Lace (19 page)

Guy looked worried. “To date there has been no need for a
vendeuse
because my clients know me and they bring their friends. They think it’s intriguing to come to this shabby
place—they feel they’re getting something cheap, which of course they
are.
Also they feel they are in on a new discovery, which I hope is true. Now, how do you like that,
ma
chère
?” He stepped back and Judy moved carefully to the mirror. She was wearing the classically draped dress of a Grecian goddess.

“Oh, how I long for this!”

“When I’m richer, then we shall see. At the moment every sou I spend is vital.” He rapidly unpinned her and deftly caught the length of silk as it fell from her shoulders.
“Now can I offer you an aperitif?”

He opened the adjoining door that led to his bedroom, a strange contrast to the immaculate, severely practical room in which they stood. Guy’s personal possessions—books, underwear,
shoes—were piled on the end of the bed, which was the only semiempty space in a room crammed with half-draped tailor’s dummies, metal clothes racks, bales of muslin and paper patterns.
Guy pushed the heap of books and shoes farther down the bed and the three of them sat cross-legged on it, sipping white vermouth from one toothmug and two paper cups, as the girls listened to
Guy’s plans. He outlined his career and spread his life plan before them—almost as clear as the aerial view from the Arc de Triomphe had been yesterday, Judy thought wistfully as she
said, “You sound so confident.”

“Myself? I live in constant self-doubt, indecision and secret panic about my capability,” Guy said. He added gloomily, “You have no idea what agony it is to decide whether a
jacket should be double or single-breasted—and such a decision is vital because I cannot afford to produce many garments, so it has to be the one or the other. And until I can afford an
assistant, there is no one with whom to discuss
anything.
I tell you, it’s lonely at the bottom.”

“I know what you mean,” said Judy. “I’m going to miss Maxine dreadfully. I’ll have no one to chat with, not even a room to live in as yet.”

“Why not move in here?” Guy suggested. “It’s the cheapest decent place I could find, only five hundred francs a night—that’s about two dollars isn’t it?
The Left Bank is full of cheap rooming hotels for students, but
this
one is clean, and they bring you breakfast in bed, if you can afford it. When I had influenza I had three breakfasts a
day sent up. And there’s a telephone; they take messages if you tip that surly bastard in the hall once a month.”

“A wonderful idea,” Maxine said. “Guy can keep an eye on you, and you can advise him on double or single breasts.”

On their way to dinner, they stopped at the hall desk where Maxine negotiated with the surly porter over monthly rates and got a fifteen percent discount. Then they walked along the rue
Bonaparte to the noisy Beaux Arts restaurant on the corner. Lifting her glass of wine, Judy felt much more settled. Now all she needed was a job.

Judy didn’t feel so cheerful two days later when she went job hunting.

Armed with her Swiss diplomas, she was interviewed in a shabby employment office where she sat in line until her name was called. She was interrogated by a woman of uncertain age, with a
typically French face—that combination of sallow skin, weary brown eyes and expensively gilded hair pulled back in a chignon. She spoke very fast and Judy stuttered when making her replies.
At the end of the interview, the woman gave a long sniff to imply doubt, shrugged her shoulders to imply resignation, then pulled a large kitchen timer out of her drawer and gave Judy a typing
test. In spite of the intimidating atmosphere, Judy passed. The woman gave another long sniff to imply surprise, shrugged her shoulders to imply that one never knows, made four telephone calls,
handed Judy four address cards and sent her off to her first interview.

Having finally located the building, Judy took the cagelike elevator to an airless office where she was interviewed by a finicky little fat man who kept looking down and brushing his left sleeve
as he asked his questions. After he turned her down, she went on to the next interview, and, in all, spent a week and a half visiting similar dingy offices. They were all painted gray or beige,
smelled of dust and old biscuits and the desks were piled with overstuffed, crumpled, cream cardboard files. Finally, after being beaten down from the salary that the agency had quoted, Judy was
accepted as a temporary secretary by a large, middle-aged fabric importer, with a face like a gray egg upon which had been painted a drooping black mustache. He dictated in French, but when
necessary, Judy translated his letters into English or German before typing them, and struggled with the innumerable custom forms that were necessary to get tweed from Scotland and linen from
Dublin to Paris, or to send silk from Lyons and lace from Valenciennes to New York. Her employer obviously regarded her as nothing more than a walking, talking, typing machine and made no effort to
speak to her apart from a brief
“B’jour, mademoiselle.”

“I wore your beautiful silk dress to a ball last night, and I danced every dance with a different young man—and I was bored limp,” Maxine said gloomily to her
Aunt Hortense as they sat in the small, maple-wood panelled library of Aunt Hortense’s Paris apartment. Maxine, who had sought the meeting, was tense but determined.

“I can’t seem to talk about this to my parents without a fight. Anybody would think we were living in 1850, not 1950. Mama can’t understand that I don’t
want
to go
to all the right parties and dance with all the right men, then marry one of them. I don’t want to marry Pierre, the god of the ski-slopes, and then have a complete duplicate of the dull,
comfortable life that my mother has led.”

Under her huge, green-brimmed straw hat, Aunt Hortense raised bushy eyebrows above her big bony nose and sniffed. Unlike Judy, Maxine was a bit frightened of her aunt, who now nodded without
saying anything. Encouraged, Maxine continued. “Of course I love my family, but I don’t want to be part of that nursery life any longer. I want to get away from them. I want to have a
life of my
own.
‘You will have, if you marry the Boursal boy,’ says Mama.” She mimicked her mother’s exasperated voice. “Pierre has already spoken to Papa, you
know, but when I visit his parents in that apartment on the Avenue George V, I can’t get out fast enough. It’s claustrophobic and I feel trapped again. Although it’s much grander
than our home—white marble and a black maid—his mother leads exactly the same life as my mother, except that
she
does it in haute-couture clothes. I don’t
want
to
marry Pierre because I don’t
want
that life.”

Angrily Maxine bit her thumbnail although there was little left to bite. “And there’s another more important reason. Pierre is really only interested in skiing, you know. I realise
that sounds ridiculous and you’re going to tell me that it will pass, but I think that with him, when it does pass, nothing else will take its place. He’s rich and he likes to ski; he
doesn’t like to work and there’s no reason why he should.” She looked up at her aunt pleadingly. “But I couldn’t stand being married to a rich ski bum, especially an
aging
rich ski bum. So I’m going to refuse Pierre, and then I want to leave Paris for a bit. I know Paris. I’ve lived here all my life. I want to visit other places—London
and Rome.”

Again Aunt Hortense nodded slowly in order to give herself time to think. At that age, many girls felt like Maxine, but the child was unusually impatient in this attempt to get what she wanted.
In time, Maxine would learn to move slowly and carefully in order to get her own way, not to crash aggressively into a prerehearsed argument like this one. She would learn that, whoever she
married.

“What exactly
do
you want?” Aunt Hortense asked.

“I want to go to London and learn to be an interior decorator, then come back to Paris and open my own concern.
You
are the one who started to educate my eye—shopping for
clothes with you, shopping for antiques with you, going around museums with you.
You
have your own style. Now I want to develop one of my own. French designers are still doing the same thing
that they’ve been doing since before the war. Stuffy, overdecorated, overexpensive interiors. This is not what I want to do.” She looked up from under her lashes. “I’m going
to ask Papa to let me study in London for two years. I want you to persuade him to let me go because I know I can’t, and I know you can.”

Aunt Hortense nodded again as she tended to when she thought it prudent to say nothing.

Encouraged, Maxine continued. “My friend Pagan says that the best London decorator is James Partridge, who’s just done her mother’s flat. She says he’s got a marvellous
understanding of colour and antiques and Pagan’s already talked to him. She’s asked if he could find a job for me.”

Aunt Hortense nodded again. It was not such a stupid idea. It was always useful if one married well. It would certainly improve the girl’s eye and if she were making money, then she could
hardly be spending it.

So she asked Maxine’s parents to one of her smaller, grander dinner parties. She seated Maxine’s father between a mildly famous, mildly flirtatious actress and a pretty little
Countess who had been widowed the previous year and was rumoured not to be inconsolable. Maxine’s father enjoyed himself hugely. After the meal, when her guests were sitting over brandy and
coffee in the library, his sister drew him to one side and said, “A little word with you, Louis, about my goddaughter. I feel that Maxine shouldn’t waste any more time socializing in
Paris. It’s time that she continued her education.”

“Well, we rather assume that she’s going to marry the Boursal boy. . . .”

“Oh, surely not, surely that’s not what you want for your clever daughter? That blockhead? Why, the girl is hardly out of school and you want to marry her to a brainless idiot like
that! No, I think that Maxine takes after you. She is clever, she shows a definite talent for the arts. It would be a good idea if she studied them seriously.”

“Well, perhaps you’re right, Hortense,” said Maxine’s father, who really didn’t think it was important what Maxine did before she married provided it didn’t
cost him too much. “I’ll ask her mother to see what courses are available at the Beaux Arts.”

“Very wise of you, Louis. And there’s one other small thing that should be attended to. Her English isn’t nearly good enough—not nearly as good as yours. She speaks
English the way Winston Churchill speaks French—
exécrable!
What I should most like to see for her is two years in London, studying with a really good decorator. One learns so
much faster in practice than in theory, don’t you think?”

“London? Two years?
You must be mad, Hortense, her mother would never let her go. She’s only nineteen, remember.”

“You’ve just implied that she’s old enough to be married. Besides she has friends in London. Oh, Louis, think what a joyless adolescence
we
had. She has such talent,
your Maxine! Surely you wish to allow the poor child to spread her wings a little before she has to knuckle down to the serious and often tedious business of being a wife.”

There was a pause. “And if I allowed her to go to London, to whom would she go?”

“The best decorator in London, of course,” said Aunt Hortense decisively, “and that is Monsieur Partridge. I have no idea whether there’s a free place in his office, and
I don’t know if he charges for apprentices, but I can telephone him tomorrow and find out. No! No! It would be a
pleasure
for me to attend to your wishes in this matter,
Louis.”

She led him back to the library, quite pleased with herself. It was amazing how you could spoonfeed flattery to a grown man.

So in due course, after kissing Judy good-bye, Maxine caught the Golden Arrow to London. Kate and Pagan were waiting at Victoria Station. Kate had already rented a basement apartment in Chelsea
for herself and Maxine. There were only two small, dark rooms, but it was in Walton Street, a charming little road of tiny nineteenth-century houses in Chelsea.

Every evening at six, Judy rushed from the depressing office back to her shabby, overblown-rose-patterned room at the Hotel de Londres. The room overlooked an inner courtyard
that was as full of life as a soap opera. Nobody ever seemed to draw the curtains, and beyond the other windows you could hear the fights, see the lovemaking and smell the cooking from the
apartments on the opposite side.

As Guy’s collection progressed, his own bedroom grew less habitable, so when he finished work he would climb two further flights of stairs to Judy’s room for a glass of wine and
sympathy. Sitting cross-legged on her pillow, she quickly learned about the world of French couture.

“One whole day wasted on fittings,” groaned Guy one evening, throwing himself onto the bottom of the bed. “How I long to design for the boutique market!”

“What difference will that make?”

“Mass orders,
ma chère.
Mass manufacturing and
no
damned fittings. A haute-couture garment is made to order and has three sacred, time-wasting fittings, but boutique
clothes are made in batches, in standard sizes, and are sold ready-to-wear. It’s up to the customer or the store to alter them, if necessary.”

Judy leaned under her bed for the wine bottle and filled two small glasses. “I thought you liked couture customers?”

“Only because I have to. Very few women can afford couture clothes. All of them are spoiled, and most of them are fickle. Hardly any women stick to one couture house, except the best
dressed ones.” He sipped his wine very slowly, then continued. “Celebrity clients often borrow ball-gowns for a gala, then return them dirty, sometimes even torn, with never a word of
thanks.
Zut!
I don’t want to spend
my
life at the mercy of a few rich bitches who spend
their
life dressing for cocktails.” Suddenly he sat up and pointed under the
washbasin.
“Nom d’un nom
, what is
that
?” Standing on a strip of linoleum was a wastepaper basket, and propped up in it in a nest of aluminum foil lay an upended
electric iron.