Lace

  None of Lili’s schoolmates had ever seen a hundred thousand francs, let alone owned it or lent it. Slowly she shook her head.

  “Tell you what,” said the concierge, speculatively. “I know a photographer who might pay you to model for him. Three thousand francs an hour, less my commission, would that suit you?”

  Lili nodded hopefully. She would have agreed to anything. The old woman shuffled off again to the phone box and when she returned she scribbled an address on the desk pad. “Serge will see you right away, dear. Here’s the address. It’s just down the street; he’s in the attic.”

  32

  SERGE, ONCE A famous fashion photographer, had grown fat, bored, lazy and old, in that order. He had flourished in the traditional world of haute-couture and did not understand the unconventional, relaxed fashions of the sixties. The fashion magazines had dropped him, then his advertising accounts had dwindled, and he’d been almost totally out of work until he started selling nude photos. They were not the sort of models he was used to, of course. You’d never find Bettina or Ali or Fiona or Suzy stooping to that sort of thing. Most of the girls wouldn’t so much as touch an underwear shot until recently, and you used to practically pay danger money to get them into a swimsuit, but these new, untidy models had no style and no shame. He’d always photographed women in the nude, of course, it was one of his pleasures, but he’d never thought of selling the photographs until one little tart stuck his close-up of her nipple into her portfolio, after which, for a while, his pictures of naked women were suddenly fashionable. You could seldom make out at first glance which part of the body it was, but the effect was original and often startlingly erotic. Anyway, they sold.

  Serge’s eyes narrowed speculatively as he looked at Lili, then he gave her a slow smile. “Come in,” he said. “Don’t mind my judo suit, I always wear it in the studio. A glass of wine? No, well—there’s the changing room, get ’em off, darling.”

  “Get what off?”

  “Your clothes, darling. What else would I pay three thousand francs an hour for? And from what I hear it won’t be the first time, darling, but don’t worry, there’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Look, there’s proof.”

  He waved a pudgy hand toward an enormous black felt pinboard, covered with nude photographs—and very good ones, for Serge loved women and was an excellent photographer.

  Lili picked her way past the ten-foot-wide rolls of pink, blue and green backdrop paper, past a vast white hanging sheet and an even bigger black one, past two groups of what looked like silver umbrellas on sticks and a forest of studio lights. She went into the small dressing room, where odd coloured pots of grease, terra-cotta covered sponges, crumpled Kleenex, dusty little brushes, flimsy chiffon scarves and hair curlers stood on the makeup counter, above which blazed a row of naked lightbulbs.

  Lili stood there, not moving or thinking, numbed, for five minutes. “I haven’t got all day, cherub.” The voice outside was cheerful, but held an underlying menace. Quickly she undressed. The curtains were pulled aside and Serge looked through. “Good, you’re ready. Out here, please.”

  He had set up the camera and lights in front of the black backdrop. “These days I don’t bother with an assistant, unless I’m on an assignment. Now, just stand straight with your back to camera, cherub.” Click! “Now turn sideways.” Click! “Chin up a bit.” Click! Click! “Now face me, that’s a good girl.” Click! Click! Click!

  “There, that’s over, wasn’t too bad was it? I’ll develop them now and let you know tomorrow if I can use you.”

  Lili was relieved. It had been about as erotic and frightening as having a passport photograph taken. Serge thought that it was a long time since he had seen such a pretty little cunt. Mind you, he told himself, she’d need a bit of work on her, but he wouldn’t mind betting that she’d look even better on the contacts. In the meantime, he had no intention of frightening her. If he played his cards carefully, she was worth a fortune to him.

  At her afternoon photographic sessions with Serge, Lili quickly discovered that more was expected of her than simply stripping and standing in the nude while Serge clicked his Rolleiflex. That first sitting had clearly shown him her potential. Studying the contact prints through a magnifying glass, marking with a red chinagraph the ones he wanted to enlarge, Serge had realised that the child was even better than he’d thought. She had a rare naivete, combined with a catch-your-breath eroticism of which she seemed totally unaware. The face had a pure, hopeful quality that was impossible to simulate, yet that mouth showed more than a hint of sensuality. She was a dream girl.

  Serge knew he’d have to play her carefully. Kindness was the thing; fatherly kindness would reassure the little creature, then he’d add a light touch of authority. Lead her into it very gently, give her something to do in the first shots so that she didn’t have time to think. Pay her a bit in advance, get her to sign an IOU, then, if necessary, threaten her with it. He’d have to watch out for those ribs and the gawky long legs—he’d have preferred plumper thighs squeezing that dark little bush—but the breasts were perfection. She was jailbait, but she was money in the bank.

  When Lili turned up for the second afternoon sitting she found Serge waiting in the traditional photographers’ costume of jeans and black sweater, with a thick leather belt that more or less squeezed his stomach into place. He had bought a frosted chocolate layer cake for Lili, while he himself sipped a tumblerful of red wine and seemed in no hurry to start.

  Then he picked up his camera and said, “Tell you what, cherub, I’d like to start off with some casual shots; just as you are in that cotton frock, sitting on the old velvet chair.”

  He’d already positioned his lights before she arrived, and now he switched on soft, enticing, rhythmic dance music.

  “Now cut another piece of cake, darling, it’s all for you. . . . Hold it. . . . Turn your head slowly to camera. . . . No, only your head, cherub. . . . Now smile. . . . That’s great, kid. I can see you’re going to be good. Now perhaps we’ll try it with a couple of buttons undone. Would you mind? . . . Terrific. . . . Keep looking to camera. . . . A couple more buttons. . . . Now lean over to the left and take a big bite.”

  Carefully, Lili leaned to the left, then just as she was about to bite, the piece of chocolate cake disintegrated in her hand. She burst into peals of laughter as she turned her head to Serge and . . . Click!

  Serge worked with two cameras. When he’d finished both rolls he vanished into the darkroom to change the film and came out, brisk and impersonal as a dentist. “Now let’s have you in a bikini. You’ll find some in the top drawer of the chest in the dressing room. Pick whichever you like.”

  Lili had longed for a bikini and needed little prompting. She finally reappeared in a white lace one that made Serge catch his breath as he turned on his wind machine. “Now, flower, I want you to stand with your legs apart, hair streaming backward in the studio breeze, and tilt this bottle of soda to your lips, hold it and smile. . . . That’s my girl, you’re really catching on.”

  Half an hour later, Lili was no longer nervous. “Now let’s try it with just the pants,” Serge said casually, fiddling with his light meter. Lili looked anxious.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Why, yes—if you want the money, flower. And anyway, no one will know except us.”

  “But what are these pictures for? Are they for a magazine or something?”

  “Now why ever should you think that? It’s art. Just take your bra off, darling.” Lili was dubious, but unwilling to argue about the unformed, uneasy suspicions that Serge so smoothly wiped from her subconscious. She unhooked and stood there, looking anxious, hands held over her breasts.

  “That’s great, flower. No, don’t smile, just like that.” Click! Herb Alpert continued to play cheerfully, reassuringly in the background. “Now sit on the chair hugging your knees up to your . . .

  “That’s terrific, bud. . . . And kneel with your hands clasped behind your head. Now I want y
ou to put on a pair of stockings.” He produced a pair of thick, black stockings and schoolgirl shoes. Lili didn’t think they looked very artistic, but obediently she smoothed them onto her legs. Combined with the white lace panties they emphasized her frail, young vulnerability, the innocence contradicted by her heavy, grown-up pink-nippled breasts.

  The following day Serge took her out on the roof and photographed her against the Parisian chimney pots in her cotton frock, until she relaxed, until she trusted him. He’d throw that roll away. He wouldn’t even bother to develop it Then he tossed her an exquisite peach chiffon negligee and said, “Now let’s try this on.”

  When she reappeared he put his head to one side, gave a small, disapproving frown and said authoritatively, “Those pants ruin the mood. Just slip them off, flower, that’s a good girl.” He turned away and adjusted his camera settings, then looked around. “Just slip them off, I said.” The light menace was unmistakable.

  Shivering slightly in the weak September sunlight, Lili slipped them off and Serge got some wonderfully erotic shots of those big but still pubescent breasts that topped her gawky adolescent body, seen through a thin veil of peach chiffon—which sometimes gaped open without Lili realising it—against the slate roofs, chimney pots and pigeons of the Paris skyline. Serge was pleased. “Tomorrow we’ll go to a quiet little spot in the Bois de Boulogne,” he said. “We’ll shoot the next lot with trees and grass.”

  Lili didn’t want to continue with the sittings. Once away from the reassuring presence of Serge, she felt ashamed. She blushed and groaned to herself as she hurried home. She wouldn’t go to the studio again.

  But every morning she woke, head swimming with nausea, and as she ran down the corridor to the lavatory, she knew she had to continue the sessions. Just to harden her resolve, Serge presented her with some prints of her first sitting. Lili hid them under the mattress with her gold locket. She wanted to tear them up, but she also wanted to keep them. She did look very pretty in the pictures.

  Madame Sardeau occasionally shouted at her, “You’ve got to finish my winter nightgowns before the lycee starts,” but she didn’t pay much attention to Lili, and she had more than nightgowns on her mind. Her husband now often worked late at the office. There had been odd telephone calls, and when she answered, the line went dead. His manner was strange, and not once since she returned from Normandy had he bothered her at night. It was odd.

  Lili saw no money for her work. Serge paid it directly to the concierge and to give him due credit, he didn’t cheat Lili of a sou. But the concierge would not arrange the operation until Lili had all the money, so she continued to model until she was three months pregnant.

  Lili sat in the small steaming cafe, not wanting to get up and walk again. Her legs felt weak and her body felt as raw and painful as her thoughts. Until it was time to prepare supper, the cafe was a halfway house of cheerful, normal life, poised between that horrible experience this afternoon and the depression which, as always, she would feel when she approached the dark Sardeau front door.

  She could not forget the humiliating pain of the operation, on top of the painful humiliation of Alastair’s disappearance. She had thought he loved her. Was it so dreadful not to have taken those pills? Would it have been so dreadful to have had a baby instead of an abortion?

  She dragged herself up the stairs to the seventh floor and rang the bell—she wasn’t allowed a key. The door flew open and Madame Sardeau stood there, like a black, shrieking crow. In her hand was Lili’s gold locket and the contact prints that had been hidden under her mattress.

  “What’s this filth? So this is what you were doing when I thought you were in the park! This is what you get up to when my back is turned! This is the way you show your gratitude, you slut!”

  Lili backed away, terrified, retreating backward down the stairs as the furious woman continued to shriek at her. From below a voice shouted up the dusty stairwell, “Less noise up there.”

  Lili stumbled backward and nearly fell, clutching the stair rail to save herself. “You filthy little bitch, it’s easy to see where you come from—the gutter! Just as we thought, you lewd little whore! After all we’ve done for . . .”

  Lili turned and fled, away from those dreadful words, back to Serge’s studio, and threw herself, weeping, against his plump chest.

  “Hmm, so the old trout found out, did she?” he said calmly. “Well, I’m not surprised, but it’s a pity, flower.”

  He was not surprised because he had telephoned Madame Sardeau anonymously and suggested that she look under Lili’s mattress. . . . He wasn’t about to lose her now that the abortion was done. Serge wrapped Lili in a rug, laid her on the studio couch and heated some milk for her.

  “It was today, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  Huddled in the rug, Lili sobbed and nodded.

  “Well, you’d better just lie there until you feel better, then we’ll decide what to do.” He softly stroked her black, tangled hair until she fell asleep. From Lili’s chatter, Serge now knew a lot about the Sardeaus. She wouldn’t go back. He’d got her! There was no risk of losing her now, not after they’d found out so abruptly. She wouldn’t be the first teenage runaway to disappear in Paris; there was unlikely to be a fuss if they couldn’t find her. She could hole up with him and hide for a bit—he had no girl living with him at the moment to complicate matters. Lili was nearly fourteen; with makeup she could pass as an eighteen-year-old. Sweep the fringe away from her forehead, give her a lipstick, some new clothes and high heels, and she’d never resemble any photographs the police might be given. And if they did pick her up, well, he hadn’t molested her, had he?

  Serge had just returned from a visit to an advertising agency. His new portfolio contained only shots of Lili. Lili lying flushed and sleepy on a tousled bed, half-hidden by a lace shawl; Lili with her hair in braids, running naked through high, out-of-focus grass; Lili, in a straw hat and skimpy shorts, pushing a bicycle along a woodland path; a back view of Lili’s little haunches as she twined jasmine in her hair before a bedroom mirror that reflected her voluptuous breasts.

  The art editor had pushed up his heavy black-rimmed glasses, snapped out of his boredom and reached for the phone. “Sorry to disturb you TJ,” he said, “but you know that tyre calendar we’re considering for next Christmas? Well, I think I’ve got something here.”

  An exquisitely tailored account executive hurried in, flipped through the portfolio in silence, then looked through it again with more attention. “They’re good,” he said, “but these are only of one girl.”

  “Well, of course we’d have other girls, but the mood is exactly what I’m after, something different from the usual tits and ass stuff, that quality of innocence, that feeling of eternal summer, that nostalgia and the counterpoint of exuberant joie de vivre.”

  “Yes, yes, they’re certainly sexy. Okay, he can have a shot at the dummy. But I want it fast, and we’ve got to have at least two other girls. And one has to be a blonde.”

  Serge draped another blanket over Lili and quietly moved out of the studio into the next-door room where he lived, ate and fucked. He reached for his black address book, threw himself on the unmade bed and lifted the telephone. “That you, Teresa? Got a nice job for you, flower.”

  For the rest of the week, Lili stayed hidden in Serge’s loft as she regained her strength and her spirits. He had gone shopping and returned with an armful of flowers, two Beatles records, a Victorian-style lace nightdress, an organdy-petal bonnet with white satin streamers, a see-through black string vest, some steak and a shopping bag crammed with bonbons and sugary food. After a day or two Lili lost her quivering fear of the Sardeaus, and Serge firmly encouraged her to regard that part of her life as over. She had run away, the sensible little creature. Now she was going to be treated as a grown-up and have fun. “Next week Teresa will take you on a shopping trip and buy some pretty clothes,” Serge promised.

  While Lili rested he worked hard with Teresa, a twenty-year-old m
odel who wore her hair in blond braids and tried hard to look fourteen. During the day she posed for margarine and soup advertisements, and in the evening she liked to go to expensive restaurants with old men. Young men bored her: she liked a sugar daddy with whom she could play at being a child. Teresa was a high-class call girl.

  After a trip to the Galeries Lafayette, Lili returned with a pair of Jules-et-Jim tweed knickerbockers with a matching Jackie Coogan golfing cap; a white broderie anglaise cape that fell from her shoulders to five inches above the knee in layer upon layer of white frills; three dresses the colour of sugared almonds, each with a matching pair of high-heeled pumps; her first handbag and a coat of white rabbit fur. Her hair had been restyled and back-combed into a bouffant, Bardotlike, sexy tangle. All thought of returning to school, all thought of the Sardeaus, all thoughts of the past and the future flew from Lili’s mind and she lived only in the voluptuous present. Her new friends laughed and chatted with her as she was coaxed into posing—naked—in the fur coat, then lay on the studio bed with Teresa, both wearing lace briefs and nothing else.

  Sometimes they went out in the evening with Teresa’s man friend, who was in the scrap metal business, and when they did, Teresa adopted a childlike voice and spoke of herself in the third person. “Teresa wants to go to Fouquet’s,” she pouted. “Albert is a horrid man if he doesn’t take Teresa somewhere pretty and Teresa won’t talk to him.”

  She always got her own way, then immediately stopped pouting and said, “Oh, Albert is so good to little Teresa; she’s going to sit on his knee and love him all night.”

  “Christ, not in Fouquet’s again,” groaned Serge. “Don’t you ever wear panties?”

  When Teresa was working with Lili, the older girl was not petulant and childish, but friendly, shrewd and willing to pass on the wisdom of the hotel room. She gave Lili the benefit of her experience—shrewd bits of advice and sad little ways of avoiding humiliation.