Lace

by Shirley Conran

  “Oh, Pagan,” Kate said, “I can only be with you a few days. Darling, won’t you please, please try? Can’t you stay in bed all the time and I’ll look after you? Living alone here could be positively dangerous.”

  “Yes,” agreed Pagan. “I once passed out on the sofa with a cigarette in my hand and my book caught fire. Luckily it only made a mess of the book. But I did manage to stop smoking, and I don’t drive a car; even when I’m pissed, I’m not very dangerous on a bicycle.”

  “Pagan, there must be someone. Isn’t there anyone who can help you? A local doctor? The vicar? They obviously all know you’re an alc—that you drink.”

  “Nobody knows. I’m very careful. I bury the bottles. I’m very careful in the village. . . . Oh, you’re right, Kate, I don’t suppose I’ve really fooled anyone. But I’m not an alcoholic. You’re not to say that. Alcoholics are old down-and-out tramps who sleep in city doorways at night. I like getting drunk. There’s a difference.”

  “Pagan, how can you be so stupid? What does it matter what you call it? You’re wrecking your life. Can’t you go to a doctor in London?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Kate. While you’re here I honestly will try not to drink. And if I lie or cheat, I’ll tell you afterward. I can’t offer more than that.”

  For the rest of the evening Pagan was restless and twitchy, drank innumerable cups of tea, and only picked at Kate’s cheese omelette. The next day they walked up to Trelawney where Pagan not only had a massage, a facial and a manicure, but had her hair styled and her eyebrows plucked.

  Her hands started to shake that evening. Her teeth chattered, and then her whole body started to shiver. Kate put her to bed again, spooned chicken broth into her, and crooned as if to a sick child.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Pagan muttered weakly, “stop henning around me. This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  Wrapped in a coverlet, Kate spent the night in an armchair in Pagan’s room. Neither of them slept much. Kate wanted to talk to a doctor, but Pagan made her promise not to. “Everyone around here knew Grandfather. I know I’m a disgrace to the Trelawneys, but I don’t want everyone else to know.”

  The next morning Kate went to see Pagan’s mother. She wasted no words. “You must know that Pagan’s a drunk. Why haven’t you taken her to a specialist or to some hospital or organization that can help her?”

  “I can’t see that Pagan’s condition is any business of yours, Kate. Or mine,” Mrs. Trelawney said in her well-bred, don’t-touch-me voice. “Pagan is a grown woman. She’s thirty years old. As a matter of fact, when I suggested she see a therapist she said she could never see the word ‘therapist’ without stopping after the ‘the.’”

  “But why didn’t you insist?”

  “Because there’s nothing wrong with her. It’s just that she drinks too much. There’s nothing wrong with her head. All she needs is self-discipline. Psychiatrists are for the mentally ill and there’s no mental illness in our family.”

  “You mean that you refuse to face the possibility of mental illness in your family.”

  “If there was anything I could do, then I would have done it, because, quite candidly, it’s such a bad advertisement for the clinic. I’ve spoken to our doctor about her on several occasions, and Pagan has seen him, but the fact is that she’s seemingly bent on self-destruction and I can’t make her do anything about it. I never could.”

  “You never tried,” Kate snapped, storming out of the room.

  After a second sleepless night, Pagan’s teeth were chattering and her body shook. Kate decided that when her body needed sleep, Pagan would sleep. Until then it didn’t matter much whether or not Pagan slept. It wasn’t as if she had any urgent appointments.

  For three days Pagan trembled and was unable to sleep. She couldn’t walk or stand without help. On the fourth night Pagan still couldn’t sleep and retched horribly, but at dawn she suddenly calmed down and fell into a doze.

  “I’m proud of you,” Kate said gently as she dipped strips of bread into a boiled egg and fed them to Pagan in bed.

  “Oh, darling, so am I. No, I can’t force any more down. I never dreamed that stopping would be so absolutely grim, I had no idea that I was so dependent on the bloody stuff.”

  Kate worried that when she returned to London Pagan would return to her drinking. Pagan wasn’t as worried as Kate. “You see, darling, for the first time I really want to stop. After all, what’s the alternative? Do I continue to knock back cooking sherry for the next twenty years?”

  “We’ll put in a telephone and I’ll ring you every day. At least you’ll be able to phone me if you get in a panic. There’s one thing I want you to promise me. That you won’t be ashamed of telling me that you . . . if you can’t make it.”

  “No, I’ve already said that if I lie to you, I’ll own up afterward,” said Pagan.

  Kate went off, though not very hopefully. Until the telephone was installed she sent a telegram or a short letter to the cottage every day. She also telephoned Alcoholics Anonymous, but was told they could be of no use unless Pagan approached them of her own free will.

  29

  THOUGH PAGAN CONTINUED to feel exhausted, the increased comfort of the cottage cheered her up. Mrs. Hocken cleaned the cottage twice a week. Pagan started to clear up the overgrown garden, for she wanted to keep herself occupied and out of the house. She went for a long walk every morning and would continue to do so until she felt strong enough to start riding again. They had both agreed that when she was again confident on a horse, Pagan might get some horsy sort of job that she would enjoy, even if she didn’t earn much.

  Wrapped against the wind in her ankle-length, Persian lamb cloak, Pagan walked with Buster to a weather-beaten wooden bench on top of the cliff. There she would sit in the sun, calmed by the waves slapping far below.

  But one morning, as the spring wind tore at her cloak and she slowly climbed the rise, she could see that someone was already sitting on her bench. As she approached, she could make out that the figure was a man—a black figure hunched against the gray sky.

  Pagan stumped up to the summit of the cliff. She muttered a brusque “Good morning,” then sat down on one end of the bench and pulled her cloak around her. She felt the raw wind on her face. The water was pale gray at the horizon and gray where it dashed against the cliffs beneath her, but the rest of the sea was black.

  “Do you come here often?” her neighbour asked amiably.

  “Yes,” she said curtly. There was silence for another ten minutes. When the wind flung the water against the base of the cliff, Pagan could feel the tremor under her feet. The gray sky was now laced with lavender streaks, in fact, there was likely to be a storm.

  “Nice day,” the stranger said.

  She turned and looked at him. “It’s my birthday.”

  “Do I congratulate you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, have a humbug.” He produced a paper bag from his pocket and offered her one of the sticky peppermints. She’d never seen him before. He wasn’t local and he couldn’t be at the clinic with that bag of candy. “May I offer you a glass of champagne in celebration?”

  There was a long silence. Then Pagan fell.

  “You mean you’ve got a bottle here?”

  “No, but I’m staying at the Golden Lion in the village. I should think they’d have some. Are you staying in the village?”

  “Not really.” Pagan hesitated, not liking to say that he was on her land.

  They walked back through the woods to the saloon bar of the Golden Lion. “Mornin’, Miss Pagan,” the landlord said, “not often we see you here.”

  The low, empty room smelled of yesterday’s beer and cigarettes. Behind the bar a row of gleaming bottles hung upside down, awaiting just one word from Pagan. There was only one bottle of champagne in the cellar. It was very old and much too sweet, but as they drank it on the upright oak settle by the fire, Pagan could feel the relaxation seep through her body.

>   The stranger’s name was Christopher Swann, and he was staying at the Golden Lion in order to finish a book. “It’s not the sort of book that anyone’s likely to buy to pass away the weekend. I’m a biochemist and a virologist; the book’s an account of some experimental work. A group of us are trying to prevent cancer—we’re trying to discover suitable vaccinations. My lab is working on a vaccine against hepatitis B, which is strongly linked to cancer of the liver.”

  “Vaccination? Like a smallpox shot?”

  “That was the most important shot of all.”

  “Did a biochemist invent it?”

  “No, a country doctor called Edward Jenner. Around 1796 he noticed that dairymaids didn’t seem to catch smallpox, but many of them caught cowpox, which was a relatively mild infection. So Jenner thought that perhaps if everyone had a mild attack of cowpox, then they wouldn’t catch smallpox. He checked his antibody theory by vaccinating an eight-year-old boy on the arm with pus that had been drawn from an infected pustule on a dairymaid who had cowpox.”

  Halfway through her second glass of champagne, after Pagan had listened to the stranger’s fascinating conversation for nearly an hour, she invited him to supper. “It won’t be an elaborate meal,” she warned, aware that she had nothing in the cupboard except a tin of pâté de foie gras and a jar of crystalized violets. He offered to escort her home, but she refused. “I’ll meet you here this evening at six o’clock and take you home.”

  Suddenly energetic and hopeful, she flew off to Mrs. Hocken.

  “Darling Mrs. Hocken, will you please, please help me? Will you clean out the cottage with me today instead of Friday? I’m having a visitor!”

  Since Kate had left, not much cooking had been done at the cottage, and there was nothing in the refrigerator except half a jar of mayonnaise and a large bottle of vitamin pills. Pagan cycled back to the village and bought some thick veal chops, potatoes to bake in their jackets, salad and fresh Cheddar cheese. She also bought two bottles of wine.

  She was very careful while her visitor was there; only filled her glass an inch at a time, waited until his glass was empty before refilling hers, and didn’t open the second bottle of wine since he didn’t seem to want any more.

  But after he’d left, she immediately drank the remaining bottle and woke up at four in the morning, still in the armchair, frozen and with an aching head. She burst into tears and smashed the bottle into the fireplace, where it scattered the still-warm ashes.

  Next morning she suffered terribly from self-accusation but had a clear head. While lying in her bath, she considered what to do with the bottles at the back of the woodshed that she’d hidden from Kate. She considered throwing them over the cliff. She considered having a swig right there.

  She dressed, piled the bottles into her big straw shopping basket, lugged them into the wood and buried them under a pile of bracken. Then she went home and looked up “biochemistry” in her dictionary.

  Christopher worked in the early morning and the afternoon. For the next three mornings, Pagan met him at the bench on the cliff. They roamed the woods and the beaches and climbed over the granite rocks above the sea line at the base of the cliffs. Together, they were soaked by salt spray, splashed on the beaches by waves that broke on the sand farther up than they expected, slipped on slime and seaweed, then walked back to hot Cornish pasties and half a pint of bitter at the Golden Lion.

  Every evening, Christopher came to supper at the cottage. Mrs. Hocken was bribed, cajoled and flattered to act as Pagan’s private cook. She provided soups, casseroles, pastries, even a steak-and-kidney pie with Christopher’s initials in golden-brown pastry.

  Every evening Pagan built a roaring fire, put classical music on the gramophone, and then they talked far into the night. She found to her surprise that, although she didn’t understand it all, she was fascinated by what Christopher said as he talked about his work. Watching the firelight flicker over his face, once Pagan was so absorbed by his presence that she forgot Mrs. Hocken’s cottage pie warming in the oven. It was burned black.

  Pagan tried to drink only one glass of beer in the mornings, and in the evening she restricted herself to one glass of wine by pouring the rest of the bottle into Christopher’s glass as fast as she could. “Are you trying to get me drunk, then take advantage of me?” he half-joked on their fourth evening together.

  “I don’t like to drink too much,” she muttered.

  But the following morning, Pagan found herself scrabbling in the wet bracken, trying desperately to remember where she had buried the bottles. When she couldn’t find them, she burst into tears. Looking again, she found her treasure trove, snatched off a cork and remembered no more until hours later, when she woke up stiff and damp. It wasn’t the first time she’d blacked out, but it was the first time she cared. She only had fourteen days before Christopher would return to London.

  She staggered back to the cottage, took an icy shower, then walked to the clinic to make two telephone calls. First she called the Golden Lion and left a message for Christopher that though she hadn’t been able to see him this morning, she would expect him for supper as usual. Then she phoned Kate and confessed.

  “But can’t you see him without having a drink?” asked Kate. “Plenty of people do.”

  “But I can’t, I can’t stop. It’s so shaming. I’d have to explain . . . I can’t, I can’t,” Pagan cried miserably. “Keep sending the telegrams and I’ll keep on trying to drink as little as possible. But I can’t stop, it would look odd to him.”

  “Might look odder if you don’t stop,” Kate said.

  On the seventh evening, Pagan and Christopher were soaked by a sudden squall on the way through the woods to the cottage. Pagan thought she looked terrific with her hair plastered wet against her head, striding through the rain. It was an old trick of hers to suggest a walk in the rain, and besides Pagan really loved the physical sensation of getting soaked.

  In the kitchen they pulled off their wet shoes and socks and shrugged off their soggy tweed jackets. The fire had gone out in the sitting room, and Christopher bent down to relight it as Pagan rubbed her purple hands. “The only way I’m going to get warm again is by having a bath.” She ran upstairs and turned on the water, recklessly pouring in far too much hyacinth oil from one of Kate’s bottles.

  Fragrant steam filled the bathroom. “We need a Boy Scout,” Christopher called up the stairs. “I can’t get this fire going.”

  Pagan poked her head around the door. “The wood’s a bit damp. Try the firelighters in the cupboard on the right of the fireplace.”

  She had just submerged in the blissfully hot water when he shouted up, “There aren’t any left in the box.”

  “Well, there’s a new box in the kitchen, it’s on the . . . I can’t remember. . . . Wait a minute, I’ll get them.” Snatching off her bath-cap, she wrapped her new yellow robe around her, padded down the steep stairs, and found the box of firelighters under the sink. “Might as well do it while I’m here. I understand its temperamental ways.”

  She knelt down to poke the firelighter under the wooden kindling and then leaned forward as she lit a match. As she did so, her dressing gown gaped open and revealed one pointed breast. Christopher leaned forward and cupped it firmly in his hand.

  For a moment Pagan didn’t move. There was a whoosh as the paper caught fire. She turned her head, her hair dripping, and the buttercup robe fell back from her naked shoulders. Then his mouth was on hers and they collapsed on the moss-green carpet.

  Christopher’s hand felt swiftly for her other breast. She felt his body as he tugged at her robe, pulled it open, felt between her slippery wet thighs. He softly explored her until her whole being seemed to leap toward him as he slid his body on top of hers.

  He pushed steadily inside her and she gasped as their bodies started to move, both driven by his hard rhythmic thrusts. His hands held her breasts firmly and Pagan felt as though she were flying as she yielded to this insistent strength. Seagulls
swooped in her head, the tides sucked in and out, she felt the pull and depth of the sea, the sweet drowning of fulfillment.

  Afterward they lay together on the carpet, neither wanting to leave the other’s body, neither speaking. Finally, Christopher murmured, “Fire’s gone out again. How about a bath?” Leaving her wet robe and his clothes strewn over the living room, they slowly mounted the narrow staircase outside the kitchen. He stood her in the warm bath and soaped her all over, his hands sliding down her body, following the soap as he explored every part of her. Then he took the hand spray that fit over the taps, and she felt the warm sting of water caressing every inch of her body. She felt as if she were coming alive again.

  Christopher hopped into the bath and they rocked together languorously in the warm scented water. Then Christopher lay back against the porcelain, and Pagan sat upon him as his hands tickled her erect pink nipples. She could feel him high inside her, as he thrust against the core of her. She wanted him to stay there forever, joined to her. Then she felt his pent-up energy inside her. He pulled her down to him and a wave of warm water swept over the bathroom floor as they laughed together in the hyacinth-scented steam.

  He dried her in front of the bedroom fire, fondled her with Kate’s soft yellow towels. In the dim light he embraced her, wrapped his arms hungrily around her. Then he slowly pushed Pagan backward onto the patchwork quilt and gently spread-eagled her limbs. “I want to get to know you,” he said softly. He knelt at the foot of the bed and started to stroke the sole of her left foot. Gently, teasingly, he kissed her toes and slowly licked between each one, drawing each toe into his mouth as he stroked her legs with a butterflylike touch. Pagan swooned into semi-awareness, conscious only of the voluptuous sensations that were flooding her body.

  “My right foot’s about to march in protest,” she murmured.

  “Tell it we’ve got the whole night,” Christopher said, busy tickling the back of her knee. When his fingertips, featherlight, reached up from her knee to her inner thigh, Pagan pushed them away.