Lace (4 page)

At the reception desk they phoned up to make sure she was expected. The guests standing beside her murmured in soft Italian, the groups beyond spoke Arabic and French. Kate couldn’t hear a
word of English. It reminded her of Cairo. The elevator took her to the seventeenth floor and as she walked along the hushed gray corridor to Suite 1701, Kate pulled the back of her mulberry jacket
down and fluffed up the purple silk bow of her blouse.

Just before she reached it, the door was opened by a thin woman with gray hair that matched her dress. Beyond her, through the open door, Kate could see into a long cream room that overlooked
Central Park. A waiter was setting out ice, tongs and small dishes of olives; the secretary beckoned him out, stood aside so that Kate could enter and then softly closed the door from the hall.

Kate gasped.

“Jesus!” said Judy.

“Wrong again,” said Kate, who could never resist a one-liner. Astonished, she stood in the doorway, trying to decide what this was all about. Judy and Pagan were sitting on a couple
of apricot velvet couches placed at right angles to each other; at either end of the couches, huge vases of madonna lilies and imported apple blossoms stood on low, smoked-glass tables and beyond,
to the right, in a beige velvet armchair, sat Maxine.

“What’s this, a surprise reunion?” asked Kate.

Pagan fingered the delicate little green malachite butterfly that hung around her neck on a fine gold Cartier chain. Maxine said in a fast, low voice, “We’d better be careful what we
say.”

The atmosphere was tense. Kate did not have time to move over to the other women before the double doors at the far end of the room were flung open and in walked a small, gold-skinned young
woman, wearing a white silk gown draped like an ancient Greek tunic.

Star quality radiated from Lili. A cloud of black, soft hair hung to her shoulders, swept back from an oval face with high, slanting cheekbones. Her small nose had a faintly predatory hook, her
full lower lip was slightly too large, but when you looked at her you only noticed her eyes. They were huge shining chestnut eyes, thickly lashed, that glistened as if a crystal tear were about to
fall from each one.

Tonight, however, Lili’s eyes did not glisten. They glared. They projected rage and fury. For a moment the star stood silent as she surveyed the four older women: Kate in her mulberry suit
by the door; Pagan in pink, sprawled across the apricot cushions; Maxine poised, porcelain cup in one hand, the saucer held on her blue silk lap; Judy in brown velvet, on the edge of the sofa with
shoulders hunched, hands under her chin, elbows on her knees, scowling right back at Lili.

Then Lili spoke.

“All right,” she said, “which one of you bitches is my mother?”

I
FEEL SICK
,”
muttered Kate, leaning back against the headboard and fastening a new lace bra over her adolescent
breasts.

“Worth it,” said Pagan, as she licked her fingers. Wearing orange satin boxer shorts and a pink kimono, she sat cross-legged at the end of Kate’s narrow bed and looked
regretfully at the white cardboard box between the two teenage girls. One chocolate eclair remained.

“We’ll save this for after supper. Now shall I paint your toenails purple to take your mind off throwing up?”

The English pupils always splurged their first week’s allowance on cakes, lipstick and nail polish. They had been freed from strict schools in order to be transformed into cultured young
ladies by this Swiss finishing school. After years of deprivation, followed by a post-war period in which even bread and potatoes were rationed, the girls thought Switzerland in 1948 was a paradise
compared to shabby, tired Britain—a paradise of cream cakes, chocolate, snow and romance.

Pagan hunched over Kate’s left foot. A myopic, pre-Raphaelite beauty, she usually stooped to minimize her height. She rarely wore her glasses, partly because she was vain and partly
because she kept losing them.

Lolling back on the bed, bare left foot poised in midair, Kate looked over Pagan’s head. She could see the snow-topped mountains of Gstaad, framed by the white lace curtains of her open
bedroom window.

“Let’s go into the forest before tea,” suggested Kate.

“Keep
still,
you idiot,” said Pagan. “We were told to greet the new girl. We’ll go after tea if she hasn’t arrived. Poor thing, you’ve bagged the best
armoire. There’s hardly any hanging space in hers; she’ll have to keep her stuff under the bed.”

Most of the bedrooms in l’Hirondelle finishing school were for three girls, but on the top floor, under the wooden eaves of the huge chalet, the rooms were smaller. Leading off
Kate’s bedroom for two was a tiny, pale blue attic, with a low, sloping pine ceiling and just enough space for one narrow blue bed, a small table and a chest. Pagan had grabbed it and she was
so exasperatingly untidy that it was just as well she had a room to herself. Nothing could teach Pagan to be neat. She had been christened Jennifer, but as her nanny’s constant cry was
“Pick it
up,
you little pagan”, or “No tea until your room’s tidy, you little pagan”, Jennifer eventually became known as “Pagan”, and the nickname
stuck.

“I’m not going to waste such a lovely afternoon!” Kate jumped off the bed and pulled on a neat beige cashmere sweater and skirt. Pagan tugged a pair of old jodhpurs over the
orange satin shorts and wriggled into a gigantic Fair Isle pullover, which she yanked in at the middle with a man’s thick leather belt that almost went around her waist twice. They clattered
down the wooden stairs two at a time, flung themselves out of the front door and half-walked, half-skipped along the steep path that led behind the school and up into the forest. After climbing
about a mile over fallen pine needles, they found a notice stuck in the middle of the path that read
“Attention! Défense de passer.”

“Probably means that the pass is defended by attentive gamekeepers,” said Pagan, whose French was atrocious, and they continued to puff uphill until the path stopped in a grass
clearing that ended abruptly on a cliff edge. Below they could see the brown chalets of Gstaad, encircled by the dark green forest, and beyond, a spectacular amphitheatre of mountains that were
snow-topped even in midsummer.

“Yoohoo . . . oooo,” yelled Pagan through cupped hands. As the sound echoed back across the valley, she turned to Kate and said, “They’ll expect us to yodel properly by
the time we get back to—”

She stopped abruptly. Suddenly they heard an answering cry, seemingly from beneath their feet. Then someone shouted,
“Au secours!”

“That means ‘help,’” Kate said earnestly.

“And it came from beyond the cliff.
Pourquoi secours?
” yelled Pagan.

The voice yelled “
Parce que
. . . I’m stuck.”

“Are you English?” yelled Pagan, starting to stride forward, but Kate yanked at her belt to stop her. They were about ten feet from the cliff edge and it might not be safe.

“No, American. Watch out. The cliff just gave way. We weren’t even near the edge . . . It just suddenly crumbled.”

“How many of you are there?”

“I’m the only one that fell. Nick jumped back and he’s gone for help . . . aaaah!” Both girls heard the sound of slithering earth and stones.

“Are you still there?”

“Yes, but there isn’t much ledge left. Oh, God, I’m so frightened.”

“Don’t look down!” said Pagan, lowering herself to the ground and starting to snake forward. “And don’t shout anymore . . . Kate, I’m going to crawl to the
edge and then you lie down behind me and hang on to my ankles.” Slowly Pagan wriggled to the point where the grass stopped abruptly. She peered carefully over the edge. About six feet below
her, two dark blue eyes looked up, surrounded by fair, shaggy hair.

The girl was standing on a narrow ledge, arms outspread as she hugged the cliff face. “Nick just couldn’t reach me,” she said. “He tried and tried. He took off his shirt
and tried to pull me up with it but it tore, then the ledge started to crumble and so he ran to get a ladder. But the ledge keeps crumbling, there’s not enough room to sit down now. I’m
so frightened.”

At least a hundred feet below, the earth was starting to slide again. It made Pagan feel sick. “Oh, crumbs,” she gasped. “Oh, Lord, don’t look down.” She tried to
reach the girl with her hands but her outreached fingertips were about two feet from the upstretched hands of the frightened girl below.

“Look, hang on just a bit longer,” called Pagan encouragingly, as she withdrew her head and wriggled back to Kate. She started to take off her sneakers and jodhpurs.

“These pants are tougher than the shirt,” she explained, as she tied the end of her jodhpur legs with a reef knot so that the garment formed a circle; then she threaded her belt
through it, pulling the buckle tight.

“For God’s sake hang tight onto my ankles,” Pagan hissed to Kate, as she wriggled back to the cliff face and peered over it. Some earth crumbled away beneath her breasts and
she felt even sicker as she dangled the jodhpurs down to the girl below. “Can you get them over your head and under your arms like a lifebelt?
Don’t look down!
”

Slowly Pagan lowered the makeshift lifebelt until it reached the girl’s outstretched fingertips. “Keep your hands together and try to wriggle the jodhpurs down under your arms . . .
slowly . . . slowly . . .”

Pagan wrapped the other end of the belt around her left hand and hung on to the end of it with her right hand. All the time she noticed little crumbs of earth were sliding down the sheer cliff
face toward the red earth, snapped-off pine trees and roots that were piled so far below.

“Now hold on to the belt,” she said in what she hoped was a commanding voice. “
Slowly,
try to walk up the cliff, like a fly.”

“I can’t. I
can’t!
”

A chunk of earth fell from below the girl’s left foot, leaving it dangling in space.

“If you fall, I’m not sure that I can hold you,” Pagan said. “You’ll probably break my wrist and pull me over,
so
don’t
think
about what I say.
Just
do
it, when I count to three.”

Kate was now lying behind Pagan with her arms hanging around Pagan’s waist. “Now, one, two,
three!
” Pagan said, as forcefully as she could.

Obediently, the thin little girl—thank God she was so small—leaned out and started to scramble up the mountain. As the belt jerked taut, Pagan felt an agonizing pain in her wrist and
shoulder. She wondered whether she’d dislocated it, then the whole of her left arm was in agony as, inch by inch, the girl scrambled up.

The leather belt started to slip in Pagan’s sweaty hand. She was gasping for breath as she slowly wriggled backward, pulled by Kate.

Two dirty hands hanging onto the belt slowly appeared over the cliff face, followed by a frightened white face.

“Slowly,” gasped Pagan, “slowly!” She thought she felt the ground move beneath her and experienced a moment of cold terror. Then the little girl collapsed over the top of
the cliff and Kate quickly pulled her up over it and back to safety as Pagan’s bleeding fingers released the belt.

But before Pagan could stand up, the ground beneath her fell away and suddenly she was dangling from the waist, head downward over the crumbling mountain. The ledge that the girl had been
standing on had disappeared.

Kate grabbed Pagan, and together they fell backward, panting and sobbing as they crawled to safety.

Not until they reached the pine trees and the little path did Pagan feel safe. Then her knees gave way and she collapsed. Anxiously, Kate bent over her.

Suddenly a look of alarm crossed the face of the girl Pagan had rescued. “Oh, my,” she said, putting both hands to her temples, “I’m going to be late. Oh, I dare not. Oh,
I
must
go. Oh, dear, oh, thank you, oh, look, do you know the Chesa? Can you come there sometime so I can say . . . I mean, I can’t thank you enough but . . .
I must
go!
”

And she turned and half-ran, half-staggered down the path, then disappeared around the bend.

“What a cow!” Kate said. “You saved her life and she just ran off! Oh, darling Pagan, your poor hands!” Pagan’s legs were filthy and her hands were bleeding. As the
jodhpurs and sneakers were still on the cliff edge, she was wearing only the Fair Isle sweater and the dirty orange satin shorts.

Suddenly, from the other side of the clearing, a group of labourers appeared carrying rope, a net and a ladder. A tall, thin young man, naked to the waist, ran in front of them, but he suddenly
stopped dead, ran a hand through his floppy black hair and yelled, “Christ, it’s fallen!”

“The girl’s all right, we got her up,” called Pagan from where she was sitting. “Are you Nick?”

The young man came running over. His crooked nose was smeared with earth, his aquamarine eyes looked distraught. “She’s all right? Judy’s
all right?
What happened? How?
. . . You’re
sure
she’s all right? Where is she? . . . Oh, God, I’ve been through such hell. . . .”

“So has Pagan,” Kate said indignantly. “She leaned over the cliff and pulled your girl up—and then she rushed off when Pagan had just saved her life, saying that she
didn’t want to be late!”

“Well, if she’s late again, she loses her job, you see. She’s already been warned twice. Was she
all right
—not hurt, I mean?”

“
She
must be all right to rush off like that,” said Kate scornfully, “but Pagan isn’t all right. Look at her hands!”

“Stop making a fuss, Kate.” Pagan wobbled to her feet. She was as tall as the young man who had jumped to help her. “I’ll be perfectly fine after a bath.”

“Just let me tell the rescue team there’s no longer a problem and I’ll see you home,” said Nick, pushing his floppy black hair out of his eyes and turning to talk in
rapid German to the group of men behind him. He turned back and put a supportive arm around Pagan’s waist.

“I’m perfectly all right,” said Pagan weakly, wincing as he touched her left arm. “Let’s get out of here before more mountain disappears.”