alesia, where so many of the chic-est, most magical names, Dorothée Bis, Cacherel, Lapidus, sold their last-season’s stock for a fraction of its original cost) and arranging for her to see the occasional couture show, but almost more importantly, taking an intense interest in what she was doing, happy to talk far into the night over the relative merits of Karl Lagerfeld and Vivienne Westwood, pure cotton as opposed to cotton polyester mix and the status of American couture vis-à-vis French and English. It was Janine, not Maggie or James, who had encouraged Harriet to take art at A-level, Janine who had argued with them both to let her go to St Martin’s to do a foundation course, Janine who had persuaded them (with still more difficulty) that she should be allowed to go and work as a stitcher at Jean Muir, rather than carry on with a more conventional education.
From there, working long, hard, badly paid hours, learning in a week what she knew college could not teach her in a month, possibly a year, studying not only technique but the necessity for a pursuit of perfection that was unarguably religious in its fervour, she found herself by a series of extraordinary accidents answering the phone to one of the great fashion editors of her day: Caroline Baker, ex-Nova, then working on Cosmopolitan. A dress Caroline had asked to borrow for a session had not turned up; Harriet was told to take it personally in a taxi to the studio. There, relieved of the dress and her responsibilities, she stood in the back of the studio unobserved watching entranced as Caroline selected, added to, subtracted from, built on a series of garments, with shirts, jackets, sweaters, shoes, scarves, jewellery, hats, hairstyles, creating looks that were at the same time unique to her and her magazine and yet remained faithful to the spirit of the designers; and she saw too how the sparkiness of a good model, the care of a talented make-up artist, the energy of a creative photographer could intensify, bring further alive an already dazzling picture. She forgot everything, what she was meant to be doing (finishing a hem), where she was meant to be (back in the workroom); she could scarcely have told you her name. At the end of the afternoon (which was actually eight thirty in the evening), as Caroline and her two assistants were packing up the clothes and the photographer had embarked on an apparently endless conversation with a model agency in New York, she emerged timidly from her shadow and asked Caroline if she could talk to her.
Caroline smiled her rather vague, sweet smile and said of course she could; she listened to Harriet’s halting explanation of her ambitions to be a designer, her slowly growing frustration with what was the painstaking discipline of couture, and her enchantment with what she had seen that day. Caroline laughed and said it wasn’t always like that, but why didn’t she go and talk to a girl she knew, a stylist, who was looking for a dogsbody. ‘It will be just that, I warn you, trailing round London finding things like scarves and bracelets and berets, nothing glamorous, and I think she wants experience anyway, but it’s worth a try, you could go and talk to her. Oh, and learn to type, then you could work for someone like me.’
The stylist took Harriet on (being more in need of cheap labour than experience). Caroline had been right: it was backbreaking, thankless work and most of the time everything Harriet contributed was discarded; but she made contacts at every manufacturer, every retail outlet in London, and on a great many magazines and several advertising agencies as well. She took Caroline’s advice and taught herself to type, and on her twenty-first birthday her present from fate was a job as personal assistant to a firm called Jon Jonathan. Jon Jonathan was the pseudonym for two brothers, who designed the kind of evening dresses that fill the tables at charity balls and the social pages of the glossy magazines.
They were successful, clever and fun; Harriet had a wonderful eighteen months with them, gaining first-hand experience in running a business, made a lot more contacts, and was allowed to put a couple of dresses into a new line they were doing for the booming teenage ball market. Her dresses sold out in days, and the following season she did several more, all of which were best sellers. A year later, she got a job as a designer for a new young high street chain of upmarket leisurewear called Freetime. Working on those clothes, aiming for a line as clean-cut, as classically perfect in its own way as Jean Muir’s, and yet as breezily commercial as Jon Jonathan’s, Harriet felt she had established a concept that she could make her own. She turned out coordinates of shirts, sweaters, leggings, chinos, with matching hats, caps, scarves, socks. She put stinging colour with cool neutrals, outrageous detail with classic style. She finally knew where her talents fused; she knew now what she wanted to do. The Freetime studios were in Wandsworth; while she was working for them, a tiny shop became empty in the increasingly fashionable high street. With the courage, vision and refusal to look down that had characterized her working life so far, Harriet sold her car, her flat, bought the lease and opened under the name of Harry’s (Mungo Buchan’s childhood name for her) on her twenty-fourth birthday. For a year she lived and worked there, some weeks scarcely even leaving the four walls. She was exhausted, poor, frightened and permanently exhilarated, flying on adrenalin: cashing in shamelessly on the contacts she had made over the years. Previous customers bought from her, journalists wrote about her (she was a great story), the Jons once bailed her out when she was in a real crisis and put money into her business, in return for a ten per cent share. ‘Don’t ask for more,’ she said coolly, the first time. ‘I’d rather go under altogether than lose control of Harry’s.’ She refused to take money from Theo, from Merlin, from her father, even when she wanted to expand, to get another shop. Theo was particularly pressing, said he had always wanted a foot in the fashion market, that she would be doing him a favour. ‘I’m sorry, Theo,’ she said collectedly, sipping at the champagne over which he put to her his proposition (£1 million investment in return for a forty-nine per cent stake). ‘I’m going to make it on my own.’
‘Harriet, Harriet,’ he said, shaking his head at her, ‘it’s impossible without investment. I’ve forgotten more about starting a company than you’ve even learnt yet. You’ll starve from underfunding, and then you’ll come back, crawling to me.’ He winked at her through a cloud of cigar smoke; Harriet didn’t even smile back.
She was lying; it was. She was desperate for her second shop, a perfect site in the Fulham Road (where she knew her customers lived in droves), and she didn’t have anything like the money. Interest rates were soaring (this was 1988), Theo’s offer was as insanely generous as it was tempting. But she wouldn’t take it. She went to the bank and took out a loan, and she opened the second Harry’s just before she was twenty-five; she followed it with shops in Bath, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Exeter. A year after that she had her own design studio in Covent Garden, with two assistants; her turnover was £10 million. And then she looked at Paris, and saw how well shops like Laura Ashley and The Gap were doing there, and with Janine’s help found a tiny shop in Passy, with a flat over it. She loved Paris, she had always loved it. She began to spend half her time there.
And still her luck held, and the economy boomed, and her clothes echoed the joyous, extravagant optimism of the era and its devotion to the fitness creed, and sold and sold, not only to the young, but to the newly young thirty- and even forty-somethings. There seemed to be no stopping her.
And then she fell in love.
It was so ridiculous when she had known him so long.
‘It’s so ridiculous when I’ve known you so long,’ she said, staring at him, her heart churning, her head in turmoil, feeling her body wildly weak with longing, and shock as well that it had happened at all, looking at her hand in his across the table, as if she had never seen it, seen either of them before, feeling the hot, twisting, leaping shafts of desire between them, savouring the delicious, sweetly strange knowledge that soon, astonishingly soon, she would be in bed with him, learning of him, discovering him, feeling him, and he raised her hand and held it against his cheek, while looking at her with something that was close to amusement mixed nonetheless with love, holding her eyes with his.
‘So long, all your life in fact,’ he said, smiling, beginning to kiss her palm, and fronds of hot sweet excitement began to forge their way through her, and she smiled back, and said, ‘What would they say to us, whatever would they say?’ And he said (reaching out with the other hand, stroking her cheek, slowly, lingeringly, and then pushing her hair back, and his hand in her hair, on her head, was somehow the most sensuous thing she had ever known), ‘They’d say it was dreadful, terrible, completely unsuitable,’ and she said, (turning her head, leaning it on his hand, closing her eyes briefly with the effort of sitting still), ‘And it is, it is terrible, it’s awful, what would my father say? I can’t even begin to think about it.’
‘Your father,’ he said simply, ‘is much more of a pragmatist than you might think.’ And she stared at him, arrested briefly in her delicious progress into love, and said, ‘What do you mean? I don’t understand,’ and he said, ‘I mean exactly that and don’t let it trouble you.’ She would have pressed him further, demanded an explanation, only he dropped her hand suddenly, and placed his hand on her thigh under the table, and she felt his fingers, his strong, thrusting fingers moving on it, stroking it, and then working upwards, slowly, inexorably, towards the tender liquid place that was yearning for him, unable to wait for him, and she forgot everything, only stood up abruptly, and said, her eyes fixed on his, ‘Shit, we have to go, we have to go now, quickly,’ and he threw a thousand francs onto the table (in payment for what was at the most a four-hundred franc bill) and took her elbow and guided her out of the restaurant and into the car he had waiting outside. ‘My hotel,’ he said briefly to the driver, then lay back and took her in his arms, and began to kiss her; hot, hungry, probing kisses. When they reached the hotel they went in quickly, through the foyer and up in the lift, and he took her hand and half dragged her out of it and into his suite.
He pushed her in impatiently, almost roughly, and slammed the door behind him, stood there leaning against it, breathing heavily, staring at her, his eyes moving all over her, her face, her breasts, her legs as if he had never seen her before, and she was panting too, staring at him, filled with excitement and fear at the same time, many fears, of what she was doing, of whether he really wanted her, of how she would be for him.
‘This is bad of us,’ he said, ‘really bad,’ (still smiling, knowing he didn’t mean it, knowing she knew it too). ‘Maybe even now we shouldn’t, I shouldn’t, not to you, you of all people.’ And, ‘Yes we should, we should and me of all people, it will be all right, I know it will,’ and she was dragging off her shirt, fighting out of her trousers, her eyes still fixed on him.
‘Yes, but he’s my best friend,’ he said, tearing off his tie, his shirt, struggling with his zip.
‘I know, I know, and what does it matter?’ she said, tearing off her tights, her pants.
‘He’d be so shocked, so angry,’ he said, moving forward, bending, starting to lick at her nipples, her erect, hard nipples. ‘You said he was a pragmatist just now, you know you did,’ she said, and her hands were in his hair, pushing at his head, pushing his mouth onto hers and he said, ‘God, your breasts are so beautiful,’ and then raising his head, smiling at her like a delighted child, ‘I knew it, I always thought they would be.’ And he pushed her down onto the bed, kissing her, his hands everywhere, on her stomach, her buttocks, her thighs, and she was writhing, moaning for him, her hands on him, too, stroking, feeling, exploring, the big firm buttocks, the surprisingly flat stomach, the soft, heavy balls, the wet, quivering penis, and then he said, ‘Christ, Harriet, Christ, I can’t, I can’t stand it,’ and it was there, his penis, in her, swiftly, impatiently, thick, heavy, reaching far far into her, urging her into sensations, hot piercing liquid sensations, and she lay back, her arms flung wide, her eyes closed, not touching him, not doing anything, just opening, opening to him and her pleasure, and there was a great white-hot brightness ahead of her, above her, and she was reaching, grasping, climbing to it, and she had never imagined, never known such strength, such power, and she thought she would tear, break with it, and then suddenly there it was, a great wild roar of joy and she realized there was indeed a great noise and it was her own voice, crying out with triumph, and for what seemed like a long long time her body gradually fell away from its climax in sweet, slow tumblings of pleasure and into peace. And then she opened her eyes, and saw him looking at her, and there was such tenderness, such love in his eyes, and she could not, would not, feel anything but triumph and joy. And ‘Was that good for you?’ he asked, and she smiled and said, ‘Theo, you know how good it was.’
It had started with dinner, a perfectly ordinary dinner. He had phoned her at the shop in Passy, said he was alone in Paris staying at the Crillon while some work was done on his house, could she spare him the evening, and she had said delighted (for she had always loved him, adored him even, had grown up thinking how wonderful it must be to be the sort of woman he would want, fall in love with, had thought also that she was exactly the sort of woman he would not, had said of course she could, but he must come down to her, she had something to finish first. His car, an absurdly extended Mercedes, arrived forty minutes later, and the shop was locked; she went to the door and smiled up at him through the glass, thinking not for the first time, not even for the hundred and first, that he really was the most extraordinarily good-looking man even at the age he must be (well into his fifties), and quite absurdly sexy too, with his wild black hair, his burning, brilliant brown eyes, his permanently tanned skin. He was very tall and big, heavy even, but not fat; and he was of course, as always, beautifully dressed, not as so many middle-aged men dressed, trying to look young, but carelessly careful, in a fine lawn shirt, a silk tie, a dark jacket, perfectly cut grey trousers, and as he bent to kiss her she could smell very faintly the unmistakable scent of the Hermès Equipage he always wore.
‘You look tired,’ he said, half severely, ‘and you’ve lost weight, I shall take you out and spoil you,’ and she said, smiling, that that would be lovely, and he sat patiently for a while as she fini
shed a drawing, wrote a letter, faxed them both to the studio in London, and then less patiently as she made a couple of phone calls.
‘Come on, come on,’ he said, ‘don’t you ever stop?’ ‘No’ she said, firmly, ‘not till I’ve finished, do you?’
‘Never finish,’ he said, ‘actually. Can I use your phone?’ And then it was her turn to wait while he called first London, then New York and Sydney, until finally, impatient herself, and irritated at his wanton and expensive use of her phone, she said, ‘Theo, for Christ’s sake, stop it,’ and he laughed and said, ‘Sorry, I’ll pay for the calls,’ and wrote her a cheque there and then for 300 francs.
‘That’s much too much,’ she said, ‘don’t be absurd,’ and he told her to shut up, it was hush money, and took her elbow and eased her out of the shop.
They ate in one of her favourite restaurants, just round the corner from her shop, classically perfect French food, the tables set with baskets of bread and jugs of wine and water, the first course brought swiftly (she had mushrooms à la Grecque, he a goat’s cheese salad) and then a long wait for a shared carré d’agneau, as they talked, finished one jug of wine, and he ordered another (‘Can’t we have something better?’
‘No, Theo, we can’t and anyway, it wouldn’t be’). He was slightly depressed, lonely (the fourth divorce was hitting him, he said, and he was feeling his age) and had just been trumped in a deal to buy an Australian property company. Harriet listened, politely at first, then more patiently, tenderly almost, recognizing for the first time at least with her heart what her head and her father had frequently told her: that this great ebullient, badly behaved, overindulged spoilt child of a man was in fact strangely vulnerable, oddly sad.
Another Woman (9781468300178) Page 24
