Wicked Pleasures (5 page)

‘No, I’m sure it’s not,’ said Virginia hastily. ‘I didn’t mean that. But I think it must still be wonderful, to see your ideas for a house, for a room, even, turn into reality. Like a picture coming to life. With people moving around in it, and liking it.’

Amanda Adamson’s face softened suddenly into humour. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Yes. People. You know what drives people to me? Rather than saving thousands and thousands of dollars and getting it done themselves?’

‘No,’ said Virginia. ‘No I don’t.’

‘Terror,’ said Mrs Adamson. ‘Terror of appearing tasteless. Our role is to advise people and give them a house that stands up to the most minute examination from their friends. Or rather the people who come to their houses.’

‘Oh,’ said Virginia. ‘Oh, I see.’

‘People are very insecure,’ said Mrs Adamson. ‘Very insecure. It’s important to understand that.’

‘I think I know about insecurity,’ said Virginia, thinking of Mary Rose, so cultivated, so pretentious about taste and style, and yet driven to employ a decorator and then pass off the result as her own. ‘I’ve seen evidence of that very close to home.’

‘Oh really?’ said Amanda. She smiled at Virgina suddenly. ‘I think you’d do this job rather well. I have a good feeling about you. Would you like it?’

‘Oh I would,’ said Virginia. ‘I really really would.’

She found herself employed as a shopper at Adamsons; it was something of a misnomer, she felt, as most of the time she was not shopping at all, but tidying up the showroom, making coffee for clients, taking messages, picking up merchandise. But sometimes she was sent out to shop: to visit the wholesalers and pick out samples: ‘Six different blue linens, Virginia, different weights, for Mrs Macaulay’s cushions, and while you’re doing that, could you keep an eye open for lemon silk for the curtains.’

‘Virginia, Mrs Blackhurst has changed her mind, she wants wool and silk mixture now, not slub, could you go and find the nearest to that green that she likes so much and if there’s a pattern, try that as well.’

‘Virginia, Mrs Waterlow wants red saucepans in her kitchen, not aluminium, could you try and track some down.’

‘Virginia, Papp are sending three tables up on memo, could you just run in there and see if they have any silver frames we could use.’

This being in the days before the D. & D. building opened, and everything was more or less under one roof, the shopping was something of a challenge; many, indeed most of them, were contained more or less in the same area, around and about the Upper 50s and Third, but sometimes it was worth going down to the rag trade area and hunting there, and even to the Village; she was good at it, she often brought back something unexpected, witty, that delighted and charmed the spoilt, capricious women Adamsons spent its days making more spoilt and more capricious.

Virginia loved the new world she had found herself in; she loved its excesses, the shops like Karl Mann, who recoloured Monets to match clients’ carpets, and inserted people’s own pooches and/or ponies into reproductions of quite famous eighteenth-century paintings. She loved the flamboyant characters like Angelo Donghia and Joe Schmo, who had turned interior design into a branch of showbiz. She went to a party at Donghia’s house on 71st Street, taken by one of the designers at Adamsons; Donghia was a great champion of the young, a mentor of many young designers, and he was charming to her. She spent a starry evening talking to actors and fashion designers and journalists in the ballroom, with its white satin banquettes, and in the great mirrored hallway.

It was all new and glamorous and exciting, and yet she felt totally at home
in it, absolutely in the right place; she knew she could make something of this world, and make something of it her own.

It was a potential client, the mother of her best friend at college, Tiffy Babson, who gave her the big idea. Mrs Babson said she had bought a cottage out at Connecticut, near Old Lyme, and she wanted help with the bedrooms. ‘The rest is just perfect, and I don’t want to change a thing, but the bedrooms are a nightmare. Could you ask Mrs Adamson if she would consider doing them?’

Virginia asked Mrs Adamson; Mrs Adamson said that she was extremely sorry, in tones that made it clear she was nothing of the sort, but she didn’t do bedrooms, as Virginia very well knew. ‘I would only consider doing a bedroom,’ she said, ‘for somebody extremely famous. Or of course the mother or the daughter of a very important client. You can tell Mrs Babson that she won’t find anyone of any note at all doing bedrooms. I’m sorry.’

Virginia relayed this to Mrs Babson, as tactfully as she could; Mrs Babson was disappointed. Virginia looked at her.

‘Mrs Babson, I could – help a bit if you like. I mean we’d have to not tell Mrs Adamson, but I could certainly take a look at the cottage and make some suggestions, and maybe even get you some fabric for the drapes and so on.’

‘Virginia, that’d be wonderful!’ said Mrs Babson. ‘Come out this weekend and take a look.’

She went and took a look. The cottage was charming, right on the shore. Virginia drew up a colour board of blues and greens and whites, with some fabric samples she had hanging around the office, and did a sketch of each bedroom, complete with lights (brass ones, hanging on chains), white wicker furniture, and rugs on painted wood floors, marbled the colours of the ocean. Mrs Babson was enchanted, and asked her to take it a stage further; Virginia said she would shop around for the furniture and the rugs, but that it was more than her job was worth to actually make any purchases. ‘So it will have to be retail: expensive, I’m afraid.’

‘Never mind,’ said Mrs Babson. ‘I’ll be saving plenty on Mrs Adamson’s fee. Now Virginia, that doesn’t mean I expect you to do all this for nothing. You must bill me, just as if I was a regular client.’

Virginia said she wouldn’t hear of it, but that if Mrs Babson was happy with the end result, she could pass her name to her friends.

Mrs Babson did so; almost immediately a Connecticut neighbour, with a New York apartment as well, both in need of restyled bedrooms, approached her; and then another. Virginia liked doing bedrooms; they were more personal, less daunting than drawing rooms. She spent a great deal of time (as indeed she had learnt from Mrs Adamson) talking to her clients, establishing how they saw their bedrooms, whether they were simply somewhere to sleep, or somewhere to sit, chat, eat breakfast maybe, read. For one client she suggested a corner that was more than a corner, more of a study extension, separated from the main part of the bedroom with wicker screens; for another, a little girl who wanted to live in
a tent, a four-poster with huge draped curtains; for a third she had an artist paint a trompe l’oeil of the ocean on a tiny bedroom wall in the Hamptons. What Virginia Praeger did with a bedroom, all the ladies said, was make it speak louder for their personalities than the whole of the rest of the house put together.

And so VIP Bedrooms was born. Virginia said to Betsey that she had never thought to be pleased her middle name was Irene.

By the following autumn, Virginia felt the burgeoning of an altogether unfamiliar sensation: confidence. She had a growing list of clients, her appointment book was always full, the small study she had appropriated for herself on the garden floor of East 80th was swiftly proving inadequate as an increasing number of visitors stepped over the piles of fabric samples, paints, reference books to sit in front of her small desk and large drawing board and discuss their decor problems with her. At least one of her commissions, a small but enchanting studio apartment – strictly speaking beyond her bedroom brief – in the Village was being considered for inclusion in
Seventeen
magazine. This was, she knew, due more to luck than anything; her client, a young designer, had a boyfriend who worked on the magazine. They were doing a supplement on single homes, and the assistant art director had been to see the apartment, loved its stark whiteness and its faithfulness to the studio style, and been impressed at the same time by the jokey trompe l’oeil on one huge wall of a door opening onto a close-up of the Statue of Liberty’s head. If that came off, Virginia knew she would be made. She told Fred III and Betsey about it over dinner one night; Betsey was immensely impressed and made all kinds of unsuitable offers of bringing flowers down to the apartment herself, and maybe even have Clarry the maid clean it.

‘Mother, you’re sweet, but I’m afraid Janey Banks – she’s my client – would see both those things as an insult. No, I’m sure if
Seventeen
do it, they’ll be bringing in their own flowers and cleaners. It is exciting though, isn’t it?’

‘It’s wonderful,’ said Betsey. ‘And you are just the cleverest girl. Isn’t she, Fred?’

‘What’s that?’ said Fred, who was engrossed in a report in the
Wall Street Journal
on the relative effects on the Stock Exchange of Nixon or Kennedy’s arrival in the White House the following November.

‘I said Virgy was just the cleverest girl, getting her work into
Seventeen
magazine.’

‘Well she hasn’t yet,’ said Fred. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it. And
Seventeen
magazine, what’s so great about that? A broadsheet for teenagers. Wait till she’s in
House and Garden
, then I’ll be impressed.’

‘I’m afraid you won’t,’ said Virginia, getting up from the table. ‘Would you excuse me, Mother, I really have a lot of work to finish.’

‘Fred Praeger, you are just the pits,’ said Betsey, snatching the paper from his hands as Virginia closed the door rather slowly and quietly behind her. ‘How can you hurt her that way? She’s doing so well, and even if she wasn’t, don’t you think a little encouragement would be in order?’

‘I don’t believe in empty encouragement,’ said Fred. ‘If she’s going to run a business, she has to develop some guts, get a little thicker-skinned than that.
Anyway, what’s she doing, telling a few people what colour their walls should be? Nothing very difficult about that. That’s not a career. She’s just filling in time as far as I can see, until she gets married. And frankly, Betsey, I’d a lot rather she did that. She’s twenty-one years old, it’s time she had a husband.’

‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ said Betsey, ‘I never heard such old-fashioned nonsense. Why should she be in a hurry to find a husband?’

‘All girls should be in a hurry to find a husband,’ said Fred. ‘It’s what they’re here for.’

‘You’re wrecking her self-confidence. You always have.’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ he said, ‘she’s just fine.’

‘She’s not fine.’

‘Well she seems fine to me. And when she gets a husband she’ll be even more fine.’

‘If you’re not careful,’ said Betsey, ‘she’ll get the wrong sort of husband. Just to put one over on you.’

Virginia was, in fact, although she would have died rather than admit it, looking out for a husband with increasing anxiety. Half her friends were married, the other half engaged; she was nowhere near either condition. She felt nervous, increasingly lacking in confidence about herself.

Her career had helped; the knowledge that she had succeeded in something, off her own bat. She no longer felt the complete no-no of a person who had left Wellesley more than a year ago. But she was surprised to find how little it really mattered. She was still uncertain of herself, or her ability to attract, to amuse – often, she thought, to feel. She looked ahead, sometimes, at her future, and saw herself growing older, unclaimed, undesired, increasingly desperate, and she was frightened. Then she would shake herself, tell herself she was only twenty-one, she was being ridiculous, she was successful in her career, she had lots of friends, her life was full. Only it was full in the way she had never really wanted, her social life already slightly lopsided and awkward – fewer dinner parties, these days, more invitations to larger gatherings, where her singleness didn’t matter. Of course it was ridiculous, to be worried about such things at her age; but in 1959, in the circles in which she moved, they mattered. She didn’t necessarily have to be married, but she had to have someone she could be asked around with. And to have a sexual relationship with. Virginia knew that at her age she should have had some kind of sexual experience. It was very different from being a college virgin. And it was beginning to be embarrassing.

She had boyfriends; of course she did. But they were never right. Too brash, too quiet, too sporty, too dull. This one plain, this one a dandy, this one obsessed with money, that one with his career. None of them anywhere near perfect. And Virginia was a perfectionist. She was just not prepared to settle for anything mediocre, for compromise. What she wanted, she supposed, had to admit, was someone a bit like Baby: fun, charming, witty, attractive. That would be nice. Then she shook herself. ‘For heaven’s sake, Virginia Praeger. Can’t you do better than fall in love with your own brother?’
She had been going out for the past month or so with a banker, a solemn, rather intense young man called Jack Hartley. He was nice, in spite of his intensity, kind, interested in her, and good-looking in a dark, slightly heavy way. He took her to the theatre and to concerts, which he particularly enjoyed, and engaged her in long solemn conversations about politics and the state of the economy. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing. He kissed her a little earnestly when he took her home each night, and never tried to do any more. Then he got rather drunk one night, took her out to dinner and on the way home started caressing her breasts in the cab. Virginia sighed mentally and let him get on with it, thinking it was perhaps not such a high price to pay for having a reasonably acceptable escort. She wasn’t enjoying it, but it wasn’t unpleasant. As the cab pulled up outside the house, she said (more to show him she wasn’t shocked than for any more sexually acceptable reason), ‘Jack, do you want to come in for a nightcap?’

Jack Hartley looked at her and there was genuine surprise in his eyes. She was puzzled but ignored it.

‘That would be nice,’ he said, ‘I’d like that very much.’

Up in her small sitting room, she handed him a bourbon, poured herself a glass of wine.