Lace II (5 page)

*   *   *

Pagan sprawled across her old-fashioned brass bed in her room at the Algonquin and again tried to direct-dial her husband.

It was two in the morning in New York, which meant seven in the morning in London, so with luck she’d catch Christopher just before breakfast, she thought, as she looked around the small pretty room. Her Jean Muir pink coat was thrown carelessly over the rose-velvet armchair and her discarded underwear was scattered over the malachite-green carpet.

“Darling, that you? How are the dogs? Is Sophia doing her homework
directly
when she comes home from school? Are you helping her with geometry? … Sorry, it doesn’t seem like twenty-four hours, it seems weeks since I saw you last, darling.… Yes, I’ve met Lili, but I don’t want to talk about it on the telephone.… No, we didn’t discuss the possibility of a donation to your laboratory, darling, you’re even more tactless than I am.… No, there simply wasn’t a chance to discuss the importance of cancer research.” She pushed her heavy, wavy mahogany hair away from her face and wriggled her long-legged, lean, naked body into a more comfortable position on the lace blanket cover. “…Yes, I know I forgot to pack my nightclothes, but nobody’s noticed, darling, I’ll hide in the loo when they bring breakfast up.… Oh, damn, did I really forget the grocer order again? Thank heaven for Harrods and Globe Car Service.…” Eventually, in a carefully casual voice, Pagan said, “How are you feeling, darling?” After his heart attack, she always worried when she was away from Christopher.

“…No, I hardly slept at all last night, you know I mustn’t take sleeping pills or anything addictive. But tonight I’m prepared to enjoy a sleepless night. I’ve bought this absolutely gripping book called
Scruples.…”

*   *   *

Judy had also spent a sleepless night. Huddled under the red-fox spread of her big, luxurious, peaceful bedroom, she restlessly gazed at the peach-colored walls and matching wild-silk curtains, at the pretty Victorian oil paintings of peaches and grapes, apples and apricots that hung from the walls. She was almost glad that Griffin wasn’t here; he’d had to fly to the West Coast for a couple of days to launch a new decorating magazine, the first of his many publishing ventures to be based in San Francisco. Only the previous evening, Griffin had asked Judy the question that she’d been waiting to hear from him for ten years. Although Griffin was a major shareholder of
VERVE!
and although they’d been lovers for over ten years, there had always been a subject that she was forbidden to discuss. That subject was Griffin’s home life. Everyone in the media world knew that it had been clearly established years ago, before he’d met Judy, when that tough,
clever bastard, Griffin Lowe, was still being seen around town with the best-looking models and young actresses in New York, that none of them stood a chance: Griffin would never leave his wife and three children, because he’d fought too hard to climb his way up the ladder of success and he wanted all of it, the successful, respectable life that he’d established as well as his notorious, amorous adventures.

And then, a few days ago, Griffin’s wife had left him for another man; they were going to Israel together, to start a new life on a kibbutz. The long-suffering Mrs. Lowe had walked out on her handsome, rich, debonair, double-crossing husband.

What was equally surprising was that Griffin had immediately asked Judy to marry him. What was even more surprising was that, after hearing the words for which she’d waited ten years, Judy found that she didn’t want to marry Griffin. Griffin had developed a habit of cheating on his wife and therefore she wasn’t too sure that she wanted to become his wife. Old habits die hard.

*   *   *

Silhouetted against the russet shade of the bedside light, the slim naked figure looked like an alabaster Praxiteles; slowly his fox-shaped face broke into an intimate smile. “No, darling, it’s absolutely safe; Lili’s out there playing the biggest role of her life.” Softly he laughed into the ivory telephone. “I’ll be back in Paris on Saturday … promise, darling … you can save it for another couple of days … you’d better.…” The man’s head jerked up as the door was flung open and Lili stood there smiling. Hastily, the man said to the telephone, “Sorry, this is suite 1719. I think you’ve got the wrong number.” He replaced the telephone and held out both his arms to Lili, who hurled herself into them. “You were right, Simon! It worked just as you said it would!” She threw her arms round his neck and kissed him full on the lips. “At last I know who I really am, at last I know who my mother is!”

Simon Pont was an actor. A good stage actor who needed an audience to produce his best work, who hated movies and only occasionally made one, strictly for the money. He and Lili had lived together for two years and it was Simon who
had originally persuaded Lili to search for her mother. A quiet, intelligent, thirty-five-year-old, he seemed secure enough to handle Lili with firm indulgence, seemed to understand that she needed more protection and attention than most men are prepared to give a woman. It was Simon who had given Lili the reassurance she had needed, and it was he who had realized that Lili needed to trace her mother in order to firmly establish her own identity. Simon had pointed out that if Lili found her real parents, then she might stop looking for substitute parents to love in almost everyone with whom she became involved—which is why she was so vulnerable to the exploiters, the con men and the con women that the rich and the famous invariably attracted.

Now Simon held Lili to his handsome naked body and licked her ear with his long, curly tongue. “Tell me who your mother is, darling. Lady Swann?”

“No, not Pagan Swann; it’s Judy Jordan. She admitted it almost at once, but I remembered what you’d said—that they’d be bound to pin it on the only woman who wasn’t married and didn’t have to explain me to a husband!”

He pushed the white silk from her shoulder, and nipped the golden flesh with his little wide-spaced teeth. Lili wriggled. “So I suddenly asked Judy who my father was and—just as you said—the other three all snapped round to look at Judy, so I knew that she was telling the truth, that she really
is
my mother.”

Simon pushed Lili’s dress from both shoulders, and gently flicked one sandalwood nipple with his finger and thumb. Lili wriggled again, “Listen, Simon, she wasn’t some rich bitch who’d just dumped me because she couldn’t get an abortion.” Simon tugged at Lili’s white belt as she continued. “Judy was poor, from one of those grim Baptist families in West Virginia, a scholarship student in Switzerland, working her way through college by waiting on tables. And she was only sixteen when it happened.”

“And who helped it to happen?” Simon’s voice was gentle. “What about your father? Who’s he?” He tugged again at Lili’s belt, and the white Grecian tunic slithered to the floor. Simon pressed her naked body against his and stroked Lili’s hair.

“That part’s sad,” said Lili, sorrowfully. “He’s dead. He
was an English student that she met in Switzerland, but he was drafted into the British army and died fighting the communists in Malaya. He never even knew she was pregnant.”

“Do you believe that?” Simon put his arms round Lili and grasped her buttocks.

Lili thought for a moment. “There was something odd about the way she told me. Pagan Swann started to say something, then thought better of it.”

“What about the rest of his family?”

“I haven’t asked Judy yet. There was so much to talk about. It’s a really strange story. Apparently all four girls paid Angelina for my keep. Judy didn’t dare to tell her parents, you see. Judy intended to come to Switzerland for me as soon as she was able to support me by herself. But she was only a twenty-two-year-old secretary when I disappeared.”

“I’m glad she didn’t get an abortion.” He rubbed himself against Lili’s big soft breasts.

“She couldn’t have done that in Switzerland in 1949. It was illegal and dangerous.”

He trickled his finger up her spine. “So now, can we start a family of our own?”

“What, right now?”

“Right now.” Gently he pushed her backwards onto the gray-silk bedcover. She always felt safe with Simon, Lili thought as he began to kiss her. She trusted him. There was no need for him to dominate her, envy her or exploit her, because he was a successful actor in his own right. And she knew that he had her interests at heart. Why else should he have encouraged her search for her mother?

*   *   *

After her sleepless night, Judy didn’t feel tired. She felt contented and apprehensive. A fizz of anticipation colored all the chores of planning future issues of her magazine, because the future was now the future for both Judy and her daughter. She picked up the telephone. “Dick?” she said, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice as she spoke to New York’s most famous portrait photographer, “I want you to take a very special picture for me.…”

Next, she called her florist. “Do you have tiger lilies?” she
asked, her voice quivering. “Then please send every single one to Mademoiselle Lili at the Pierre, and put a card with it saying … “With all my love, Mother.” As she hung up, she savored that word. All her life she had thought of a mother as someone like her own mother—disappointed and inwardly desperate. The picture of that ineffectual woman, setting out for Chapel every Sunday, flashed into Judy’s mind. Sin and its avoidance were the only things in which her mother had seemed interested, and when Judy’s father had plodded home from the grocery store to break the news that he had lost everything, all her mother had done was to kneel and pray; she had merely accepted the disaster, and hadn’t tried to fight it. Motherhood, to Judy, meant drudgery, dependence and the sublimation of all the joy of living into faith in an unforgiving God. But now that Judy herself was a mother—truly a mother—with a living daughter to prove it, the notion of motherhood began to become exciting. Her morning rushed by in a froth of delight.

“D’you suppose there’s a new man in Mrs. Jordan’s life?” wondered the junior secretary as, one after another, the magazine’s senior staff came out of the pastel-painted office looking startled, but pleased, because for once their proposals had been received with uncritical enthusiasm. “Did you know that Griffin Lowe’s wife walked out on him last week?” the senior assistant whispered as she stood up to take in Judy’s morning mail. “I think that’s why she’s lit up. When your lover’s wife finally concedes after ten years, it must feel pretty good.”

*   *   *

Every Friday, Kate the editor and Judy the publisher of
VERVE!
had a weekly editorial conference for all staff. It always took place over lunch in Judy’s office. The ten men and women who created the magazine pulled up lucite chairs and hurled ideas at each other for an hour and a half over the long table, cold meats, cheese and sodas. Judy found the Friday conference an excellent way to channel the thoughts of her staff for the weekend, and Monday always produced a satisfying stack of memos which crystalized the ideas that had been thrown about during the Friday brainstorming session.

Today, Kate’s green eyes flicked over her agenda, as she tried to work up the necessary enthusiasm to motivate her
staff. Thank heaven, next week she’d be away from the highly polished, shallow world, where, at the end of the day, nothing could happen without the lipstick advertisements. It had been eleven years since her last best seller, eleven years since she’d done something worthwhile on her own, and now she was itching for the end of the month, when she was to start her first sabbatical—a year on her own.

Suddenly, Kate was startled to hear Judy ask, “What do we think about working mothers?” She picked up a stick of celery and nipped off the end. “I’m concerned that our feature coverage is getting too heavy on emotional and sexual issues; we didn’t get two million readers by treating them as if they had nothing more important to think about than multiple orgasms. I want some solid feature ideas about the basics of our readers’ lives.”

The team couldn’t believe it. Family life was a no-no on the magazine. Few principles were written on tablets of stone in that office, but one of the unbreakable commandments was that children should never be mentioned between those assertive, glossy covers. Both Judy and Kate were childless.

The youngest assistant editor tentatively said, “The last readership survey showed that the majority of
VERVE!
readers planned on working again after they had started their families.” She picked up a celery stick with the same gesture as Judy; she was editing an article on body-language-in-the-workplace, which advised that mirroring a superior’s movements was a good way to establish subliminal empathy.

“Let’s have a breakdown of those figures.” Judy snapped the celery stick. “I want to know everything we can find out about our readers’ attitudes toward children, childcare, stepparents—that whole important area.”

There was an astounded silence as Judy continued, “And I’d like to see us become a little less parochial, a little more international. How about a regular feature on successful European women? Starting, of course, with internationally known actresses.”

“Our readers don’t relate to these European stars.” Judy’s business partner, Tom Schwartz, raised his eyes from the hot dog he’d had sent up. He winked across the table at his wife, Kate, and Kate knew that the idea was about to get firmly
kicked at, as Tom continued. “My instinct is that our readers are interested in the new identity that women are creating for themselves and these sexy actresses from over the ocean merely represent everything they want to reject. They aren’t relevant to a girl who’s focused on getting her qualifications and her business skills in shape.”

Judy was about to protest when she realized she was overreacting. Twenty-four hours ago, she, too, had also considered Lili a glamorous, irrelevant, continental pain in the ass.

Kate wished that Tom hadn’t taken a stand on European stars, since she was about to do as Judy asked and propose the feature on Lili, without telling the magazine staff the full significance of the story. Now she was forced to override her husband’s opinion in public and, despite Tom’s unsinkable self-esteem, she felt ungracious as she announced, “There’s always an element of risk when we’re trying a new idea. But I’ve decided that we’re going to run a major interview with Lili in the December issue.”