Lace

by Shirley Conran

  Suddenly she felt sad. As if she were touching a talisman, she fiddled with one of the matching rings she wore on her middle fingers, each one an exquisitely carved coral rosebud on a thick gold band. Apart from these she didn’t much care for jewelry—her passion was for shoes. Her walk-in shoe closet contained row upon row of exquisitely handmade boots and shoes. Judy decided she might just celebrate tomorrow by going mad in Maud Frizon. Why not? Her partner had told her only this morning that they were worth nearly two million dollars more this year!

  It was increasingly hard to remember life in her old studio on East 11th Street, from which she’d been evicted because she couldn’t pay the rent. But Judy forced herself to remember those days. They made the present all the more pleasant by contrast.

  There was another reason why Judy never wanted to forget what it felt like to be short of money in a big city. That was how a lot of her readers felt. They bought VERVE! for its optimism, its encouragement, its sensuality, and they looked on the magazine as a friend. The truth was that Judy travelled to work by bus because she wanted to stay in touch with her readers.

  Reconciling the opposite sides of her public image was sometimes difficult. On the one hand, she liked to be seen as a warmhearted, straightforward, hard-working woman who’d been known to lunch off a street corner hot dog, a working girl much like her readers. On the other hand, those same readers expected her to lead a glamorous social life, dress the way they dreamed of dressing, and be a celebrity herself. So, when Judy was not eating hot dogs she lunched at Lutèce, dieted at the Golden Door when necessary, and travelled constantly. Like New York, she set a brisk, optimistic pace. On those occasions when—suddenly—she plummeted into black loneliness, she gritted her teeth and bore it. Loneliness from time to time was the price of freedom, and freedom wasn’t a stars and stripes, Boy Scout idea, it was doing what you damn well wanted to do—all the time.

  The doors of the bus hissed open, sucked in more passengers and hissed shut again. A sallow, middle-aged woman collapsed into the seat opposite Judy, settled her shopping bag on her knees, then suddenly groaned. “I wish the buildings would go up in flames, then there’d be no more problems.” She said it again, then yelled it. No one in the bus took the slightest notice until the woman got off; then there was a general rustle of relief, a few smiles and shrugs—just another New York crazy who didn’t care what anyone thought of her.

  But that was also a sign of maturity, mused Judy. You became an adult when you stopped caring what other people thought about you and started to care what you thought about them. . . . Was it a feature? she wondered professionally. She thought about a possible author, celebrities to interview, a quiz, and made a quick mental note to get one of the editors working on it. “Are You Grown-Up Yet?” Not a bad title. Not a bad question, either, she thought to herself, unable to answer it. She still felt as childlike inside as she looked on the outside, although she would never allow anyone to know it. Vulnerability was bad for business. Judy preferred her reputation as an enfant terrible, a baby tycoon, the lethal little lady publisher who had already come a long way and intended to go much further. The image that Judy projected was that of a woman to be reckoned with—a woman who made you think ten percent faster when you were with her, but also a woman with a weakness for pretty shoes.

  She was making up for lost time. Until she was fifteen, Judy had worn only sensible black shoes.

  Behind the lace curtains her family had been painfully poor. Her parents were devout Southern Baptists, greatly interested in sin and its avoidance. In order to avoid sin, Judy and her young brother Peter were never allowed to do anything on Sundays. They could sing in church but they weren’t allowed to do so at home, they were not allowed to listen to the radio, because radio on Sunday was sinful: the big, elaborate, walnut radio, with the wooden sunray pattern over the speaker, was the focal point of the living room, but on Sundays, apart from cooking noises, the only sound in the house was the clatter of the old icebox that stood by the door to the back porch.

  Naturally, smoking and drinking were sinful. Nevertheless, her Grandad, who lived with them, would disappear from time to time into the cellar for a drink from the bottle that he kept hidden behind the boiler; perhaps he justified it to himself as medicine. After his Sunday drink, Grandad always went to the back porch to his rocking chair, which creaked under his weight as he beamed at the apple tree at the end of the yard and waited for the hereafter. Judy’s parents must have known about the whiskey because you could smell the stuff on his breath; her mother’s mouth would tighten, and she would give a tiny, delicate, disapproving sniff, but she never said anything. Grandad was supposedly a teetotaler.

  The man in the plaid shirt seated across from Judy looked uneasy and lowered his eyes furtively to check his zipper. She looked away quickly—she must have been staring again. When she was lost in thought, her dark blue eyes glared through the big tortoiseshell frames with a ferocity that was as alarming as it was unintentional.

  She wondered again what the purpose of this meeting with Lili was, and why the mystery?

  First there had been the contrite telephone call—and God knows, Lili had every reason to sound contrite. Ultimately, of course, the bust-up with Lili had been good for Judy’s public relations business, but that hadn’t been Lili’s intention that night in Chicago. . . . “If you could find it in your heart to forgive me for the very bad way in which I behaved. . . .” Lili had pleaded, in that deep voice with the slight continental accent. . . . “I was so ungrateful. . . . So very unprofessional. . . . I am ashamed when I think about it. . . .” In spite of herself, Judy had started to mellow; it wasn’t just because of Lili’s stardom or her magnetism, it was simply because Judy had enjoyed working with her. They really had been a terrific team until that night in Chicago.

  Lili had said there was a special matter that she wished to discuss with Judy, “something of a very confidential nature I should like to speak to you about personally.”

  Judy didn’t waste her time on anybody. Dozens of strange proposals were put to her each week, and most of them didn’t get past her secretaries. But this was Lili, whose name had been linked to more celebrities than that of any other woman, Lili, whose waiflike beauty was a twentieth-century legend, Lili, who never gave interviews.

  The last fact counted most with Judy. Lili was worth at least a thousand words for VERVE!, whatever happened at the meeting, so Judy agreed to it. Eager and charming as a child, Lili thanked her and asked her to keep their rendezvous a secret. Judy hadn’t intended to tell anyone anyway. But she was intrigued; like herself, Lili had also succeeded in life fast, mysteriously and against the odds. She must be about twenty-eight or twenty-nine now, although she didn’t look it.

  Last month’s telephone call had been followed by a confirming letter on thick, cream paper with the single word LILI centrally engraved in navy Bodoni typeface; for some reason Lili had no last name.

  What could she have in mind? Judy wondered. Backing? Surely not. Publishing? Not likely. Publicity? No longer necessary.

  It was six-twenty and the traffic was still motionless, so Judy jumped off the bus and walked the last few blocks. She always liked to arrive on time.

  The cab smelled of stale cigarette smoke, the backseat had been slashed and the guts were spilling out; it was also stuck in traffic on Madison Avenue, but the driver, a surly Puerto Rican, was mercifully silent until suddenly he barked, “Where you from?”

  “Cornwall,” said Pagan, who never thought of herself as English. She added, “The warmest part of Britain,” and thought that wasn’t saying much. Pagan’s pallor was due to poor circulation; she had always suffered from cold weather, which was eleven months of the year at home. As a child she had hated to put her naked feet out of bed on winter mornings and hurriedly plunged her chilblains into sheepskin slippers. Her first frenzied love-hate relationship was with her warm but uncomfortable winter underclothes; the scratchy, cream wool combination suit that cove
red her from neck to ankle, with sagging sanitary trapdoor that unbuttoned at the back; the prickly, flannel Liberty bodice, a vestlike garment that ended at the stomach with long, dangling suspenders to hold up her thick woolen stockings.

  When Pagan was a child, at seven every morning a little housemaid had scurried around Trelawney to light the stoves and the fires, which were banked down or turned off every freezing winter night at eleven p.m. no matter what time everyone went to bed. Smelly cylindrical oil stoves stood before the lace curtains of the bathrooms and minor bedrooms, open coal fires smoldered in the principal bedrooms and great, glowing logs were piled in the hall and drawing room, but the long hallway and bathrooms were always freezing, and the food from the home farm was lukewarm when it finally arrived on the manor table. The uneven flagstones in the dining room always felt cold, even in summer, even through Pagan’s shoes; when she thought no one was looking, Pagan used to tuck up her feet under her bottom and away from the icy floor—but it was always noticed and she would be told sharply to “sit up like a lady.”

  However, the worst part of winter had been getting into bed under the cold heaviness of the linen sheets. Once beyond the heat range of the oil stove, Pagan’s bones would ache and her body become gradually numb until sleep mercifully anesthetized the dull pain.

  At this memory, although it was hot for October, the forty-six-year-old Pagan shivered in her pink wool Jean Muir coat.

  As usual, Pagan was staying at the Algonquin, where she felt oddly at home. The lobby had the slightly seedy, unwarrantedly superior air of a London club with its high-backed, shabby leather wing chairs and dim, parchment-shaded lights. Her room was small but surprisingly pretty after the calculated gloom of the lobby. A comfortable, pink velvet armchair stood on the grass-green carpet; artful lace scatter pillows, cunningly placed brass lamps, a few bird pictures in golden frames spoke of the skillful decorator’s touch. The old-fashioned, newly smart brass bedstead reminded Pagan of the nursery at Trelawney and the dark-green-on-white trellis wallpaper swept her mind back to the conservatory where her grandfather used to read the Times every morning, surrounded by slumbering dogs, palms, ferns and tropical plants. The conservatory was heated by long, hot, brown tubes that writhed around the walls at floor level and burned your fingers if you touched them. It was easily the warmest, if not the only warm spot in that drafty mansion, especially when the wind was blowing straight off the sea, sweeping harshly over granite-grim cliffs to the rhododendron-encircled lawns. The conservatory was also a terrific place to hide from her mother; with a book and an apple, Pagan would slither like a lizard under jade fronds and jagged malachite spikes, concealed by yellow froth and spumescent greens.

  Pagan could hardly remember her father, who had been killed in a car crash when only twenty-six. Pagan, then three years old, had been left with a vague memory of a scratchy cheek and a scratchy, tweed-kneed lap. The only traces of her father were the row of silver trophy cups, which stood on the oak shelves in the study, for school swimming matches and county golf, faded sepia photographs of cricket teams, and a group of laughing people at a beach picnic.

  After his death, until she was ten and had to go to school in London, Pagan and her mother made their home with Grandfather at Trelawney, where Pagan had been both spoiled and toughened. When she was three years old, she had been taken out into the bay and lowered over the side of the dinghy in Grandfather’s arms to learn to swim. When she was thirteen months old she had been put on her first pony; the reins were placed in her baby hands and her grandfather walked her around the paddock every morning so that she would learn to ride before she was old enough to be frightened; she first hunted with Grandfather Trelawney when she was eight.

  It was her grandfather who had taught Pagan courtesy. He listened politely and with genuine interest to everybody, whether it was one of his tenants, the village postman or his neighbour, Lord Tregerick; the people Grandfather couldn’t stand were what he called “the money chaps”—lawyers, bankers, accountants. Grandfather never looked at bills, he simply passed them on to his agent to be paid.

  Pagan had always been surrounded by servants, many of whom were there because her grandfather hated to dismiss anyone. Somebody put Pagan’s gloves on, somebody pulled her boots off, somebody brushed her hair at night, and somebody put her clothes away, so the little girl grew up to be compulsively untidy. Pagan always remembered the soft rustle of the housemaid’s skirt as she carried brass cans of hot water to the bedroom in the early morning and stood them by the rose-patterned washbasin; the blissful warmth of the butler’s pantry, where Briggs cleaned the silver and kept the flower-decorated Minton dinner service on shelves behind glass doors; the cozy warmth and fragrance of the big kitchen; the resigned, sour face of her grandfather’s valet as he scratched the mud from Pagan’s riding clothes in the brushing room.

  Pagan seldom saw her mother, and when she did put in an appearance she was obviously bored. She hated the country; there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Cornwall in the 1930s was hardly sophisticated and Pagan’s mother certainly was. Short hair sleeked beetle-neat against heavy, dead-white makeup; the daily masterpiece, a scarlet glistening mouth, was painted over her real mouth, which was much thinner; red traces of Pagan’s mother could be found on glasses, cups, towels and innumerable cigarette butts. Mrs. Trelawney often went up to London, and when she came back, she brought her London friends down for the weekend. Pagan disliked them, but nevertheless, she picked up much of their Mayfair slang, and for the rest of her life her conversation was dotted with their dated, breathless exaggerations.

  Now in 1978 Pagan still missed her grandfather and regretted that her husband had never met him—or stayed at Trelawney before it had been transformed. Not that her grandfather would have had anything in common with her husband, who was interested only in books and his work. He took no interest in Pagan’s fundraising—although without the money she raised, he would have been unable to continue his research. Exasperated, she sometimes scolded him. When she did, he would hug her and say, “Darling, I’m sorry white mice are so expensive.”

  Pagan knew that he was proud of her work, though at first her forthright business methods had alarmed him. Sometimes she suspected they still did.

  She always hated to leave her husband, but after his heart attack it was unwise for him to travel; he was better off at home with help close at hand, a semi-invalid, but still one of the wittiest, cleverest and most distinguished men in the world. Although neither of them spoke about it, the past sixteen years had been a very special bonus—but sixteen years of constant care to keep him alive and working would be triumphantly worth that effort if now, as seemed likely, he might at last succeed within the next ten years. The question that they never asked each other was whether he could last until then. That was why Pagan hated to leave her husband, even to discuss the possibility of a major donation to the Institute.

  And from such an unexpected source.

  In the scarf-scattered, gumboot-glutted, coat-choked, stone-paved passage of her cottage on the Trelawney estate, Pagan had answered the telephone and heard the low, husky voice of Lili herself. As casually as if she were suggesting meeting in the next village, Lili had asked Pagan to travel to America to meet her on a matter that was both urgent and confidential. Pagan had been astonished by the telephone call. International film stars weren’t in the habit of phoning her out of the blue and she had never met Lili, though of course she’d heard about her. One could hardly avoid hearing about that romantic, talented, sad creature.

  On the telephone, the film star had spoken in a quiet, serious voice. “I’ve heard so much about your projects,” she said. “I’m fascinated by the wonderful work your husband is doing and I’d like to discuss a way in which I might be of help.”

  When Pagan had politely pressed Lili for further details, Lili had explained that her American accountant had suggested several possible ways in which Lili might contribute, some extending over several years, and
he had suggested a preliminary meeting in New York with Lili’s tax advisers. It sounded as if a really big contribution was going to be made and a very generous check had then been sent to Pagan to cover her first-class travel expenses.

  Sitting in the stationary cab and listening to the driver swear in Spanish, Pagan wished that she didn’t feel so utterly awful. The waving mahogany hair that fell to her shoulders always looked fine, but today her face was puffy, her blue eyes dull, her eyelids swollen, and she looked all of her forty-six years.

  New York time is five hours earlier than London. Pagan had arrived the previous evening, and after only a few hours’ sleep, she woke at two in the morning, which was breakfast time in Britain. She wasn’t able to concentrate on her book and she hadn’t been able to get to sleep again. She never took sleeping pills or any other medicine, not even aspirin.

  She was terrified of getting hooked again.

  Sleek black skyscrapers loomed slightly darker than the sky. You don’t know how many shades of black there are until you’ve been in fashion or the printing business, Kate thought, as she hurried along West 58th Street, slightly late as usual. When she left the office at six-ten the sky had been pale blue and cream, but now, at six-thirty, it was dark. For a moment Kate thought nostalgically of the long English autumn twilights, then she paused at Van Cleef & Arpels. The Empress Josephine’s diamond coronation tiara sat in state in one window; Kate preferred it to the tiara in the other window, the more magnificent Russian Imperial diadem that had candy-sized emeralds set in a three-inch-thick blaze of diamonds. Again Kate wondered why she hadn’t let Tom pull her through the revolving doors last Monday. Most men hadn’t even heard of Van Cleef, let alone know where it was, let alone offer to do a little shopping there. “Let’s go get Josephine’s tiara,” Tom had said, tugging at her hand, and when she shook her head he had still tried to pull her in, pointing out that emeralds went with anything. Why hadn’t she wanted to accept an expensive present from him? After all, her birthday was next week: she would be forty-six years old and she didn’t care a bit. She didn’t need expensive reassurance; she had got what she had always wanted—a wonderful man and a wonderful job.