Lace

  “Put it down to logic and my twelve formative, predatory years in the motion picture industry,” yawned Tom. “It’s nearly ten. Let’s pack it in and go home.”

  “I hope you invested your teenage savings in Bell,” said Judy, picking a telephone bill from the top of the pile and holding it at arm’s length. “That would have proved logical.”

  Tom yawned again. “Nobody really operates on logic, especially not a woman. Logic is merely the ability to rationalize what she’s going to do anyway.”

  “And in a man?”

  “Man isn’t a rational being either, he’s irrationally controlled by fear.”

  “Is that why we’re succeeding? Because you terrify people?”

  “Because I’m prepared to be ruthless, sure. If people don’t see you’re prepared to be ruthless, they’ll take advantage of you. You used to let them, I don’t allow it. That’s what’s different.”

  “And your new budgeting system doesn’t hurt.”

  Tom insisted that fees be billed in advance and paid within thirty days. They didn’t lift a telephone until the contract was signed and the money was deposited in their account, and they never did two minutes’ worth of work after a contract expired.

  Tom’s responsibilities were to make sure that the business paid off, to run the office and to look after their regular clients. Judy’s responsibility was to bring in the business, handle the major one-shot campaigns and supervise their local agencies. Judy also handled the creative work, planning the campaigns, working with writers and designers, which was the part she liked best. Once the general campaign had been mapped out and the design work was under way, Judy sent the proposed plan to her regional directors, who executed the campaign locally. A lot of calls were needed between LACE and the RDs—a twenty-five-city tour needed six hundred phone calls before the tour was over. But the client only made one single call—to LACE.

  It was a ridiculously simple idea. And because of that, it worked brilliantly.

  37

  KATE STILL FAKED. Not always, because she could climax with very little trouble if she lay on top for long enough and wriggled herself into position, but that didn’t always seem to happen and when it didn’t, if Kate couldn’t sleep, she would nip into the bathroom and quickly satisfy herself.

  But after she and Toby had been married for six years, something horrible happened—and continued to happen for some time.

  On a hot August night, Kate lay in bed reading a newspaper account of Marilyn Monroe’s sad, tawdry death. “Oh, dear, she was so lovable and funny.” Two teardrops of sympathy wobbled on her lashes and caught Toby’s attention.

  “She was beautiful, too. . . . What long eyelashes you have, Kate.”

  “Yes, Toby, but colourless. If I didn’t wear mascara, you wouldn’t be able to see them.”

  “Would my eyelashes be longer if I put mascara on them?”

  “I expect so . . . darling, it says here that poor Marilyn’s feet were dirty and the scarlet polish on her toes was chipped. Oh, how sad!”

  Toby disappeared into the bathroom and emerged about ten minutes later. Casually, Kate looked up, then did a horrified double take. “Toby!” Toby was crudely and completely made-up, like a raddled old dim-eyed dowager.

  Kate said, “Oh, do take it off, Toby!”

  But Toby smiled oddly, looked at her steadily and said, in a disturbing, high, brittle voice (a bit like Pagan’s mother), “No, I want to make love like this.”

  So they did.

  She didn’t mention it the next day, but that evening Toby, having had rather a lot of brandy after the quiche aux épinards, said sarcastically, “I don’t think spinach tart is one of your stronger points, darling,” and proceeded upstairs.

  When Kate went up to bed with indefinable fear in her heart, she found him lying on their Astrid Sampe turquoise-striped bedspread simpering at the ceiling. His face was fully made-up and he was wearing her fragile, white lace nightgown.

  She said, “Now come off it, Toby, I’ve had enough of this. Please stop it. Please cut it out.”

  But Toby sat up, pouted and said in an odd, little-girl voice. “Why can’t Toby have nice things like you do?” He pulled her onto the bed beside him and murmured, “Toby loves looking pretty, Toby loves dressing up like this, but promise it’s a secret between us, between two girlfriends? A very important secret.”

  He didn’t take long. It was all over in ten minutes, but it took Kate twenty-four hours to pull herself together again.

  And then it happened again, and Kate had another twenty-four hours of the shakes. Inexorably, night after night, Toby “dressed-up,” as he put it.

  Within a fortnight, Kate was white and taut from lack of sleep and anxiety, but Toby was blooming. On the following Wednesday he came back from Harrods with a size 48 sheer black swans-down-trimmed negligee and matching décolleté nightgown.

  “I told the assistant it was for my mother,” he said, smoothing it over his lean hips. On Friday night he lashed himself into black garters and fishnet stockings and a frilly black padded bra that he’d bought on Shaftesbury Avenue. On Saturday evening he wore a red satin, wasp waisted corselet and high-heeled pink pom-pom mules. (“They didn’t have my shoe size at Harrods, so I got these backless things, but they’re still too small.”)

  Kate found the situation as macabre and unreal as her father’s funeral. The rouged cheeks, ever so carefully shaded peach, seemed to symbolize death. And once again—she was bewildered; what Kate couldn’t understand was the suddenness of Toby’s transformation. He had never given her the slightest hint, had always been so severely practical. He had never so much as worn a frilled shirt to a party, never indicated in any way that he preferred his balls veiled by lace, never by word or deed indicated that he was not a normal heterosexual. Kate had never for one moment suspected that what Toby really wanted in bed was this gruesome farce. One week she had had a husband and the next week she had this horror.

  She could not understand what was in his mind, could not understand his odd, trancelike state when he was wearing women’s clothes. What made it even more confusing was that Toby wore two sorts of female clothing, he seemed to want to pretend to be two different types of women, so poor Kate never knew from one night to the next whether she would find herself in bed with a 1930s lascivious, black-satin, sophisticated woman-of-the-world, or a demure, white-pantied, schoolgirl virgin. When Toby wore stockings and high heels his muscular, stringy calves somehow stuck out sideways below the knees, oddly bandy, not like a woman’s but, yes, they were like one woman’s legs. That night Kate had the nightmarish sensation that the person panting on top of her was her mother-in-law, Major Hartley-Harrington’s widow.

  Toby refused to discuss the situation, and during the day he seemed to be a different person—that is to say, his normal self. But at night he couldn’t wait to get upstairs, sometimes dragging Kate by the wrists in a steel grip. His eyes glittered strangely in his masklike makeup: Kate thought he looked like a novelette villain. “You’ve been reading too much Barbara Cartland,” she told herself. But there was no other way to describe that relentless, breathlessly excited, glassy-eyed expression on Toby’s face. Kate didn’t understand what was happening and she didn’t know what to do.

  What had she done wrong? Why had this terrible thing happened so suddenly? Was Toby homosexual? If so, why did he make love to her? Why should she be so frightened of him if he was turning into a homosexual? Lots of their friends were queer and they didn’t terrify her as Toby now did. What was terrifying wasn’t the makeup or the drag, the padded lace bras, that monstrous red satin corselet or the way he tried to strap his balls away between his legs (no wonder when he wore high heels he walked so oddly). No, what was so chilling was Toby’s mincing, simpering, obviously totally sincere mimicry of what he thought a woman was—deep down—really like. It was a travesty, an insult to her sex, and that was what Kate, who had never heard the word “transvestite,” found so shocking.

/>   She forced a scene and Toby threatened to leave.

  Kate gave way.

  She forced another scene and Toby gently reminded her that she was a thirty-year-old barren bitch, and would she shut the fuck up. “Oh, aim so sorry, dahling, don’t cray, let’s kiss and make up, hmmmm? Just a teensy little kiss,” he said. And he bent over her and lifted her chin up to his heavily lipsticked mouth. Every pore on his face seemed magnified, as Mrs. Trelawney’s scalp had been magnified, as the black wiry hair had sprung from her white scalp on that horrible bathroom evening when Kate was still a schoolgirl. Now she saw in similar, horrid, clarified detail the magenta grease that smeared the fleshy cracks in Toby’s mouth and clogged the shaven bristles on his upper lip. He still wasn’t very good at putting on lipstick.

  As her anguish and shame increased, she still hoped every evening that it wouldn’t happen that night, that Toby’s fixation would disappear as swiftly as it had arrived. Kate longed to confide in someone, to have Toby’s behaviour explained away, to be reassured, to hear that everybody did it, that such things were part of a normal phase of a man’s development. But she knew they weren’t, and there was nobody to whom she felt she could unburden her embarrassing story.

  When she suggested talking to their doctor, Toby went white and glared at her, compressed his magenta lips, then sprang at her and twisted her arm behind her back until she feared he was going to dislocate it. Then he violently shoved her down the small flight of stairs that led off their bedroom to the bathroom. Sprawled on the floor with Toby straddled over her in his black fishnets, hands on hips and eyes blazing, Kate promised that she wouldn’t tell their doctor or anyone else. Anyway, who would believe her? She wondered hopelessly as she gazed up at lust in action.

  “If you do,” said Toby coldly, in his normal, masculine voice, “I shall simply deny it. There’s nothing to prove these clothes are worn by me; after all, they’re in your bureau.” He heaved pleasurably at the black lace of his corset. He needs a shrink, Kate thought, but she knew she would never dare suggest it.

  But she also knew she couldn’t stand it. She had to get away from London, away from Toby. Increasingly, Kate felt depressed by Toby’s sexual behaviour, which disgusted and bewildered her. She hadn’t mentioned it to Pagan at the cottage because Pagan obviously had too many problems of her own to cope with, but when Pagan returned from her honeymoon with glowing descriptions of New York (despite the ordeal of Christopher’s heart attack) and an invitation from Judy, Kate decided to go and spend a month there. She wanted to run away and forget her misery for a few weeks.

  During the war, when Kate was seven, she had found an orange in her Christmas stocking when nobody in Britain had seen oranges for years. Her father had bought it for a vast sum from a sailor in a pub. Kate could hardly remember what an orange was; like bananas and ice cream, they no longer existed. But obviously Santa Claus did. She’d been having doubts, but the orange proved it. Carefully she sniffed the fruit, dug her nails in the skin, peeled it in one long length; then she took a whole day to eat it, sucking each segment carefully, savoring the fragrant juice that spurted into her mouth. After that she nibbled all the peel and made it last for a week.

  To Kate, New York wasn’t the Big Apple, it was the Wonderful Orange. She knew London, Paris and Cairo and had expected New York to be another, similar, big city. But New York was like nothing she’d ever imagined. Out of her bedroom window she blew kisses to the city like a child.

  Judy made a great fuss over her, gave a party for her, spoiled her, told everybody how wonderful Kate was and suddenly she came to life again. The glittering sparkle and excitement of the city simultaneously soothed and exhilarated her. It was like that shot in the arm they’d given her in the hospital, it made her feel that she could do anything—and made her want to do something.

  The night before Kate left for London, she decided to tell Judy about Toby’s dressing-up. She told Judy the whole story, finally finishing by yelling at her, “I can’t stand it much longer, so what can I do?”

  After a moment of silence, Kate started crying.

  “D’you still do that? Still cry all the time?” asked Judy absent-mindedly, as she thought hard.

  “It’s a fu . . . fu . . . fu . . . form of self-expression. I lu . . . lu . . . like crying. It lets people know how I feel and it makes me feel better.”

  “Well, kiddo, get your crying finished and then concentrate. Because I think you should head straight for a psychotherapist when you get back to London.”

  “You think there’s something wrong with me?”

  “No, relax! I merely think that you should discuss the situation with someone who knows what he’s talking about. Because you don’t, and I don’t, and it doesn’t sound as if Toby does.”

  So when Kate returned to London she visited a psychiatrist in Harley Street. He sat with his hands on his chin in a sage velvet wing chair on one side of the fireplace, while she sat on the other, reporting to him twice a week. The doctor first established that Kate had clearly told Toby she hated the “dressing-up”, then suggested that she do so again. Once more Kate hit the bathroom floor. The doctor wrote to Toby and asked to see him about “a matter that is gravely disturbing your wife”.

  Toby flew into a rage as soon as he opened the letter. “You’ve told him our secret. I know you have. I thought we agreed that it was going to be a secret?”

  “It’s not my secret—it’s your secret,” Kate shouted.

  Eventually, Toby agreed to visit the psychiatrist, who later reported to Kate. “Naturally,” he said, “I cannot tell you what your husband and I discussed, but he’s defiant; my prognosis is not optimistic, in fact, the reverse.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think he will continue this pattern and that he will increasingly take risks. Soon he may wear female clothes outside your home. He will take his bra to the office in his briefcase and wear women’s underwear under his trousers.”

  “What do other wives do?”

  “Most don’t put up with it, so their husbands visit prostitutes, taking their drag with them. That’s one of the things that whores are for.” Another pause, then he said very gently, “I think you may have to make a decision. Accept it or leave him.”

  It took Kate another month of nightly argument and nightly capitulation to the muscular, glassy-eyed virgin or the wide-shouldered, weirdly padded, sophisticated lady before she decided she couldn’t stand the dressing-up for the rest of her life. Even if he didn’t do it, she would know that it was what he really wanted.

  So after a battle over the house—which was in Kate’s name—Toby left her, taking the silver, the priapic sculpture, the wire chairs and the more valuable old brass scientific instruments. When Kate miserably visited a divorce lawyer and told him the whole embarrassing story, she was told, to her astonishment, that she’d be unlikely to get a divorce on the obvious grounds.

  “You say that he hasn’t paraded in these garments before anyone but you?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Well, he wouldn’t, would he?”

  “Then, unfortunately, we have no proof of this distressing conduct. If we had, it would count as mental cruelty, but that’s extremely difficult to prove. I don’t advise it. I think he must be asked to provide proof of adultery.”

  “But I don’t think he’s committed it.”

  “These things can be arranged.”

  Toby agreed to provide evidence of adultery, provided that Kate would legally agree never to claim maintenance from him. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think we could claim maintenance for you,” said her solicitor and then sighed. “This is such a complicated case.”

  “What’s complicated about it?”

  “Well, you own the house; most women own nothing.”

  Telling Pagan, Kate said, “It costs seven shillings and sixpence for a license to tie the knot and thousands of pounds to sever it. D’you think that marriage was invented by lawyers?”

  When K
ate and Toby split up, Kate suffered a violent reaction against pureness of line and the innate structure of an object. Instead, she went in for pink, frilled, gingham curtains, flowered chintz and bird prints. She reconverted the basement back into an apartment and let it at a rental that paid for all the basic overhead of the house. But she was suddenly left without an income once again, so she advertised for translating work in the Times.

  All their visual friends were astonished that Kate and Toby should separate. Toby wasn’t easy, but hell, who was? He had a perfect eye for proportion and was certainly heading for success, had just been appointed to his first committee. As she couldn’t tell them what the trouble was, Kate poured her overburdened, indignant heart onto paper and posted it to Judy. From her letters, Judy sensed Kate’s depression and wrote back that she was worried in case freelance translating at home would be too lonely an occupation at the moment, when she thought Kate should be getting out of the house and meeting new people.

  “Why don’t you try writing in English for a change?” Judy suggested. “You’ve been translating books and articles for years now; you and Toby seem to know a lot of journalists, so why not ask one of them to help you? Write a couple of articles about design and designers and get somebody to look at them. Just take a deep breath and telephone all those feature editors on Fleet Street. They can’t eat you, they can only say no.”

  So Kate telephoned, and all the feature editors said, “What ideas have you got?”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Oh.”

  “Submit a couple of ideas in writing and we’ll let you know.”

  So she did, but nobody seemed to want them. Then, at a party, she met the art editor of House Beautiful and she started to write captions for the magazine. She was paid very little but was glad of the chance to learn to write as a professional. After six months she submitted a few more ideas to Fleet Street and was commissioned to write two of them—a piece about pop art in the home and another about a new firm that had invented a way to reproduce very convincing “antique” statues in reconstituted stone, complete with lichen stains. After that she got the hang of what was news. Anything that anyone had already read wasn’t, no matter how interesting. Kate then interviewed a couple of designers in their homes and again the articles were printed. So she sent in more ideas, each one just three lines on a single sheet of paper, with her name on the top.