Lace

  When Kate was seven months pregnant, her father’s former partner died, so Stiggins was left the sole trustee of her father’s will. Kate consulted her stock market exercise book and found that in the previous six months British Widows had fallen by eight and a half percent, more than the rest of the market, and there was a huge lawyer’s bill to pay for settling her father’s affairs. Kate telephoned the Law Society and found that nothing could be done to get the Ryan money out of British Widows unless Kate’s mother was willing formally to accuse the trustee solicitor of gross negligence. This complaint would have to be made through another solicitor, and it might be difficult to get a solicitor to take on a case that meant suing a colleague.

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly change my lawyer, dearest,” said Kate’s mother, aghast. “I could never look your father’s lawyer in the face again.”

  That night Kate woke with bad, cramping pains and found that she was lying on a sheet that was wet and soggy with her own blood. Toby rushed her to St. George’s Hospital where, four hours afterward, he was told that she had lost her baby.

  Later, Toby sat by his wife’s bed and comforted her, held her hand for hours as she lay weak and speechless, brought her a bowl of blue hyacinths and was quietly advised by the doctor to get her pregnant again as quickly as possible.

  He did so.

  Again Kate lost her baby.

  Three years later, on May 6, 1960, when Anthony Armstrong-Jones married H.R.H. the Princess Margaret, Toby went to the wedding at Westminster Abbey, saw the royal bride walk gravely down the aisle in her billowing white satin Norman Hartnell gown, then saw her grave demeanour change to happy exuberance at the Buckingham Palace reception afterward.

  Kate didn’t go because, although she had been invited, she was again in the hospital, recovering from her third miscarriage.

  Passing through London on her way to New York, Maxine visited her. Kate lay alone in a very small, very high green cell. A tangle of pipes wound around the walls like serpents. “Poor baby.” Maxine thrust an armful of daffodils at Kate, then blushing, she realised she’d said the wrong thing. “What goes wrong, my darling?”

  Kate sighed and nothing was heard except the grumble of water-pipes. “The first two were miscarriages at the twenty-eighth and twenty-seventh week, but this one was at the thirty-second week, and he was born dead.” She pulled a face. “I can’t explain how tough it is, how depressing. You get the contractions and it hurts like hell and you feel what it’s like to be in labour, and all the time you know that there’s only going to be a poor little dead body at the end of it.”

  “But isn’t there some warning? Couldn’t you lie down and stop its starting?”

  “The first time I started to bleed when I was asleep and then got pains and lost the baby. At the hospital they blithely quoted statistics as if they were batting averages. ‘Cheer up, one in six pregnancies ends in a miscarriage, try again.’ But I knew they were lying to be kind. I knew nearly all those miscarriages would have been before the fourteenth week. . . .”

  She sniffed the sour, spring-scented yellow flowers. “No vases left, I’m afraid, darling. I asked this morning. There never are any bloody vases in hospitals.”

  “Damn, I forgot. Should have brought you a plant.” Maxine put the flowers in the washbasin as Kate continued.

  “The second time was worse. I didn’t even have time to get to the hospital. D’you know that if you miscarry you’re supposed to keep the fetus and the afterbirth and put it in a clean kitchen bowl or plastic bag and take it to the hospital so that the lab can analyze it and tell you why you miscarried? Neither did I, so it was lucky that the doctor got to me in time.”

  “Yes, but why do you miscarry?”

  “Don’t think I haven’t asked that. The first time they said that the fetus had detached itself from the placenta, and the second time they said I had a weak cervix because it dilated too early. So I had some treatment for it. But I had exactly the same trouble again this time. Now they’re going to give me a D-and-C to clean my uterus out.”

  There was a pause, then she added, “The doctors have quite nicely suggested that we shouldn’t bother to try again.”

  She lay with her hands limp on top of the sheet and she sounded almost indifferent, but in fact Kate had taken the news very badly—worse than most women, said the doctors, who suggested to Toby that they consider adoption, whereupon Kate had become hysterical and said that he was never, never, never to suggest such a thing again.

  “Don’t overreact so,” Toby said soothingly. “It’s just because you’ve never considered adoption.”

  “I have, I have. Oh, God, yes, I have.” Kate became even more frantic, until a nurse rustled in with a syringe and pushed Toby out.

  Kate went home weak, exhausted and unutterably sad.

  Toby couldn’t understand why she felt such depth of loss, such misery. It wasn’t as if she had even held the child that she had just lost. She couldn’t talk to anyone, she wanted to be alone, but at the same time she didn’t want to be alone, and she cried for days. Toby was comforting, but he couldn’t be around much because he was finishing a big job near Swindon—ironically, a children’s convalescent home.

  It made Kate sad to see her breasts go back to normal size and feel her stomach grow floppy again, when only the month before it had felt hard and firm. She felt again what she had felt at her father’s funeral—an odd sense of loss and bewilderment.

  What had she done wrong?

  She must have done something wrong! Why else this perpetual disappointment when she only wanted normal human happiness? Other people had it, why was she being punished? Why couldn’t she feel, even for a brief moment, that she was a complete woman? Kate distracted herself from her sense of emptiness with a determined round of business entertaining and the more frivolous ambiance of the Chelsea set. Her little house was only five minutes’ walk from the King’s Road, and at least three evenings a week, Kate and Toby would drop in for a drink at the Markham Arms, the elaborate Edwardian pub that stood next to Mary Quant’s little shop, Bazaar.

  Bazaar was a sort of nonstop, free-drinks cocktail party, to which the prettiest girls in London dragged their husbands and their lovers. As Bazaar had only one minuscule dressing room, the girls all had to try on the clothes in the middle of the shop, where every passerby could gaze through the plate glass and enjoy the view.

  Suddenly, Chelsea seemed to have sprung into fashion as Britain’s San Francisco or Left Bank. As its cellars, espresso coffee bars, beat joints, clothes and “fab” girls were internationally publicised, the little London borough ceased to be a geographical location and became synonymous with a way of living and dressing. Kate loved the excitement that throbbed from the artery of the King’s Road into fashion, design and show business; she adored the new clothes and wore skimpy, high-waisted, gray flannel tunics with white knee socks or a scarlet leotard with scarlet vinyl boots. She wore plum and ginger outfits with swashbuckling black leather coats and fur hats as large as those of the sentries outside Buckingham Palace. Outwardly, she looked a Chelsea girl, a dishy bird, challenging, confident, leather-booted and black-stockinged, in the vanguard of the youthquake, which was establishing the fact that the second half of the twentieth century belonged to the young (or so they thought) as they went about the business of trend-setting.

  Kate was a little in awe of Mary Quant, a small, redheaded girl who was terrifyingly silent most of the time. She and the other dishy birds, the Chelsea girls, seemed shatteringly sophisticated and with it. Beside them, Kate felt hopelessly unbrilliant and untalented. Oh, to have been at art school! Oh, to be able, like Mary, not only to invent but to wear with aplomb the Look of the Moment whether it was the Lolita Look, the Schoolgirl Look, the Leather Look or the Wet-Weather Look with yellow plastic skirt and fisherman’s sou’wester.

  Kate tried. She bleached her hair and had it cut in a sex-kitten tangle of curls and black-rimmed her eyes above pale-pink lipstick (worn over a
white base) and she felt utterly forlorn and unbelonging. She thought of joining Chelsea Art School and learning to paint, she timidly told Toby one evening, as they hurried through a drizzle to the Markham Arms. Toby dug his hands deeper into the pockets of his hairy duffle coat, which he wore over black drainpipe trousers and sweater (he dressed like Audrey Hepburn), frowned at his beige suede boots, and said, quite kindly, that he didn’t really think Kate had what it took.

  Then Kate heard that Pagan was back in England and had been for a long time. Kate and Maxine both had heard rumours that Pagan’s marriage had broken up. They had both written to her in Cairo and also care of Trelawney and neither of them had received a reply. Kate had heard that Pagan was living in Beirut and vaguely imagined her in baggy pink trousers, munching Turkish delight on a pile of silken cushions. Maxine was far too absorbed in her own marriage and her businesses to try to track down Pagan, especially if she didn’t want to keep in touch. If Pagan wanted to see Maxine, well, Pagan knew where she could find her.

  Then, one evening, at an art gallery opening, Kate met—and instantly recognised—Phillippa, the long-nosed, ginger-frizzed bridge player, whom Kate hadn’t seen since her visit to Cairo. Phillippa was the sort of person who made a life’s work of keeping up with people, never allowing them to escape her inexorable United Nations Christmas cards. She told Kate that Robert had divorced Pagan ages ago and that Pagan had returned to England and buried herself in the country. “Nobody was surprised when they split up,” added Phillippa. “Robert was always impossible—that dirty trick he played on you both was absolutely standard behaviour for old Robert.”

  “What dirty trick?” Kate was puzzled.

  “But surely you know . . . ?” Kate’s surprise grew into indignation, then fury, as Phillippa told her how Robert had deliberately separated Pagan and Kate so long ago—and that the whole of Cairo knew of it: you couldn’t keep a secret from the servants east of Gibraltar.

  Kate instantly guessed that Pagan would be at Trelawney, and suddenly she longed to see her friend again. She longed for the comfortable, noncompetitive companionship of Pagan. Perched on the plastic, inflatable, see-through armchairs that Toby had designed for an art gallery, Kate thought it was like suddenly yearning for a comfy old armchair instead of this tortured balloon she was sitting in.

  She would telephone Trelawney tomorrow.

  Kate returned from her visit to Pagan’s cottage feeling loving and protective and with an object for her thwarted maternal instinct to focus on. She proceeded to spend a fortune on telegrams and was as anxious as any worried mother during Pagan’s brief and dizzy courtship. After her marriage, when Pagan came to live in London, Kate found to her joy and relief that their friendship was still as strong as if they had never been separated by miles and years and bitterness. They immediately resumed their odd half-sentence, no-verb, one-word, shorthand conversations, unintelligible to their husbands or to anyone else who hadn’t known them for fifteen years.

  36

  JUDY’S PHONE RANG at three in the morning. Sleepily she fumbled for it.

  “Did I wake you up?” asked a charming, solicitous male voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Good! Because you need to wake up. This is Tom Schwartz of Empire Studios. You’ve just had the nerve to make a public announcement about one of our major new film purchases for 1963 without so much as consulting Empire. Yes, I’m referring to the Joe Savvy deal. Didn’t it occur to you that a major studio might like to handle its own news? Or were you expecting thanks for saving us the trouble? Perhaps I underestimate your influence? Does Walter Winchell always consult you first?”

  “Look, buster,” Judy said in a sleepy voice, “you wanna fight, that’s fine with me. The most maddening way to end a fight is by slamming the phone down, which is what I’m about to do. I’ll come around to your place tomorrow around ten and let you shout at me for exactly seventeen and a half minutes, because it certainly was inconsiderate of me. I’ll be wearing sackcloth; you bring the ashes.”

  She slammed the phone down, took it off the hook and sank back to sleep.

  “Would I have intentionally upset someone as important as you, Mr. Schwartz?”

  For seventeen minutes they had screamed at each other with increasing enjoyment in Tom’s elegant office.

  “As I’ve already indicated, I don’t give a shit. But if you really want to make amends, you can start by putting your glasses back on your nose so you can at least see the top of my desk. I’ve seen pictures of you with that little French guy and you were wearing glasses in all of them. A woman who wears glasses for a photograph can’t see without ’em.”

  Judy fished her enormous, black-rimmed goggle glasses out of her purse, stuck them on her nose, sat up and threw him a hopeful smile. If she deliberately made herself vulnerable, people generally forgave her. But Tom was used to being wooed by ravishing starlets of both sexes. “Cut it out,” he said. “Let’s stop wasting time.”

  After they’d been working together for two months, Tom took her to lunch at Côte Basque and said, “You’re good.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m good.”

  “I know. Together we’d make a great team.”

  “Then why not?” Tom leaned over the table and covered her hand with his.

  “Then take your hands off me. If you’re really serious, you’re the one man I’ll never go to bed with.”

  “With you a little hand goes a long way,” Tom said sourly. “D’you say that to every man who asks you out to a meal?”

  “Oh yes, I always make it clear that it’s not because I’m ungrateful for the hamburger. I’m frank, but polite.”

  “Then I might as well give up and tell you what we can do together. I want to quit my job, work with you and expand your office into a small coast-to-coast public relations business.”

  “You did say small?”

  “Yes. Headquarters in New York and tie-ups with other advertising and PR firms in every major city.”

  “What would they get out of it?”

  “Money. An affiliated office in New York. I’ve spent the best years of my life touring temperamental film stars for Empire and I know how to do it—which means that the local offices would meet interesting personalities as a change from handling detergent accounts.” Tom signalled for another bottle of Perrier water. “I want to aim for one-shots as well as permanent clients. I want people to turn to us when their own publicity department is overloaded, or when a star needs special attention; Empire could certainly subcontract to us, if they don’t feel too sore when I leave.”

  “Why should a star agree to be handled by us?”

  “If you try and book a tour from New York, it’s mostly wasted effort, because it’s impossible for one office to keep in touch with what’s happening to the media all over America. But local offices are always up-to-date. They know which guy in town has the most influence.”

  “Why me?” Judy asked.

  “I’ve been looking around for someone. You can do it.”

  “Would I have to drop any of my present clients?”

  “No. They’ll be the base we build on.”

  “Will I have to put up any money?”

  “A little, sure. We’ll need money for decent offices and a staff.”

  “Then the answer is no, because I haven’t any money.”

  “I could maybe guarantee a bank loan for you.”

  There must be something honest about my face, thought Judy. “Where would you get the money from?”

  “I’ve been investing ten percent of my income in the stock market since I was nineteen years old.”

  “I think the answer still has to be no. I’ve only just gotten out of hock to the bank, and I kind of like sleeping at nights.”

  Three years of running her own business had meant three years of constant financial anxiety for Judy. Naturally, she knew how to handle publicity, but apart from doing Guy’s simple bookkeeping, Judy had never had anything to
do with the business world, and it had been a great shock to find that there were people in this world who didn’t pay their bills—because they couldn’t or wouldn’t or never intended to pay in the first place. Twice, Judy had been evicted from her studio apartment for nonpayment of rent. On the first occasion the money she owed had been paid by her former boss, Pat Rogers, who had remained a firm friend. On the second occasion, Pat insisted that Judy hire a new accountant; then she guaranteed Judy a sizable bank loan and quietly slipped her a couple of minor accounts—a floor polish, and a young, aspiring singer named Joe Savvy.

  “No one’s going to sack me for disloyalty,” Pat reassured Judy, “because I’ve just been offered a job writing features for Harper’s, so I’m moving back into journalism at the speed of sound.”

  Remembering her struggles to repay Pat’s loan, Judy shook her head and said, “No, Tom, I can’t join you. I simply haven’t the capital.”

  “Look, if you prefer, I’ll lend you the money, Judy.”

  “Why should I put up half the money when I’ve got the clients and you haven’t?” A brazen navy-blue gaze flashed at Tom. “Why can’t you just buy my goodwill for, say, twenty thousand dollars?”

  “You’re joking, of course.” He settled back. She was going to say yes.

  They haggled through the vichyssoise and the grilled sole, and eventually, over the honey mousse, they agreed that Tom would buy her goodwill for seven thousand dollars and invest a further four thousand dollars in the new business.

  “But we can’t continue to trade under your name alone,” Tom

  said.

  “What do you want to call it?”

  “How about Local American Creative Enterprise?”

  “It’s a bit of a mouthful. . . .”

  “Not if you use the initials.”

  “L-A-C-E. Neat.”

  Even before they’d organised their national network, LACE was showing a profit. “But I can’t understand why!” Judy complained one evening in her office, as she and Tom went over the previous month’s figures. She had just returned from a thirteen-week tour of the country, during which she had finally decided on the publicity offices she wanted to work with and had come to terms with them. Now she bit her thumb thoughtfully. “I’ve still got the same clients and our running expenses have gone up, but suddenly it’s paying off. Why?”