Old Sins (23 page)

‘How old is your daughter?’

‘She’s nine months old,’ said Julian.

‘Well, that’s a lovely age,’ said Madeleine. ‘I wish they could stay like that. Our C. J. is just a little older. He’ll be down in a minute, his nurse is taking him out for a walk. Maybe when they’re older he and your Rosamund can be friends. I’d really like that. Oh, look, here he is now. C. J. come and say hallo to Mr Morell.’

The nurse, smiling, carried C. J. over to Julian; the child looked at him solemnly and then buried his head in her shoulder.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Julian, ‘don’t I even get a smile?’

Madeleine held out her arms, took the child; he turned and smiled suddenly at Julian. He had brown hair, and large brown eyes; they held a slightly tremulous expression. Madeleine kissed him and then handed him back to the nurse. She went out, talking quietly to the baby under her breath.

‘He’s sweet,’ said Julian. ‘What’s his real name?’

‘Well, he was christened Christopher John, but the nursemaid we had then called him C. J. and it kind of stuck. He’s so terribly different from his sister, it’s funny how you can tell so early. He’s quieter, and he doesn’t try and push the world around like she did at that age. I don’t think he’s ever had a temper tantrum. She’ll be running for president by the time she’s seventeen. But he’s such a nice little boy. I suppose he may toughen up.’

Julian thought of C. J.’s soft brown eyes, his shy smile, and thought it would be rather a pity if he did.

Julian spent most of those two years in New York working harder than he had ever worked in his life, even during the very early days of the company, in a total commitment to seeing his vision become reality. It was not unusual for him to work right through the night, and occasionally half of the next one as well; he missed meals, he cancelled social engagements, and he expected precisely the same dedication from everyone working with him.

Nathan and Hartman, considered to be the finest architects in New York, had initially been hired to work on the store, and were fired within weeks because their plans didn’t meet with Julian’s absolute approval; a second firm met the same fate. Then a young French architect, Paul Baud, arrived at the Pierre one evening and asked to see Julian. He had a small portfolio under his arm, and he looked about nineteen. Julian had sighed when he heard he was downstairs; then he said he would give him five minutes and if he hadn’t convinced him by then he would have to go away again. Baud drew out of his portfolio the plans for a tiny hotel in Paris and a small store in Lyons which was the only work he had ever done, and spent the entire night in the bar at the Pierre with Julian, drawing, talking, listening. Then he went away for a week and came back with the plans complete. Julian hardly altered a thing.

He went to Paris for his beauty therapists, knowing that only there would he find the crucial combination of knowledge, mystique and deep-seated belief in the importance of beauty treatment that would have the women of New York paying visits three or four times a week to his salons. He installed on the fifth floor an extraordinary range of equipment and treatments, massage machines, passive exercisers, seaweed and mud baths, steam cabinets, infra-red sunbeds, saunas, and a battery of masseurs, visagistes, hair stylists, manicurists, dietitians. There was a small excessively well-heated swimming pool, a gymnasium, a bar that sold pure fruit and vegetable juices, and a few dimly lit cubicles fitted out with nothing but beds and telephones, where the ladies, exhausted from a morning’s toil, could sleep for an hour or so before setting forth to buy the clothes, jewellery, perfume and make-up to adorn their tortured, treated, bodies.

Buyers were brought in from all over the world: from Milan, Rome, London, Paris, Nice, San Francisco: men and women who did not just know about fashion and clothes but had it in their blood, who could recognize a new line, a dazzling colour, a perfect fabric as surely as they could tell their own names, their own desires.

Julian hired a young greedy advertising agency called Silk diMaggio to promote the store, ignoring the sober advice of Philip Mainwaring to go to Young and Rubicam or Doyle Dane.

Nigel Silk was old money, new style, born of a Boston banking family, who had perfected the art of appearing establishment while questioning every one of its tenets; he was tall, blond – ‘By Harvard out of Brooks Brothers,’ Scott Emerson described him – charming and civilized.

Mick diMaggio, on the other hand, was no money at all, the youngest of the eight children of a third-generation Italian immigrant, who ran a deli just off Broadway. Mick talked like Italian ice cream spiked with bourbon, and wrote the same way; Julian looked at the creative roughs he produced for the poster campaign – a young beautiful woman, lying quite clearly in the aftermath of sexual love, under the headline ‘The absolute experience’ – and threw up his hands in pleasure.

‘This,’ he said, ‘will empty Bergdorf s.’

They were a formidable team.

One of its most formidable parts was Camilla North.

Camilla North was born ambitious.

So eager had she been to get out into the world and start achieving that she had actually arrived nearly four weeks early; she was walking at seven months old, talking at nine; she was at dancing class at two, riding at three and reading and writing at four.

By the time she was ten she had become a superb horsewoman, an accomplished dancer, and was gaining honours in examinations in both the piano and the violin; by way of recreation she was also learning the classical guitar. She promised to be a brilliant linguist and mathematician, and was the only pupil at her exclusive girls’ school ever to have gained a hundred per cent mark in Latin at the end-of-year examinations three years running.

The interesting thing about Camilla was that she was not actually especially gifted at most of the things she excelled at; she had talents, minor facilities, but because she had a fierce, burning need to do everything better than anybody else, she was prepared to put sufficient, monumental even, effort into it to fulfil that need. A rare enough quality in an adult, it was an extraordinary thing to find in a child; her piano teacher, coming to the house to give her her lesson, frequently found her white with exhaustion, on the point of tears, labouring over some difficult piece or set of scales; her mother would often tell people in a mixture of pride and concern that ever since she had been a tiny child she had got up half an hour earlier than she need, in order to practise her ballet; she was hardly ever to be seen simply fooling around and enjoying her pony, but spent long hours practising her dressage skills, endlessly crossing and traversing the paddock, changing legs, pacing out figures of eight; she even insisted on learning to ride side-saddle; and if she was ever found to have fallen asleep over a book, it would be her Latin grammar and not a story book.

She even extended this capacity to what would normally be regarded as fun; when she first was given a bicycle she went out to the back yard with it and said she wouldn’t come in until she could ride it. Five hours later she was still out there, in the dark, both knees cut, both elbows badly bruised, a fast swelling lip where she had struck it on the handlebars – and an expression of complete triumph on her face as she rode round and round the lawn.

Nobody could quite work out what drove her. She was the much-loved oldest child and only daughter of Mary and William North; amateur psychologist friends of the family said she was trying to hold her own against the competition on offer from her three younger brothers but as none of them were nearly as clever or as successful as she was (although it had to be said none of them worked nearly so hard) this did not seem an entirely satisfactory explanation. Neither did it seem to be genetically determined; William North was old money; a charming, and gentle-mannered man, with a large and successful law practice in Philadelphia that he had inherited from his father. He worked hard and he was a clever man, but his instinct in confrontation of any kind was to withdraw, and he
had no serious desire to see his firm taking on the world – or even the rest of Philadelphia. Mary North was even older money, still more charming and gentle-mannered, with no serious desire to do anything at all except keep her household running smoothly and happily; she was slightly frightened by her restless, brilliant little daughter and felt more at ease with her sons. But William was fiercely proud of her; they were very best friends, and would sit for hours after dinner, discussing politics, playing chess (this was the only time Camilla could bear to lose at anything) or simply reading together, while the boys loafed around, watching television and playing rock and roll records.

Camilla went, inevitably to Vassar, a year young; she graduated, summa cum laude, in languages, and also studied fine arts. She left in 1956, with a reputation as the most brilliant girl not just of her year but several years; and also as the most beautiful.

Camilla sometimes wondered what she would have done if she had been born plain. Being beautiful was as important to her as being clever; she simply could not bear to be anything but the loveliest, and the best-dressed woman, in a room. Fortunately for her she almost always was. She had a curly tangled mane of red-gold hair, transparently pale skin, and dramatically dark brown eyes. She was very tall and extremely slender; she had in fact a genetic tendency, a legacy from her mother, to put on weight, and from the age of twelve when she had heard somebody say she was developing puppy fat, she had been on a ferocious diet. Nobody had ever seen Camilla North put butter on her bread or sugar in her coffee; she never ate cheese, avocados, cereal or cookies; she weighed herself twice a day, and if the scales tipped an ounce over eight stone, she simply stopped eating altogether until they went back again. She quite often went to bed hungry, and dreamed about food.

She always dressed superbly; sharp stark slender clothes, in brilliant red, stinging blue, or emerald. At college she had been famous for her cashmere, her kilts, her loafers, a supreme example of the preppy look; but as soon as she left, she abandoned them and moved into dresses, suits, grown-up clothes, the severity always relieved by some witty dashing accessory, a scarf, a big necklace, a wide leather belt in some
brilliant unexpected colour. She loved shoes; she had dozens of pairs, mostly classic courts with very high heels which she somehow managed to move gracefully in; but she looked best of all in her riding clothes, in her white breeches, black jacket, and her long, wonderfully worn and polished boots, her red hair scooped severely back. She occasionally hunted side-saddle; it was an extraordinary display of horsemanship and she looked more wonderful still, in a navy habit and white stock, a top hat covering her wild hair. So much did she like her habit that she had a version of it made in velvet for the evening; she wore it without a shirt, and with a pearl choker at her throat, her hair cascading over her shoulders; it was a sight that took men’s breath away, and it was this that she was wearing when she first met Julian Morell.

She was living in New York by then, in a small, walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village. It was several months since she had left Vassar, and she had not yet found a definite job to do. She had found the debutante and the social scene boring, and she had, besides, considerable hopes and ambitions for herself; she came to New York to seek her fortune, preferably in the field of the arts. She had hopes of working in the theatre, as a designer; or perhaps in the world of interior design. She met Paul Baud at a party; he was immediately impressed by her, and told her he was looking for designers for a new store; why didn’t she let her talents and imagination loose on a department or two. It was a new concept for Camilla; she sat at her drawing board virtually without food or rest for almost thirty-six hours before she was even remotely satisfied with what she had done. She delivered the drawings to Paul’s office without even asking to see him, so sure was she that she would never hear from him about them again.

She had chosen to live alone, against considerable opposition from her parents, for two reasons; one was that she liked her own company. The other was that she had hardly any friends. Camilla had no idea how to make friends. All her life she had been entirely occupied with struggling, striving, working; she had never had a best friend to talk to, giggle with, confide in, not even as a small girl. She had gone to children’s parties, she was pleasant and friendly and nobody disliked her,
but nobody liked her particularly either. She was too serious, too earnest, there was too little common ground. Later on, in her teens, she went to fewer parties, because she tended to get left out; she didn’t mind, because she was so busy. But at college she became much sought after, because of the way she adorned a room, set a seal on a gathering; she was not exactly popular, but she was a status symbol, she was asked everywhere.

Nevertheless she remained friendless, solitary; and she had no gift for casual encounters. On Sundays for instance, when the other girls went for walks or spent long hours chatting, giggling, talking about men, making tea and toast, she would sit alone in her room, studying or reading, declining with a polite smile any invitations to join them.

She was perfectly happy; her friendlessness did not worry her. It worried and surprised other people, but it was of no importance to her. What would have surprised other people, also, and was perhaps of a little more importance to her, was that at the age of twenty-one she was not only a virgin, but she had never been in love.

Julian was immediately impressed by Camilla’s drawings, brought to him by Paul late one Friday evening; feverish with excitement about his project, desperate to progress it further, he asked to meet her immediately. Paul phoned the number of Camilla’s apartment in Greenwich, and got no answer; urged on by Julian’s impatience to see her, he tried her parents’ number. Yes, they were told, Miss North would indeed be back that night; she had gone to the opera with her parents and was coming home for the weekend.