Lace

by Shirley Conran

  “Don’t. I’m horribly fat there, darling, it embarrasses me, don’t touch it.”

  “All women think their thighs are too fat. Shall I tell you something? Men adore plump thighs. They don’t like stringy, boyish muscles there. Men love that soft, yielding flesh of your inner thigh.” He nibbled it gently. “For most men there’s nothing more eortic than slowly sliding their hand over the taut top of a nylon stocking, past the garter belt, feeling the warm smooth flesh, then that softer warmth, that inner promise. Lace underwear feels harsh and scratchy against the voluptuous softness of a woman’s inner thigh. Look, feel for yourself.” He grabbed Pagan’s fingertips and, with them, he gently stroked her thigh then slowly brushed her fingers over her inner leg. “There, see? Soft, baby flesh.” He made love to each leg and then each arm, and when Pagan tried to pull him to her, he pushed her firmly back upon the quilt, saying, “Later.”

  By the time his mouth had reached her navel, she was only conscious of the response of her body to his skilled touch. She made small, birdlike sighs, her pleasure became almost unbearable. She reached out one arm to touch his shoulder and tried again to pull him to her but was firmly pushed back on the bed. She started to stroke the gray hair on his chest, but her hand was gently laid by her side. “Please don’t interrupt my work,” he mumbled as his tongue reached her armpit. She felt as if she were about to faint from the tickling pleasure.

  Then he was inside her again, and she felt as if the brass bedstead were slowly whirling up toward the ceiling. She was soaring ecstatically, about to fly through the sky. His thrusts were slow and insistent until the moment when she gave the wild shriek of a gull as it soars to heaven; then she felt his excitement mount as he thrust fiercely into her until, with a harsh cry, he climaxed.

  They lay still and silent, warm together in the little bedroom.

  30

  PAGAN’S MOTHER COULDN’T believe her ears. “What do you mean? You’re going to get married? To whom?” She looked at her happy, animated daughter, glowing as only physical passion can make a woman glow. Mrs. Trelawney was even more astonished when she heard that she was about to become the mother-in-law of Sir Christopher Swann, the distinguished Director of the Anglo-American Cancer Research Institute.

  Kate wasn’t so thrilled. “Are you going to tell him or not?” she asked Pagan in the cloakroom of La Popote, a small restaurant in Walton Street, where they were dining.

  “Not yet,” said Pagan.

  “Is it fair?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “He’s so much older than you,” said Kate doubtfully, “and Pagan, he’s so big and bald. Dammit, he’s an old man! How can you marry an old man?”

  “Darling, he’s forty-nine, old is ninety. He says he’s been bald since he was thirty. It’s quite sexy, you know, that shiny, hard top. If you think what it’s like to have the back of your neck stroked, then that’s what it’s like up there, he says.” She leaned forward to peer in the mirror as she dabbed her lipstick. “And he’s big but not fat; I mean, I promise you, darling, I’ve seen him as nature intended. That’s all muscle.” She screwed back her lipstick. “Do you like this new pale pink? . . . So do I. Want to try it? . . . You must admit he looks a bit like Peter Lawford, apart from the hair, that is. And don’t you love that amused look in his eyes as if he can read your innermost thoughts! It turns my knees to jelly.”

  “I can see you’re in love with him,” said Kate, deciding that the pale pink lipstick didn’t suit her, “so it really doesn’t matter what other people don’t see in him.”

  “And there’s another thing. He is the most marvellous lover. Maybe it’s because he’s been doing it for so long, darling, maybe that’s one of the advantages of old age. But all I can say is that for the last two weeks we’ve hardly been out of bed. I don’t have any time to think about booze. He knows so much about me now, he can keep me out of my skull with delight for hours and hours.”

  Kate was impressed. She had always wanted to know what a great lover did.

  “Christopher says that he’s never yet met a woman who’s the same as another woman. He says we all like different things, we all—oh—respond in a different way, and the most important thing for a man is to get a woman to tell him what exactly she likes and wants.”

  “But I should die of embarrassment. If Toby asks what I like most, I always say everything.”

  “Christopher says that most women say everything, darling, but it’s just being frightfully tactful. He says it’s nearly always difficult to get them to talk because they’re so madly shy of saying what they want or else they’re afraid it’s hrrrevolting, as Maxine used to say.”

  She had started to tug a comb through her hair. “It’s wonderful. It’s not that we get into seventy-nine different positions or that he can keep it up for hours, it’s just that it’s so intimate. Once I got over that hurdle of false modesty and was able to shut my eyes and blush in the dark and talk to him truthfully, it was such a relief. For years I’d been lying because I thought I was a freak, because the magic wand left me cold, and now Christopher has proved that I’m not a freak . . . I’ll tell you what he does.”

  “Careful, there’s someone else coming in. You can’t spout this filth in front of strangers.”

  “I’ll tell you when we get back from our honeymoon, only in the interests of education, mind. We’re getting married in three weeks, at the chapel at Trelawney. You will come, won’t you? You’ll never guess where we’re going for our honeymoon. Indianapolis! Christopher has to lecture at something called St. Vincent’s. He says I can lie in bed and recover while he’s earning our keep. Then, thank God, we’re going on to California and afterward back to New York. I’ll telephone you with all the filthy details when we get back at the end of June.”

  “Well, be careful what you order from room service,” said Kate.

  “I’m going to stick to beer, nothing but beer, and drink it out of little wineglasses. But I’m definitely going to stop drinking when we get back.”

  Only Kate and Mrs. Trelawney were present at the wedding in the sixteenth-century chapel in the hollow below the bluebell wood. Pagan wore a pink wool Chanel suit encrusted with gold chains and gilt buttons with lions’ heads on them. With it she wore a navy silk blouse with a pussycat bow, a navy Breton straw hat and matching slingback shoes. She looks electrically happy, as if she could hardly bear to get out of bed long enough to get married, thought Kate as Pagan strode down the aisle on her husband’s arm to the traditional triumphant burst of Mendelssohn, played rather jerkily on the organ by Mrs. Hocken’s sister.

  But by the end of September, Kate still hadn’t heard from Pagan.

  It was mid-October before Pagan telephoned Kate.

  “That was a long honeymoon.”

  “Well, something happened, something utterly terrifying. On our first night in New York I woke up to hear odd strangled gasps. When I turned on the light, Christopher was purple and his eyes were staring and his arms were thrashing around. So I grabbed the phone, and the doctor arrived so fast you’d have thought he was waiting in room service. He gave Christopher a horse-size injection into his chest and I was shooed out of the way. Then they took Christopher off to the hospital in an ambulance. It was a massive heart attack. He was in the hospital for three months—thank God we had medical insurance.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Kate gasped. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Christopher’s apartment—I mean our apartment. It’s in On-slow Gardens. Can you come around, darling? We got home last night. I’ve only just unpacked and I feel so utterly depressed. Christopher’s in bed, and I have to be so bloody cheerful all the time. It’s absolutely grim.”

  Kate cancelled her luncheon appointment and drove straight to On-slow Gardens. Pagan’s big sitting room was really an avocado-coloured library with books covering the walls from floor to ceiling. There were Persian rugs, tan leather sofas, brass lamps with blue-green glass shades, and a big bay window that lo
oked out over the elm trees in the gardens.

  “How long will it be before Christopher gets better?” Kate asked tentatively.

  “Well, the doctors don’t exactly look at it that way,” Pagan said glumly, sipping from a large mug of coffee. “They treat heart failure by correcting the imbalance between the supply and demand of the blood and by removing all the accumulated excess fluids in the patient’s body.”

  “Eh? What does that mean?” Kate asked, completely mystified.

  “It means that Christopher has to have a lot of rest—mental and physical. He isn’t allowed to work for too long. And he has to diet, because being overweight puts so much strain on the cardiovascular system. He isn’t supposed to eat salt because he mustn’t retain fluid, and he takes diuretic pills to make him pee a lot. In and out of the loo all day. He’s also had to give up smoking. But the really awful thing is no sex.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forever.”

  “How awful! But I suppose he can . . . pay attention to you.”

  “No—it might excite him.”

  “But the doctors can’t be serious! How does Christopher feel about it?”

  “Rather selfish. He doesn’t want to die. As a matter of fact, I feel the same way.”

  Now I’ll never find out what a really great lover does, Kate thought. It would be too unkind to ask. Oh damn!

  Kate immediately realised the danger of Pagan’s depression. “If he needs looking after, then you simply must stop drinking. Even beer in little wineglasses. Suppose he had an attack when you were bombed?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” said Pagan dully. “I know I’ve got to stop and I know it’s not going to be easy. I lived here with Christopher for a month before we were married and I can’t tell you how unbearably fast I got hooked again. I tried to fight the yearning, but it beat me within days.” She heaved a noisy sigh. “As soon as Christopher had left for the laboratory I used to set the alarm clock for four p.m., then grab the cooking sherry and sip until I passed out or was sick. The alarm clock always jerked me awake, and then I’d have at least a couple of hours to pull myself together with a cold shower, eau de cologne and aspirin. It was ghastly. I only seemed to do it when I was alone, never at weekends. Perhaps I would slink out to the kitchen for an occasional swig, but somehow the dreaded craving wasn’t too strong at weekends. Look, I want that address from you again, I’ve lost it. That list of AA places.”

  “It will be no use unless you tell Christopher. Do you want me to tell Christopher for you?”

  “No. I’ll tell him as soon as he’s got over the journey. Let’s get this bloody phone call over.”

  The following Thursday she went to her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, leaving Kate with Christopher and two sheets of typed emergency instructions.

  “It was grim,” Pagan told her later. “Tough. No pissing about. You felt they were all desperately serious, all there for a purpose. We all had that fatal interest in common. We met in the crypt of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, you know that church in Trafalgar Square, and we sat drinking tea and eating biscuits. They smoked a lot, after a couple of hours you’d have thought the room was full of sea fog. There were lots more men than women and a couple of them were quite shabby—they looked as if they might be just out of prison or something.”

  “So what happened?” demanded Kate.

  “Someone started off by saying that willpower was about as effective a cure for alcohol addiction as it is for cancer. If your system can tolerate ethyl alcohol, then alcohol can give you harmless pleasure, the way it does for you, Kate. But if you can’t tolerate it, like me, you gradually become dependent on alcohol. I tell you, it was oddly cheering to know that I was merely addicted, not just an old soak.”

  She was lolling on the hearthrug, cuddling the sheepdog, Buster, who had been out in the rain and smelled like a damp blanket. “It’s amazing that the government allows the stuff to be plugged on TV when they know that drink is the third highest killer in the country.”

  “Did anyone talk to you?”

  “Nobody asked me anything, I just sat, watched and listened. One thing I learned—you just try not to drink for one day at a time.” Pagan paused. For the first time she felt hopeful and not hopelessly weak-willed. “And you’re never cured. Once you’re an alcoholic, you’re always an alcoholic, just as a diabetic is still a diabetic, although he controls his illness with insulin.” She was high on hope.

  “Pagan, you’re too damn enthusiastic about it,” Kate said. “It worries me. You’re not to talk to Christopher until you’re calm. Otherwise, he won’t realise that you’re serious.”

  But Christopher did. “Oh, I guessed just before we were married,” he said. “There seemed no other reason for the reek of mouthwash on your breath every night when I came home, so I marked the bottles—not the ones in the drinks cabinet, I knew you’d be too crafty to take those. I marked the cooking stuff in the kitchen. I was waiting for you to tell me. I hoped I could help you.”

  When he was able to return to work, Christopher took Pagan to the laboratory to meet his associates. “I’ve told everyone to explain things to you in words of one syllable,” he murmured, kissing Pagan on the ear just before they got out of the car.

  She was shown around the lab building as if she were visiting royalty, but the scientists might as well have been speaking Swahili for all she understood of her two-hour tour. She gazed at the machines, at the computers, at the racks of glass containers where human cancer cells were growing in tissue that would be used in the preparation of the cancer vaccine. Then she asked the least unnerving of the lab technicians to lunch on the following Sunday, because she was determined to understand Christopher’s work, if she could. She’d get this black-bearded Peter to explain it to her.

  In the car, on their way home, Christopher said, “Look, if you’re really interested, Pagan, why don’t you help us to raise money? I think you’d be good at it. Perhaps Kate could help you.”

  “Not Kate,” said Pagan thoughtfully, “but Judy might.”

  A few months later Pagan accompanied Christopher to New York, where he was giving a lecture at the Sloan-Kettering Institute. For the first time in thirteen years she saw Judy. They rushed to hug each other in the oak-panelled gloom of the Algonquin lobby.

  “But Pagan, you look exactly the same, except you don’t wear glasses anymore. Contacts?”

  “Yes. You look extremely different, darling. You always looked a child, but now you look a rich child.” Pagan eyed the blond-streaked, geometric Vidal Sassoon haircut flopping over one eye and the creamy, raw-silk safari suit, worn with vanilla suede pumps.

  “This is one of my working outfits—Guy’s, of course. Must look like a success if you want to be a success. Pagan, that’s the first thing you’ve got to remember when I get around to giving you the concentrated course in public relations that you talked about on the telephone.”

  “I asked Kate to tell you and Maxine the truth about what had happened to me. It’s all right, you don’t have to order Coke just because I’m here. . . . Kate saved my life. And as soon as she told Maxine where I was, Max insisted that Christopher and I come over to stay with them. She was simply terrific. It was as if we’d last met a week ago. Now you’ve offered to show me how to help publicise the Research Institute. You’re all being wonderful friends—I simply don’t deserve it after ignoring you for all these years. It makes me feel even more ashamed.”

  “Listen,” Judy said, “guilt is the most useless bit of baggage. You don’t want to clutter your head with it. It can’t do any good and it only makes you feel awful.” She offered an olive to Pagan and grinned. “Real friends aren’t people you joke and have a drink with. You don’t need to see real friends, you just know that they’re there when you need them. We formed our own little support system, remember, back in Gstaad? Through sick and sin, as Maxine used to say.”

  She firmly interlaced her fingers. “Like that, we’re interlinked
, we’re our own best safety net, so don’t you forget it. Now keep your ears open and prepare for instruction.”

  As usual Judy was bubbling over with ideas. Pagan took notes and hoped that she’d be able to sort them out later. Her head was spinning.

  Pagan went back to London and set to work. At first she was so embarrassed by the idea of telephoning strangers that she had to lock herself in her bedroom, and she blushed before dialing the numbers. But her background and fact sheets were fresh and interesting, her determination was formidable, and picking up her old network, she found that she knew a few rich people and quite a lot of influential ones. One person led to another. Pagan quickly discovered the charms and rewards of work. Every fortnight she wrote a report to Judy, who returned two closely typed pages of criticism and suggestions.

  Pagan started by writing an article for her old school magazine in which she asked for money and helpers. She sweated over this for four days and worried about it for weeks afterward, but she was delighted by the positive response. She found herself with £43.20 and two part-time assistants. Since drawing attention to the Research Unit was as important as raising money for it, Pagan started a pyramid letter. “Please send me £2.00 and pass on a copy of this letter to two friends. Don’t break the chain—it’s a lifesaver.” This brought in £4,068—far more than she had expected.

  Some months later Pagan was standing in a small private room at the Savoy, hoping that her pale gray velvet suit with silver fox at the wrists wasn’t too formal for the buffet luncheon she was about to give for twenty influential journalists. It was an expensive way to start, but she wanted nothing to be skimped at her first press party. She couldn’t help feeling anxious. She wanted to be able to provide the right information for each journalist rather than give general information to a crowd. She had not invited medical journalists, who were informed on the subject, only mass-circulation writers. Nobody present wrote for less than a million readers.