Lace

  Occasionally, a girl was caught talking to a boy by one of the school staff and punished by being kept in school the following weekend, but Kate was the only girl who kept getting caught, first, because she was besotted with the dazzling François, and second, because she was at heart a straightforward girl, unaccustomed to being devious. When challenged by Matron, she admitted meeting François in the local church. A fortnight later a jealous classmate reported Kate’s rendezvous with him in a stable and the following week a mademoiselle saw them drinking Glühwein on the Hornberg—a major offense. Kate was increasingly anxious until one weekend François told her he had booked a sitting room in a little pension on the edge of the town. He wanted to be alone with her in comfort, not crouching in straw, standing half-frozen in the snow or sitting on public exhibition in a café. He wished to talk to her in private because he had something important to say. He’s going to propose, thought Kate.

  So she followed him into a green-shuttered chalet, their boots clattering up the dark, wooden stairs. François unlocked a door and Kate stopped dead at the sight of the carved wooden double bed covered with a blue-and-white checked quilt. François gently pulled her to an armchair by the window and started to kiss her. Knees melting, Kate thought that perhaps he hadn’t noticed the bed. Perhaps the bed was a mistake, perhaps he couldn’t get a room without one.

  She kicked her boots off as she felt his warm tongue licking her ear, then his lips were on the back of her neck and finally she lay in his arms, eyes almost closed and mouth half open.

  “Chérie, we’re going to have a wonderful life together,” François said, as he slowly undid each pearl button on her gray lace blouse and slid his hand inside it. Kate felt as if she were swimming under water in a slowed-down film as with gentle movements he pushed back her blouse, unhooked her bra and bent his lips to caress the pink tips of her nipples.

  Then, naked from the waist up, she was lying languorously under the checked quilt and the wet tip of his tongue was warm in her other pink ear. She felt his hand under her skirt, a cunning, casual movement as if the hand was moving without the knowledge of its owner.

  She shifted and tried to jerk her body up from the bed. François thrust her back. Quite hard. “Cock tease,” he hissed. Under a sea of stiffened prickly petticoats Kate felt his grip on her thigh as he thrust his hand above her silk stocking top and then up the leg.

  She tried to pull away from him. “I never have, I don’t know how to, please don’t, I’ll do anything if you won’t.”

  Oh, God, Kate thought, he’d undone his trousers and now she could feel his flesh throbbing against her soft inner thigh. Poised above her, François was looking at her as if he didn’t know her, he was breathing hard, his eyes were glazed, intent, somehow uninvolved. “I’ll be careful then,” he muttered and to Kate’s relief he withdrew his hand; but only so that he could roll sideways and strip his clothes off. He didn’t seem to realise that his thing was showing. The lavender-pink penis reared up from its nest of black hair, balls wobbling beneath it. How ugly it was, Kate thought.

  Kate tried to get up again, but he thrust her down on the bed then roughly pulled her breasts toward him, lunged his throbbing penis between them and started thrusting his body. Squashed beneath him, Kate felt bewildered, indignant, disbelieving. She couldn’t breathe because of his weight on top of her. With a hoarse grunt François stiffened and shivered, his grip hardening painfully on her breasts. Then he collapsed on top of her and Kate felt a stickiness trickling over her collarbone and down her neck. She knew what it was and she didn’t dare move in case some of the stuff got in the wrong place. She was terrified.

  “You see, I told you I’d be careful, my darling,” François mumbled.

  Kate didn’t think he’d been careful at all. How dare he call her his darling? On the other hand, wasn’t that just what she’d wanted half an hour ago? To be his darling? His passion for her must have been uncontrollably great.

  Yes, that was it, she told herself. He loved her, that’s why this had happened. It wasn’t what she’d expected, it hadn’t been romantic and wonderful, it had been messy and uncomfortable. But perhaps making love was like skiing, painful and hard for the first couple of times. . . .

  Anyway, now she’d let him go below the underclothes, stage two, so obviously he had to be the love of her life.

  But, strangely, she felt like crying.

  Two days later Kate discovered that the rest of the school wasn’t speaking to her. They were ostracizing her. Smugly, theatrically, publicly, they made it clear that they despised her. “What’s the matter? What have I done?” Kate asked Pagan, who looked harassed.

  “Oh, they think you’ve gone all the way with François. Pay no attention to the jealous bitches,” she said.

  “But I haven’t,” Kate said, wondering whether, in fact, she really had. Certainly the school thought so. Kate was puzzled by the hypocrisy of a world that condemned certain actions in public but practiced or envied them in private; she had disobeyed the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not be found out. And besides, she was being punished for being Miss Gstaad.

  The following Sunday, Judy was waiting for Kate outside the Chesa, arms held across her chest and tucked in her armpits, stamping her boots in the snow to keep warm. “Listen, Kate, that creep you’re going out with has told the whole town that he’s slept with Miss Gstaad. The barman at the Imperial told Nick and Nick came straight to me. We thought you ought to know.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Kate, realising at last how the school knew. She dashed to the pension to meet François, where François smoothly denied telling anyone. Kate believed him because she wanted to. She felt drained of energy, forlorn, bruised. She clung to François, let him undress her completely, clung to him shivering under the warm quilt as he stroked her body, as he pushed his hand beneath her buttocks, as he felt between her legs. . . . That hurt a bit as he wriggled his finger inside her. But Kate remained passive—she didn’t know what was expected of her, but since she’d already been blamed for it, she might as well do it. She could feel the hard warmth and weight of François on her stomach, there was a second of suspense, then she gasped in pain. But soon they were moving together smoothly, as if they were dancing, and she began to feel a slight warmth and excitement. But before it developed into anything even approaching an orgasm, François stiffened with a gasp, then she felt a warm wetness as his erection subsided. He seemed pleased with himself, but Kate felt oddly disappointed, wobbly and stranded. Perhaps there was something wrong with her? Perhaps she was frigid?

  It did not occur to her that François was at fault. Boys, she assumed, knew how to do these things. Perhaps she just needed more practice. She supposed that she’d get the hang of it in time.

  Two to come out, the black ones in front to be capped and I have to wear a brace at night for a bit,” reported Maxine that night in bed. “He phoned Papa on the spot and Papa said go ahead. Not nearly as expensive as I thought, cheaper than my tangerine dress.”

  “Well, now your hair,” said Pagan, huddled under her quilt in the moonlight. “It grows too low on your forehead, like a Neanderthal woman. . . . I’m going to trim away a bit with my nail scissors and give you a lovely widow’s peak. If you don’t like it, you can loop your back hair over it, and if you do like it, you can have it done permanently by electrolysis.” She sprang off the bed and reached for Kate’s little purple underarm razor. In the face of such assurance, Maxine allowed her hairline to be shaved away by the light of her pocket flashlight. Pagan looked slightly worried after she’d done it; Maxine looked terrible, as if she were being prepped for a lobotomy.

  “Maybe if you plucked her eyebrows?” suggested Kate, so Pagan attacked Maxine’s bushy eyebrows. Unfortunately, she plucked too much from the left side, then attempted to match up the right side and took too much of that away, so she returned to the left for further depilation until Maxine was left with two thin odd horizontal question marks of hair under her lopsi
dedly shaven forehead.

  Maxine looked in the mirror and burst into tears.

  The following day Matron hurried her off to the hairdresser, and later that afternoon Maxine returned, beaming again. Her hairline had been properly trimmed, and the hairdresser had persuaded her to have her hair streaked and styled. Her braids had gone and in their place was a thick, blond, shining mane.

  “Now your weight,” Judy said firmly the following Sunday. “Ten kilos. No more cakes. You’re always saying you hate the school food, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. You can buy seven hard-boiled eggs a week and have one for breakfast with black coffee, an orange and a slice of ham in your room at lunchtime, no tea break, and as little as possible for supper. And the footballs will slowly disappear.”

  They didn’t, but the rest of Maxine diminished at the rate of a kilo a week. Fascinated, the rest of the school watched her transformation. Some tried to emulate it, but they hadn’t Maxine’s determination and tenacity in the face of warm bread, fresh from the oven, with strawberry preserves for breakfast or the cream cakes and steaming chocolate of the five o’clock break.

  When Maxine was no longer a size sixteen but a size fourteen heading for twelve, Judy examined her thoroughly, as one might a horse on auction, and nodded with satisfaction. Then she stepped back and said, “The nose.”

  Surprisingly, Maxine was worried that she might appear vain, that people would notice, that her mother would object, that it was sacrilegious to alter the nose God had given her.

  “God didn’t intend you to wear a bra either,” Judy said. “It’s up to you to help God a bit, you know, if you want to look as good as you can.”

  After Christmas Maxine returned to school ten days late, with two black eyes and a perfect nose. “What a performance,” she said, lifting her sunglasses to show her bruises. “I nagged and I cried and I refused to go out, oh, you would have been proud of me, I behaved so badly and with such determination. I wheedled Aunt Hortense into paying for it, provided my parents consented.” She readjusted the sunglasses. “The aunt didn’t expect my parents to consent, but I kept telling them that they couldn’t be so cruel as to refuse such an offer. I tell you, the whole of Christmas Day I was in tears. So eventually they agreed. It only took four days, and I needed the rest after that performance!”

  Maxine’s new nose and figure greatly increased her self-confidence, and she now concentrated on losing more weight. She ate and drank as little as possible, she was on skis as often as possible, every night and morning she would sit on the floor of her bedroom and roll her plump thighs away with a wooden kitchen rolling-pin. “Ninety-eight . . . ow, ninety-nine . . . il faut souffrir pour être mince, ouch, a hundred. Pouf! Now where are my ski socks?”

  “Surely you’re not going to ski today?” Kate asked. “It looks like an upended paperweight outside. It’s a Sunday for staying by the fire.”

  “I only lost half a kilo last week, look at my chart on the wall. Five more kilos to lose.”

  Maxine trudged off to the ski lift. She had decided to try a longer, more advanced run so she caught the gondelbahn cable car to the top of the Wispile. The top of the mountain was gray and threatening with black clouds lacing the sky behind. Marine shivered and looked at the signpost, a Christmas tree of coloured arrows nailed to the post that pointed to different ski runs. The yellow runs were easy, the red ones more difficult and the black runs were only for very experienced skiers.

  Maxine, who had only been skiing for a couple of months, thought that the black track didn’t look all that difficult—in fact it looked quite easy and much the prettiest. And so it was for the first two hundred yards, then the piste took a sharp turn to the left and Maxine found herself in a rutted ice path that fell steeply through the forest. For a moment she thought of climbing back, then she was going too fast and couldn’t stop; her skis clattered over the ruts. She was frightened of wrapping herself around a tree; it hadn’t occurred to her that there might be nobody else on the piste. She jerked over a bump, fir trees loomed, she floundered and fell.

  She pulled herself to her feet, shot forward—again too fast—on the corrugated ice track and fell again, bruising her hip. Although she wore two pairs of woolen mittens inside her ski gloves, she couldn’t feel her numbed hands and her cheeks and forehead already ached with the cold. She pulled herself up again and for the next ten minutes she managed to ski slowly and carefully with a great deal of side-slipping. Then it started to snow, which limited visibility until she could only see a few yards in any direction; the piste was quickly covered by snow and she could see no arrows. As snowflakes fluttered down remorselessly, the lack of sound was eerie and she felt frightened.

  Suddenly, a lone, black-clad skier with an orange-peaked cap shot past her. She waved her ski poles after him and shouted, but he didn’t stop. Maxine groped her way onward and downward, following the direction the man had taken. She found herself alone on a steeply sloping field of icy bumps, but she didn’t dare take it straight. She started to traverse it slowly. Each time she reached the edge of the field, she did a laborious kick turn and clumsily levered herself down a couple of feet. Her knees started to tremble with the effort but she zigzagged on, all thought of style forgotten. She had just reached the bottom of the field when the man with the orange-peaked cap slipped gracefully past her.

  “Au secours,” she shouted. “Help!” But the skier didn’t seem to hear, so again Maxine followed in the direction that he had taken and soon found herself on the edge of the steepest slope she had ever been on.

  She was terrified. She considered climbing back, but downhill, she reasoned, would be easier than uphill, so she took her skis off and dragged them behind her, kicking footholds with the heels of her ski boots, terrified lest she drop a ski, because it would undoubtedly shoot off down the glassy mountain and be lost forever. As perhaps she was herself. . . .

  Although she was heading downhill, she had a nasty feeling that she might be going the wrong way. It was now three hours since she had left the top of the mountain. She was soaking wet, she’d got snow down the back of her neck and could no longer even feel her feet. Cold, forlorn and frightened, she sat down to rest in the snow, worrying about frostbite and peering into the thick grayness all about her.

  This time, because she wasn’t skiing, she heard the orange-hatted skier descend. She scrambled to her feet, waved and screamed at him.

  “Stop, stop, please stop.”

  He pulled up by her side.

  “Could you please tell me the easiest way down?” Maxine asked anxiously.

  He looked at her through yellow goggles and said in French, “There is no easy way down. You’re on the black run. Why did you pick the black, why not one of the easier runs?” He sounded exasperated. “Look, you’d better follow me or you’ll never get down. Put your skis on.”

  Slowly Maxine inched her way after him down the hellish mountain. He would ski forward then stop and wait, watching her as she jerked, slid and wobbled forward, her new teeth gritting with determination as the gray obscurity started to thicken into darkness. Then suddenly her knees gave way and she collapsed into the snow. She gave a little sob.

  “I’m afraid I can’t go on. I’ve got to rest. I’m sorry, but I can’t move anymore.”

  The black skier’s voice became gentle and persuasive as he urged her on. “Come on,” he said, “you’re doing wonderfully well, we’re nearly at the halfway station, it’s just around the next bend, then you can ride on the gondelbahn back to the bottom!”

  So they slowly inched forward until Maxine fell again. She ached all over. “I can’t go on,” she muttered, then buried her face on her knees and rolled over in the snow, curled in a fetal position.

  The skier sighed, unclipped his skis and stuck them upright in the snow. “Here, let me rub you warmer,” he said. He rubbed each arm, then her back until she ached with the pain of it. Then he roughly rubbed her legs until she could feel them again and helped her stand.


  Slowly, painfully, they progressed onward. The halfway station wasn’t around the next bend or the one after that. It was almost an hour before they turned around a bend and saw it. Maxine almost crawled into the station, but her rescuer said he was going to ski down the remainder of the piste. He would join her in the bar at the bottom, if she liked.

  Effortlessly, he slipped downhill and away from her.

  At the bottom of the ski lift Maxine, slightly recovered, headed for the nearby bar and staggered to the cloakroom. She took off her cap, goggles, scarf and extra sweaters, washed her face in warm water—oh the bliss of it—and fluffed out her hair as best she could. Then she clumped into the steamy, pine-lined bar. Because no one was stupid enough to ski in such dangerous weather, the bar was empty except for a husky black figure leaning against it, dangling an orange cap and yellow goggles.

  “Hot buttered rum for you, I think, tea for me,” he said, as she smiled her newly irresistible grin. “I must admit that I never expected to find a pretty girl under that collection of old horse blankets you were wearing.”

  His bronzed face was ringed with neatly curling blond hair. Maxine took one look into the clear, blank blue eyes and fell in love with him on the spot.

  The added bonus was that Maxine’s savior was a reserve on the Swiss ski team, and every girl in l’Hirondelle would have killed for a chance to meet any member of the team. Wait until she told them! she thought.

  But she didn’t tell them because Pierre Boursal sat with her, alone in the deserted bar, until it was time to go back to school for supper, then walked her back, carrying her skis, while Maxine prayed that he would ask to see her again, and by the time he did—not to ski, mind you, once was enough—he had become too important to her to boast about. She didn’t even tell Kate or Pagan in case it was tempting fate. Or Kate or Pagan.

  From then on, Maxine met Pierre whenever she could—after the last ski lift stopped, of course. Pierre had not intended to get involved with a girl. He took his training seriously. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink and didn’t intend to be distracted by women. Maxine’s virtue was splendidly safe with him, thanks to his training, she thought, longing for him as they clung to each other on some tiny dance floor or she sat with his muscular arm around her waist in the darkest corner of some tearoom. At such times she clearly saw how very, very easy it would be to be wicked.