Lace

by Shirley Conran

  They chatted about nothing much for ten minutes, then Kate asked gently, “Why have you hidden yourself away like this, Pagan? Why don’t any of your old friends in London know that you’re here?”

  “Because I didn’t tell them, darling. . . . I simply didn’t want to see anybody after that three-parties-a-night life in Cairo.”

  She gave a sad laugh. “I felt so ashamed of myself and Mama was obviously ashamed of me as well. . . . Nobody of our school year has been divorced.” She poured tea from a blue tin teapot. “I just wanted to hide from people. . . . A few chums got in touch with Mama, or wrote to me suggesting a visit, but I never answered the letters. . . . The fact is, I never knew how I would react to anyone.” She sighed. “I looked normal on the outside but inside my feelings were bubbling. If anybody spoke to me in a kind voice, I wanted to crumple up and cry. Idiotic, wasn’t it? . . . I used to get a lump in my throat and couldn’t answer them back. So I avoided talking by avoiding people. I only spoke to the villagers when it couldn’t be helped and I dashed upstairs and hid when I heard the postman’s bicycle bell.” She added milk to the cup with a shaking hand.

  Kate was stunned by the change in Pagan. Her speech was rambling and disconnected. How had that confident, vibrant creature changed into this confused, nervous wreck?

  “Don’t you see anyone, Pagan?” she asked.

  Pagan shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve become a bit of a hermit, except for occasionally seeing Mama. . . . One day I heard Mama explain to one of her patients that I was a recluse and that’s why I talk to myself. That gave me a laugh.” She handed a cracked pink cup to Kate. “Matter of fact I’ve never understood what’s wrong with talking to yourself; your jokes are always laughed at . . . you always win your arguments . . . it demonstrates a happy degree of self-acceptance.” She sipped from her earthenware mug. “You don’t have to finish that biscuit, it’s about six months old. . . . Don’t think I was unhappy. I had Buster for company and every day for the first six months I woke up and, oh, it was just utter bliss to see that Robert wasn’t there on the next pillow. I’m comfortable enough here, listening to the radio and reading. I’m afraid it’s not very tidy at the moment because Mrs. Hocken broke her ankle falling over a puppy, so she hasn’t cleaned for a couple of months.”

  “Don’t you still ride?”

  “Mama sold the horses and the stables are now massage booths and a gymnasium. . . . More tea?” She held out another ginger biscuit to Buster but dropped it.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Pagan said, “Oh, dear, why weren’t we sent into this life with an instruction manual? My trouble is that I don’t seem to learn from my mistakes. I don’t just repeat my mistakes, I make new ones. . . . When I look back, I suppose everything started to go wrong in Switzerland. Since then, everything I got involved with looked wonderful to begin with and ended in disaster. . . . Now I’m just permanently tired. Tired of everything. Tired of failure. Tired of life. So, I retired.”

  She put her hands behind her head and gazed up at the ceiling. Kate quickly slipped her ginger biscuit into her handbag. There was another pause, then Pagan said, “That’s enough of me. You’ve now heard everything that I’ve done here for the last eight years. Nothing. . . . Unlike old Maxine. I sometimes see photographs of her in newspapers—not that I often read them, I just listen to the nine o’clock news and thank God that none of it is about me. . . . Amazing how old Maxine’s sort of zoomed into being a glamour puss. One of the movers and shakers as they say. . . . Suppose the rest of us could be described as the shaken and the still shaking.”

  Pagan stretched her arms and yawned. “Now what’s happened to you in the last ten years, Kate?”

  “I was heartbroken over Robert,” Kate said, and sipped her tea, “although it seems ludicrous now. After that, I went out on the same old round with anyone who asked me—anything rather than stay at home. It was parties, parties, parties until I met darling Toby. Then after we were married we had a far more quiet life.” She took another sip. “But let’s not talk about me this evening.” She finished her lukewarm tea and put down the cup. “How about walking up to Trelawney? It’s such a lovely day. The woods are full of bluebells.”

  “No need to be in such a hurry,” Pagan said, picking up the tea tray. “If you wait long enough to clean the car it always rains. Old Arabic proverb.” She carried the tray toward the kitchen and the vodka bottle that had been quickly hidden under a tea cozy. Whoever he was, Kate’s husband could obviously afford Gucci shoes and a Hermès handbag, Pagan noticed.

  While Pagan was banging away in the kitchen, Kate surveyed the living room—books piled on the floor, old newspapers piled on the chairs, half-empty teacups, a table covered with ring marks and cigarette scars, overflowing ashtrays, dog hair everywhere. Her first thought was to clean up Pagan and then the cottage; it could be a charming little home. Kate’s second thought was to see Pagan’s mother before taking any action. Why hadn’t she done anything? The bloody woman was supposed to specialise in drunks, wasn’t she?

  They walked up the path through the woods, admiring the bluebells as they went. Past a mass of dark green rhododendrons, they crossed the steel cattle grid that supposedly stopped the deer from getting onto the main road. They climbed slightly uphill, over a muddy field of buttercups and then across the well-trimmed lawn that surrounded the beautiful stone house. In front of the conservatory was a ten-foot-high, curved, see-through, plastic shelter. “The new, heated outdoor swimming pool,” Pagan explained. They walked through the conservatory, now filled with glistening chrome—the bicycles and huge mechanical rubber belts for massaging the buttocks. Once past the rows of pink-faced guests, cycling hard to nowhere, they went into the hall and climbed the six-foot-wide, purple-carpeted stairs that led to Pagan’s mother’s study.

  Mrs. Trelawney looked up from her desk, over her hornrimmed glasses. “Nice to see you, Kate,” she said, as if she’d last seen Kate yesterday. “You haven’t changed a bit.” With neat movements she removed her glasses, folded them and placed them in a crocodile case. They shook hands; the marmoreal temperature of Mrs. Trelawney’s hand matched her welcome. She rang a bell and they drank lapsang suchong from rose-decorated Minton china. Then Kate was shown around Trelawney.

  After her tour Kate managed to steer Mrs. Trelawney to one side. “I can only stay down here for a week,” she said in a low voice that, nonetheless, conveyed her fury. “I want to tidy up Pagan and the cottage as soon as possible. I’m sure you can let me have a couple of your cleaners tomorrow; I’d also like to take all the treatments that you offer, and I want Pagan to take them with me. Perhaps you could give me the bill for both of us.”

  “Frightfully kind of you,” Mrs. Trelawney said in a polite voice, as if she were commenting on the view, “but do please be my guest on the machines. I’m afraid that treatments might be a little difficult to arrange because the appointment book is already full.”

  “Well, cancel a few,” Kate said coldly, and went back to join Pagan by the swimming pool.

  They drove to St. Austell in Kate’s silver Karmann Ghia. First, Kate bought food: meat, cheese, fruit, Bath Oliver biscuits, pickled onions, two tins of pâté de foie gras, a box of homemade flapjacks, a honeycomb, clotted cream, black cherry jam, stone-ground bread, some Bendicks Bittermints and (because they were so pretty) a little bottle of crystalized violets. She also bought a new set of pots and pans, some towels, flowered sheets, hand lotion and scented soap for the bathroom. Pagan protested but Kate firmly said, “Birthday present,” as she scribbled another check for a couple of yellow-striped reclining chairs for the garden. Finally, she took Pagan to Jaeger and bought her a lavender cashmere sweater and matching tweed skirt with plenty of hem to let down; then she chose another sweater and skirt in sage green.

  Pagan had been fidgety since pub opening time at eleven-thirty in the morning, but Kate didn’t let her friend out of her sight. In order to avoid alcohol, Kate decided not to have lunch at a hotel
or a pub, so she bought a couple of steaming onion-and-meat-filled Cornish pasties, which they ate in the car. Pagan shivered as she dusted the crumbs from her skirt.

  “Why are you wearing that mackintosh and not a coat,” asked Kate, “when you know how quickly the weather turns nasty down here? . . . I suppose you do possess a coat?”

  “Well, I did have one,” Pagan said, “but I left it somewhere. One didn’t need a heavy coat in Cairo.”

  “Your mother was wearing a mink jacket this morning.”

  “Well, if she gave me something like that I’d lose it,” Pagan said. “You know how untidy I am.” She was not convincing.

  Suddenly Kate remembered. “Whatever happened to Abdullah’s cloak?”

  “My God, I bet it’s still in the attic. She never let me wear it, you know,” said Pagan brightening. “Didn’t want me to lose my reputation!” She hooted with laughter and cheered up.

  They drove back to Trelawney. “If it’s still there,” Pagan’s mother said vaguely, “it’ll probably be in one of the cardboard boxes in the east wing attic. You’ll see about forty boxes labeled ‘clothes.’”

  After looking through half the dusty cardboard boxes, Pagan gave a shout of triumph and pulled out glistening folds of black Persian lamb. “Oh, heavens, moths!”

  And indeed the beautiful soft black folds were bald in patches. “But it is wearable,” said Kate, “it’s warm and I’ll get it recut for you in the summer. Next birthday present.”

  That evening they lay on the rug in front of the fire, as they used to when they were schoolgirls, and talked. “Looking back,” Kate mused, “I can’t think what either of us saw in Robert. He was such a stuffed shirt behind that young-Cary-Grant mask. That awful, rigid, public school mold—all his lot, those Hooray-Henrys, were terrified of putting a foot out of line. I mean you can’t imagine Robert saying piss off in public, can you?”

  Pagan thought not. “I can’t think how you ever fell for him, Kate. I really fell in love with Egypt, not Robert,” she said dreamily. “It was so warm, so ancient and mysterious. You know I don’t really like parties, but I loved the attention, I loved being the belle of Cairo, it was so soothing after the pain of . . . well, it stopped me thinking about Abdi.”

  “In one way Robert was a bit like Abdi,” Kate added thoughtfully. “Unlike the Hooray-Henrys, Robert used to be very good at supplying your every want—and even wants you never knew you had. Then, just when you got used to having everything supplied—as if it were Christmas every day—he would disappear to Cairo and it would all stop so suddenly that you missed it dreadfully.”

  She paused, then added, “And another thing, Robert didn’t try to get you into bed like all the other scalpers. Robert always wanted to stop when you wanted to stop.”

  “With good reason!” hooted Pagan, and they both giggled until it hurt, as they hadn’t done since their schooldays.

  “What about sex?” Kate asked curiously. “What have you done about that for the last few years?”

  Pagan sighed. “Once I had a little fling with one of the patients. . . . I’d been to see Mama and he followed me back to the cottage. We had a jolly old time for a couple of days. He went back pissed to the gills—I’ve never seen Mama so furious. I was not to interfere with her patients/bread and butter/reputation/life, etcetera. Very unnerving.

  “A couple of months later, I imported a hitchhiker, one of those irresistible blond hunks. That lasted for about four days and then, when he thought I’d gone for a walk, I caught him yanking open the drawers of my desk. I got the feeling he was looking for money, but I always keep cash in the toe of my spare gum boots, so I tiptoed away, then crashed in. I told him my mother was coming to stay for a few days, so he’d have to leave. He asked for money for the train ticket to London and was pretty nasty when I wouldn’t give it to him . . . anyway, I thought that maybe the next pickup would strangle me, hack me up neatly with the bread knife, pack me in a suitcase and dump me in the left-luggage at St. Austell station and nobody would miss me for days. So I decided to forgo the pleasure. You know sex has never really been that important to me. There’s always masturbation, but really after a bit I didn’t bother. I didn’t seem to need it.”

  The following morning when two stout cleaning ladies appeared, Kate shooed Pagan out for a walk with Buster. Four hours later the cottage was clean and tidy, food lined the cupboards, a fire was burning in the sitting room grate, and Kate had planted a little basket with primrose. Exhausted, Kate thought she would open some of the pâté when Pagan got back.

  But Pagan was already back. Kate found her after the cleaners had left, when she went to get more logs for the fire. Pagan was lying asleep on the floor of the woodshed with two Guinness bottles at her side and an empty hip flask in her hand. Chill with horror, Kate shook her awake. “Darling, darling, you’ll catch your death out here. Come in and have a hot bath.”

  She helped Pagan stumble into the kitchen, then ran a bath for her. Pagan’s eyes were half-closed and she was beaming as Kate washed her face. “Nanny, Nanny, mind the shope doesn’t go in my eyes,” she gurgled, before slipping under the water.

  Pagan was an amiable drunk, but a heavy one. By the time she had been dried and lugged to bed with a hot water bottle under the patchwork quilt, Kate was exhausted and very worried. She had something to eat and then, at six in the evening, she took a cup of black coffee up to Pagan’s bedroom.

  “Why do you get drunk?” she burst out crossly. “When did it start?

  “Pagan scowled; she had a headache; she felt queasy; she felt without energy or interest. Nonetheless, she sensed that it was now or never. She had never admitted to herself or anyone else that she was a drunk. But now she did.

  “In Cairo,” she said eventually. “That’s when it started. A couple of drinks made those endless evenings with the same stuffy people a bit more bearable. And drink would blot out the reality of having to go home with Robert afterward. Then in the mornings Robert liked to start the day with a quarrel; he enjoyed a row, the way some people enjoy tennis or Canasta. Whatever I’d done, it was always because I was lazy and useless and stupid. He was very convincing.” She gave a tired sigh. “I used to stay in bed until he’d left for the office . . . then I’d numb the memory by sloshing some vodka into the fresh mango juice.” She felt for Kate’s hand. “I never meant to get drunk when I had a drink. I still don’t, I never feel I need it, I just feel, ‘why not?’ And then I have another, then just a little one, then another and another, until I can’t remember how many.” She held the hand tight. “In Cairo we never once mentioned it, but I know Robert knew about my drinking. He once let slip that he knew I’d been sick in the night because I’d left the seat up, so he must have known.” She shivered.

  “I mean, normal wives aren’t sick in the night, are they? Of course, what he wanted was a wife who was sick in the morning, but there I was, labeled ‘frigid’ and ‘barren’. Nothing like spiked mango juice for that particular condition, and I knew why Robert didn’t want to talk about the booze. He didn’t want to feel gruesomely guilty about it.”

  “But it’s eight years since you left Robert!”

  “Then my sense of inadequacy is eight years old. . . . I thought I’d feel better as soon as I left him, that the depression would be wiped away as soon as I got back to England. But it wasn’t.” She paused and plucked at the patchwork quilt. “I felt a sudden gulf of gloom when I left Cairo, because I knew I’d burned my boats. I stupidly expected Mama to meet me when I went through customs at London airport. . . . I hadn’t seen her for two years, but I always wrote to her every week and I’d cabled her to say that I was coming back.”

  Another pause and this time the quilt was carefully smoothed. “But she wasn’t there.” Kate squeezed her hand sympathetically. “So I waited and waited until suddenly, standing there in the middle of the arrivals lounge, I completely lost my nerve. It’s difficult to explain, but suddenly I wasn’t certain of anything; I couldn’t have tol
d you the time, I felt so unsure and incapable. And then I suddenly felt terrified of being on my own.”

  She gulped and paused for a moment. “Odd, because I’d never been close to Mama, so why did the roof suddenly fall in when she didn’t meet me at the airport?” Kate gripped the hand tighter in silent sympathy and Pagan continued. “I suppose that was the first time I realised I was alone in life and it was a moment of stark terror. As a wife I’d been a failure, as a daughter I wasn’t worth meeting at the airport and as a mother I really was a nonstarter, as we all knew. . . . Darling, I think my hand’s going to turn blue if you hold it any harder.”

  There was another long pause. “Then I found I had hardly any money and that bitch, Selma, was totally in control of my mother. She really adores the old cow. That hurt.” For a moment Kate thought she was going to see Pagan in tears. “I just had a feeling of futile emptiness, a flat sensation that nothing—nothing—lay ahead.

  “Then the feeling tilted, it became steeper and steeper and I felt as if I were running too fast downhill and couldn’t stop. There was a black hole at the bottom. It got worse and worse.” She clutched Kate’s hands until Kate winced. “It made me panic, and when I panicked I drank. I didn’t need an excuse to die, I needed an excuse to live, and I almost ran out of excuses. If I woke up in the night I felt suicidal, but if I drank, I didn’t wake up in the night. So I drank. Drink blotted out the depression; it made me feel like a real person, like the person I was and the person I might have been. When I was drunk I didn’t feel like a failure.”

  “Slower, slower,” said Kate, alarmed by this sudden agitation.

  Pagan took no notice and continued as if speaking to herself. “When I was small I used to hide from my nanny and escape into a fantasy world where my real friends lived; animals who talked and wore aprons and slippers and had teapots. Life became a bit like that again. Reality was too fearful, so I blotted it out. Once I fell into the bath when I was drunk and knocked myself out. I woke up in the bath with all my clothes on and my hand hurting like hell. Luckily there wasn’t any water in the bath or I might have drowned.”