Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  For me, being sexy isn’t just about being good-looking, although it is, whatever anyone else might tell you, at least partly that. Sorry, nine-tenths of the boys out there. And it certainly hasn’t got anything at all to do with being nice. Sorry, Ludo. Or buying you presents. And I think you know what’s coming here. Anyone who’s ever read a romantic novel from Jane Austen to Judith Krantz knows what I’m about to say. So get ready for a splash-down in the wide and welcoming sea of cliché—originality is not my aim, but that odd fish, truth. Yes, what we’re looking for is our old friend the “element of danger.” Not “take you down an alleyway and slap you silly” danger. More the knowledge that the object of your interest could go off with someone else more or less whenever he felt like it. More that you see the shape of a sneer behind a smile. More that you don’t know what you’d find if you went through his pockets.

  I knew exactly what I’d find if I went through Ludo’s pockets, not that I bothered to anymore: two handkerchiefs, both as crunchy as Quavers; a tube ticket from a month ago; the chewed top of a cheap pen; a used plaster, screwed up into a ball; a poem, scrawled on a tissue; and a paperback by someone you’ve never heard of, with a name like Zbignio Chzeznishkiov.

  There. I’m a stock character from fiction: the silly girl who, not content with the respectable young man she can have, wants to inject a bit of risk in her life. But fiction makes us what we are; we live in worlds densely populated by characters dreamed up by writers or film directors or magazine editors, characters more real than the insubstantial ghosts that swarm past us in the street, or drive by in cars, or hang like carcasses in the tube. Often when we think we are being most ourselves, it turns out that our words, our actions, even our thoughts, have been given to us. Sorry, I’m raving.

  Anyway, on that evening, however, something like contentment reigned in our household. We had a lovely time tutting over the soaps and wincing at ER (it was the one where Doug Ross saves a boy from drowning in a land drain, surely the best ever).

  At about eleven I made some remarks about having to pack. Ludo said something stupid about that not taking long. Boys just don’t have a clue about girls and packing. There are things that we need that they don’t even know exist. It takes Ludo from thirty to forty-five seconds to pack, depending on how long it takes him to extract his socks from yesterday’s trouser legs. We didn’t make love, but we kissed, properly kissed, and I went to sleep thinking about all the wonderful things there are in the world to buy and how most of them were waiting for me in Paris.

  CHAPTER 5

  Visceral Couture

  The Eurostar left at nine-thirty. That meant up at six-thirty, tea in bed till seven, bath till seven-thirty, dress and tarting till eight-fifteen, quarter of an hour to collect myself, leave at eight-thirty, tube down to Waterloo, get there by five past nine, just late enough to send Penny into fits, but leaving, in the real world, plenty of time to check in and board by quarter past nine.

  I dressed comfortably for traveling, in a Clements Ribeiro, and my second favorite pair of J. P. Todds. There was the inevitable quick panic before I left, and I had to run to the station, wrestling with my smart new Burberry. Even worse, I was forced to finish my makeup on the tube, which always makes me feel like a slut.

  I met Penny by the Eurostar check-in. As usual, she was sowing chaos around her, pushing where she should be pulling, gesticulating at strangers, and snapping at Hugh, who’d come along to see her off—with, I don’t doubt, a heavy sigh of relief.

  As ever, her look hovered somewhere between magnificence and absurdity, generally keeping just on the right side of the border. This time she was doing her “film star traveling incognito” number, in dark glasses and a mad Pucci scarf, which helped to draw the eye away from the truly magnificent full-length sable coat. She had somehow inherited or otherwise acquired the coat from Hugh’s side of the family, and such was its luxuriance that nobody ever suspected it was real. The overall effect was very Sophia Loren.

  Hugh kissed me hello, then quickly again for good-bye. Penny managed a condescending peck on the cheek, acknowledging that our Paris trips were not quite work and not quite play.

  The drama reached something of a peak on the way up to the platform. There was the usual choice between squishy lift and jostly escalator. As the lift queue seemed to be full of Belgians, Penny decided to go for the escalator, a device she habitually shunned. Big mistake. She clung to the rail as though the escalator were a tiny ship caught in a tempest.

  “My feet, Katie,” she cried, “my feet! What do I do with them? Where do they go?”

  “Just close your eyes and pretend it’s a normal stair,” I said, coloring at the attention we were attracting. “Oh, God, let me . . . hang on . . . just put that . . . and that one there.”

  People were looking round. The Belgians in the lift queue pulled Magritte faces and pointed with umbrellas.

  And then it stopped.

  Stuttered.

  And then stopped.

  “We’ll asphyxiate!” yelled Penny, illogically. “Come on, we must go back.”

  By this stage we were halfway up, and there must have been fifty people crammed in behind.

  “Penny, we can’t!” I tried feebly.

  But Penny had switched from helpless panic mode to all-action hero. She swept around, through, or over the hapless travelers, who were all waiting patiently for the wretched machine to get going again. She was like one of those ships that smash through the arctic pack ice on the way to pointless expeditions. “First Woman to Reach the North Pole without Sanitary Protection” sort of thing. I followed, shamefaced but, as so often with the indefatigable Penny, not a little admiring.

  The lift doors opened just as we reached the foot of the escalator. Penny hesitated not one second but barged straight in, past the bemused Belgians, waving an arm, and saying, in a tone that forbade any argument: “Excuse me, this is an emergency. We are designers. I am Penny Moss.”

  A Eurostar lackey bowed. Honestly, he did. He may, of course, have been drunk.

  Things settled down a little once we found our seats, and within twenty minutes Penny was relaxing into her second glass of champagne, as Kent or Sussex, or whatever it was, slid by in a happy green-and-brown blur.

  I was facing the wrong way, of course. Penny always liked to see where she was going. But I didn’t really mind. I’ve always thought—and pay attention here, because this is about the only profound thought I’ve ever had—that life is like facing the wrong way on the train. Because, you see, the present, the bit of countryside that’s exactly equal to where you are, is over before you know it’s there, and then all you have is the dwindling afterward of it. And though you can guess what sorts of things are going to come rushing over your shoulder, because you can see roughly what sort of terrain you’re in, there’s always the chance of something really unexpected or scary, like a tunnel, or a field with horses, or Leeds.

  Oh. I always thought it would look better when I wrote it down. Perhaps I just can’t do profound.

  “Interesting young man, that Milo,” Penny said, between sips. In the rush I’d forgotten about her dramatic appearance at the party. “He said that he would also be in Paris, which was an amusing coincidence. He seemed so sensitive, so . . . attentive.”

  “That’s the way of the PR, Penny. He probably had you down as a potential client.”

  “Oh no, I really don’t think his interest was professional. I really am rather afraid I may have made another of my tragic conquests.”

  I choked on a complimentary peanut.

  “But Penny, you must realize that Milo . . . ” And then I stopped. This was really too delicious. Milo was going to love it. “You must know that Milo is terribly, um, confused . . . shy . . . vulnerable.”

  “Yes, I sensed it. And you feel I would be simply too much woman for him in his present state? Of course, of course. Not that I would ever stray; it’s been so long now. But there’s no law against dreaming,” she said wis
tfully, her fingers pulling at the hem of her skirt. “And I do so feel for the poor boy, torn between the fatal intensity of possession and the emptiness of loss.”

  Already the journey was living up to expectations.

  Champagne for Penny was a time machine, and eventually Milo was left behind and we found ourselves back in the sixties. Exactly which bit of the sixties was hard to work out, and Penny never specified, as that would have given away too much. I suspect it was a largely imaginary place, a sixties of the mind, a distillation of different times, combining late fifties debutante innocence with the lollipop-colored, country-house drug scene of 1969.

  First, of course, there were the years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She seemed to have been worshiped by Albert Finney, adored by Richard Harris, and fondled by Peter O’Toole (or, as I’m sure I heard it, tooled by Peter O’Fondle). In between her white-gloved carousing she flitted from voice production, to mime, to fencing (“my saber cuts once reduced Roy Kinnear to tears, poor lamb”), to ballet, to makeup, and back to voice. Her long-dead tutors, Ernest Milton, Hugh Millar, and Edward Burnham, joined us in the carriage, still graceful, fruity, and fey.

  She talked of nights in the Gay Hussar or the White Elephant, followed by dancing to Dudley Moore in the Basement. Satire at the Establishment always seemed to go with bizarre passes by comedians: Lenny Bruce offered to share his syringe, Frankie Howerd performed some act of dark obscenity (“Well, darling, I was in drag”).

  Most of all, there were the clothes.

  “Darling, I was divine in my white piqué Mary Quant, topstitched in black, and over it a black piqué coat with a stand-away collar. . . . and Ossie Clark gave me a bias cream crepe with a keyhole neck . . . and I wore my ribbed yellow wool A-line Courrèges, with the sweetest little pair of silver-buckled Guccis.”

  I sat back in my seat, drifting in and out of Penny’s monologue. Every now and then I’d snap into focus to hear her say something like “. . . and then I looked down and Princess Margaret’s hand was on my knee . . .” or “. . . I’d never seen anything like it before or since; I swear it was purple. . . .”

  Who knows how much of it was true? Penny had a way of believing in her own creations, and that gave them a reality, a truth, beyond any humdrum business of fact. But there’s something more to it with Penny. It’s as if things only ever exist when they’ve been externalized: talked about or paraded before you. Nothing happens on the inside with Penny. What she thinks, she says, or rather she only thinks them once she’s said them. And for all her extravagant displays of affection and loathing, I’m sure she’d have no feelings at all if there weren’t people around to observe them. I suppose that this is just another way of saying that she’s a drama queen. But drama queen is too ordinary and plebeian a concept for Penny. Perhaps drama empress comes closer. And how she loves a drama! I promise, more than once, I’ve seen her place the back of her hand across her forehead and literally swoon, generally speaking onto the first-floor ottoman, which might have been designed for such things.

  I dozed, and without even noticing the tunnel bit, I found we were in France. You can always tell by the sudden profusion of small, erratically driven vans on the roads. And then the Gare du Nord. I was sent off to find a trolley, while Penny, swaying gently on the platform, defended our cases from the predatory French porters.

  There are two quite distinct sides to our trips. The bad bit is the marathon trudge around the fabric stands that fill the three huge hangars, big enough for airships, of the Première Vision exhibition. That consumes days two and three. It’s no fun, but it’s worth it, because it buys me, us, the good bit.

  The good bit is Paris itself. I don’t care how much cooler Milan and New York are; I don’t care if the food is better in London or the weather nicer in Rome. For me Paris has always been my Emerald City, my Wonderland, my place of dreams. As a girl I used to think that if I could just get high enough in the park swings, I’d be able to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower peeping over the monochrome, rain-dulled roofs of East Grinstead. I’d get Veronica to push. “Higher! Higher!” I’d shout. But she was never up to the job, and I resented her for it.

  And Penny is different, in Paris. Of course, she’s still a tyrant and a bully; she still imagines that the world exists to pay her homage, or at least to make her life easy; and she still reacts with outrage when her importance is not acknowledged. But in Paris Penny manages to exude a light that warms rather than dazzles. Somehow the hand thrust into the face of the waiter at L’Assiette charms his habitually pursed lips into obeisance. Somehow her attempts at the language, an extraordinary mixture of underworld argot, finishing school refinement, and simple error (I once translated her instructions to a taxi driver back to her, with just the merest touch of editorial license, as, “Hey, fuck ears, we would be enchanted if you could direct for us your carriage to the front portal of our castle. You have the scrotum of a bat”), is greeted with indulgent good humor by the snootiest of Parisians.

  We always stayed at the Hôtel de Université, on the rue de l’Université in St.-Germain. This may surprise you, but we shared a room: it was another part of the strange intimacy of our Paris times. The payoff, the compensation to me for Penny’s gentle snoring, and to her, for my whatever it is that irritates her, is that we had the grandest room: a neo-classical cube of perfection. The Université could not have existed anywhere else in the world. It combined, in Penny’s words (and for once they seemed the right ones), “the stately grace of Racine with the panache and verve of Molière.” The service was attentive but restrained, and even the youngest of the doormen knew that Penny, and not I, was the one to flirt with.

  Most of all, the Université was perfect for the shops. And when in Paris, boy, did Penny shop. You see, she never bought other people’s clothes in London: it seemed to her too much like sleeping with the enemy. But in Paris, despite the fact that she chose the same designers that she shunned at home, it was somehow okay. And for once there was some logic to her logic.

  And so, after leaving our cases in our room, we skipped, on that first afternoon, as on every first Parisian afternoon, from Prada, to Paule Ka, to Kashiyama (not that it’s called Kashiyama anymore, but Penny could never remember its silly new name and would look helplessly at me if I used it), to Sabbia Rosa, and then back to Prada again. Leather was on the menu, and we both found something suitable; she in a rich chocolaty brown, me in camel.

  Because I’m in fashion, you probably think that buying clothes is something of a busman’s holiday for me. Working for fifty hours a week neck deep in the kinds of clothes that 99 percent of the population can only dream about must, you surmise, dull the appetite? Wrong, so wrong. I still feel the near erotic pleasure, the juddering, ecstatic, transforming joy, of clothes. I love the foreplay—the touching, smelling, breathing of beautiful fabrics—before the sweet consummation of trying on and the sublime climax of the purchase. I shiver still for satin-backed crepe: cool, like a diamond, to the tongue. How thrilling it was to find out that silk velvet smells exactly as it should, of earth and leaf mold.

  It is still now as intense as the first time, that wonderful afternoon when Dad, for the only occasion in his sad life getting things exactly right, brought me home a perfect princess dress of polyester pink taffeta, studded with rosebuds, with a satin sash and a net underskirt. It was my sixth birthday. At the party, Veronica spilled punch on the dress and I pulled her hair until she cried. She was lucky I didn’t drown her in the punch bowl.

  The first evening we had dinner in a little bistro that Penny claimed to have been coming to since her honeymoon, when she and Hugh had spent a month living in a brothel. Or that was Penny’s story, and a very amusing one it was, full of comic misunderstandings of a classic French farcical kind. Hugh told me it was actually a perfectly respectable hotel that just happened to have a lot of velvet about the place. But Penny never let truth get in the way of a good story or, for that matter, a bad one.

  The bistro w
as like a thousand others in Paris, although it claimed distinction by virtue of an assumed connection with an ancient guild of carpenters, or wheelwrights, or hairdressers—Penny could never get the story straight, and it had a habit of changing depending on which of the waiters you asked, should you have the curiosity to inquire. In honor of this association, there hung from the ceiling an intricately carved something, a kind of gothic parrot cage. Again depending on the whim of the waiter, this could be a model of the vaulting of Notre Dame, a medieval clock, or une machine pour le fabriquer les cigarettes.

  As usual, Penny asked me what I’d like and then ordered something else for me altogether. And as usual, it was an unmentionable part of a pig, with a gizzard garnish. Before our food arrived, but well into the second glass of wine, Penny broke off from a rambling monologue on what we should look out for at Première Vision the next day and gave me a long and searching look, her eyes seeming both to widen and yet sharpen their focus. That look was one of her specialties and perhaps her single greatest business asset. No man, and few women, could sustain eye contact with her in basilisk mode for long. It was her complete self-confidence, of course, the total absence of those goading, middle-of-the-night doubts that riddle most of us, that gave her gaze its power.

  “Katie darling, do tell me what’s wrong.” That was a bit of a shock. It seemed that Penny had had another of those rare, invariably cynical flashes of insight.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “Katie my dear, I know you. I know how you are. I know your ways.” None of those things, I must add, were true, or even nearly true. Penny knew Penny; Penny knew the fashion business; Penny well may have known how to dance the highland fling; but Penny did not know me. The trouble was that something was wrong. I simply couldn’t stop thinking about Liam. His face was projected onto elaborate eighteenth-century facades; his voice whispered through elegant corridors; his smile glimmered at me from the silver highlights on the gray brown waters of the river.