Lace (3 page)

However, the worst part of winter had been getting into bed under the cold heaviness of the linen sheets. Once beyond the heat range of the oil stove, Pagan’s bones would ache and her body
become gradually numb until sleep mercifully anesthetized the dull pain.

At this memory, although it was hot for October, the forty-six-year-old Pagan shivered in her pink wool Jean Muir coat.

As usual, Pagan was staying at the Algonquin, where she felt oddly at home. The lobby had the slightly seedy, unwarrantedly superior air of a London club with its high-backed, shabby leather
wing chairs and dim, parchment-shaded lights. Her room was small but surprisingly pretty after the calculated gloom of the lobby. A comfortable, pink velvet armchair stood on the grass-green
carpet; artful lace scatter pillows, cunningly placed brass lamps, a few bird pictures in golden frames spoke of the skillful decorator’s touch. The old-fashioned, newly smart brass bedstead
reminded Pagan of the nursery at Trelawney and the dark-green-on-white trellis wallpaper swept her mind back to the conservatory where her grandfather used to read the
Times
every morning,
surrounded by slumbering dogs, palms, ferns and tropical plants. The conservatory was heated by long, hot, brown tubes that writhed around the walls at floor level and burned your fingers if you
touched them. It was easily the warmest, if not the
only
warm spot in that drafty mansion, especially when the wind was blowing straight off the sea, sweeping harshly over granite-grim
cliffs to the rhododendron-encircled lawns. The conservatory was also a terrific place to hide from her mother; with a book and an apple, Pagan would slither like a lizard under jade fronds and
jagged malachite spikes, concealed by yellow froth and spumescent greens.

Pagan could hardly remember her father, who had been killed in a car crash when only twenty-six. Pagan, then three years old, had been left with a vague memory of a scratchy cheek and a
scratchy, tweed-kneed lap. The only traces of her father were the row of silver trophy cups, which stood on the oak shelves in the study, for school swimming matches and county golf, faded sepia
photographs of cricket teams, and a group of laughing people at a beach picnic.

After his death, until she was ten and had to go to school in London, Pagan and her mother made their home with Grandfather at Trelawney, where Pagan had been both spoiled and toughened. When
she was three years old, she had been taken out into the bay and lowered over the side of the dinghy in Grandfather’s arms to learn to swim. When she was thirteen months old she had been put
on her first pony; the reins were placed in her baby hands and her grandfather walked her around the paddock every morning so that she would learn to ride before she was old enough to be
frightened; she first hunted with Grandfather Trelawney when she was eight.

It was her grandfather who had taught Pagan courtesy. He listened politely and with genuine interest to everybody, whether it was one of his tenants, the village postman or his neighbour, Lord
Tregerick; the people Grandfather couldn’t stand were what he called “the money chaps”—lawyers, bankers, accountants. Grandfather never looked at bills, he simply passed
them on to his agent to be paid.

Pagan had always been surrounded by servants, many of whom were there because her grandfather hated to dismiss anyone. Somebody put Pagan’s gloves on, somebody pulled her boots off,
somebody brushed her hair at night, and somebody put her clothes away, so the little girl grew up to be compulsively untidy. Pagan always remembered the soft rustle of the housemaid’s skirt
as she carried brass cans of hot water to the bedroom in the early morning and stood them by the rose-patterned washbasin; the blissful warmth of the butler’s pantry, where Briggs cleaned the
silver and kept the flower-decorated Minton dinner service on shelves behind glass doors; the cozy warmth and fragrance of the big kitchen; the resigned, sour face of her grandfather’s valet
as he scratched the mud from Pagan’s riding clothes in the brushing room.

Pagan seldom saw her mother, and when she did put in an appearance she was obviously bored. She hated the country; there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Cornwall in the 1930s was hardly
sophisticated and Pagan’s mother certainly was. Short hair sleeked beetle-neat against heavy, dead-white makeup; the daily masterpiece, a scarlet glistening mouth, was painted over her real
mouth, which was much thinner; red traces of Pagan’s mother could be found on glasses, cups, towels and innumerable cigarette butts. Mrs. Trelawney often went up to London, and when she came
back, she brought her London friends down for the weekend. Pagan disliked them, but nevertheless, she picked up much of their Mayfair slang, and for the rest of her life her conversation was dotted
with their dated, breathless exaggerations.

Now in 1978 Pagan still missed her grandfather and regretted that her husband had never met him—or stayed at Trelawney before it had been transformed. Not that her grandfather would have
had anything in common with her husband, who was interested only in books and his work. He took no interest in Pagan’s fundraising—although without the money she raised, he would have
been unable to continue his research. Exasperated, she sometimes scolded him. When she did, he would hug her and say, “Darling, I’m sorry white mice are so expensive.”

Pagan knew that he was proud of her work, though at first her forthright business methods had alarmed him. Sometimes she suspected they still did.

She always hated to leave her husband, but after his heart attack it was unwise for him to travel; he was better off at home with help close at hand, a semi-invalid, but still one of the
wittiest, cleverest and most distinguished men in the world. Although neither of them spoke about it, the past sixteen years had been a very special bonus—but sixteen years of constant care
to keep him alive and working would be triumphantly worth that effort if now, as seemed likely, he might at last succeed within the next ten years. The question that they never asked each other was
whether he could
last
until then. That was why Pagan hated to leave her husband, even to discuss the possibility of a major donation to the Institute.

And from such an unexpected source.

In the scarf-scattered, gumboot-glutted, coat-choked, stone-paved passage of her cottage on the Trelawney estate, Pagan had answered the telephone and heard the low, husky voice of Lili herself.
As casually as if she were suggesting meeting in the next village, Lili had asked Pagan to travel to America to meet her on a matter that was both urgent and confidential. Pagan had been astonished
by the telephone call. International film stars weren’t in the habit of phoning her out of the blue and she had never met Lili, though of course she’d heard about her. One could hardly
avoid hearing about that romantic, talented, sad creature.

On the telephone, the film star had spoken in a quiet, serious voice. “I’ve heard so much about your projects,” she said. “I’m fascinated by the wonderful work your
husband is doing and I’d like to discuss a way in which I might be of help.”

When Pagan had politely pressed Lili for further details, Lili had explained that her American accountant had suggested several possible ways in which Lili might contribute, some extending over
several years, and he had suggested a preliminary meeting in New York with Lili’s tax advisers. It sounded as if a really big contribution was going to be made and a very generous check had
then been sent to Pagan to cover her first-class travel expenses.

Sitting in the stationary cab and listening to the driver swear in Spanish, Pagan wished that she didn’t feel so utterly awful. The waving mahogany hair that fell to her shoulders always
looked fine, but today her face was puffy, her blue eyes dull, her eyelids swollen, and she looked all of her forty-six years.

New York time is five hours earlier than London. Pagan had arrived the previous evening, and after only a few hours’ sleep, she woke at two in the morning, which was breakfast time in
Britain. She wasn’t able to concentrate on her book and she hadn’t been able to get to sleep again. She never took sleeping pills or any other medicine, not even aspirin.

She was terrified of getting hooked again.

Sleek black skyscrapers loomed slightly darker than the sky. You don’t know how many shades of black there are until you’ve been in fashion or the printing
business, Kate thought, as she hurried along West 58th Street, slightly late as usual. When she left the office at six-ten the sky had been pale blue and cream, but now, at six-thirty, it was dark.
For a moment Kate thought nostalgically of the long English autumn twilights, then she paused at Van Cleef & Arpels. The Empress Josephine’s diamond coronation tiara sat in state in one
window; Kate preferred it to the tiara in the other window, the more magnificent Russian Imperial diadem that had candy-sized emeralds set in a three-inch-thick blaze of diamonds. Again Kate
wondered why she hadn’t let Tom pull her through the revolving doors last Monday. Most men hadn’t even
heard
of Van Cleef, let alone know where it was, let alone offer to do a
little shopping there. “Let’s go get Josephine’s tiara,” Tom had said, tugging at her hand, and when she shook her head he had still tried to pull her in, pointing out that
emeralds went with anything. Why hadn’t she wanted to accept an expensive present from him? After all, her birthday was next week: she would be forty-six years old and she didn’t care a
bit. She didn’t need expensive reassurance; she had got what she had always wanted—a wonderful man and a wonderful job.

Now that she was a successful magazine editor, nobody would ever guess that for years Kate hadn’t known what she wanted or where she was going, that she had felt as little in control of
her life as a rag doll being tossed around in a washing machine. She felt she was being pushed around, all right, but she didn’t know in which direction. “Now, girl,” her father
always said, “remember you’re as good as anyone, Kathreen, remember that your dad’s got the wherewithal and that’s what
counts.
Nothing to stop you being
top
of the pile, and that’s where your dad expects you to be, make no mistake about it.”

The “wherewithal” had been the vast profits from the rows of identical small, squat red-brick houses that her father had built across central England. The “wherewithal”
had paid for better clothes, better cars, better holidays and a better home than her schoolmates’, but it had
not
been what counted; if anything, the “wherewithal” had been
responsible for unspoken resentment from some of the other girls at her London day school. Kate had
never
felt that she was as good as any of them, and neither was she
top.
She always
dreaded the arrival of the end-of-term reports, anticipating her father’s rages, the punishments and—most alarming of all—her father’s attempts to coach her: the more he
shouted the less she could remember.

She had been a cowed girl. The anger that she had never dared to show had built up in layers of silent resentment. She knew she was a moral coward, but she was terrified that argument would
rouse her father’s anger. So, like her mother, Kate always said as little as possible or fled.

Once they knew her well, men were always surprised to discover how easily they could make Kate do exactly what they wanted without a word of complaint from her. But then, when they pushed her
too far, she simply disappeared without a word of explanation.

As Kate couldn’t stand her father when he was alive, she couldn’t understand why, whenever one of her books hit the best-seller list, the wistful thought came unbidden into her head,
“Wish the old bugger could have seen
that
.” She couldn’t understand why she wanted the ogre of her youth, dead these twenty years, to be proud of her; she couldn’t
understand her disappointment because her father had died before she discovered what she was top
at,
before she could shout, “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’ve made it!” Kate
didn’t take much notice of her success, and neither did her friends, most of whom dated from the days when she was unknown, but her dad would have relished it, he would have cut her pictures
out of the newspapers, kept all her cuttings and alerted his buddies when she was about to be on television.

Certainly this new book sounded an easy winner, another potential best-seller. Lili’s story—true or false—should hit the list a week before publication. She was beautiful,
romantic, irresistibly fascinating, and the public lapped up every detail of her life; for instance,
how
many times had she read that Lili always wore white, whether it was satin or silk,
tweed or cotton? And of course Lili was a woman with a past—and what a past!

Before Lili had reached international status, when she had still been just another continental B-film actress who stripped in every movie, Kate had once spent some time hanging around the set in
a wet wood outside London and had subsequently written the first big story to treat the teenage Lili as a potential star. Kate had not heard from Lili since the interview, but the piece had been
syndicated around the world, which is why, Kate supposed, she had been summoned to the Pierre. Today, all the stars wanted an “as told to” autobiography. Nevertheless, she had been
surprised when Lili had telephoned in person and asked to meet her secretly.

Kate hurried toward the Plaza, smelled hot bagels and damp autumn mist, passed a group of blank-faced, bald-headed women, swathed in silver fox and lace, spotlit in Bergdorf’s window;
stopped at the traffic light beyond which was a blue police car, with two cops inside, both as bald and blank as the plaster models in Bergdorf’s. Kate crossed the street. Dark green, elegant
awnings stretched from apartment building doors across the sidewalk to where bored chauffeurs sat in spotless dark cars. Kate nodded to the blue-uniformed doorman, who saluted her as she swung
between the marble pillars of the Pierre Hotel, through the revolving doors and along the wide, cream corridor.