Lace

by Shirley Conran

  “That’s Lili!” The whisper ran around the huge hall, “That’s Lili, that’s Lili.” The girl in white walked out into the night.

  PART

  EIGHT

  41

  I’M SURPRISED THAT you ever managed to lure a man in here,” Maxine sniffed, “or that any man manages to find his way out of this mess. You’re a closet magpie, Judy! You’ve never been able to throw anything away. You’re a thirty-five-year-old pack rat, that’s what!”

  “Well, I guess that’s because it was a long time before I had anything to throw away! And please remember that my bedroom is also my working area. This is where I read, brood and scheme, as well as sleep. It’s where I make my money, Maxine!”

  “You always realised that money was important, Judy. It took the rest of us longer to learn.”

  Maxine stood up and opened the doors to the two walk-in closets that separated the bedroom from the living room. One of them was full of shoes.

  Judy said, “Real protection isn’t a man—it’s money! That’s what gives you the power to do good, the power to be bad, the power to stay or to leave.”

  Maxine peered at shoe shelves, which were lined in crimson moiré taffeta. “Most women prefer not to think about money. They think that dealing with money is tedious.”

  “Not so tedious as being without it, and only if you haven’t been taught how to handle it,” Judy replied sharply. “We should all have been taught how to earn it, how to make it, how to multiply it, how to keep it! But women are merely taught how to spend it. And when there’s trouble, few women have any money, that I have noticed.”

  Maxine agreed. “When a couple split up, the woman gets possession of the children, but the man gets possession of the money. Of course that is exactly when a woman realises the importance of the stuff.”

  She examined the scarlet shelves—different ones for low pumps, for high pumps, for delicate sandals, for low-heeled boots and for the rows of high-heeled boots in tinted suede, supple as gloves.

  “Having money isn’t important, but not having money is disastrous,” Judy added.

  “You may know a lot about money, ma chère, but you don’t know much about the trappings of wealth.” Maxine looked around the room again. Nobody was allowed in Judy’s bedroom to tidy up, so it was in a permanent state of chaos. The two bedside tables were covered by stacks of magazines, newspapers, books and legal pads. All the other flat surfaces, including the window ledge, were piled high with antique tinware, souvenir ashtrays, unframed paintings, last year’s New Year’s cards loudly hailing 1968, and fading Mexican paper flowers.

  “Most people never get beyond the living room,” Judy apologised.

  Maxine sniffed, picked up one of the legal pads and sat on the edge of the bed. “A little organization is needed, ma chère. No, I promise I won’t throw anything out, but we put it all in different places. Now you don’t need three guest bedrooms, do you?”

  “Well, yes, I do. That’s one of the reasons Tom wanted me to get a bigger apartment: this is our entertainment base; we put up a lot of people from out of town—our regional directors—and sometimes they overlap.”

  “Why not try having only two guest bedrooms and a study with a convertible sofa? I’ll make a list now and we’ll go to Bloomingdale’s tomorrow before I go on tour. At least your closets are tidy and your clothes are cared for.”

  “Yes. Francetta doesn’t care much for scrubbing floors, but she’s a marvellous maid, and her husband does the heavy work on his day off.”

  Maxine picked up a lavender silk pump with a single feather curling across the instep. “Handmade in Florence, I see. Your business seems to be doing as well as ours. Isn’t it wonderful to sleep at night? Sixty-six was an even better vintage than ’64—which was the year that really put us on our feet.”

  “Oh, this money doesn’t only come from LACE, it’s the result of Tom’s speculation. I have terrible anxiety attacks about it, and as a matter of fact I can’t sleep at night. It’s different for Tom—he can be objective about it, but I can’t.

  “I’ve tried and tried to live with it,” she continued, “because Tom seems to need the thrills and suspense of speculation the way some people need to ski down mountains or climb up them. He says he needs the adrenaline charge.”

  “Good heavens, you mean Tom is a gambler?”

  “I say he is and he says he isn’t. He says that every business move is a calculated risk, but gambling is for idiots who believe in luck. Oh, no, he disapproves of gamblers.”

  “Then in what way does he speculate with such danger? Has he always done it?”

  “No, because his wife couldn’t stand it. Hell, a lot of people invest on Wall Street, Maxine, it might not be dangerous. I just don’t know. But what he does goes against everything I’ve been brought up to believe in. Not being in debt, always saving a little. . . . My mother thinks the two most obscene words in the English language are ‘credit card’.”

  “But I couldn’t move around Europe without a credit card!”

  “My mother doesn’t move around Europe.” Judy moved to the window and looked down over the park. “To tell you the truth, debt scares the hell out of me.”

  “. . . Remember what Edward G. Robinson’s Renoirs fetched?” Tom had asked in the quiet of their office the previous night. “No, I’m not buying Impressionist paintings because it’s too late for that. But the point is that if you buy the best there’s always someone who will buy it, if you need to sell. The best is always in short supply. . . . Anyway, I hope so, because we have just acquired a T’ang horse. Yes, an eighth-century Chinese ceramic horse about eighteen inches high, sort of earth-coloured. . . . No, you can’t, it’s in the bank vault. . . . It’s acting as part collateral for the loan that helped to buy it. For God’s sake, what’s the difference in principle between buying that horse and the office building mortgage, or the land near Houston? Except that we can’t rent a T’ang horse out for grazing?”

  As Judy saw it, LACE was the puny, endangered base that all this borrowing rested upon, and however much Tom stabbed his index finger at the balance sheet, she couldn’t fight her childhood indoctrination to the point of seeing their increasing wealth as reality. LACE was a real business, the rest was just figures on paper. She remembered the fight they’d had when the LACE bank loan crossed the half-million-dollar mark and Tom had merely said, “Grow up, Judy, no business or fortune can be started today without getting into debt—and it’s only the first fifty thousand that’s hard to borrow.”

  But what worried Judy most were Tom’s commodity speculations. In the last few years he had staked their hard-earned profits first on cocoa, then on sugar, while Judy lay awake nights wondering whether they were going to be stuck with a warehouse full of the stuff. As a matter of fact, Tom also occasionally lay awake at night, because he’d started to buy on margin and that was very different from his more cautious stock market investments. But he was lucky and prices moved up—cocoa by twelve percent and sugar by nineteen percent—within a month of his buying. With the profit, he went short on cotton and long on cocoa again, and lost on cocoa and made a killing on cotton. By the time he plunged into soy beans, he no longer took much notice of what he called Judy’s “irrational fears” and made a profit of thirteen percent within six weeks of his purchase. After that, he mainly speculated in cocoa and sugar, on the whole with great success.

  Judy explained all this to Maxine and added, “He wasn’t like that to begin with. A couple of times during our first business year we weren’t able to meet the rent payments, so Tom always took his figures along to the landlord before the payment was due, and he never got thrown out, as I did. That I could understand, but at the end of our second year—when he bought cocoa on margin and it paid off—d’you know what he did? He bought our office building, using the cocoa profit as a down payment! From that moment I felt strangled by the debt around our necks.” Judy sighed. “The worst part is that I can’t talk to anyone about it. You
must remember that it’s a secret, Maxine.”

  “Once you tell a secret to another person it no longer is a secret,” Maxine pointed out. “Is this apartment paid for?”

  “Yes, I insisted on that, and to my surprise Tom didn’t make a fuss. He just sniffed and said my useless ethics were expensive. I cannot understand how this perfectly rational man, who is marvelously good at a job I understand, can be so insane when it comes to money. Or why he gets so exasperated when I tell him, especially when he loses on some deal and thousands of dollars disappear overnight. After our last fight I thought we’d have to stop working together.”

  Thoughtfully, Maxine stroked the lavender silk shoe; then she said, “You’re thirty-five, you own a smart apartment and you’ve got a well-paid, enjoyable job. I should forget the rest and let Tom do as he wants.”

  So Judy shut up, but she didn’t stop worrying.

  Three weeks later, Maxine returned from her promotional tour across the country.

  “A true friend is someone who confesses that she weighs more than you do,” Judy said, watching Maxine stand on the scales in the guest bathroom.

  “Especially if she doesn’t,” Maxine agreed. “Can it be possible that I’ve put on eight pounds in three weeks on tour?”

  “People either gain a lot of weight or lose a lot. Now put your robe on and come into the living room. I’ve brought your press clippings back from the office.”

  They moved into the cream-walled, double-cube living room. The ornately carved, dark opium beds stood on three sides of a big sang de boeuf marble table. Zebra skins lay on the dark hardwood floor and an antique, red-and-black painted Persian screen zigzagged across one corner. Two elaborate Louis XV gilt mirrors hung on either side of the marble fireplace and on the opposite wall was a growing collection of Steinberg drawings.

  Maxine rushed to a pink file that lay on one of the opium beds, then stretched back against mauve and blue silk cushions as she skimmed through the newspaper clippings. She hadn’t seen them because she had left each city before her interviews were printed.

  “Not bad, not bad. This column in Time with the little picture is delightful. It was so good of you to telephone every night, Judy. It was always an anxious time, not knowing whether or not one was succeeding, and it was also lonely. I almost wished that I’d taken my secretary.”

  “When you’ve finished admiring your press clippings, come and see how the bedrooms have been altered while you’ve been away. I told the decorator to do exactly as you said.”

  Judy’s bedroom now looked luxurious and peaceful. Wild silk drapes covered the window wall and a rich red-fox spread had been flung over the velvet brown bed. On one side of it was a control panel for TV, stereo, radio, telephones and drapes. Two large, low rosewood chests now stood on either side of Judy’s bed to hold all the work clutter. There was only one picture in the room, a Manchu noble, inscrutably lifesize, in a seventeenth-century Chinese silk painting that hung opposite the big bed. Apart from the bed, the only other piece of furniture in the room was a chaise longue upholstered in red-tinged chintz. The same chintz had been used for the couches in the adjoining room, which was now furnished as a study. The walls had been completely covered by bookshelves and painted deep raspberry. Judy’s collection of odd objects, when spaced upon the shelves, could suddenly be seen as a collection of antique toys and other esoteric memorabilia. A Victorian rolltop wooden desk stood in front of the window.

  “I love this dark red,” Judy said.

  “I’ve just used it in Guy’s new offices. He’s got more competition now, since Saint Laurent started his own salon, hence the revamp.”

  The two women moved back into Judy’s bedroom where she started quickly to undress and change for the evening. “Guy needn’t worry about competition. Nobody can compete with his suits,” Judy commented, as she unzipped her scarlet pants suit and stepped out of it. “I’ve practically lived in this for the past few weeks. When did you last see him?”

  “Oh, I haven’t seen him for months, but not seeing each other doesn’t seem to alter our relationship. It’s the same with Pagan and Kate, we never write, we don’t see each other for months, but when we meet we just pick up where we left off.”

  “Friendship expands to fill the space available.” Judy pulled on a flesh-coloured bodystocking.

  “In a way, yes. Friendship can wax and wane and disappear like the moon—then rise and wax fat again at some later date. . . .” She clasped her hands behind her head. “I mean real friendship.”

  “My idea of a real friend was your Aunt Hortense.” Judy hitched up the bodystocking shoulder straps. “I can’t imagine her wearing these clothes, can you?”

  “On the contrary, she’d have looked wonderful in a trouser suit. Oh dear, the last time I saw her before her stroke was when she was playing under the beech tree with Alexandre—he must have been two years old that summer—and she was wearing a green chiffon blouse. He’d managed to undo a couple of buttons and was solemnly stuffing daisies down her cleavage. She looked unusually untidy and unusually happy, and that is how I like to remember her.”

  The two women were silent as Judy wriggled into a thigh-length, skimpy, black crochet dress.

  “Ma chère, you look as though you’re wearing nothing underneath. These new short fashions make us all look like showgirls in the miniskirt and the high boots. No wonder men love it. Is it for some special man that you want to look as if you wear no lingerie?”

  “No, no special man.” She clipped on a pair of sunburst diamond earrings. “You know I never seem to fall in love like other women. We’re dining with Tom and an editor from Newsweek.”

  “Hurry up!” Tom yelled from the living room a couple of days later. “Move it, Judy.” He poked his head around the bedroom door. “You can’t be late at your own reception, especially not when the Nixons are guests of honour.”

  “Sorry. Maxine got stuck with a late takeoff to Tokyo.” Vigorously towelling her hair, Judy zipped up her black velvet dress then quickly brushed her hair.

  “Why don’t you ever use makeup?” He had sauntered into the bedroom, hands in pockets.

  “Because I either look like a clown or a raddled twelve-year-old, even after a lesson from Way Bandy. How’s that?”

  “Jailbait. Incidentally, why did the cancer people choose the Carlyle?”

  “They didn’t, I did. The security’s excellent and their staff is very tightly screened. We’ve lost Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy this year, and with Nixon coming tonight I couldn’t be more nervous.”

  “Sure. It’s a new account, as well, and your friend Pagan moved it our way. But they know you’re good, honey, you don’t have to worry.”

  But all evening, Judy felt as jumpy as a cat, especially when she realised that she was being watched by a tall, dark-haired man. He leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets and said, “You look wicked and wonderful,” as she hurried past.

  “So does Mount Everest.” She smiled tightly. He was definitely not Security. She ignored him for the rest of the evening, except once, when she felt his eyes upon her back, turned, and sure enough there he was, calmly gazing at her from under heavy eyelids. To Judy’s amazement she started to blush; hastily she looked away from him, down at the floor. Then with an effort, because they trembled and yet felt weighted, she slowly lifted her eyelids. Steadily he looked back at her without moving and she felt as if she were naked before him. She felt helpless, her breath unsteady, her face flushed. With an almost painful effort, she turned away, furious with herself. . . . There was something familiar about his face, although she couldn’t place him. That bumpy forehead with the slight frown, the wide mouth and attractive, crooked teeth, that slow smile. . . . Now he was talking to another man, making fast, impatient movements, jerking his head to flick the dark hair back out of his eyes, stabbing the air with his index finger.

  Got it!

  It was Griffin Lowe of Orbit Publishing. He hadn’t been on her lis
t, but someone high on it must have brought him. Briskly she moved over toward him. “It’s Mr. Lowe, isn’t it? Can I introduce you to anyone?”

  “No, thanks. I came with the Javitses but I don’t think I’m staying. It’s my second day with contact lenses, and they’re fighting back. Why don’t we split and have dinner?”

  “Because I’m working.”

  “No need to, if I say you’re not.”

  “I’m sorry, but no.” Judy walked away with just a hint of rudeness. She didn’t need that kind of rich man’s power play and didn’t appreciate it one bit.

  She was the last to leave. After settling the details of the bill with Luigi, she stood under the awning and was about to ask for a cab when a maroon Rolls Royce drew up and the back door opened. “An offer you can’t refuse. A lift home, with no strings. We know the address.”

  She laughed and climbed into the back, which was fitted out like a small living room and smelled discreetly of real leather.

  She didn’t ask him in and he didn’t suggest it. The car simply drove off into the night and Judy headed for a hot tub, rather sorry not to have had the opportunity to turn down Griffin Lowe again. . . .

  42

  THAT WAS THE LAST she heard of him for six weeks, then he telephoned at seven-thirty on a Monday morning to ask her to dinner on the evening of her choice. She said, “You must be crazy! Is this business? Because it certainly isn’t pleasure.”

  “Look, I know you get up early. It’s whatever you care to make it. Sure, I use PR firms.”

  “Okay, how about Le Chantilly at seven this evening.”

  She wasn’t surprised to find Griffin Lowe an interesting and entertaining companion. Of course she had ordered his clippings file sent up to her office, but everyone in the media world knew about Griffin. His publishing empire included a great deal of profitable trash, but also two of the the best magazines in America. Everyone knew that Griffin was a tough, clever bastard who didn’t care what anybody thought of him, which was just as well; they knew he could bring off brilliant, surprising business coups. They knew he had his own sense of rough justice, and that he was a forty-five-year-old, well-known womaniser. Oh, yes, and they knew he was married, with three children—or was it four?