Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  On impulse I called Hugh’s club in St. James’s Square. He’d popped out for a constitutional, so I left a message to say that I’d come round in the afternoon.

  “Is that really you, Katie, you naughty girl?” he said rising from his favorite oxblood leather armchair.

  It was the second time I’d been to the club, which had only recently allowed women into its dreary, musty rooms lined with bad paintings of forgotten Victorian luminaries. Unsurprisingly, few women had taken up the opportunity, and the bar was populated exclusively by beblazered septuagenarians, some rakish, some raffish, some catatonic. Not a place for a big night out with the girls. But they still served a mean gin and tonic.

  “Not for the first time, Hugh, kettles and pots come to mind.” It was a little hard, but I knew he could take it. “But how are you? I heard about Sukie. What on earth were you playing at?”

  Hugh shook his head slowly. He was still a handsome man, but I didn’t suppose it was his beauty that attracted Sukie.

  “I fucked up, Katie. No two ways about it. Trouble is, at my age you become very easy to flatter. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever turned down the chance of a dalliance, given a woman of anything like reasonable looks. Not in my nature. My way has been to try to keep myself out of the path of temptation. It’s why I’ve always spent so much time here. That and steering clear of Penny, when she’s on the rampage. So when that young fox started giving me the eye, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I did try. Fought her off for a couple of months. But the flesh is weak. That was the first time, in the closet.”

  “But Sukie, Hugh, what was she doing? I don’t mean to be rude, but . . .”

  “Yes, I know, old enough to be her father. Thanks for rubbing it in. The truth is, I may have slightly talked up my role in the company. Painted myself as some sort of kingmaker. Silly vanity. But she swallowed it. Probably thought I’d oust my own wife to put her on the throne. Like the Franks of the Fourth Crusade, setting up a harlot on the patriarch’s chair in Constantinople.”

  “Quite,” I said, bemused. “Where is she now?”

  “God knows. Lost interest, obviously, when she saw how the ground lay. But she’ll land on her feet. Her sort always do.”

  Her sort, my sort, said an honest voice within.

  “What about you and Penny? Do you want to go back to her?”

  “Of course I do. Can’t get by without the old girl.”

  “Will she have you back?”

  “I always thought she would, but it’s been a terrible blow to her, all this. And I don’t think the business is going too well at the moment. So, you see, everything’s gone a bit belly-up since you left. I spoke to one of the girls in the shop. It seems Penny’s not what she was. Lost a lot of her, you know, Penny stuff. The balls. Always took life by the scruff of the neck. That’s why I loved her. Still do, of course. Have me back? God, I hope so. I am an arse. But listen, I haven’t asked anything about you. Heard some rumor about you shooting up heroin in broad daylight, keeping your needles hidden under a live baby. Couldn’t see it myself.”

  I told him the tale of the last few months, played mainly for laughs to help cheer him up.

  “Sounds like you’ve rallied pretty well. Always knew you would. Can’t keep a good trooper down. What’s next on the agendum?”

  “Bit like you, really. I want Penny to take me back. Do you think she will?”

  “Too close to call, Katie, that one. No harm in trying. Always worth having the odd carrot and, oblique or, stick up your sleeve, I find, when dealing with Penny.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  There was one other thing I wanted to discuss.

  “Have you heard much from Ludo?”

  “Despair of that boy of mine. Came down from his aerie a while ago. Mooched about for a bit, then went back. My guess is he’s still carrying a torch for you. I would, if I were him.”

  “But there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it, with five hundred miles between us.”

  “Well, he is on a mountain, after all. You could always make like Mohammed.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Ending in a Colon

  I allocated Sunday as a planning day. There were so many pieces that I had to fit together. I actually considered doing some sort of huge color-coded chart. But that would have meant going out to buy felt-tip pens, and the weather was foul. It would also have meant that I’d have turned into Veronica. In place of felt-tips, I had filter-tips, nine out of my pack of ten by two in the afternoon, and coffee: three pots, drunk down to the cold dregs.

  Just as a strategy was beginning to form out of the general fug, the bell went. It was Jonah.

  “I’ve something for you,” he said mysteriously, through the intercom.

  I let him into the flat. He had a small brown paper parcel.

  “You remember, Katie, asking me for something.”

  It took a second or two before I realized what he was talking about.

  “My God, the film!”

  I hadn’t thought about it since I’d asked Jonah if he could find it. I’d assumed it would be impossible to get hold of.

  “This, Katie,” he said, holding up the parcel in his huge hands, “has caused me more grief than you can imagine. I’ve had to involve myself with some bad people, some very bad people.” He was even graver than usual. “That industry attracts the worst sort of . . . businessman. It’s very rare to find a world without some kind of ethical framework, however warped, some code of honor, some system of values. But here . . . only nihilism, emptiness.”

  “But nothing’s wrong?” I was worried by his seriousness.

  “Well, I have the film, or rather a video. As I’m sure you know, everything made before the eighties is on film rather than video. My contact managed to track down a print of Albert and Clittoria, as far as I know the only one ever made. But to be usable it had to be transferred onto video, and the film hadn’t been properly conserved. It literally fell to pieces during the process.”

  “Oh,” I said, almost relieved, “so it didn’t work? The video’s a blank?”

  Penny’s indiscretion was no longer part of my plans. I suppose it never really had been.

  “No, no, here it is. This is now the only copy in the world. The original has gone forever. But things have become . . . complicated. You see, the truth is that after handing over the copy, my . . . er, associate asked himself why I was prepared to go to such lengths to find one old forgotten porn film when there was so much new, explicit stuff available. I suppose we’re lucky that he isn’t philosophically trained, or he might have begun to ask questions before.”

  “So what did you tell him?” I wasn’t quite sure where this was leading, but I feared it was no place good.

  “Well, I told him something about what was going on. That was a mistake. He refused to believe that my interest was . . . humanitarian, in that I was helping you. He thought there was some kind of scam, and he wants the video back, after you have used it for your own purpose. I think he means to use it to blackmail the . . . person involved. And he’s not a man to be taken lightly. You see, porn and drugs go together in this city like Marx and Engels.”

  “But surely, Jonah, you can handle him?”

  I had always thought of Jonah as possessing superhuman powers; I couldn’t imagine him being afraid of anyone.

  “Katie, I am one man, and not a young one. This other is a whole organization. And the younger people in business today . . . they have no boundaries. And no philosophy. Katie, they are capable of killing people who stand in their way.”

  Shit. This definitely wasn’t part of the plan. If there was any blackmailing going on, then it ought to be done by me. Except that I wouldn’t have. I suddenly felt out of my depth. I’d always known that Jonah moved in a dark and dangerous world, but somehow it had never seemed real to me. And now I was like a schoolgirl who plays with a Ouija board without believing any of it and then accidentally summons a genuine gh
oul.

  “But this is terrible, Jonah, what can we do?”

  “We’ve no choice; we have to return the tape. Actions, Katie have consequences. Surely you’ve learned that much?”

  A little bit of long overdue good fortune had seemed to put my fate back in my own hands; I’d achieved a kind of order, forced the world back within the bounds of reason. But now with this new complication chaos had been unleashed again. I closed my eyes and moaned. When I opened them again I found I was looking at my bookshelf. And at one end of the shelf was something that wasn’t a book.

  I’d swear you could hear the ping from the street outside.

  It was like coming home starving, convinced you’ve nothing in the fridge, and then when you look you find a forgotten, lifesaving Marks & Spencer chicken pie, just on the right side of the sell-by date.

  “Has this pornographer of yours seen the video?”

  “No, not personally. The transfer was done by some technician. Why?”

  “Oh, I have an idea.”

  After another week of successful touring, I told Kamil that I needed Friday afternoon off to attend to some private business. He was happy—the orders were rolling in, the factory purred like a stroked cat: he looked at himself and found that he had become a successful entrepreneur.

  Latifa told me shyly that he had asked her out.

  “What did you say?”

  “Told him I’d let him know.”

  “What’s holding you back?”

  “Well, he is a bit of a tit, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but he’s okay underneath.”

  “And the girls would really take the piss. I don’t know if I could live with the embarrassment.”

  “Latifa, never let embarrassment stop you getting something you really want. And the great thing about boys is that if there’s anything about them you don’t like, you just change it.”

  “Mean a lot of work with Kamil.”

  I treated myself to a taxi into town. Yes, my first since, well, you remember. And I thought about tactics. I recalled Hugh once talking about the difference between strategy and tactics. “Strategy’s how you win the war,” he’d said with Churchillian grandeur and authority apropos of some minor fashion world skirmish over the cost of acetate linings, “tactics is how you win the battle.”

  My strategy was in place, but I hadn’t worked out quite how to fight this last great battle. However reduced, Penny was sure to be a formidable opponent. Her weapons were powerful, most of all that blunderbuss of an ego. In a clash of wills could I be sure that mine was the stronger? Only, perhaps, if I used the supreme performance-enhancing drug: anger, burning cold and white. I played yet again through the memories of the last few months: the humiliations and disasters. My mind returned once more to that hideous interrogation by Penny and Hugh and little Cavafy. I felt my jaw tighten with rage. Good, good, but I made it stop because I knew how unattractive it made me look. I played back further and found endless other slights, spots of intensity in the sweeping pattern of manipulation. That feeble attempt to put me off Ludo in Paris; another time when she’d dropped hints about some wasting disease that would confine Ludo to a hospice within a year. A suggestion that he might be gay. All attempts to prize us apart. And soon I was there, smack in the zone, ready to take whatever Penny could throw at me; take it and then hit back. I searched for the right sort of image to fix in my mind and hit on a samurai warrior, wielding a glistening sword with murderous precision while making those peculiar getting-into-a-hot-bath sounds so characteristic of a Japanese on the rampage.

  Walking down the narrow lane to the shop, I was assailed by a swarm of ghosts: spectral voices, images, memories. But I was here on business, and I shooed them away. The window was a mess: too many competing ideas. Three mannequins had been squeezed in, making it look like a bad morning on the tube. The colors clashed, and the angles were all wrong. It gave me toothache.

  I didn’t recognize any of the girls in the shop. As I opened the door, two of them leapt up and sprang toward me like lionesses. Wrong, all wrong. They shouldn’t have been sitting in the first place, and they certainly shouldn’t have signaled their desperation for a sale. Surely Sukie hadn’t put them on commission? Before they had time to maul me, I said:

  “I’ve an appointment with Penny. I’ll go straight up; she’s expecting me.”

  The girls lost interest as soon as it became clear I wasn’t a customer. I was confident they wouldn’t ring upstairs to check.

  The studio was strangely inert. It should have been buzzing at this time of year. Tony and Mandy were both there, but it was dispiriting to see them sitting quietly, rather than hissing at each other. Even the machines seemed to have lost their happy buzz, wheezing and coughing now like asthmatics. I caught Tony’s eye, and his face lit up with pleasure. Before he had the chance to shout, I put my finger to my lips and pointed heavenward. I mouthed, “See you later,” and moved on up.

  At first, as I emerged at the top of the ladder-steep stairs, I thought the office was empty. Gone the clatter of keyboards, the tinkle of coffee cups; banished the chatter, the giggling. And then I saw her. Not that I recognized her at first, as she gazed out of the window at the narrow band of heavy air allowed her by the London skyline. Surely this frail lady could not be the fearsome Penny Moss, the Boudicca of fashion? Penny’s hair was a vibrant red, dyed, of course, but all the more feisty for being the product of an act of will rather than an accident of nature. But this woman’s hair was sapped of life. It was not that the roots were showing, but rather that the color had simply given up, surrendered to the unstoppable advance of entropy. And that ashen, lined skin—where was the plump vigor, the famous HRT-enhanced luminosity? This lady stooped over the desk, but Penny was finishing school straight. Only six months before, I’d seen grown Italians hesitate before deciding which of us to leer at as we walked down the street. It must be a trap, I told myself. I adopted a cold, commercial tone.

  “Penny?”

  She turned, and the gray eyes struggled to focus.

  “Who’s that? Who’s there, standing in the shadows?”

  “It’s me, Penny, Katie.”

  The eyes narrowed, and I saw the effort as she wrenched herself back from whatever place of cold refuge her mind had found.

  “Katie, Katie. Is that really you?” The voice was melancholy. I thought, perhaps, that there may have been some regret, even affection, in the tone. But then it sharpened. “What have you come back for? Here to gloat? Or to beg for your old job back?”

  It was that feeble show of spirit that broke my resolve: it so illuminated the change. I would have needed everything in my arsenal to cope with a full-strength Penny, and a display of self-pity would have irritated me into crushing her. But here was Penny, mortally wounded, toothless, and yet still game. Hate and fear drained out of me, and I discarded plans A and B, which required the various degrees of coercion at my command. My samurai sheathed his sword and trudged off.

  “No, not gloating, not begging. Just here to talk. I take it that Sukie’s gone for good?”

  “Don’t mention that name to me. Of course she’s gone. My biggest mistake in thirty years, trusting her.”

  “What about Hugh?”

  “Hugh?”

  “Hugh . . . going.”

  “Oh, well, I don’t really blame him, men being what they are. He’s in the doghouse for a while, but I expect I’ll let him back in, sooner or later. He couldn’t survive on his own any more than . . . well, what did you want?”

  A little bit of the spark had returned: the first twitching of a patient coming round from the anesthetic.

  “I’ve had some ideas. I’ve been working with a small-scale manufacturer, and I think there may be some scope for synergy.”

  I cringed a little at the corporate babble and made a mental note never to use that word again.

  “Things haven’t been too good, you know, this season,” said Penny. “Even before Sukie left.”

 
; I wasn’t sure if she’d taken in what I’d said.

  “But you’ve got lots going for you. The name, the history . . . and me again, if you want me.”

  I didn’t know I was going to say that until it came out. Penny looked for the first time fully into my eyes.

  “You hurt Ludo very deeply, you know.”

  “I know. But it all would have blown over if you . . . if we’d been allowed to talk it through.”

  A smile touched the corners of her mouth. “Yes, I’m sure you could have talked him into believing anything.”

  It was a crucial moment. I thought about calling back the samurai, who was sulking in a corner. And then I, too, smiled.

  “You know I love him?”

  Penny nodded, and the moment of tension passed.

  “What about this . . . synergy thing?” she said. “Is that one of those new fabrics?”

  “Well, you know we always wanted to expand, but could never quite work out how?”

  And so I made my proposal. I’d work again as Penny’s assistant. We’d keep the classic Penny Moss look, but then also do a younger, diffusion range, designed by me and made by Kamil. Perhaps use the Kilburn shop as a sale outlet. It meant we could double our turnover without any real risks. I’d already sold the idea to Kamil, and he was keen on some form of partnership.

  Penny looked interested, but also very weary.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Katie. It’s not just the problems with Sukie and Hugh. You remember Kuyper, and the lease?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Well, all that’s blown up. He’s far worse than he used to be, now I’m alone. He’s been threatening me. He comes in and he shouts and waves his fists around, and I really think he’s going to hit me. But I don’t mind that so much as the cost of going to the courts. I know we’re in the right, but if he sues us for the money he says we owe, it would tip us into bankruptcy. And without Hugh or anyone else here to help, I just don’t know what to do.”