It was Eliza. She was wearing a black shift, with a large hole cut out of it where her midriff was – in fact, he could actually see her navel, Christ, why were girls allowed to do that sort of thing – and thigh-high black boots. Her hair had grown, it was past her shoulders, and her fringe was so long he could hardly see her eyes.
‘Course,’ he said and disappeared into the throng, then realised he had no idea what she wanted: well, not beer, but red or white wine, or some of that evil-looking punch, probably laced with something. He picked up a glass of red and a glass of white wine and made his way back to her, half-expecting her to have moved on to another group like everyone else that wretched humiliating evening. But no, ‘Oh, thank you, Matt, I’ll take the white if that’s OK, are you having a good time?’
‘Oh – yeah – well you know.’ He took a large gulp of the red. ‘Don’t know many people, but – yeah, I met someone you probably know, Suki someone—’
‘Suki! Suki Warrener?’
‘Not sure. Probably.’
‘Was she stoned? She always is. Cigarette, Matt? No, no, have one of mine. Mad as a hatter, Suki is – talking of hatters, did you meet Esmond?’
‘Oh – sure, yes. Very nice bloke.’
‘Isn’t he? Oh, Maddy, darling, hello, fab party, sorry I’m late, God, look at Simon Butler, God he’s such a tart, bit early to be carrying on like that I’d have thought, tiny bit reckless too, but – oh, now who is that in the PVC dress? We had those in for about a day at Woolfe’s and then they were all gone, terrific success. And how many Maddy Brown dresses are here?’
‘Oh – quite a few. Yes. Oh, God, Suki’s passed out, I’d better go.’ Eliza drained her glass and smiled at Matt. She did seem to be feeling really friendly.
‘Want another of those?’ he asked.
‘Umm – yes – no – oh, listen it’s “She Loves You”, absolutely my favourite at the moment. Matt, dance?’
And she took his hand and led him into the dancing.
She danced well, really well. And she knew it. It began as a performance, and entirely by her; she moved into the music, ignoring him, her head thrown slightly back, her body bending, twisting, turning, her hair flying, her eyes shining, she had a smile on her face that was part pure pleasure, part look-at-me self-confidence. And Matt, nervous at first, demoralised by his evening, simply followed where she led. But then – for he knew he too danced well, really well – he began to perform too, oddly sure of himself suddenly, and she, recognising it, her smile now for him, not her audience, her eyes fixed on his, her body following his, every move, every twist, every turn, pushing double, treble beats into every one; slowly everyone else stopped, staring at them, caught up in what was a virtuoso display and at the end, when the music momentarily finished, when the beat changed, they seemed quite alone together, the evening briefly but entirely theirs, and Eliza stood there, staring at him, her eyes huge and shining, breathing heavily, and he stood too, neither of them moving, caught in a kind of sweet shock, frozen in time.
And then of course, things began again, the music went on, everyone began to dance again, people talking, smiling at one another; and there was a shout of ‘Eliza’ and a tall, blond man was waving at her from the door, and she leaned forward and gave him a quick, half-embarrassed kiss and said, ‘Sorry, Matt, I’ve got to go, we’re only just looking in,’ and the magic was gone and it wasn’t the princess in the story who had changed into a raggedy kitchen maid, but the prince become a nobody once more.
But Matt didn’t care; he left quite soon after that, having thanked Maddy, shaken Esmond’s rather cold white hand, and even felt emboldened to kiss Suki, who was sitting on one of the sofas, weeping helplessly, he had no idea why: and drove most happily home.
He wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but he felt as if things had changed. As if he was – or might become – a rightful person in Eliza’s life, rather than someone she was rather self-consciously nice to; and as if she was a rightful person in his, rather than someone impossibly out of reach. He didn’t quite understand it; but there was sex in there somewhere, that was for sure.
Chapter 14
She couldn’t be – could she? Surely, surely not. They’d been so careful; she always was. She had never risked it, never. Some girls did, she knew; threw caution to the winds, when desire got too much for them, and then spent the next two or three weeks sick with fear. Not her. Her life, her perfectly ordered life was too precious to risk for a few minutes’ passion. And she had certainly never allowed any man to take the responsibility, however much they might assure her it would be all right.
But here she was, over two weeks late, with boobs so sore she could hardly bear to touch them.
‘I did tell you,’ the gynaecologist said slightly reprovingly, ‘it’s not one hundred per cent. Nothing is. Except abstinence,’ she added with a sudden smile. ‘Bit late for that, though.’
‘A bit,’ said Scarlett. ‘So – what can I do?’
‘One of two things. Have it. Or not have it.’
‘I can’t have it,’ said Scarlett. ‘I really can’t. Do you know anyone who could – well, help me?’
‘My dear girl, of course I don’t. It’s illegal. And if I did, and I told you, I could be struck off. But there are people. Clinics even. Expensive, but at least not dangerous. To your health, that is.’ She buzzed for her secretary. ‘Could you send in my next lady, please, Mrs Blake. Thank you. Good morning, Miss Shaw. I do hope things go well for you.’
‘Old bat,’ said Diana, ‘and I bet you anything she’s had a couple of abortions herself. Oh, Scarlett. I’m so sorry. You poor thing.’
‘Yes, well. My own fault I suppose.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! Are you quite sure?’
‘’Fraid so. The lady toad has laid her eggs.’
‘So bizarre that, isn’t it?’ said Diana absently. ‘To think our pee can make a toad ovulate. That is what happens, isn’t it?’
‘It is, yes. I remember my mother saying in her day they injected a mouse with the wee, and then they had to kill the poor thing to see if it ovulated. At least the toad can live on to be used another day. Anyway—’
‘Sorry, Scarlett, I’m not helping, am I? What bad luck. Oh dear. You can’t – well, you know—’
‘What?’ said Scarlett.
‘Well – might he – marry you? If you told him?’
‘Unlikely,’ said Scarlett. ‘He’s married already.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yes. Bit of a bind.’
‘Bit.’ Diana was silent for a moment, then said, ‘What have you tried?’
‘Oh – you know. Castor oil. Gin. Gin and castor oil together. In a very hot bath. That did give me terrible stomach ache; I was quite hopeful for a bit. But – no good. I spent the night on the toilet and in the morning – right as rain. Or rather the baby was. Don’t know what else I can do.’
‘Look, I’ll ask around,’ said Diana. ‘Some of the girls are pretty clued up, you know. Amanda, for instance. I know she got preggers once. She swore it just sorted itself out but I never believed her.’
Scarlett’s heart lifted just a little.
It had been Eliza’s idea, their Paris fashion feature. At the beginning of January, when the plans for shooting the collections were being put in place, and Fiona, always highly strung, became tearful on a daily basis.
Jack Beckham had been dismissing her suggestions for weeks. ‘I’m not having that sort of predictable crap in my magazine,’ he said. ‘If you can’t come up with anything better than that, Fiona, best not go at all.’
‘We have to go,’ Fiona wailed, ‘we’ll lose all credibility as a fashion magazine if we don’t. And it hasn’t helped that Mary Quant and Jean Muir have both come out and said Paris is dead. Well they would, wouldn’t they?’
It was something Jeremy said that gave her the idea; she had told him that she would be going to Paris as Fiona’s assistant and he had said, first having told her how proud of her h
e was, ‘Several of my mother’s friends go to the collections to order their clothes for the following season. Most couturiers spend their time dressing middle-aged women, once the razzmatazz of the press shows is over. It must be quite depressing for them, I always think.’
Eliza had reported this to Fiona next day, simply by way of a distraction after another tear-inducing session with Jack Beckham, and she had sighed and said yes, it was true, but there were a few young women, ‘mostly film stars’, who famously bought couture. ‘Like Catherine Deneuve for instance, and Elizabeth Taylor and of course Audrey Hepburn is Givenchy’s muse.’
‘Are there any young ones who aren’t film stars, do you think?’ asked Eliza, and Fiona said yes, she supposed there must be, millionaires’ third wives, that sort of thing.
‘Well, maybe we could find one, follow her round all the collections, feature what she liked—’
Fiona stared at her in silence for what seemed like a very long time. Then, ‘Eliza, you are a genius,’ she said, ‘whizz over to the picture library and get out all the files on the Best Dressed Women, that sort of thing. Photocopy any you think look really good, and let’s have a look.’
Terrified at the responsibility, Eliza went to one of the big picture libraries in Fleet Street and came back with a bulging file.
‘There aren’t many young ones,’ she said, ‘mostly older people like the Duchess of Windsor and Diana Vreeland. There’s poor Jackie Kennedy of course – oh and Princess Grace of Monaco.’
‘No, none of them would do it, and anyway, Jack would say they were too obvious,’ said Fiona distractedly: and then suddenly, ‘but here, Eliza, look at this woman, she’s gorgeous. Who’s she?’
Mariella Crespi gazed at them from the fading pages: a dazzlingly chic brunette, thirty-seven years old, married to Giovanni Crespi – ‘he’s much older than her, gosh, over seventy, clearly she’s an old man’s darling’ – one of Italy’s richest men. ‘It says industrialist,’ said Fiona. Mariella, who had been a debutante according to the cuttings, and had worked in the art world, had married him on her thirtieth birthday. She had never quite made the top spot on the best-dressed lists, but had appeared on several for the past four years. According to Woman’s Wear Daily, fashion was her religion and the salons of Paris, Milan and New York her places of worship.
‘One day I will make it,’ she was reported as saying, ‘right to the top. It is my big ambition.’
‘It’s worth a try,’ said Fiona, ‘she might think it would be fun and it would up her profile a bit. Let’s send her some copies of the magazine and a grovelling letter, and courier them off absolutely straight away – oh, no wait, I’d better run it past Jack, but I know he’ll like it.’
He did. Fiona wrote and rewrote the letter seven times and it was parcelled up with the magazines to go to the villa on the shores of Lake Como, which was the Crespis’ main residence.
‘I’m not very hopeful,’ said Fiona, handing the package to Eliza to dispatch, ‘but you never know. And it’s terribly short notice.’
‘I think she’ll do it,’ said Eliza. ‘I just feel it in my bones.’
Mariella Crespi was in bed eating her breakfast of brioche and caffè latte when her maid delivered the package from England. She read the letter swiftly, then started to leaf through the magazines. As she read, her expression, initially cool, became increasingly enthusiastic; after half an hour she pulled on a robe and went to talk to her husband.
He was in his study, dictating letters to his secretary, as he had been for over an hour already, for he still ran his industrial empire with great energy and enthusiasm; when he had finished he would work his way through the long list of phone calls a second secretary had compiled, ignoring the ones in which he felt no interest.
Mariella adored her husband as he did her; she was well aware that people assumed she had married him only for his money, and the assumption was wrong. Of course the money was very nice, and acquired for her everything it ever occurred to her she might want, but she also found him interesting, thoughtful, concerned and of course admiring. He was also, even in his seventies, an extremely attractive and beautifully dressed man; she was proud to be seen on his arm.
The only demands he made of her were that she should be his constant companion, look beautiful at all times and run his houses – in addition to the main residence on Lake Como, there was a small ski chalet in the mountains at Cervinia, and an apartment in Nice.
The story told in the newspaper cuttings of a lovely young debutante, who had met Signor Crespi at a ball, was not entirely correct; she was not in the least aristocratic, but the youngest of five sisters who had grown up in a two-bedroom apartment in a poor area of Milan. When she was sixteen, her widowed mother Nina had looked at the treasure in her midst, the olive-skinned, dark-eyed, full-bosomed beauty, with her mass of shining hair and deep throaty laugh, and entered her for a local beauty contest. Mariella won, and then another and then another and at the age of nineteen was competing at national level.
Signor Crespi was chairman of the judges at one such event and pronounced her the winner. The prize was five thousand lire and Mariella used it to attend a course on the history of art. She gained a qualification and was employed as a guide in one of the smaller galleries in the city, where Signor Crespi was a frequent patron; he remembered her, invited her to dinner, fell in love with her, and in a fairly short space of time asked her to marry him.
It was, astonishingly, a happy marriage. Mariella adorned Giovanni’s life, and truly loved him. She was a tender and devoted wife; and, most importantly, there had never been the slightest whiff of scandal.
Her only regret – and it was a deep and sad one – was that he had been unable to give her any children. When they were first married, Giovanni was in his late sixties, and very far from impotent; but as the years passed, it became evident he was equally far from fertile.
Giovanni had only one child, a son, by his first wife, who was a great disappointment to him. Benino was not the high-flyer his father might have hoped for, an ambitious heir to his large industrial empire, but a gentle creature, who at the age of twenty-five had announced he was entering the priesthood.
However, Mariella was a pragmatic creature, not given to regret; she was a successful member of Milanese society and enjoyed it greatly, only occasionally allowing herself to admit to a certain ennui in her life; the letter from Charisma magazine therefore fell into it like manna from heaven.
She had appointments that day in Milan, at both Elizabeth Arden and her hairdresser Mario Petris, for the social season – traditionally launched by the opening night at La Scala at the beginning of December – was in full swing; but before setting off, and having sought the permission of Giovanni, she cabled the fashion editor who had written so charming a letter, saying she would like to meet her and summoning her to Il Grande Hotel Milano in a few days’ time.
‘She’ll hate me, I know,’ wailed Fiona. ‘She’ll be horrible, all spoilt and hard and condescending,’ but she came back starry-eyed and dizzy with excitement.
‘She is just amazing. So, so nice, absolutely beautiful and terribly excited about it all. She loved the magazine and all Rob’s stuff, and she’d heard of Daniel Thexton, said she’d seen his stuff in Vogue. She’s going to go to all the collections and we can talk to her after each one and hear what she has to say about it and then photograph the clothes.’
‘But not on her?’
‘No, no, of course not, they wouldn’t fit her, they’re all model sizes, although she’s so glamorous we can certainly do some pictures of her outside each house or something like that. She wants as much exposure as she can get. She wants to come to the sessions too, amazingly. I told her they were often in the middle of the night and she laughed and said, “so much the better”. And, best of all, because she’s an actual client and such a high-profile one, we’ll be able to borrow the clothes that bit more easily. It’s perfect, Eliza. Really perfect.’
�
�I know she can’t model the actual clothes for the sessions,’ said Eliza slowly, ‘but maybe – maybe if she wore her own example of whatever designer we’re doing, we could include that in some way. Shoot her alongside the model, or separately, but on the same page or spread. Do you think she’d do that?’
Mariella said she would adore to.
She was staying at the Meurice; she invited Fiona for cocktails the evening before the first show. Fiona came back overflowing with excitement.
‘Jacques Fath tomorrow. She always orders at least three things from them, she says. And then she’s going to Cardin, Chanel of course, Balenciaga, Balmain, Dior – oh Eliza, it’s so exciting.’
She dressed by preference at Jacques Fath and Cardin, ‘and Pucci, naturally, I adore Emilio so,’ but she was not above the ready-to-wear market as well, ‘of course I wear Missoni, who would not?’
Most importantly she was nice: good-natured, patient and enthusiastic. (‘How does she get to be that way?’ Fiona said wonderingly. ‘Most of these women are frightful.’) When the directrice of Balenciaga told Fiona coldly she could only have the dress that Mariella had chosen at eleven that night, ‘Vogue will have it until then, maybe later, you will just ’ave to wait,’ Mariella simply shrugged and said, ‘Is fine. We will have dinner first. I will bring a very very tight girdle, so my stomach is holded in. Eliza, you must come too.’
She had taken a fancy to Eliza, who she had met in the studios, and who kept her supplied with the Italian Murillo cigarettes she loved, as well as playing cards with her while the hairdresser did her hair.
‘I think it’s because you’re posh,’ Fiona said. ‘Takes a nob to know one.’
‘I’m not a nob,’ said Eliza crossly. She spent a lot of time trying to shed this image, in what was supposed to be the new classless society; nothing seemed to work.
‘Course you are. If they cut you down the middle, it would say “posh” all the way through, like Brighton rock. Anyway, I’m grateful, anything that keeps Mariella sweet.’
The Decision Page 16
