Lace

  Nick looked at her fondly. “We hardly get any time to talk as it is. We only get to our bedrooms to sleep. I start at seven laying tables for breakfast, then we work in the restaurant straight through until three in the afternoon. Then there’s a break until six-thirty and we’re back in the restaurant until eleven. Unless there’s a function, in which case we work until two in the morning and still get up at seven.”

  “We’re lucky to have such good sleeping quarters here,” Judy said. “The student waiters who are on loan from the Lausanne Palace say that there it’s five to a room under the roof, and at the Palace Saint Moritz I hear that the temporary staff have to sleep in the basement.”

  “Goodness, I feel as if l’Hirondelle is a rest cure,” said Pagan, who rather enjoyed the slack tedium of the school routine—unlike Kate, who was exasperated by the laziness and boredom of the lessons.

  After that meeting, Judy always saved a table at the Chesa for the girls on Wednesday afternoon when they each took two hours to drink one expensive cup of chocolate, and Nick took them all out for tea on Sunday afternoons when they ate their heads off.

  Judy’s obvious independence immediately fascinated the other three girls, who envied her energy, her stamina and her cheerfulness, not realising that Judy had to push herself every morning to survive the drudgery of her day. Reluctantly, the girls followed their school timetable, but Judy set her own harsh timetable, and she stuck to it grimly. The Hirondelles were also intrigued by the forceful way that Judy spoke. She said exactly what she thought, whereas the three more privileged girls had been brought up to hide their feelings and not express their own wishes and opinions.

  The girls quickly realised that while Nick was besotted with Judy to the exclusion of anyone else, here was the older brother they had all longed for—to admire them, to protect them, to tease them, to provide them with introductions to other boys and to pay for their outings. Nick was safe. He wasn’t part of the sexual success-or-failure, scalp-collecting game, so the three Hirondelle girls instinctively developed a special way of flirting with Nick. They could be outrageously provocative with Nick with no fear of the consequences; they could practice their act with a safety net, as it were.

  Nick was flattered and delighted with his new role as escort to three attractive but undemanding girls. Brought up in the stone-cold confines of the traditional British boarding school, a timid child, living in the country, he hadn’t had much chance to meet girls, attractive or otherwise. But he had beautiful manners and once his blushing was under control, he was as proud as a pasha when escorting the four of them. Playing such an important part in what the other girls at l’Hirondelle enviously christened “the Set” also meant that Nick soon lost the bashfulness of an only child and the agonised self-doubt of a British teenage male.

  The girls knew that they would eventually meet other boys once the weekly dances started in mid-November, but despite Nick, they were sometimes restless and thirsty for adventure.

  “Maybe we could sneak out the back door one night and go to some divine nightclub, somewhere like the Gringo,” Pagan said with a yawn one Sunday afternoon, after an enormous banana split.

  Nick looked up sharply and brushed his black hair back from his face. “You’d better be careful, you know. You’ll get expelled if you’re caught . . . and there’s something else.” He blushed. “Something nasty. You know old Chardin’s driver, Paul?”

  “Yes, the chauffeur,” said Kate.

  “No, he’s a driver,” Pagan corrected. “Unless you’re speaking French, a chauffeur is someone you hire for the evening. A driver is in your permanent employ.”

  “Whatever you call it, you all know what I mean. Well, Chardin is a . . . er . . . homosexual and his . . . er . . . friend is Paul. I know it’s true because Paul is also carrying on behind Chardin’s back with one of the chefs at the Imperial.” He turned even pinker. “The next bit is just a strong rumour, but I’ve heard it several times. You all know that what Chardin really loves is money.”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Well, it’s rumoured around town that if a girl is caught outside the school with a boy, she’s immediately expelled—unless her father pays hush money to avoid the disgrace. The girl might just have been out for a lark, nothing serious, but Chardin exaggerates to parents over the long-distance telephone. It’s always her word against Chardin’s, and the girl has to admit that she got out, so the parents usually believe the worst and pay up.”

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Do people realise he’s homosexual?”

  “All the waiters around here know that Chardin’s queer,” said Nick. “For years he’s had handsome male drivers when he doesn’t need a driver at all. There’s a bar at the back of town called Le Cous Cous—some pretty odd types hang out there—I wouldn’t walk into the place, I can tell you!”

  “But wouldn’t he be afraid of being blackmailed?” Pagan asked.

  “If the blackmail stories are true, then Chardin is playing a dangerous game, but it isn’t as dangerous as it might seem. He picks his victims carefully. And there are plenty to choose from. You don’t suppose for one minute that he couldn’t stop girls from getting out at night if he wanted to, do you? The parents of the girl are always a long way off in another country, and they’re rich. Chardin never asks for sums they can’t easily afford. I believe the lowest rate is an extra year’s tuition. On the whole, the parents can easily afford to pay their way out of a minor scandal, and because they’re all from different countries, none of them are in touch with each other, so there’s no danger of their meeting up.”

  The girls hung on his words, fascinated by these awesome, wicked possibilities. “So for heaven’s sake be careful,” Nick continued. “Just in case any of these rumours are true. I know it’s gossip, but I keep hearing the same thing on the hotel grapevine. And that’s not all. Some fellows say that Paul is bisexual.”

  There was a pause while Nick explained what bisexual meant. By now he was blushing fiercely and wished he hadn’t started, but he was also enjoying this flattering attention. “It’s said that if a very rich girl gets out at night and she’s caught by Chardin, then she might be . . . deliberately seduced by Paul and photographed in . . . er . . . compromising positions. The barman at the Imperial told me that last year the father of one of the Brazilian girls had a few too many and started cursing Chardin. He said he’d flown over only because the headmaster was blackmailing him, and he couldn’t go to the police because his daughter was involved and if the scandal leaked out, his wife would never forgive him. . . . He had to protect the family name and his daughter’s reputation or she’d never make a good marriage, and so forth. . . . Then he said that he was never going to forgive his daughter for putting him in such a position, because he couldn’t risk calling Chardin’s bluff. There were photographs of his daughter with Paul.”

  Nick smiled. “They must have been pretty unusual pictures. He told the barman that he paid thirty-six thousand Swiss francs for them. Cash.”

  For Pagan, Maxine and Kate, life at l’Hirondelle passed in a charming haze of sentimental naivety. Although disguised in the bodies of women, the pupils were still children. Exuding puppylike exuberance and energy, they giggled and tittered, scampered and shrieked, and were, on the whole, rather silly. Lessons bored them, love fascinated them, passion was what they longed to study and their only ambition was to fall in love. There was a heady air of anticipation as they prepared to be—women! Hours were passed with magazine instructions and diagrams in one hand, costly tubes of makeup in the other, as girls decided whether their faces were oval, round or square. Much time was spent discussing, trying on and swapping clothes. All the girls yanked their waists in to minimal with wide elastic belts, they wore low ballet dancer’s slippers, huge full skirts and pale pink or blue sweaters with a small strand of small pearls. The bras of the American girls divided their breasts into circular stitched cups that thrust sk
yward like twin ice cream cones. On their second Saturday, every new, non-American pupil rushed out and bought a French lace bra. After that, the girls endlessly compared their new bouncing breasts, measured them and worried about them. “One of mine’s larger than the other. . . .” “Why are mine lower than yours . . . ?” “Serena’s got hairs on her nipples. . . .” “You can get more cleavage in the middle if you stuff socks down the side. . . .” “I wish I had more. . . .” “I wish I had less.”

  Maxine tried hard to avoid mammary emphasis. She had large, rather low breasts, and she hadn’t yet become accustomed to them. They still embarrassed her, so she pushed as much of them as possible under her armpits and gradually acquired a round-shouldered stoop. Nothing that the other girls said could convince Maxine that her splendid protuberances were an asset. She would turn scarlet as soon as she saw a group of workmen in the distance, knowing that when she drew level with them, the men’s mesmerised eyes would follow her breasts as she passed. To comfort Maxine, her mother had told her that her embonpoint would disappear when she breast-fed her first baby, but the thought of carrying those footballs around for years until they were battened on by a baby that hadn’t yet been conceived did nothing to console Maxine, who, when not wearing her expensive Dior clothes, hid under enormous, shapeless sweaters.

  Maxine was wearing one of these short woolen shrouds as, one evening, she taught Kate to dance un slow. Humming “Slow Boat to China,” she grasped Kate as they solemnly shuffled around the narrow space, between the two beds. “It’s better that there’s no space, because that’s how it feels in a nightclub,” explained Maxine, who had never been to one. None of the three girls had ever had a date with a boy, wouldn’t know what to talk about if they did, desperately envied all the girls with older brothers and worried endlessly about where you put your nose when you were kissed.

  They talked about such matters every night. After lights out, Pagan would creep from her room, clutching her heavy goosefeather quilt as a wrap, and sit cross-legged on the end of Kate’s bed while they discussed all aspects of being a woman. Always it was unanimously agreed that they would dare all for true love, which would instantly be recognizable as such. Next, they decided what sort of man they were going to marry and sketched their personal Prince Charming to each other. They discussed what their wedding dress would look like, and then the honeymoon was described. In the cozy darkness they would draw deep breaths and discuss the fascinating mystery that none of them had yet encountered . . . sex. This was invariably romantic and never left you sleeping on the damp patch. They never imagined Prince Charming with an erection and certainly not wearing a rubber.

  The universal lack of accurate sexual knowledge in the school was surprising, but all girls at l’Hirondelle lied through their teeth about their sexual experience—which, on the whole, was nil—in order to avoid looking unsophisticated. Hitherto, Kate and Pagan’s only sexual experience had been furtively fantasizing about tampons. To date, neither of them had used tampons, but Pagan had stolen the brochure from her mother’s box and she and Kate had pored over the perplexing illustrations.

  None of them had explored, felt or seen the area between their legs. None of them had heard of masturbation or knew that they had already experienced it. The fourteen-year-old Maxine, bored and wriggling on a chair during Scripture class, thought she had experienced religious ecstasy. Pagan, hunting on a borrowed mount with an unusually high-fronted saddle, had once felt exulted with what she thought was the divine thrill of the chase. Kate had always loved climbing ropes at gym class because of the lovely tickly sort of itch you got when, having pulled yourself up arm-over-arm, you slid down the rope with your legs crossed around it, thighs tensed and descent controlled by your feet acting as brakes. Once she’d had this feeling right at the top of the rope and had hung there swaying, blissfully frozen, unable to move and heedless of the cross, clipped voice of Miss Haydock, the instructress (who was used to girls being frozen on top of the ropes), telling Kate to come down immediately.

  Maxine, being French and seventeen—a year older than Kate and Pagan—was their unquestioned and respected authority in sexual matters, especially as she had been instructed. Boys were all the same, Maxine’s priest had explained, tomcats. They were only after one thing and you weren’t to let them get it, because once they had got it, they despised you for letting them get it. Even if a boy swore that he loved you, after getting it he would spurn you (both privately and—worse—in public) because then, obviously, he wouldn’t respect you anymore. If a really serious boy really loved you, and tried to insist, well he was just testing you—the priest didn’t say for what. In some mysterious way a man couldn’t control himself, so if he went berserk with sexual passion, it was your fault for being so attractive, which was called “leading him on.” This might easily lead to disaster, for then what would you tell your husband on your wedding night? Were you not to save yourself for your husband, the marriage would be a disaster from the start, and therefore your life would be ruined. Because the man could always tell.

  It was strange that not one of the girls queried the sexual double standard. They accepted that a boy could be driven uncontrollably mad by passion, but it never crossed their minds that it was understandable if a girl felt the same way. They accepted that setting the sexual limit was the responsibility of the girl, not the boy; it was her job to control his lust. So girls would learn to chop off their own erotic urge, a behaviour pattern was formed, and after years of cutting off their natural feelings, many of these girls later found it difficult to proceed—or even be aroused—beyond that permitted sexual cutoff point. Their sexuality had been programmed and warped.

  Maxine insisted that Italian girls saved themselves for their husbands and at the same time let a man go all the way by using an alternative route for the journey.

  “Ugh! You’re inventing it, you revolting creature,” said Pagan. “Anyway, how can a man tell?”

  “If he can’t get his thing in, that’s proof that you are a virgin,” said Maxine, “unless you are very sportive, or ride on the horse or the bicycle or do gymnastics.”

  Even if you had a serious beau who you thought might metamorphose into a fiancé, there were definite rules of sexual etiquette. Luckily, Maxine knew them all and shared her information after lights-out. “Nothing on the first meeting—the rendezvous,” she said with authority, “except a significant look when you say good-bye.” There was a pause while they all practiced significant looks in the darkness.

  “Then after the second meeting you would permit him to kiss you on the cheek. And the next time, a real kiss at the farewell.”

  “French kiss, with the tongue?” asked Kate.

  “Not until the fourth rendezvous.”

  Maxine had to admit that she hadn’t done it and hurried on to the fifth rendezvous, where, if the boy was serious, you might wish to go to the waist, a category that had two subdivisions: over clothes and under them. Personally, Maxine would never permit either. She intended to be prudent until she was married.

  A certain sort of girl allowed the man to go below the waist, in which case the two subdivisions were (1) above and (2) below the underclothes, but with his thing firmly zipped up, you understand.

  “But what happens under the underclothes?”

  “The boy strokes the fur.” There was a further silence while in the dark they all furtively stroked their pubic hair and felt nothing.

  The seventh stage of wickedness was letting the boy go all the way. Going all the way would be ecstasy, of course, but it would also be dreadfully dangerous.

  Considering that every girl in l’Hirondelle was terrified of getting pregnant, it was surprising, when it came to the point, that they all felt a firm, almost religious conviction that pregnancy couldn’t be inflicted upon them, especially not the first time. God wouldn’t let it happen to you, and anyway, statistics proved it. Unless, of course, you touched . . . the stuff. All the girls were terrified of semen. It only t
ook one microscopic egg, from all those millions, to get you pregnant and the damn things could stay alive for four days, invisibly creeping up your panty legs. So it was better to take no risks at all, and vital for the boy to take a precaution. But how revolting if he used the rubber thing!

  “It’s called a French lettuce,” said Pagan with authority.

  “No, it’s called a capot anglais,” corrected Maxine coldly.

  Whatever it was called, it led to another etiquette problem. Did you look away while he was putting it on? Did you pretend not to notice? Or did he put it on before he arrived? In which case it would prove that he had not been carried away by your beauty, but that he’d really meant to do it all along. Anyway, how was it put on? “I think they smooth it on when the thing is pointing upward,” said Pagan, “like a glove with only one finger.”

  Not very romantic, they thought. But they had to admit it was better than being pregnant. Being pregnant was, well, inconceivable. Any unfortunate girls at whom fate pointed the finger had to sit in a scalding hot bath and drink a whole bottle of neat gin. A true friend would sit beside her in the steam to cheer her up, stop her fainting, drowning or making loud drunken noises that might be heard by Matron. Alternatively, you had to find a relatively large sum of money and visit an old woman in a back street, who would lay you out like a plucked chicken and pull your legs apart on her grubby kitchen table. Then, without washing her hands, she would push a knitting needle up you. If you were rich you could go to a private clinic and have an anesthetic, and the knitting needle would be made of stainless steel and sterilized and everybody would pretend that you were having your appendix out.