Lace (46 page)

After her tour Kate managed to steer Mrs. Trelawney to one side. “I can only stay down here for a week,” she said in a low voice that, nonetheless, conveyed her fury. “I want
to tidy up Pagan and the cottage as soon as possible. I’m sure you can let me have a couple of your cleaners tomorrow; I’d also like to take all the treatments that you offer, and I
want Pagan to take them with me. Perhaps you could give me the bill for both of us.”

“Frightfully kind of you,” Mrs. Trelawney said in a polite voice, as if she were commenting on the view, “but do please be my guest on the machines. I’m afraid that
treatments might be a little difficult to arrange because the appointment book is already full.”

“Well, cancel a few,” Kate said coldly, and went back to join Pagan by the swimming pool.

They drove to St. Austell in Kate’s silver Karmann Ghia. First, Kate bought food: meat, cheese, fruit, Bath Oliver biscuits, pickled onions, two tins of pâté de foie gras, a
box of homemade flapjacks, a honeycomb, clotted cream, black cherry jam, stone-ground bread, some Bendicks Bittermints and (because they were so pretty) a little bottle of crystalized violets. She
also bought a new set of pots and pans, some towels, flowered sheets, hand lotion and scented soap for the bathroom. Pagan protested but Kate firmly said, “Birthday present,” as she
scribbled another check for a couple of yellow-striped reclining chairs for the garden. Finally, she took Pagan to Jaeger and bought her a lavender cashmere sweater and matching tweed skirt with
plenty of hem to let down; then she chose another sweater and skirt in sage green.

Pagan had been fidgety since pub opening time at eleven-thirty in the morning, but Kate didn’t let her friend out of her sight. In order to avoid alcohol, Kate decided not to have lunch at
a hotel or a pub, so she bought a couple of steaming onion-and-meat-filled Cornish pasties, which they ate in the car. Pagan shivered as she dusted the crumbs from her skirt.

“Why are you wearing that mackintosh and not a coat,” asked Kate, “when you know how quickly the weather turns nasty down here? . . . I suppose you
do
possess a
coat?”

“Well, I
did
have one,” Pagan said, “but I left it somewhere. One didn’t need a heavy coat in Cairo.”

“Your mother was wearing a
mink
jacket this morning.”

“Well, if she gave me something like that I’d lose it,” Pagan said. “You know how untidy I am.” She was not convincing.

Suddenly Kate remembered. “Whatever happened to Abdullah’s cloak?”

“My God, I bet it’s still in the attic. She never let me wear it, you know,” said Pagan brightening. “Didn’t want me to lose my reputation!” She hooted with
laughter and cheered up.

They drove back to Trelawney. “If it’s still there,” Pagan’s mother said vaguely, “it’ll probably be in one of the cardboard boxes in the east wing attic.
You’ll see about forty boxes labeled ‘clothes.’”

After looking through half the dusty cardboard boxes, Pagan gave a shout of triumph and pulled out glistening folds of black Persian lamb. “Oh, heavens, moths!”

And indeed the beautiful soft black folds were bald in patches. “But it is wearable,” said Kate, “it’s warm and I’ll get it recut for you in the summer.
Next
birthday present.”

That evening they lay on the rug in front of the fire, as they used to when they were schoolgirls, and talked. “Looking back,” Kate mused, “I can’t think what either of
us saw in Robert. He was such a stuffed shirt behind that young-Cary-Grant mask. That awful, rigid, public school mold—all his lot, those Hooray-Henrys, were terrified of putting a foot out
of line. I mean you can’t imagine Robert saying piss off in public, can you?”

Pagan thought not. “I can’t think how you ever fell for him, Kate. I really fell in love with Egypt, not Robert,” she said dreamily. “It was so warm, so ancient and
mysterious. You know I don’t really like parties, but I
loved
the attention, I loved being the belle of Cairo, it was so soothing after the pain of . . . well, it stopped me thinking
about Abdi.”

“In one way Robert was a bit like Abdi,” Kate added thoughtfully. “Unlike the Hooray-Henrys, Robert used to be very good at supplying your every want—and even wants you
never knew you had. Then, just when you got used to having everything supplied—as if it were Christmas every day—he would disappear to Cairo and it would all stop so suddenly that you
missed it dreadfully.”

She paused, then added, “And another thing, Robert didn’t try to get you into bed like all the other scalpers. Robert always wanted to stop when you wanted to stop.”

“With good reason!” hooted Pagan, and they both giggled until it hurt, as they hadn’t done since their schooldays.

“What about sex?” Kate asked curiously. “What have you done about that for the last few years?”

Pagan sighed. “Once I had a little fling with one of the patients. . . . I’d been to see Mama and he followed me back to the cottage. We had a jolly old time for a couple of days. He
went back pissed to the gills—I’ve never seen Mama so furious. I was not to interfere with her patients/bread and butter/reputation/life, etcetera. Very unnerving.

“A couple of months later, I imported a hitchhiker, one of those irresistible blond hunks. That lasted for about four days and then, when he thought I’d gone for a walk, I caught him
yanking open the drawers of my desk. I got the feeling he was looking for money, but I always keep cash in the toe of my spare gum boots, so I tiptoed away, then crashed in. I told him my mother
was coming to stay for a few days, so he’d have to leave. He asked for money for the train ticket to London and was pretty nasty when I wouldn’t give it to him . . . anyway, I thought
that maybe the next pickup would strangle me, hack me up neatly with the bread knife, pack me in a suitcase and dump me in the left-luggage at St. Austell station and nobody would miss me for days.
So I decided to forgo the pleasure. You know sex has never really been that important to me. There’s always masturbation, but really after a bit I didn’t bother. I didn’t seem to
need it.”

The following morning when two stout cleaning ladies appeared, Kate shooed Pagan out for a walk with Buster. Four hours later the cottage was clean and tidy, food lined the
cupboards, a fire was burning in the sitting room grate, and Kate had planted a little basket with primrose. Exhausted, Kate thought she would open some of the pâté when Pagan got
back.

But Pagan was already back. Kate found her after the cleaners had left, when she went to get more logs for the fire. Pagan was lying asleep on the floor of the woodshed with two Guinness bottles
at her side and an empty hip flask in her hand. Chill with horror, Kate shook her awake. “Darling, darling, you’ll catch your death out here. Come in and have a hot bath.”

She helped Pagan stumble into the kitchen, then ran a bath for her. Pagan’s eyes were half-closed and she was beaming as Kate washed her face. “Nanny, Nanny, mind the shope
doesn’t go in my eyes,” she gurgled, before slipping under the water.

Pagan was an amiable drunk, but a heavy one. By the time she had been dried and lugged to bed with a hot water bottle under the patchwork quilt, Kate was exhausted and very worried. She had
something to eat and then, at six in the evening, she took a cup of black coffee up to Pagan’s bedroom.

“Why do you get drunk?”
she burst out crossly. “When did it start?

“Pagan scowled; she had a headache; she felt queasy; she felt without energy or interest. Nonetheless, she sensed that it was now or never. She had never admitted to herself or anyone else
that she was a drunk. But now she did.

“In Cairo,” she said eventually. “That’s when it started. A couple of drinks made those endless evenings with the same stuffy people a bit more bearable. And drink would
blot out the reality of having to go home with Robert afterward. Then in the mornings Robert liked to start the day with a quarrel; he enjoyed a row, the way some people enjoy tennis or Canasta.
Whatever I’d done, it was always because I was lazy and useless and stupid. He was very convincing.” She gave a tired sigh. “I used to stay in bed until he’d left for the
office . . . then I’d numb the memory by sloshing some vodka into the fresh mango juice.” She felt for Kate’s hand. “I never meant to get drunk when I had a drink. I still
don’t, I never feel I
need
it, I just feel, ‘why
not?
’ And then I have another, then just a little one, then another and another, until I can’t remember how
many.” She held the hand tight. “In Cairo we never once mentioned it, but I
know
Robert knew about my drinking. He once let slip that he knew I’d been sick in the night
because I’d left the seat up, so he
must
have known.” She shivered.

“I mean, normal wives aren’t sick in the night, are they? Of course, what he wanted was a wife who was sick in the morning, but there I was, labeled ‘frigid’ and
‘barren’. Nothing like spiked mango juice for that particular condition, and I knew why Robert didn’t want to talk about the booze. He didn’t want to feel gruesomely guilty
about it.”

“But it’s eight years since you left Robert!”

“Then my sense of inadequacy is eight years old. . . . I thought I’d feel better as soon as I left him, that the depression would be wiped away as soon as I got back to England. But
it wasn’t.” She paused and plucked at the patchwork quilt. “I felt a sudden gulf of gloom when I left Cairo, because I knew I’d burned my boats. I stupidly expected Mama to
meet me when I went through customs at London airport. . . . I hadn’t seen her for two years, but I always wrote to her every week and I’d cabled her to say that I was coming
back.”

Another pause and this time the quilt was carefully smoothed. “But she wasn’t there.” Kate squeezed her hand sympathetically. “So I waited and waited until suddenly,
standing there in the middle of the arrivals lounge, I completely lost my nerve. It’s difficult to explain, but suddenly I wasn’t certain of anything; I couldn’t have told you the
time, I felt so unsure and incapable. And then I suddenly felt
terrified
of being on my own.”

She gulped and paused for a moment. “Odd, because I’d never been close to Mama, so why did the roof suddenly fall in when she didn’t meet me at the airport?” Kate gripped
the hand tighter in silent sympathy and Pagan continued. “I suppose that was the first time I realised I was alone in life and it was a moment of stark terror. As a wife I’d been a
failure, as a daughter I wasn’t worth meeting at the airport and as a mother I really was a nonstarter, as we all knew. . . . Darling, I think my hand’s going to turn blue if you hold
it any harder.”

There was another long pause. “Then I found I had hardly any money and that bitch, Selma, was totally in control of my mother. She really adores the old cow. That hurt.” For a moment
Kate thought she was going to see Pagan in tears. “I just had a feeling of futile emptiness, a flat sensation that nothing—
nothing
—lay ahead.

“Then the feeling tilted, it became steeper and steeper and I felt as if I were running too fast downhill and couldn’t stop. There was a black hole at the bottom. It got worse and
worse.” She clutched Kate’s hands until Kate winced. “It made me panic, and when I panicked I drank. I didn’t need an excuse to die, I needed an excuse to live, and I almost
ran out of excuses. If I woke up in the night I felt suicidal, but if I drank, I didn’t wake up in the night. So I drank. Drink blotted out the depression; it made me feel like a real person,
like the person I was and the person I might have been. When I was drunk I didn’t feel like a failure.”

“Slower, slower,” said Kate, alarmed by this sudden agitation.

Pagan took no notice and continued as if speaking to herself. “When I was small I used to hide from my nanny and escape into a fantasy world where my real friends lived; animals who talked
and wore aprons and slippers and had teapots. Life became a bit like that again. Reality was too fearful, so I blotted it out. Once I fell into the bath when I was drunk and knocked myself out. I
woke up in the bath with all my clothes on and my hand hurting like hell. Luckily there wasn’t any water in the bath or I might have drowned.”

“Oh, Pagan,” Kate said, “I can only be with you a few days. Darling, won’t you please, please try? Can’t you stay in bed all the time and I’ll look after you?
Living alone here could be positively dangerous.”

“Yes,” agreed Pagan. “I once passed out on the sofa with a cigarette in my hand and my book caught fire. Luckily it only made a mess of the book. But I
did
manage to
stop smoking, and I don’t drive a car; even when I’m pissed, I’m not very dangerous on a bicycle.”

“Pagan, there must be someone. Isn’t there
anyone
who can help you? A local doctor? The vicar? They obviously all know you’re an alc—that you drink.”

“Nobody knows. I’m
very
careful. I bury the bottles. I’m very careful in the village. . . . Oh, you’re right, Kate, I don’t suppose I’ve really fooled
anyone. But I’m
not
an alcoholic. You’re not to say that. Alcoholics are old down-and-out tramps who sleep in city doorways at night.
I
like getting drunk. There’s a
difference.”

“Pagan, how can you be so stupid? What does it matter what you call it? You’re wrecking your life. Can’t you go to a doctor in London?”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Kate. While you’re here I honestly will
try
not to drink. And if I lie or cheat, I’ll tell you afterward. I can’t offer
more than that.”

For the rest of the evening Pagan was restless and twitchy, drank innumerable cups of tea, and only picked at Kate’s cheese omelette. The next day they walked up to Trelawney where Pagan
not only had a massage, a facial and a manicure, but had her hair styled and her eyebrows plucked.

Her hands started to shake that evening. Her teeth chattered, and then her whole body started to shiver. Kate put her to bed again, spooned chicken broth into her, and crooned as if to a sick
child.