Lace

by Shirley Conran

  Pat said, “I can see you enjoy shouting, but it’s not the way to win an argument,” and went off to shout at the chief accountant, after which Judy’s expenses were raised. It was still a lonely, dyspeptic life, but at least she ate.

  And she produced results.

  Less than six months later Judy was able to persuade Pat to fly Guy to New York to discuss a trunk show. Pierre Mouton accompanied him to investigate the possibilities of selling in the United States. Guy’s new collection of separates covered the blue segment of the spectrum from lavender to deep purple. The unconstricting clothes projected a pulled-together style that was easy to move in, made a woman feel as if she wasn’t wearing anything and enabled her to look her best without feeling self-conscious. He had used only luxurious fabrics and refused to produce a really cheap line. “One good suit is a better investment for a woman than three so-so suits,” he said firmly to Judy as they leaned against the boat rail.

  From the green-gold water, Wall Street looked like strips of ticker-tape stretching toward the sky. “This is the obligatory tourist’s starter trip,” Judy had explained, “down the Hudson River, past the Statue of Liberty, then up the East River to circle Manhattan. After that, I’m going to march you right around this city. You have no idea how I love it.”

  “More than Paris?”

  “Different.” Within a week of being in New York, Judy had decided that this marvellous, glittering, exhausting place was where she belonged and that she would never leave it. She felt personal and possessive about the city in a way she had never felt about Paris. “I love New York and I’m starting to love my job; life isn’t quite so hectic and it’s a good deal more comfortable now that I travel with the show and not ahead of it.” She turned toward him, squinting into the late afternoon sun. “Incidentally, Pat wants to meet us for dinner so we can discuss touring your next collection. I warn you, she wants you to travel with it—a genuine French Frenchman wiz faseenateeng accent. They’ll keel over at the mere sound of you in Cleveland.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a free trip around the States.”

  “Don’t expect a vacation.” Judy turned her back to the water, leaned against the rail and wagged a finger at him. “Certainly the trips look wonderful when you see the models being greeted at airports, with armfuls of cellophane-wrapped roses as they step into the limo, but that’s all baloney. What really happens is that we arrive on the last night plane—six people and thirty-eight suitcases—and we’re met by a truck at the airport. I drag them out of bed at dawn, then one model will zip off to do the TV breakfast show and the rest get ready for a store show where the entire fashion-conscious audience is wearing tired-looking trouser suits or limp raincoats. Then we’re interviewed by every newspaper in town, and after that there’s the afternoon store show, then TV again, then off to the airport. If you travel on in the evening you arrive too late to eat, and if you travel on the dawn plane there’s no time to eat or drink anything anyway, except those packets of Nescafe in the hotel bedroom. I tell you, after a truck tour you need two days in bed with the telephone off the hook while your nerves and your stomach sort themselves out.”

  She paused and watched the seagulls swoop over the gray water. “It’s a nonstop routine of packing and unpacking. The poor dresser has to get all the garments pressed before each show, then she has to lay out the accessories. They’re real saints, those dressers!” she snorted. “But the models are devils, and the sexual complications never end. We had two lesbians on the last trip, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, even on the catwalk. . . . Then there’s the food problem. Of course the models are terrified of putting on weight and the really skinny ones are the worst—they’re all either on some diet of dried seaweed and lime flowers, which they expect the hotel to stock, or else they order champagne and caviar and try to charge it to room service. We always tell the hotels that we won’t pay extras, and the girls know it. Still, they sulk when they find that they either have to pay cash for the caviar or send it back.”

  “So tell me more about these poor thin girls and their sexual complications. Surely they can’t all be so tiresome.”

  “I suppose that some of them are basically sweet girls, but they lead very insecure lives. They’re totally exterior-oriented—they don’t even enjoy their good looks because they constantly worry about losing them. No model thinks she’s good-looking. Not surprising! They’re constantly being auditioned, even the famous ones, for some assignment, and if twenty girls are auditioned, then nineteen will be turned down. They have to put up with endless rejection, and consequently they’re very vulnerable.”

  She pulled her cream knitted cap down to cover her ears. “Some girls live on uppers to cut their appetite—so they’re edgy and take offense at the slightest thing. Or else they can’t sleep because we move on every night to a different hotel, so they take sleeping pills. Then I can’t get them up in the morning.” She giggled. “Of course, sometimes I can’t get them up because they aren’t there to get up. They’ll have picked up some guy in the bar and disappeared. Just keeping the photographers off them is a full-time job.”

  “You can’t frighten me.” Guy tickled Judy’s button nose. “Of course I’ll tour. We’ll go together. You helped me to become a success in France. This time, Judy, I’m going to see that you stay a permanent part of the success! You won’t escape from me so easily again. . . . Unless you insist on wearing such ridiculous hats.”

  He tugged off her cream knitted cap and threw it into the East River. “That is the sort of thing my grandmother used to keep her boiled eggs warm. First thing tomorrow we buy you a beautiful fox fur hat from Saks. Only tiny babies wear that sort of knit thing.”

  Much to his surprise, Judy burst into tears.

  PART

  THREE

  14

  THE FROST HUNG white lace curtains outside the window. Elizabeth hated to get up in the freezing winter. The sky was still dark and cold, a dim sprinkling of snow topped the apple trees and beech hedge around the garden. She wanted to stay safe and snug under the feather-filled quilt, luxuriating in the warmth as she listened to her family downstairs.

  “You’ll be late, Elizabeth,” shouted Maman from the bottom of the stairs.

  Eyes still shut, the small child put her bare feet on the rug and stumbled to the foot of the carved wooden bed, where her clothes lay neatly folded on the red-lacquered lid of the blanket chest. Sleepily she fumbled into thick black tights, heavy, wool winter underwear, blue-checked frock, navy apron and then she sat on the rug to lace up her stout, stiff black boots. In 1955 this was the typical winter school uniform of a Swiss child.

  She climbed onto the chair by the window, rubbed clear a chilled glass pane and peered out at the weather. There was no snow today, as light started to show above the jagged black mountains on the other side of the Alpine valley. Below her, dimly visible beyond the snow-encrusted wooden balcony of the chalet, was the garden. Underneath her window, the first floor balcony ran right around the chalet. Under the fish-scale tiles of the roof, an old prayer had been carved

  GOD BLESS ALL WHO LIVE HERE

  The child jumped down from the window, clumped in clumsy boots across the wooden floor of the corridor and flung open the door. Her foster brother’s small room faced the mountain, and very little light filtered through the ancient windowpanes.

  “Get up, get up, lazybones.” She laughed. She flung herself on the patchwork quilt as an indignant head emerged from it. “You haven’t fetched the bread from the bakery.”

  “Felix said he’d bring it up,” mumbled Roger, sleepily.

  “I don’t believe you. Felix is on late duty this week.”

  Felix was the Hungarian head receptionist at the Hotel Rosat in Chateau d’Oex. In 1939, Felix had been dragged from his father’s farm and conscripted into the Hungarian army, then he had been forced into the German army to fight the Russians on the Eastern front. After the fall of Budapest, Felix’s division fled toward Germany,
at which point Felix had managed to escape into Switzerland. Felix chopped the wood and did other jobs that were too heavy for a woman; in return, Maman did his washing and sewing.

  “I tell you he’s coming up early, he promised.” Elizabeth rushed off, her boots clattering down the wooden stairs to the kitchen, where they always sat and ate in winter to save fuel. Maman was heating chocolate in a saucepan on top of the green, enameled stove.

  “Roger hasn’t got the bread for breakfast.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, Elizabeth, I’ll just flick water across yesterday’s loaf and reheat it in the oven. You won’t be able to tell the difference, Miss Telltale.” Her foster mother’s dark hair, still in a loose braid, not yet coiled in its neat daytime bun, hung down the back of her white flannel nightgown. Her red hands, skin flaking, placed a white pot of hot chocolate on the table.

  Maman’s husband had been killed on the Diablerets glacier eight years before. A ski guide, he had been leading a party across the glacier when they ran into bad weather. The party had been lost in the snow. Angelina Dassin was left with a small baby, which prevented her from working as a live-in maid as she had before her marriage. Almost penniless, she took the first job she was offered, scrubbing floors at the local hospital. In the evenings and on weekends she embroidered lace-trimmed white blouses for the tourist souvenir shop. For three years life had been very hard. Then she was asked to foster a baby girl who had been born at the hospital. The extra money meant that Angelina was able to stop her back-breaking cleaning job, stay cozily at home with two babies and concentrate on her embroidery.

  Elizabeth was brought up as one of the Dassin family, but she was always told by Angelina that she also had another mother, a real mother, and that one day—when she was older—her real mother would come and take her home. Those were her thoughts as every night Angelina softly sang “Au clair de la lune, mon ami pierrot” and other nursery rhymes as she rocked Elizabeth to sleep and the pines rustled outside in the dark garden.

  In fact, Angelina knew little more than Elizabeth about this mythical mother. A monthly check came in an anonymous envelope from a bank in Gstaad. Angelina always began her laborious reports, “Chère madame,” hoping that by now the poor child was married, but the replies gave no information about the sender. There were merely questions about the child’s progress that were duly answered in the next report.

  At first Elizabeth imagined her real mother as a kind of angel in a lace nightgown. Every night after saying her prayers on the rag rug she would whisper: “Bonne nuit, vraie maman.” Then she hoped that her real mother was a fairy princess and the reason that she couldn’t come to see Elizabeth was that she was sleeping in a forest glade until the fairy prince woke her with a kiss. How Elizabeth wished he’d hurry up! She hoped that the forest wasn’t too damp and that there weren’t any ants.

  Roger teased her that vraie maman was a witch woman with long fingernails and no teeth or hair, but Elizabeth refused to believe him, and when she overheard, Angelina, for once, scolded Roger. Such unkindness to his sister when he knew that if it wasn’t for her five hundred francs a month, Angelina would be on her knees with acres of wet ward floor in front of her instead of sitting in a warm kitchen and embroidering blue edelweiss around heart-shaped necklines.

  “Roger said Felix is coming up early,” Elizabeth said, as she gulped her hot chocolate.

  “Then I’d better dress quickly—hurry up, little one.” Almost in one movement, she twisted Elizabeth into her scarlet coat, guided her fingers into the gloves that were attached by a tape threaded through the sleeves, tugged on her red wool helmet, wound a thick scarf around her neck and kissed her good-bye.

  Outside, Elizabeth stood on tiptoe at the top of the steps, hopefully searching for Felix. She shivered, her breath froze on her scarf, her eyes watered and ran with tears that immediately turned to ice. A piercing whistle echoed across the mountains as the blue train to Montreux swished along the track, steel-pointed plough in front to clear the early morning snow. Elizabeth heard the low lulling noise of the cows, the clanging milk pails and the clatter from the farm next door; she sniffed the straw and dung. Except for this farm, the Dassin chalet was the last one on the mountain track. Beyond and above it, dark pine forest stretched to the summit rocks, now covered in January snow; below the chalet, the garden fell away down the mountain slope toward the frozen river that divided the snow-covered valley. The white blanket was broken only by that winding black line and the sharp dark line of the railway.

  Trudging up the mountain track from the village, she saw the bulky figure of Felix, a large basket over one arm. Shrieking greetings, the frail child slithered down the track to meet him. “Felix, will you be here when I come back from school? Will you tell me stories? Will you mend my doll, her arm’s hanging loose? Will you make me another igloo?”

  “Yes, yes and yes, if you’re not late for school.”

  “Oh, I promise.”

  The skinny little girl slithered and slid down the hard-packed snow track; she just managed to slip through the glass doors of the village schoolroom and dodge past the blackboard as Tante Gina rang the pewter handbell. The clock chimed seven-thirty as Elizabeth scrambled to her place on the splintered wooden bench that would feel harder and harder as the day wore on, until all the blue-apron-clad children perched upon it wriggled with numb discomfort.

  After prayers, the whole school always chanted their multiplication table, “Un fois deux, deux. Deux fois deux, quatre.” Afterward, as it was Wednesday, Elizabeth climbed the stairs to Tante Simone’s sitting room for her special English lesson. She also had a special French lesson but that was on Friday.

  Tante Simone’s sitting room smelled of biscuit crumbs, mothballs, eau de cologne and old ladies. Dark brocade wallpaper was punctuated by the monochromatic serious stares of previous pupils. Below these photographs stood an old upright black piano, while the centre of the room was dominated by a round table covered with an ink-stained Indian shawl and surrounded by faded blue velvet chairs, a white lace antimacassar draped over each high back. On one of these chairs sat Elizabeth’s favourite person.

  Mademoiselle Sherwood-Smith taught Elizabeth to chant traditional nursery rhymes and brought her books about a rabbit called Peter, a bear called Rupert, and the battle-scarred bloody history of the English kings and queens. She helped Elizabeth to assemble the big jigsaw puzzle that was a map of England and played a fierce game of racing demon, which was how Elizabeth learned to count in English.

  Elizabeth wasn’t nearly so keen on her special French lesson. She had learned to talk in the lilting French Vaudois accent of the canton, which sounded a bit like cows in a barn, as the voice was always lowered in the middle of a sentence, then lifted upward at the end of it in a gentle, musical moo. Mademoiselle Pachoud was much older than Mademoiselle Sherwood-Smith and she walked with a stick because of her bad leg. She was French from France, and she gave Elizabeth elocution lessons so that she should speak classic French, not a Swiss dialect. But after Elizabeth started to do this, the other children teased her.

  They pounced on her again at midday as Elizabeth wound herself into her outdoor clothes before going home for the midday meal; one of the big girls snatched her balaclava helmet and tantalizingly dangled it just beyond her reach. Elizabeth, small for her age, jumped and jumped for it, until she was out of breath and scarlet-faced with exertion and suppressed tears.

  “See, you’re not so smart, skinny, in spite of your special lessons; no wonder nobody wants to be your special friend, you stuck-up show-off.”

  Elizabeth jumped and grabbed again but the scarlet wool was jerked away. “Think you’re better than us but you’re not. I heard my maman say that you’re a bastard. Skinny little bastard, stuck-up skinny little bastard.”

  Two other girls took up the taunting cry and danced around Elizabeth, tweaking her long dark plaits, until suddenly the exasperated small child put her head down and butted one of her tormentors in the
stomach. Caught off guard, the girl fell to the ground, shrieking, just as Mademoiselle Gina entered the cloakroom.

  “She pushed me over, Elizabeth pushed me, Mam’selle.”

  Mademoiselle Gina looked at Elizabeth, scarlet-faced, teeth bared, leg drawn back, ready to kick. “Shame on you, Elizabeth, go home immediately.”

  Later, over their midday soup, Mademoiselle Gina spoke to her sister. “More trouble with Elizabeth fighting again.”

  “Oh, dear, you don’t think they tease her?”

  “Even if they do, there’s no need for violence. There’s plenty of teasing in the playground, but Elizabeth is the only child who uses her fists. She fights like a boy.”

  “Well, her foster brother Roger is more of her friend than any of the girls; I expect he’s taught her some rough tricks. It’s a pity she seems so different from the other girls, somehow an outsider. They feel suspicious and ill at ease with her, that’s why she’s so difficult and that’s why she has no close girlfriends.”

  “No excuses, Simone, the child is very touchy, always ready to suspect an insult and overhasty to avenge it. She shouldn’t react so violently.”

  “It’s only when she thinks she’s being unfairly treated that she loses control of herself; then she needs the action to get rid of her resentment. Five minutes later she’s always calm again and, apart from that, she’s a quiet pupil, very conscientious.”