Lace (10 page)

Kate shook her head in disbelief, Maxine flung her arms around her and hugged her, Pagan whooped with delight and a flock of knowing waiters lined her path to the little stage where, scarlet
with surprise and pleasure, a pale blue sash that read “Miss Gstaad 1948” was draped around her by the majordomo, who then propped a diamanté tiara on her hair, presented her
with two magnums of champagne and stood at her side in an avuncular pose as photographers’ flashlights popped.

“We’ll be having trouble with
that
one,” muttered one of the harassed mademoiselles who had been sent to escort the Hirondelle girls.

It was an accurate forecast.

B
Y THE END
of November nearly all the schoolgirls had steady boyfriends and had discovered that the little town was
astonishingly full of places for secret meetings. They met behind the church, in stables and in barns, crouching in the backs of cars, in the back of the ski shop, in tearooms on the outskirts of
town or on top of the ski runs. On the weekends the Eggli, the Wasserngrat, the Hornberg and the Wispile each had their quota of courting couples, as did the inns and cafés of nearby
villages such as Saanen and Château d’Oex, which had already catered to generations of foreign finishing-school girls suffering from the symptoms of puppy love.

After a Saturday night spent with their hair twisted up in paper curlers and their faces covered in cream or dried mud to prevent wrinkles, the l’Hirondelles invariably headed for the
Chesa. Their show of self-confidence barely hid their uncertainty and indecision. One remark or laugh could produce an instant, hateful blush—and it was doubly humiliating to be betrayed by
one’s own neck. Flirtatious and pert, conscious only of their appearance and their audience, the girls appeared not to notice the young men who were sitting at nearby tables, tilting their
chairs back, impatient but resigned to all this feminine playacting, as the girls pretended to ignore them.

Unexpectedly, for the first time in their lives, the girls had discovered they possessed a sort of power. Once she realised this, each girl felt a strange pride in being able to enslave a
boy—or two or three, which made a girl twice or three times as powerful. None of them realised the strength or dangers of this sudden sexual power; they never realised that it could be black
magic or white magic, depending on how you used or abused it. In 1948, sex appeal was
power,
the only power these girls were ever likely to get, and you used as much of it as you had as hard
as you could and full blast! Naturally, the girls knew their own prim petting cutoff points, but it never once occurred to any of them that a man might find it difficult to switch off his own
powerful urges at the moment when it suited the girl to do so. It never occurred to any of them that the power they had raised in the man was not only passion but, if thwarted, the power to rape or
kill. The reactions of a frustrated man had never been explained to any of them.

Judy acted as postbox for all the adolescent lovers. For the first time since term started, dictionaries were thumbed, grammars consulted and Maxine was much in demand as a translator. Judy also
passed messages about meeting places, which often depended on the weather. When she placed a bill or a paper-lace napkin on a table it might well be accompanied by a note that read, “Sheila,
Nursery slope ski lift at five,” or
“Hélas! Gérard chéri, impossible cette semaine. Samedi prochain à trois heures, ton Isabel.”

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 lopsidedly
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!”