Lace
“I’m Lili, and I lost my parents when I was seven.”
“Tough, ain’t it? Lili what?”
“Lili nothing. Just Lili.” She didn’t explain that after having four family names by the time she was barely seven, she had decided that in the future she would just call herself “Lili.”
“But where are the stars? Where are Christopher Lee and Mademoiselle Collins?” Lili asked hopefully, as she chewed the last ragged end of her croissant and they moved over to look at the call sheet.
“The stars stay in their trailers, which are sacred. Positively no entry allowed, nobody ever goes into a trailer if he isn’t supposed to. There are trailers for the director, wardrobe, makeup and the stars, and everyone else has to manage without one as best they can.”
“Where’s the director?”
“Staying in his trailer until we’re ready to go. The writer, the set designer and the press agent won’t turn up until around eight-thirty, lucky bastards.”
“Now I know everything I need to know about a movie set.”
“Everything except where the makeup truck is, which is where you should be at this moment. Look, there’s your name on the call sheet—‘Makeup six-thirty.’ You’d better run; I tell you, makeup can be bitches. You don’t want little piggy eyes with bags beneath them, do you?”
She saw Simon again at lunch break, when he fetched their sandwiches from the trailer. He spread his jacket on the grass and together they sat on it. He bit into the crusty roll with teeth that were unusually small, white and far apart, like a child’s teeth. “Look at that idiot driving a Mercedes down the track at that speed.”
“It’s Serge, my manager—the man I live with.”
“Oh, well, I’ll be off then.” He didn’t seem surprised or disappointed.
The following month saw publication of the tire calendar. The calendar itself was an annual event, always expensively produced by a famous photographer and a prominent art director: the editions were collected like antiquarian books. The 1964 calendar, which starred Lili, was an overnight sensation. Every art editor and designer had to have one, every truck driver leered at Lili, every schoolboy lusted after her, and many of their fathers did as well. Within two weeks the calendar was sold out, and copies changed hands at eight times the list price. The print order for the second printing was a quarter of a million, and it disappeared as fast as the first one.
Almost overnight Lili was not only famous, but notorious. She couldn’t move in Paris without being recognised.
Lili found one of the advantages of having such a low sense of self-esteem was that it wasn’t difficult to ignore her growing public image as a tough, sexy, knowing little slut.
Serge taught her to tell journalists, in a whisper, that she was an orphan; orphans had good publicity value, he said. They were sad and appealing. Lili was to stop this crazy-sounding nonsense about her mysterious “Mama”, because it confused his pitch and, anyway, he didn’t want a hundred crazy bag ladies turning up claiming to be Lili’s mother and trying to grab half her income.
Most of Lili’s early pictures were resold, and her blue movies changed hands at a price that made Serge’s income almost an embarrassment. He huddled with lawyers and accountants, discussing the tax advantages of Andorra, Jersey or Monaco; of being offshore in the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas; of starting a company in Panama or Mexico; of having money paid to Dutch lawyers to lodge in numbered Swiss accounts, or Swiss lawyers in a group-participation company that fronted for big movie stars.
The pros, cons and percentages of these schemes were never discussed with Lili, because she owned none of the properties. She was under contract to Sergio Productions, so Serge owned her. All that Lili got were the sly looks, the leers and the gossip. She couldn’t cope with any of it, so she greeted everyone with a suspicious stare.
What else could she do?
33
SHORTLY AFTER PAGAN’S third wedding anniversary, on a warm spring day in 1965, Kate and Pagan were playing a nursery card game in the garden. “Buster doesn’t like being in London much,” said Pagan, as she shuffled the cards. “Still misses Cornwall, poor darling. So do I, come to that.” They started to play. “Did I tell you that Christopher got tough with Mama? They both sat in the library talking in quiet, polite, nasty voices—snap! Blast, you’re fast—and the upshot was that we all trooped along to the solicitor in St. Austell—snap! Blast you—Christopher said he should never have allowed my guardian to lease my property to herself, although I don’t suppose for one minute that was how she put it to the poor old bugger. He seemed to think that she was running the place on my behalf and he didn’t even know about—snap!—oh you know, her will. She’d had that drawn up by some smart crook in London—blast, too fast for me!—So for ten pounds, I purchased an option to—snap! Oh, you cow—purchase Ma’s shares in the health farm at par upon her death, and for another ten pounds—snap! Bugger!—I purchased an option to purchase Selma’s shares in the health farm at current valuation upon her death. Missed again, dammit. Get that? What it means is that Selma—snap! Thank you!—can’t get her claws on Trelawney if Mama kicks the bucket, and that I get it all back in—snap!—the end if I outlive them, plus the health farm.”
“That’s nice—snap!” shrieked Kate. “Thanks, a splendid pile of hearts and diamonds.”
“Oh, you cow, you’ve won!” said Pagan. “Well, I hope it’s put you in a good temper because I want you to help me in a delicate matter.”
“What is it this time?” Kate asked.
“I’ve worked out two things,” Pagan explained, “for both of which I need your aid. Firstly, I love Christopher more than drink, and secondly I love him so much that I couldn’t bear it if he were to die. And you know that he might at any minute, and I’d be left with nothing of him. There would be nothing left of Christopher. So I want his child. Even if it kills him, I want his child.”
“Can’t you get . . . er . . . artificial insemination?”
“Certainly not! I can’t bear the idea of anything unnatural. I want our child to be conceived as an act of love, even if it’s the last one we share.”
Kate was awed by the ruthlessness of Pagan’s reasoning. “In spite of what the doctor said?”
“In spite of what the doctor said, darling. So I want you to help me to seduce Christopher, because I know he’ll never agree.” Kate was speechless with astonishment. “What I want you to do is the opposite of birth control. I want you to help me work out the dangerous time—my unsafe period. Then I want you to double-check with me, because my arithmetic is abysmal and I know I’m only going to get one chance.”
“Suppose one chance isn’t enough?”
“It was before, remember? Only once in Switzerland was enough to produce that darling little thing.”
“Let’s not talk about it or I’ll start crying.” They both sighed.
“I’ve been to the family planning clinic,” Pagan continued. “I’ve got a chart and a special thermometer and I’m going to take my temperature every morning, but I want you to keep the chart so that Christopher doesn’t accidentally find it: I’d be sure to leave the damn thing on the mantelpiece one morning. When my temperature dips slightly that means it’s just before ovulation. After ovulation it rises several tenths of a degree and then stays there until I get the curse. So when my temperature goes down is the time for action! The clinic people said that I’d better check my pattern for a couple of months before settling down to strenuous nightlife.”
Though Kate was scandalized by the idea, Pagan eventually talked her into it. Each morning after Christopher had gone to the lab Pagan telephoned her temperature to Kate. For the first two months there didn’t seem to be any difference, but on the third month there was no doubt—the temperature dipped.
On the propitious day of the fourth month, when the moon was in the correct quarter and the thermometer had definitely wobbled, Pagan, calculating and steady as a tiger, set about seducing her lawfully wedded hu
sband.
The next morning she reported to Kate. “Darling, I rushed out to Fortnum’s and bought some smoked salmon, a game pie, some country blackberries. I’d turned up the heating and when he got home I was sitting in that pink, gauze Arab shift with nothing on underneath. I’d already opened a bottle of Haut Brion ‘59, and as soon as he sat down I handed him a huge mint julep. Neat bourbon with chopped mint, crushed in melted sugar. Oh, it smelled divine! ‘Do you think it’s strong enough?’ I asked him. ‘Because you know I can’t tell.’ Darling, it was six eggcupsful of neat bourbon, but you don’t notice because of the minty sugar. The rest was easy. Mind you, it was too quick to be fun and I can’t tell you how livid he was afterward, except, of course, he dared not get too angry in case his blood pressure went up.”
Amazingly, she was pregnant. Once he’d recovered from his initial fury and was used to the idea, Christopher was pleased. Pagan said that she wanted a daughter, “a dear little girl with big brown eyes,” she said, nestling in his lap, though she was much too large for it. Her husband laughed.
“Well, you’re not going to get one, my darling.”
“Why not?”
“Because we both have blue eyes and it’s genetically impossible for two perfectly blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child.”
“What do you mean, genetically impossible?”
He pulled her against him and started to stroke her mahogany hair. “In the nucleus of every human cell are two sets of genes—one for each parent—and in an embryo they form the blueprint that determines the inherited characteristics of the baby.”
With one finger he traced her bronze, winged eyebrow. “Now when you come to the genes for eye colour, you only get a blue-eyed child if the genes of both parents are for blue. The gene for blue eyes is what we call ‘recessive,’ which means that a person with only one gene for brown eyes and one gene for blue will always have brown eyes, not blue ones. And it also means that two perfectly blue-eyed parents can only produce a blue-eyed child. It is impossible for two perfectly blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child.”
“What about hazel eyes?”
“Of course, there are degrees of eye colour. You can get greenish-blue or hazelish-brown, and there’s a very slight possibility of a throwback to some brown-eyed ancestor, although it’s very unlikely. But this never happens when the colour is definite in both parents.” He stretched over and kissed the other winged, bronzed eyebrow. “You can’t expect two clearly blue-eyed individuals to produce a clearly brown-eyed offspring, because it’s genetically impossible.” Pagan shut her eyes and snuggled up against his chest. “So because we’ve both got blue eyes, we have only blue genes to give to our child. You’re going to have a blue-eyed baby, my darling. And I hope she’ll be an exact replica of you.”
The child, Sophia, was born in the summer of 1966. Surprisingly, Pagan was a perfect mother. Her carelessness and untidiness vanished overnight. This amazed Kate until one day, while she watched Pagan play pussycat on the floor with Sophia, Kate realised that Pagan treated her daughter as she treated her animals—with more care than she did adult human beings.
Naturally, Kate was asked to be godmother. “Now, listen, darling,” Pagan said, “this is serious. I don’t want to have any more disasters in my life. I want you to be the sort of godmother that she can run away to. I want her always to see you as her ally, always on her side, whether or not she deserves it. To be frank, darling, I want what I didn’t have when I needed it.”
Kate nodded gravely.
She gave Sophia a string of iridescent baroque pearls. Predictably, Pagan said, “I’d better wear them, they’ll lose the lustre if they aren’t worn against warm skin. No point in keeping them in the bank.”
Though her alcoholic phase now seemed like an impossible dream, Pagan still went nearly every week to her AA meeting. By now she realised that they had better be part of her life forever—if she wanted to avoid yet another fatal mistake.
PART
SEVEN
34
IN THE SPRING of 1956, it had been four years since Kate had fled from Cairo. After her return, she had spent the first week weeping, conscious of her father’s tight-lipped disappointment and indignant fury. Kate felt she had to get away from home, to get away from him. She had to think of an excuse for staying in London. She didn’t want to be tied down by a full-time job, so she decided to become a freelance translator. Kate’s French wasn’t good enough—neither she nor Pagan nor any other pupil had learned much at l’Hirondelle—so Kate signed up for an intensive course at the Berlitz School in Oxford Street and fled from the opulent, fake Georgian bricks of Greenways back to her old apartment in the genuine little Georgian cottage in Walton Street.
She found her work easy. She was quick and accurate, and she got as many translations as she could handle from a French literary agent in Motcomb Street so she could juggle her working hours to suit her private life. Although her father gave her an allowance, within six months of starting work Kate could have managed without it.
She tried to blot Robert out of her mind. Once more she started to see old friends, and she quickly learned that, if she felt depressed, she should never stay indoors or alone. So she would go for a walk, moving around London by herself as she had never been allowed to when a child. She mingled with the crowds of young, untidy foreigners who lounged around the base of the statue in Piccadilly Circus. She liked to sit among the stone lions and fountains of Trafalgar Square, then visit the National Gallery, where she would sit for hours in the calm peace of the Monet water lily room.
Since leaving Cairo, Kate felt that some part of her had been cut off. Partly because she was an only child and partly as a result of her father’s verbal violence, she had always felt timid, tentative and lonely, but now she felt an added sense of loss and didn’t understand it.
What had she lost? Not her virginity; that had gone long before she met Robert—and anyway, it hadn’t been the melodramatic event that it was cracked up to be. She no longer wept over Robert, although it had been painful to hear that he had married Pagan.
But that was over—long ago—and it wasn’t as if there weren’t other men around to distract her. Kate knew lots of nice fellows, and as a matter of fact she was never out of love—a fortnight here, half an hour there, a five-minute passion for some unknown man on the top of a bus. She knew she was sensual, knew she loved to touch a man’s body, to feel a man touch her. She found something to hunger after in almost every man she met. What she didn’t know, but badly wanted to know, was why the only two men she had ever really cared about had dumped her.
Why?
Kate told herself she had been obedient, faithful, loyal, trusting and truthful. Well, almost always. So what was wrong with her? Why had she been kicked in the teeth?
“Why?” she asked Maxine, who was on a buying trip to London. They were sitting on the purple rag rug, drinking cocoa in front of the lavender gas flames.
“Maybe you give too quickly?” Maxine suggested. “No, of course I don’t mean your body, stupid. But maybe you are too eager for love—too quick to be affectionate, too clinging, too claustrophobic.” She blew on the drink to cool it. “More than anyone else I know, Kate, you need love. One can see that. So when you think you have found it, you are all over the man, like a puppy.” She put the tip of her tongue in her drink and quickly withdrew it. “Perhaps you should be more reticent, more elusive. Men value what is difficult to get. But with Francois, I remember, you threw yourself at him, threw yourself in front of him like a doormat with ‘welcome’ printed on it. So, as we say in France, he wiped his feet on you.”
“But I was being emotionally honest,” Kate said.
“And you paid heavily for this pleasant self-indulgence and lack of self-discipline,” said Maxine, with Gallic cynicism. “If you are difficult to pursue, if you make a man think and worry and invest a lot of his time and effort in pursuing you, then he will—of course—justify these efforts to hims
elf by deciding that you are unusually worthwhile and desirable.”
“Deliberately playing hard to get is nasty psychological exploitation,” said Kate, “and it’s phony.”
Maxine shrugged her shoulders. “Then call it something else.” She blew again on the hot cocoa. “I feel you lack discrimination. I see you with some real creeps.”
“That still doesn’t explain why I have this sense of loss. I mean, I hardly ever think about those two bastards who dumped me. Thank heaven, I don’t want either of them. But I want to identify this sense of loss. If it’s not them, what is it?”
Maxine took a cautious sip. “Kate, you may laugh, but I think what you have lost is your trust. You don’t really trust people anymore. No, you do trust me; maybe it is only men you don’t trust?”
Kate had been conditioned to love bastards. Without knowing or realising it, she had duplicated in adult life the pattern she had learned at her daddy’s knee: Kate was hooked on rejection. When men started to criticise her, she always fell in love with them. And when she fell in love with them, she fell into bed with them. And when she went to bed with them, she never climaxed. And she never dared to tell them. So Kate faked.
But Kate was always frightened that the man would guess. She was afraid he would leave her if he thought she was frigid. As Kate was terrified of rejection, she never had an honest relationship with a lover. Untrusting and nervous in her obsessive search for Mr. Wrong, she felt so insecure that as soon as there seemed to be even a remote possibility that he might abandon her, Kate immediately left him or pushed him out of her life.
Though she was tense and defensive in her most intimate relationships, it wasn’t obvious unless you were in bed with Kate. Fully clothed, her aura of intense sexuality attracted hordes of admiring men. Kate didn’t see herself as attractive: since apparently she had been unattractive to the men she had loved, she became haunted by the feeling that no worthwhile man could ever really love her.