Lace

by Shirley Conran

  But the distance from the other side of the slope to the second wire fence was much farther than they had expected. It was the greater part of that half-kilometer band of no-man’s-land, and the lower slopes were covered by boulders that were difficult to climb over, although convenient to hide behind. The little group separated and scrambled for cover behind the first boulders only a few seconds before the searchlight swept over it.

  At that point, for the first time, Felix allowed himself to hope that they might make it. Again they scrambled to their feet and started to stagger forward over the uneven terrain.

  Suddenly Felix faltered and felt dizzy. Feeling Elizabeth clutching trustingly at his greatcoat, he willed himself to keep going. Then to his horror he heard the dogs barking in the distance, picking up the scent.

  Frantically summoning up what strength remained to him, Felix dragged Elizabeth along. He now had no idea where the others were. His only thought was to get to the second fence before his throbbing leg collapsed or the dogs caught up with them.

  When he reached it, he nearly ran into the wire. It was a brute—higher than the first, and with more barbs. He couldn’t see it as clearly as he had the other one, because now there was no moon. He touched it, then jerked back with a gasp.

  The fence was electrified.

  Trembling, panting hoarsely, Felix threw away his stick, carefully put his rifle on the ground and swiftly bent down to Elizabeth, whispering urgently.

  “Lili, darling. You know that an acrobat must be obedient. Now I want you to stand on my shoulders and show me your best jump ever, over this fence. Don’t land the way you do on the trampoline. Try to go limp as you land, try to land in a ball. Do a bad landing for Felix. Got that, darling? A very good, very high jump and a limp, curled-up landing. Then get straight up and run down the mountain and into the first house. Don’t wait for me, my darling, and don’t look back!”

  He pulled her mittens off, to improve her grip. Uncomprehending but obedient, Lili climbed onto his shoulders. Slowly, concentrating, she straightened upright, then she took a deep breath, bent her knees a little, and soared over the fence as if it did not exist.

  She landed, painfully, on all fours, in the thin snow on the other

  side.

  As she picked herself up Lili heard baying dogs and hesitated. Then she heard Felix shout, “Obedience, Lili! Run. Run!”

  She started to run downhill, a small gray shadow against the snow.

  Behind the barbed-wire fence, Felix picked up the rifle and crouched. In the dim light, he could hear the harsh panting breath, the throaty rasp of the big Alsatian before he could see it.

  As the animal flung itself at Felix, he squeezed the trigger. The shot hit the animal in the shoulder in midspring, but it was too late for Felix to avoid its leap, which knocked him to the ground. With a savage growl—regardless of training instructions—the wounded, maddened animal attacked.

  Felix was pinned to the ground by the heavy, writhing body. He smelled the panting, fetid animal breath on his face, then felt unendurable agony as the Alsatian tore his throat out.

  PART

  FOUR

  16

  THE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD MAXINE had started work in London at Partridge, in the chaotic studio above the calm shop off Bond Street. Mr. Partridge looked and dressed more like a City stockbroker than a famous designer. He projected a sort of charming helplessness that made people feel they had to do the work because he couldn’t; this made his staff feel needed and wanted, rather than merely employed. He was a gentle, kind, learned man, but ruthlessly uncompromising about his work. His supreme virtues were an extraordinary sense of colour combined with exquisite tact and discretion.

  After familiarizing herself with Partridge’s library of samples, Maxine’s work consisted mainly of running around. She collected paint samples from here, and delivered fabric samples there; she matched up this lemon silk to that lemon yellow satin swatch. It was quite extraordinary, she thought, that there were so many different fabrics and textures and that ninety-nine percent of them were perfectly repulsive. Quickly she was promoted to doing paste-ups; this meant preparing sheets of cardboard upon which Maxine stuck square samples of all the paints, fabrics and finishes, together with photographs or drawings of all the other items that were to be used in an interior; she loved this job, which combined her gift for colour with her impeccable sense of clarity. She also became very good at writing specifications. Maxine’s mind was as orderly as a filing cabinet, and her practical shrewdness was invaluable in the crises that invariably filled their days.

  Within a few months, Mr. Partridge discovered her passion for old furniture and sent her scouting around the more distant, dusty antique shops and little-known auction rooms, such as Austen of Peckham, where you could buy a mahogany Victorian fitted wardrobe—with a special place for opera hats—for a few pounds or, for a great many more, an almost Chippendale breakfront bureau-bookcase.

  However, Maxine’s favourite source of furniture was an esoteric antique shop next to Lord Raglan’s cream-tiled dairy in Pont Street. The shop was very quiet and dark. The shop owner was a charming, elderly man called Jack Reffold, who had a high, quavery voice, discerning taste and an unerring eye for proportion. In his shop Maxine found objects that she would never see elsewhere: the blue, feather-patterned breakfast china from Queen Victoria’s yacht; a bridal doll’s trousseau packed in a miniature portmanteau; a gory oil painting of the battle of Trafalgar. Most of his better pieces were sent straight to New York, but Maxine grew to be a steady customer, particularly for the simple, stripped-pine Victorian furniture that her grandmother would have thrown out as unfit for the servants.

  One July evening, tired after work, Maxine walked back from Mayfair in the hazy golden sunset of a London summer. She took a route that led through the cream Grecian beauty of Belgrave Square and into Pont Street. They were working late at Reffold’s, so Maxine stopped to drink a glass of sherry with Jack and his three amiable, aged assistants.

  Maxine now knew a great deal about English and French furniture and the price that Americans were willing to pay for it. Jack Reffold had refined her taste and shown her what to look for, whether in a Sheraton chair or a Meissen fruit bowl. That evening he was fussing over an ornate Rockingham vase that displeased him.

  “Just look at this horror, Maxine! Remember, always look for the basic shape—it must be good. No use piling decoration on a shape like this, which is basically ill-proportioned,” he said in his quivering, scolding voice. “And it’s enormous! Never buy big pieces of anything, darling girl, because they’re so hard to resell.” He filled her glass and continued, “So many people now have small rooms, so they want small furniture, they don’t want overornate pieces that are difficult to clean. Hugh Casson says that if a thing’s worth having, then it’s worth dusting, but I don’t suppose Hugh does much dusting.”

  Afterward Maxine strolled home through the gilded evening, thinking how lovely life was. However, as she unlocked the red front door she could hear the sound of sobbing in the bedroom. She ran in. Kate was lying on one narrow bed with her head in Pagan’s lap and they were both weeping. Pagan raised a blotchy red face and without a word she handed Maxine the evening newspaper. On the back page, a two-inch item read, “The War Office has announced that the subaltern of the Green Howards Regiment killed last week by Communist terrorists in an ambush in Panang, Malaya, has been named as Nicholas Cliffe of Barton, Shropshire.”

  Maxine couldn’t believe her eyes. Death was not a part of her life. Elderly relatives disappeared, aged cats were taken away to be “put to sleep,” but it was not something that happened to you or your friends. She, too, burst into tears.

  “Does Judy know?” she asked. There was a horrified silence—they all realised that their sense of loss was minor compared to what Judy would feel when she heard the news.

  That night they cried themselves to sleep and wept nonstop for the next two days, as almost everything from coff
ee cups to crumpled pillows seemed to remind them of something about Nick. Surprisingly, it was Kate’s father who halted their mournful apathy. He sat in their badly lit small front room and encouraged them to talk about Nick. After listening patiently he said, “And how do you think this fine young man would want you all to behave when you heard that he’d passed on?” They all looked up inquiringly. “Would he want you to sit around weeping? No, of course not, he’d want you to carry on living and remember the happy times you had together. Now, if a doodlebug had got me in the blitz, Kate, I’d have wanted you and your mother to have one good cry and then never again remember me with tears. I’d have wanted you both to feel happy when you remembered me.”

  Eventually he enticed them out of the basement along to the Berkeley buttery for lunch, then as the sun was shining, he took them to look at the ducks in St. James’s Park, after which they felt much better. They didn’t forget Nick, but they stopped drooping and snuffling when his name was mentioned.

  Pagan and Kate, who were doing the London season, both introduced Maxine to the countless young men with whom they watched polo at Windsor, tennis at Wimbledon and racing at Ascot. When not at work, Maxine was rowed in punts on the Serpentine, wore picture hats to picture galleries or watched hours of incomprehensible cricket. She stayed in English country houses, where she observed the extraordinary way that British women dressed in the country: the headscarf knotted under the chin like Princess Elizabeth, the twin set that never fitted on the shoulders and stretched across the bosom, the stockings that wrinkled around the ankle, the baggy tweed skirt (covered with dog hairs), the identical beat-up crocodile handbag. Mystifyingly, clothes that were neat, well pressed and tidy were the mark of an outsider.

  At times Maxine went to dances, but not often, because she had to be in her office by nine o’clock in the morning. The drawback to dances was that an Englishman expected you to spend the whole evening with him, to the exclusion of everyone else. Having been used to Switzerland and France where both sexes at a party cheerfully changed partners until midnight, Maxine found it tedious to dance, talk and stay with one man for the whole evening until the inevitable attempt to entice her into the backseat of his sports car. She did not much care for these young men in their bowler hats and Edwardian suits or their golf caps and tweed jackets on weekends: they dressed, spoke and behaved alike—they even thought alike.

  Pagan and Kate loved the London social life, but Maxine quickly grew tired of it. She was already une sérieuse. She preferred what was called work to what others called fun. When Maxine returned to Paris, she was determined to persuade her father to spend her dowry money on the lease of one of the small antique shops in the rue Jacob. She would paint the whole place in soft olive green and import directly into France the sort of furniture she was buying from Jack Reffold—pieces that were not quite good enough to ship across the Atlantic. She would specialise in what the French called le style anglais, decoration generally based on an English, eighteenth-century interpretation of antique Indian or Chinese designs, teamed with simple Adam furniture or else with comfortably upholstered Georgian chairs and sofas, very different from the uncomfortable, buttoned-satin chairs upon which Maxine’s mother’s friends perched in their drawing rooms. The French took the ingredients of le style anglais and refined the details; they manufactured matching fringing, braid, curtains and bedcovers. Plain upholstery fabrics picked up the colours in the chintz patterns. With these ingredients the decorative formula was easy: you picked your basic chintz pattern, which was used for the curtains and sofas and perhaps one chair; then you picked two distinct colours from the chintz pattern and matched them to plain fabrics that were used for the rest of the upholstery and any bedcovers; walls were covered with the chintz fabric or with wallpaper in the same pattern or else they were painted in a colour picked from the chintz pattern, only much paler.

  By the time Maxine had finished her two-year apprenticeship in London, she could produce le style anglais overnight although she was careful never to let her clients know this. Clients overvalued time and undervalued talent and experience, she realised.

  James Partridge offered her a permanent, paid job with him in London, but Maxine preferred to return to Paris and get on with her “career”, as she now secretly called her job. “The difference between a career and a job,” Judy had once told her, “is that a job gets you nowhere. If you plan a career, then a job should be a step toward a definite goal—when you accept a job you should know exactly when you intend to leave it.”

  “Nonsense!” Maxine had said. “Why don’t you go and write a self-improvement book like Dale Carnegie?” But it wasn’t bad advice, in fact, and with it in mind, she quit her job and went back to Paris where she found that Judy—instead of getting on with her own career after leaving Christian Dior—was busily helping Guy to establish his career in fashion design.

  Maxine’s father was delighted to see her again, proud of her English and even prouder of her new abilities. He quickly found that he enjoyed making plans with her for the simple reason that she made sure he enjoyed them. She treated him like a favourite customer. He was impressed with her new knowledge and seriousness, but appalled by her ignorance of accountancy.

  “I don’t know why you insisted on staying six months extra in Switzerland to take your business exams,” he said. “No wonder you failed them! An absolute waste of money! Until you have been in business for a whole year, you will phone me every day, at ten in the morning, and let me know the most important thing that happened to you the day before. I never want to hear about more than one thing, and I never want to hear less. That will teach you to sort out your priorities. And I want to see your accounts every Saturday morning.”

  Maxine started to search for a suitable shop. Within a month, she had a seven-year lease on number 391, rue Jacob. It had not been difficult to find a shop in this street lined with dusty antique shops that had not yet become smart, shops that were still badly painted and dingy, visited by dealers rather than tourists. Number 391 was narrow and dark, but it was very deep and the apartment above was included in the lease. For the time being Maxine sublet it to an old Polish professor of Latin. She renamed the shop Paradis, and immediately hired an assistant, since otherwise she would never be able to leave the premises without closing. Then she found an art student to work part-time in the back of the shop, doing what she had done in London for James Partridge. Her father chose Maxine’s bookkeeper, a big-boned rather ugly woman called Christina, with a long, cow face and bovine brown eyes. The two women were always in the shop by 7:30 in the morning, and Maxine kept a folding deck chair in the little kitchen, so that she or Christina could stretch out and rest for half an hour if they were going to be working late in the evening.

  On Saturdays her father taught Maxine how to plan a budget and how to plan a cash-flow forecast. He also taught her how to read a balance sheet, which was much easier and more interesting than she had expected. To his surprise, and hers, Maxine turned out to have an instinctive business sense and a strong streak of frugality in her.

  After she had worked at Maxine’s shop for six months, Christina presented Maxine with a request to become a partner, backed by a cash investment. Christina also had a father and she had also persuaded him that a business with an income would be a better investment than a cash dowry, especially as, at thirty-four, Christina’s father was not entirely sure that she would ever need a dowry.

  After a year Paradis began to get bigger jobs—not just a bathroom here and a kitchen there, but complete apartments, small offices, even one country house. Paradis specified everything from the door handles to the window frames, and although modern colours and lighting techniques were used, Maxine specialised in traditional design. Paradis now had two full-time designers as well as part-time assistants.

  Every Monday morning, Maxine and Christina planned the next week’s work and allocated the different jobs to their designers, and every Monday evening there was a short confere
nce for all their part-time staff. This was held after the shop closed at six o’clock, and the meeting was always followed by supper at the Beaux Arts restaurant, always full of cheerful, noisy students eating hearty, traditional French food. Everybody enjoyed Monday evenings, because it was then that they felt the camaraderie, rather than the anxiety, of business; and they were able to relax and gossip with each other about the jobs.

  By 1953, when Maxine was twenty-two, she had attained a small but definite success; the shop was beginning to show a profit. Her father was delighted, but Maxine’s mother worried because she wasn’t married and appeared to consider suitable suitors tiresome. “It’s so unnatural,” she wailed to Aunt Hortense, “the child’s not interested in any man unless he’s a designer, or a client, or a potential client, or some grubby, bearded protege who’s still at the Beaux Arts.”

  Hortense nodded sagely. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  A few months after this conversation, Aunt Hortense telephoned Maxine. “Maxine, my dear,” she said. “I have a client for you. The nephew of a friend of mine. This poor boy has just inherited a decrepit chateau near Epernay; apparently it’s in utter chaos; nobody has lived in it since the war, and the poor man hasn’t time to deal with the house—he has to take over an estate that has been shamefully neglected for the past fifteen years. I thought it would be an interesting project for you. So, my dear, if you are willing, I shall collect you at nine o’clock tomorrow morning and we shall drive to Chazalle. I believe there’s also a vineyard attached to the estate—about seven hundred acres, also sadly neglected.”

  The next morning Aunt Hortense collected Maxine, who wore her client-trapping outfit—a stunning peach linen suit with shoes of a slightly darker shade; her hair, a shoulder-length hank of heavy gold, was tied at the back of her head in a peach silk pussycat bow. They drove out of Paris toward Champagne. The de Chazalle estate was thirteen kilometers south of Epernay, on the edge of the Cote des Blancs region that lay south of Epernay, between Vertus and Oger, to the west.