Lace (6 page)

There was an awed silence. Being expelled was a fate worse than death. The shame would pursue you through your whole life.

After supper, half the school squeezed into Kate’s bedroom to gaze at Maxine’s wardrobe until lights out. Immediately after Matron’s inspection to check that all girls were in
and all lights were out, Pagan crept into the adjoining bedroom, clutching around her, like an overweight redskin, the bulky, feather-filled quilt that is the only covering on Swiss beds. Pagan
climbed onto the end of Kate’s bed and the three girls whispered until well after midnight. Maxine told them about her three younger brothers and sister in Paris. Kate, who like Pagan was an
only child, thought that a big family sounded like fun, but Maxine’s school in Paris, on the other hand, didn’t sound like fun at all.

“We also had hours and hours of homework at St. Paul’s,” said Pagan. “Each assignment was supposed to take you only twenty minutes, and at the bottom of your work you
were supposed to put how long it took you, so naturally everybody lied because they didn’t want to look dumb. If your essay on Greek architecture took three hours, you put down twenty-five
minutes. All Paulinas are liars, and they all have weak eyes because they do so much of their work by flashlight in bed.”

“My mother complained to the high mistress once,” said Kate, “and she sat Mummy in a little low chair opposite her huge commanding throne and said in her low boom, ‘Of
course
Kate must not work in bed, she must work in her lunch hour or
leave
if she cannot keep up.’”

“The high mistress was a huge, commanding figure. She moved like a ship. You couldn’t believe she had legs,” said Pagan. “She wore pince-nez and her hair in a gray bun
and very old-fashioned orange sweaters with no bra; you could see but you didn’t dare notice. Somebody described her as God in drag. She thundered at us in a low majestic voice. I once came
second in a reading competition simply by mimicking her. I was afraid I’d get ticked off for insolence, but nobody
noticed.
They said I showed promise.”

“Why did your mother send you to that school if she was frightened of the headmistress?” asked Maxine.

“Not headmistress,” said Kate, “
high
mistress. I went because my father wanted me to have . . . the best.”

Kate’s father had wanted her to have the sort of education he hadn’t had himself. She had been sent to St. Paul’s because Kate’s father had read that
royalty went there. Kate’s father always wanted the best, so Kate’s mother always asked for it, even when shopping. When she was buying plums she would ask the grocer, “Which are
the best?” When she was buying chairs she would ask, “Which are the best?” When she was buying a dress she could never decide which one suited her, so she always asked the
assistant, “Which is the best?” and naturally the assistant chose the most expensive, which was all right, because the more things cost, the better they were.

Kate’s mother was also influenced by royalty, and dressed like the Queen. Kate’s quiet, ladylike clothes came from Debenham & Freebody because the little Princesses’
clothes were bought there and “By Appointment to Her Majesty” was printed on their boxes. Kate hated the place, with its pillared, echoing marble halls and the ancient, exquisitely
polite assistants, all gentlewomen who had known better days. She would have preferred to shop at Selfridge, like the other girls, for the cheap cotton copies of the New Look.

Kate’s mother also had the best at their home, Greenways. The antiques were expensive, but somehow the ornately carved chairs, the brocade sofas and heavy-fringed, satin curtains failed to
achieve the casual elegance of Pagan’s mother’s flat in Kensington, where the simple furniture had come up from their country house and every piece was interesting and well
proportioned, if a bit battered. Some of the china was chipped, but if your family had been using it for a hundred and fifty years, it would be, wouldn’t it?

Kate hated the smug perfection of Greenways. On either side of the drive, the trees and foliage were spotlit at night; Kate’s father thought this looked stylish and set off the pillared
porch. Inside, on the ground floor, the chairs, sofas and tables were too big, the lampshades and pictures too small; the dining room was panelled in plastic wood, and the chandelier consisted of a
circle of fake candles with little fake parchment hats. Upstairs, the bedrooms were surprisingly stark. After all, nobody ever went upstairs except to sleep, so Kate’s father saw no point in
wasting money there.

Kate was driven to school in her father’s Rolls Royce. The chauffeured car set Kate apart from her classmates.
They
didn’t have a different dress for each day of the week, and
they
travelled to school by bus or on the underground. Kate always made the chauffeur stop the Rolls at the end of the road and walked the rest of the way to school. This subterfuge was
general knowledge, but her fellow schoolgirls thought it right and proper that she should avoid showing off; showing off was a major school crime.

Unfortunately, Kate’s father showed off rather a lot. When her schoolfriends came to the house he would show them his cars and ask them to guess how much money he’d made last year or
what he had bought last week. Afterward, he would have a little chat with Kate and tell her which of her friends he preferred. Eventually Kate stopped asking people home. She started to spend her
free time and eat her lunch with Pagan, who was also a loner, considered odd by the other girls. It was unusual for a girl of Pagan’s age from a decent family to be so careless of her
appearance or to be so indifferent to what people thought about her. For her part, Pagan made it clear that she considered the conscientious, hardworking girls of St. Paul’s as boring as
riding around a dusty London park instead of cantering over the Cornish moors, hair streaking behind her in the salty wind.

Kate’s father showered invitations on Pagan and her mother—who was obviously “top drawer”—and once he invited them on a cruise to Majorca (he pronounced the j as in
jug), although the invitation was politely declined. Kate knew why her father liked Pagan’s mother. Kate knew her father wanted a good marriage for her, perhaps even a title: he didn’t
know how he was going to manage it, but after all he had the wherewithal, and he could see that Pagan’s mother knew the sort of people who had titles and she also knew “the done
thing”. The reason Kate had been sent to l’Hirondelle was because Pagan was going. If a Swiss finishing school was “the done thing”, then Kate had to do it.

Pagan teased Kate about her father’s secret hopes. “When you’re a marchioness, you’d better not ask the way to the loo, you’d better say bathroom.”

“What does it matter, so long as it’s clear where I want to go?” asked Kate crossly, but secretly she read Nancy Mitford’s novels and learned what established you as
“U” (or Upper Class), as opposed to “non-U”. Kate said “writing paper”, not “notepaper”, “napkin”, not “serviette”, and
offered visitors “a glass of sherry”, not “a sherry”. She also practiced altering her accent to a clipped, yet languid, drawl, but she soon realised that it was hopeless.
The upper classes
seemed
to speak the King’s English, but in fact they spoke a secret language full of subtle references you could learn only in the cradle. In “U” circles
there was only one thing worse than not knowing these subtleties and that was
pretending
to know them, aping your betters. One little slip and this was apparent: all you had to do was to
refer to the Royal Yacht Squadron as the Royal Yacht Club
once,
or hang family photographs on the walls instead of propping them on side tables in silver frames from Asprey, and you were
doomed.

Sometimes Kate stayed overnight with Pagan, who lived in Kensington, near St. Paul’s—although after that awful Friday she always found an excuse not to do so. For some reason Kate
always felt guilty when she remembered that November weekend.

Pagan lived in an apartment on the top floor of a once-elegant, now slightly seedy house on Ennismore Gardens. They had been playing hockey all afternoon and Kate was sweaty, so she decided to
take a bath while Pagan went out to do an errand for her mother. Kate was naked and about to step into the bath when the door opened and Pagan’s mother entered, wrapped in a white terry robe.
Somehow Kate knew her presence was not an accident and she was nervous. Instead of apologizing and backing out—as one would expect—Mrs. Trelawney moved toward her, and Kate grabbed a
towel as her hostess smiled, droplets of steam beading her scarlet lips. As she came closer, Kate could distinguish the aroma of gin.

“
What
lovely little breasts,” said Mrs. Trelawney in a husky voice. “A girl’s body is so much more
delicate
than a boy’s, don’t you think?
Most
men don’t appreciate that, of course. They don’t appreciate the exquisite
tenderness
of the breasts, the nipples.”

Clutching her towel around her, Kate backed into the small space against the window, between the washbasin and the lavatory, where she was effectively trapped. “I expect you’ve
noticed . . .” and suddenly she reached out with one manicured hand and squeezed Kate’s nipple.

Kate was frozen with horror, unable to move. To her bewilderment and mortification she felt a sharp thrill in her groin. She could see the pores of Mrs. Trelawney’s nose, the drooping,
fleshy folds above her eyes, black-beaded with mascara. Then Mrs. Trelawney closed in on her, clutching Kate with one hand while she tried to pull away the towel with the other. She bent down so
Kate could see the white line where her hair was parted. Her tongue moved swiftly, like a snake’s, toward Kate’s nipple, while her fingers slipped into Kate’s crotch with a
strength that was at once painful and exciting. For a few moments Kate felt erotically hypnotized, then her knees buckled and she slid to the floor, pushing the woman away. Gasping, she brought one
knee up to her chin and prepared to kick if Mrs. Trelawney pounced again. Kate said nothing, but her eyes glittered with fear and anger.

Mrs. Trelawney got the message. She seldom made a mistake, but when she did, she knew how to retreat.

Mrs. Trelawney backed away. “I’ll leave you to bathe in peace,” she said in her soothing, perfect-hostess voice as if nothing had happened, and left the room.

Kate leaped into the bath and sat in it, shaking. She felt safe there and wouldn’t come out until the water was cold. She spent the rest of the weekend trying to avoid being alone with
Pagan’s mother, and it was months before she could be persuaded to visit their home again. When she did, Mrs. Trelawney behaved so normally that Kate was tempted to think she’d imagined
the scene. Could she have been mistaken?

That unfortunate few minutes was destined to have a far-reaching effect on Kate’s future love life, when in the passionate embrace of a man, she felt almost unbearable sexual
excitement—and then fear, repulsion and shame.

T
HE NOISE OF
a piano, the chink of china, an occasional clear laugh sounded above the voices in the Great Hall of the
Imperial. People had been drifting in since four o’clock for tea or cocktails: under the serene gaze of an oil-painted Madonna the bridge hostess was checking her list, and at the backgammon
board the first dice rattled. In one corner Prince Aly Khan was earnestly whispering into the ear of a raven-haired South American girl. Beyond him, the young, slim Elizabeth Taylor reached for her
fourth slice of sacher torte.

Surrounded by a small group of impassive henchmen, Aristotle Onassis swung through the swing doors, followed by a small, blond young woman who clutched a pile of books under one arm. It was a
fatal entrance for a girl who was trying to avoid being seen, because the heads of the concierge, the headwaiter and the maître d’hôtel all turned to make sure that one of the
richest men in the world was being suitably attended. Behind him, Judy Jordan tried to look like a typical hotel guest as she headed for the elevator, walking rather fast and looking straight ahead
as she approached the hall porter’s desk. She wore a pleated tartan skirt, a white sweater that buttoned down the back, white socks pulled to midcalf, and saddle oxfords that sank into the
thick carpet. Nearly there. Fifteen more steps . . . ten . . . five . . . damn! A group of Arab bodyguards had suddenly appeared on either side of the elevator. Judy caught a glimpse of the neat,
olive-skinned neck of a dark, slim young man who entered the elevator followed by an aide-de-camp in Western military uniform. For security reasons, nobody was allowed to travel in the elevator
with Prince Abdullah or any other member of the Sydonian royal family, which kept two permanent suites at the Imperial while the eighteen-year-old Prince was studying at Le Mornay.

As Judy changed direction and headed for the stairs she felt a heavy hand on her shoulder.
“Fraulein,”
hissed the concierge, “you have no business to be in the Great
Hall; you are supposed to use the servants’ staircase; you’re not even permanent staff. This is the last warning you get before dismissal.”

“I’m sorry, but they kept us late at the language laboratory and I’ve got to change before going on duty at the Chesa. I was trying to save time.”

“No excuse is an excuse at the Imperial. Now get to the backstairs.”

So instead of taking the elevator to the sixth floor, Judy had to plod up a hundred and twenty-two steps, then run the last two flights to the sloping attic under the roof that was subdivided by
thin partitions into shoebox cubicles for the staff.

She flung her books on the gray blanket and wriggled into the costume that she had to wear as a waitress in the Chesa coffee shop, which was attached to the hotel. Three more days until her free
Sunday, she thought, as she pulled the drawstring of the embroidered white lace blouse, dived into the red dirndl skirt and tightened the strings of the black lace corselet. Still pulling the black
laces, she ran to the end of the corridor, knocked at a door and without waiting for an answer rushed in.