Lace (9 page)

Overnight a new elite appeared. Any man who could ski well was attractive, and any man who couldn’t, wasn’t. Men who had spent the summer being ignored as farm labourers and
bricklayers suddenly became gods in the form of ski instructors. Every plumber’s winter hope was to marry one of the heiresses from the finishing schools, consequently the girls were given
preferential treatment in ski class and a great deal more attention than they deserved. The suntanned, lithe instructors, in their red wool hats and sweaters, captured every girlish heart as they
coaxed, scolded and helped the stragglers, swooping back and forth with effortless grace that every girl envied, for to ski well was the ultimate social distinction.

Also worshiped, but from a greater distance, was the Swiss ski team, in training at Gstaad. The merits of the four team members and two reserves were endlessly discussed, but the team members
themselves had time for nothing except training. They lived in a chalet on the edge of the town and were hardly ever seen. Which, of course, made them even more attractive.

One morning at breakfast, Pagan interrupted the now nonstop speculation as to what would happen next Saturday at the first dance of the season. She looked up from a rare letter
from her mother. “Guess what?” she asked. “My mother knows Nick’s father. I told her about him in my last letter and she thinks he might have been at Eton with my cousin
Toby. She says that if his surname is Cliffe with an ‘e,’ then he’s Sir Walter Cliffe’s son and he’s going to inherit an enormous family hotel business.”

“It
can’t
be the same or he would have mentioned it,” said Kate.

“If he’s Sir Walter Cliffe’s son then he certainly
wouldn’t
have mentioned it,” Pagan said, adding for Maxine’s benefit, “It’s British
understatement, you see.”

Later, in the cloakroom of the Chesa, they told Judy, who said, “No kidding! He’s never said anything to
me
about it. I thought he was learning to be a waiter so he could
be
a waiter.” They went back to their table. Nick edged his way over to them through tightly packed tables. To the embarrassment of the other girls Judy immediately pounced on him.

“Is it true that you’re going to inherit the Cliffe hotel business one day?”

Nick blushed. To give himself time to think he pushed his hair back from his face, then stammered, “Well, yes—I’ll have to
run
it, but it won’t actually be mine;
it’s in a family trust. It’ll be my job to look after it . . . for the family.”

“Does that mean you’re rich?” Judy asked. There was a pause.

“I’m not poor,” Nick admitted unhappily, “but I’m going to have a lot of responsibility.” With unusual firmness he added, “Now d’you mind very
much if we don’t discuss it anymore?”

Later, in the cloakroom, Maxine turned to Judy and beamed. “Well, now you know about Nick, this will be the end of Jim in Virginia, I suppose?”

“Why?” asked Judy, astonished.

“Well, Nick is obviously mad about you. And it would be a very good proposition, no?” Maxine asked.

Judy laughed. “Look I’m not sixteen yet. I don’t intend to get married to
anyone
now, let alone a guy I’m not in love with. I promised my mother I wouldn’t
even go
out
with a boy while I was here, and it was only because of that that she allowed me to come. I think it was a sensible promise, and I’m going to keep it. I know it must seem
crazy to you rich kids, but
I’ve
got to earn my living. It’s hard keeping up with the French classes as well as the German ones, and working as a waitress doesn’t make
studying any easier. But I’ll only get this one chance, so I’m grabbing it. There’ll be men around for the rest of my life. They can wait.” She hesitated, then admitted,
“If you want to know the truth, I don’t
have
any beau at home. Jim in Virginia doesn’t exist. He’s just a smoke screen that I tell other guys about if they get
interested in me. It lets their vanity off the hook. Men hate being told no for no’s sake.”

“But if you make a good marriage you won’t
need
to work,” said Maxine, puzzled.

“Wanna bet?” said Judy.

That evening the school supper table buzzed with excited discussions as all the girls decided what to wear for the dance. Maxine had her blue silk strapless gown, with a
puffed-sleeve bolero; Kate would wear her dull, Debenham’s cream moiré dress with a sash and a modest heart-shaped neckline, filled in with a lace fichu. Maxine offered to recut the
front in a daring low scoop, and her offer was immediately accepted, but that didn’t solve the problem of what Pagan was to wear.

“It’s no use. I can’t go. I haven’t got a long dress,” Pagan said gloomily.

“But you’ve got a full black taffeta skirt,” said Maxine, “and your grandmother’s white silk blouse. Suppose we buy a couple of meters of shocking pink taffeta and
make a huge frill around the bottom of the skirt so that it reaches your ankles and pleat the leftover material around your midriff in a cummerbund, then unbutton the neckline of the blouse so that
it’s low?”

Pagan cheered up. In an odd way Maxine sounded just like old Mrs. Hocken in the village, and Pagan liked nothing better than converting a garment into something for a totally different sort of
occasion than the one for which it had been intended.

That evening Maxine chalked a new, daringly low scoop on the cream moiré, and Kate shut her eyes and crossed her fingers as the scissors bit into it. Then, on her knees, Maxine moved
around Pagan, pinning newspaper to the bottom of her skirt to make a pattern for the frill. All over the school girls were trying on their dance dresses. Some of the continental girls wore an
entrancing garment called a “Merry Widow,” which encased the wearer from armpit to suspendered thigh in black satin and lace. It was backed with steel strips as uncomfortable as the
whalebone stays worn by Victorian women, but it was sexy.

All over the school girls without one wrote home by airmail, begging money for extra violin lessons. . . .

The Imperial, with its fairytale towers and turrets, is one of the most beautiful hotels in the world. As the unheated green school minibus drew up to the glittering glass
porch, the pupils took off their unchic winter coats (few of them had evening wraps) because it was better to freeze than look dowdy. Escorted by two harassed mademoiselles they trooped across red
carpet under crystal chandeliers to the ballroom, where people were already sitting at small white candlelit tables. The girls sat down in the row of dark red banquettes that had been reserved for
the school and ordered gin fizzes—the girls had to pay for their own drinks, and gin fizzes were supposed to last longest. Politely formal, Nick was one of the waiters who took their
orders.

All the girls were nervous; they dreaded being asked to dance, they dreaded
not
being asked to dance, they dreaded dancing badly or stepping on their partner’s toes. They pretended
to ignore the stag line that was beginning to form at the far end of the room as they prepared for—possibly—their first major public humiliation. Pagan was glad she was sitting down so
the boys couldn’t see how tall she was. She was too tall for half the men in the room, although she couldn’t imagine why they hated her height—she didn’t mind small
men.

“I think I’ll go to the ladies’ room,” Kate said casually.

“No you
don’t,
” said Pagan. “One thing’s certain, nobody’s going to ask you to dance if you’re in the ladies’ room. Don’t be in such
a funk. Look at me!
That
will take our minds off this horrible ordeal. I’m terrified I’m going to step on this damned fuchsia frill and rip the whole thing off.”

The band struck up “La Vie en Rose”, there was a sudden scuffle and their table was surrounded by boys who all wanted to dance with . . .
Kate!
Stunned, Kate accepted the
invitation of the nearest one, who led her off for
un slow
as she thanked God for Maxine’s lessons. Soon all three girls were on the dance floor, saved from the awful fate of being
wallflowers.

At the end of the dance they were escorted back to their table, where their partners bowed and left them. Then, as the band struck up a samba, there was the same wild rush to ask Kate to dance.
She couldn’t believe it as she floated around the dance floor with a handsome, loose-limbed fellow called François, a student at Le Mornay.

François was—according to prescription—dark and handsome. In the arms of this loose-limbed fellow (so confident, even when reversing in the waltz), Kate wafted around the
dance floor in a haze of joy as his masterful arm pulled her closer to his white starched shirt front, and her heart thumped as she felt his unfamiliar warmth against her breasts. The second dance
was a rumba, which François did with all sorts of tricky variations. Before it had finished Kate suddenly flushed. This room’s too hot, she thought, then she felt an unfamiliar
sensation; a simultaneous wooziness of the head, a lurch in the stomach and a weakness in the knees. She thought, I’m going to
faint,
how odd it feels. But then she suddenly realised
what was happening. This must be
it,
Kate realised, bursting with happiness as she mistook lust for love.

François had a smooth, well-practiced line of small talk. As they floated around the floor, or as he bent her body back and forth against his in an increasingly close samba, he spoke very
politely, as if they were having tea with his family. Kate found it was oddly erotic to feel his body hardening against hers (or was she imagining it, because he obviously hadn’t noticed) as
he suavely described the best forest walks, ski runs, guides, bars, hotels and ballrooms in the district.

Kate said very little. Her green eyes just looked up adoringly into his tanned face as François explained that there was one stumbling block to the Saturday night dances. After the dance
was over, the girls from l’Hirondelle were forbidden to speak to the men they had met. On Saturday night you could cling to the man of your dreams through innumerable accordian renderings of
“La Vie en Rose,” but should you meet him on the street on Sunday morning, you were meant to ignore him, to look straight through this potential love of your life.

From the headmaster’s point of view, the girls were supposed to dance perfectly by the time they were shipped back to their parents. François explained that other inadequacies could
be blamed on a girl’s inherent inability, laziness, pubescent nervousness or premenstrual tension, but the parents got angry if their daughters couldn’t dance. A good, cheap way of
finding partners willing to teach them and getting the girls to practice their French was to allow pupils to attend public dances at the expense of their parents. However, Monsieur Chardin
didn’t trust a single one of the pubescent young women for whom he was responsible, and he wanted no irate grandparents-to-be on his doorstep demanding compensation or (even more difficult)
identification. The easiest way to ensure his tranquillity and to keep his pupils safe was to lock them in every night, like chickens.

It was an invitation to trouble.

By midnight Kate felt like Cinderella. She was, in fact, too dazed to notice that when she went to the cloakroom none of the other girls spoke to her. They were not simply
jealous of Kate’s success. What made them angry was that they couldn’t
understand
it. Kate looked so
ordinary.
“I can’t think what they see in her in that
boring old dress,” sniffed one girl “It’s not as if she’s
pretty.
Thin hair—not even long—and those odd, green, hooded eyes.”

Kate had just had the first taste of a disbelieving jealousy that she would have to endure from women for the next thirty years. Because they could not understand why men were attracted to her,
women thought that Kate was sly, that she had tricked them, that no man was safe with her. In fact they were wrong; Kate was safe with no man.

With a crash of cymbals the spotlight shone on the bandleader as he announced that the competition to elect “Miss Gstaad” would take place after the next dance, during which the
voting slips would be passed out to each table. “Well, it’s quite obvious who’s going to enter it from our table,” beamed Pagan. “Kate is the belle of the ball;
she’d better be Miss Gstaad as well.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Kate. “I’m not going to go up on that stage and make a fool of myself.”

“I
dare
you,” said Maxine. “It’s not serious, it’s not Miss World, after all, it’s only a little village hop.” She gave Kate a firm push, shoving
her off the maroon velvet bench. “Don’t be so bloody British.”

Kate stood up. Reluctantly, she shuffled onto the dance floor and was pushed into line by the majordomo, who handed her a large card marked number 17. A couple of other finishing schools had
also come to the ball, so there were about thirty girls in line on the dance floor, including a voluptuous Italian girl in a black velvet, strapless gown. Kate saw she had no chance of winning, but
it was too late to back out. Slowly the girls formed a circle.

But Kate had reckoned without Nick, who walked over to the waiter responsible for passing out the voting slips, gave him a smile that meant, “I’ll settle with you later,”
shoved a handful of slips into his own pocket, dashed into the men’s cloakroom and quickly scribbled “17” on all of them. Then he walked out and picked up the top hat that was to
be passed around the tables to collect the voting slips. Simple.

The lights were lowered, and an erratic spotlight illuminated each competitor as she slowly walked up the steps that led to the platform, stood centre stage, beaming or looking embarrassed, held
up her number and then walked down the steps.

Amid applause and wolf whistles the lights came up again as everyone dropped his voting slip in the hat that Nick held out to each table.

Each girl in the competition tried to look unconcerned. To them, the beauty contest wasn’t a minor evening’s diversion, decided upon by the bored-but-professionally-jolly majordomo;
for each of them, it was their first taste of public sexual competition, and their hearts thumped and they found it hard to breathe until after the next samba when the majordomo stepped forward and
announced that the new Miss Gstaad for 1948 was, Ladies, Lords and Gentlemen—number 17!