Lace (58 page)

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 Kate 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.

Then, one evening, Judy telephoned and said that she had arranged for Kate to interview one of her clients, a once fairly famous ballerina, now over the hill, who was heading for London.

“What?”
Kate squeaked with horror. “You wouldn’t
dare
?”

“Why not give it a try?” New York sounded faint, a million miles away. There was a transatlantic hiss, then Judy shouted,
“I’ll kill you if you don’t, after
I’ve fixed it.”

“I’ll kill you if you
do,
” yelled Kate, “and she’ll kill both of us.”

“No, she won’t. Remember that Joujou knows nothing about London or anyone in it. Or anything else. And as a matter of fact she’s quite fun.”

“Well, what would I do? How would I go about it?”

“Just ring the Ritz and make an appointment with her secretary. I’ve told her you work for the
Globe
.”

“But I don’t!”

“Then avoid saying that you do. But they’re expecting you to telephone and for Chrissake act cool. Don’t let Joujou guess it’s your first interview. She thinks
you’re a top magazine writer, and I’ve seen enough top magazine writers to know that you could be.”

“But I can’t!”

“Where are your British guts? The Dunkirk spirit? The anatomical area that we Americans label your backbone? Stop dithering and just get on with it, Kate. What’s so terrible about
failing, anyway? Not that you
will,
Kate.”

Judy’s bark sounded faint, but Kate could hear that it would be infinitely less alarming for her to face Joujou than to face Judy if she didn’t. After another expensive pause, Kate
capitulated.

Wearing a pale-pink, moon-girl, thigh-length Courrèges tunic dress with shiny white vinyl boots, Kate sat on the edge of Joujou’s bed, notebook open. She felt
breathless, dizzy and apprehensive. Now more of a TV glamour personality than a ballerina, Joujou had beautifully streaked blond hair and very good skin: she had looked thirty-five for twenty
years. The picture of domesticity, she sat demurely in a persimmon brocade armchair, glasses at the end of her nose, delicately dipping into a little sewing kit. She was mending some love beads
that had been torn off in a brawl the night before.

The bed was littered with diamonds and date-stamped photographs of jewelry. “I have to have photos because it’s a rule in the States that you’ve got to prove you’ve taken
them out when you bring them back,” explained Joujou. She nipped into the bathroom, shed her caftan for a towel, returned, swept Kate, the diamonds and the photos off the bed and slid onto it
herself. A masseuse started to attack Joujou’s right calf. Without being asked, Joujou disclosed that the secret of life was not to look too thin or too young and never to nag. “Every
man I meet who wants to marry me says, ‘Joujou, I used to love my wife, but she nags me so, and after a day at the office I can’t take it anymore.’ Ze
ozzer
zing zat men
love is to enjoy their meals, so they can’t stand women who are dieting under their noses. And a woman can’t be too thin if she wants a good face, so she has to choose. I am eating my
ass off, but carefully.”

Joujou recalled occasions only by the dress she had worn. What happened when she met General de Gaulle? “Oh, I wore my brown lace.” How did she like to spend her day?
“Shopping. Always. Me and clothes, it is a love affair. I have brought twenty-eight feet with me,” she said, jumping up from the bed and shunting Kate into her dressing room. Exquisite
garments hung on coat hangers from a twenty-eight-foot length of clothes rail.

“Not much when I travel. I prefer to be chic, not showy,” explained Joujou, “I buy everything from Christian Dior, my favourite dressmaker. What size? I’m size eight,
dahleeng. Well, maybe size nine, no, to be honest, I’m a ten.” She held matchless, pale-gray chinchilla in front of her towel. “I have the most beautiful clothes in the world.
That’s why I work, to pay for them. But because of the work I don’t have enough time to shop. I don’t have time to try them on, you see.” She cast a speculative look at
Kate. “You should never go alone to shop, you know. They persuade you into buying things that are bad for a big ass—I have a big ass and so do you swidhart, never mind, the men love
it.”

Another speculative glance, then Joujou said in an offhand voice, “You are lucky, you are my size.”

Kate looked surprised. “But I’m a size twelve, and only that with difficulty,” she said.

Joujou looked carefully at her. “Well, try some of my clothes.”

She was right. They were the same size. “Now we can buy some more clothes for me and
you
can try them on,” explained Joujou. She immediately phoned the Christian Dior boutique
and asked them to send around a selection of “appearance clothes.” Kate struggled in and out of them in the sweltering hot bedroom, while Joujou lay back on the bed, having her
cellulite massaged away, and bought the lot.