Lace (54 page)

Amazingly, she
was
pregnant. Once he’d recovered from his initial fury and was used to the idea, Christopher was pleased. Pagan said that she wanted a daughter, “a dear little
girl with big brown eyes,” she said, nestling in his lap, though she was much too large for it. Her husband laughed.

“Well, you’re not going to get one, my darling.”

“Why not?”

“Because we both have blue eyes and it’s genetically impossible for two perfectly blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child.”

“What do you mean, genetically impossible?”

He pulled her against him and started to stroke her mahogany hair. “In the nucleus of every human cell are two sets of genes—one for each parent—and in an embryo they form the
blueprint that determines the inherited characteristics of the baby.”

With one finger he traced her bronze, winged eyebrow. “Now when you come to the genes for eye colour, you
only
get a blue-eyed child if the genes of
both
parents are for
blue. The gene for blue eyes is what we call ‘recessive,’ which means that a person with only
one
gene for brown eyes and one gene for blue will always have brown eyes, not blue
ones. And it also means that two perfectly blue-eyed parents can
only
produce a blue-eyed child. It is impossible for two perfectly blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child.”

“What about hazel eyes?”

“Of course, there are degrees of eye colour. You can get greenish-blue or hazelish-brown, and there’s a very slight possibility of a throwback to some brown-eyed ancestor, although
it’s very unlikely. But this
never
happens when the colour is definite in both parents.” He stretched over and kissed the other winged, bronzed eyebrow. “You can’t
expect two clearly blue-eyed individuals to produce a clearly brown-eyed offspring, because it’s genetically impossible.” Pagan shut her eyes and snuggled up against his chest.
“So because we’ve
both
got blue eyes, we have only blue genes to give to our child. You’re going to have a blue-eyed baby, my darling. And I hope she’ll be an exact
replica of you.”

The child, Sophia, was born in the summer of 1966. Surprisingly, Pagan was a perfect mother. Her carelessness and untidiness vanished overnight. This amazed Kate until one day,
while she watched Pagan play pussycat on the floor with Sophia, Kate realised that Pagan treated her daughter as she treated her animals—with more care than she did adult human beings.

Naturally, Kate was asked to be godmother. “Now, listen, darling,” Pagan said, “this is
serious.
I don’t want to have any more disasters in my life. I want you to
be the sort of godmother that she can run away to. I want her always to see you as her ally, always on
her
side, whether or not she deserves it. To be frank, darling, I want what I
didn’t
have when I needed it.”

Kate nodded gravely.

She gave Sophia a string of iridescent baroque pearls. Predictably, Pagan said, “I’d better wear them, they’ll lose the lustre if they aren’t worn against warm skin. No
point in keeping them in the bank.”

Though her alcoholic phase now seemed like an impossible dream, Pagan still went nearly every week to her AA meeting. By now she realised that they had better be part of her life
forever—if she wanted to avoid yet another fatal mistake.

PART
SEVEN

I
N THE SPRING
of 1956, it had been four years since Kate had fled from Cairo. After her return, she had spent the first
week weeping, conscious of her father’s tight-lipped disappointment and indignant fury. Kate felt she had to get away from home, to get away from him. She had to think of an excuse for
staying in London. She didn’t want to be tied down by a full-time job, so she decided to become a freelance translator. Kate’s French wasn’t good enough—neither she nor
Pagan nor any other pupil had learned much at l’Hirondelle—so Kate signed up for an intensive course at the Berlitz School in Oxford Street and fled from the opulent, fake Georgian
bricks of Greenways back to her old apartment in the genuine little Georgian cottage in Walton Street.

She found her work easy. She was quick and accurate, and she got as many translations as she could handle from a French literary agent in Motcomb Street so she could juggle her working hours to
suit her private life. Although her father gave her an allowance, within six months of starting work Kate could have managed without it.

She tried to blot Robert out of her mind. Once more she started to see old friends, and she quickly learned that, if she felt depressed, she should never stay indoors or alone. So she would go
for a walk, moving around London by herself as she had never been allowed to when a child. She mingled with the crowds of young, untidy foreigners who lounged around the base of the statue in
Piccadilly Circus. She liked to sit among the stone lions and fountains of Trafalgar Square, then visit the National Gallery, where she would sit for hours in the calm peace of the Monet water lily
room.

Since leaving Cairo, Kate felt that some part of her had been cut off. Partly because she was an only child and partly as a result of her father’s verbal violence, she had always felt
timid, tentative and lonely, but now she felt an added sense of loss and didn’t understand it.

What
had she lost? Not her virginity; that had gone long before she met Robert—and anyway, it hadn’t been the melodramatic event that it was cracked up to be. She no longer
wept over Robert, although it had been painful to hear that he had married Pagan.

But that was over—long ago—and it wasn’t as if there weren’t other men around to distract her. Kate knew lots of nice fellows, and as a matter of fact she was never out
of love—a fortnight here, half an hour there, a five-minute passion for some unknown man on the top of a bus. She knew she was sensual, knew she loved to touch a man’s body, to feel a
man touch
her.
She found something to hunger after in almost every man she met. What she
didn’t
know, but badly wanted to know, was why the only two men she had ever really
cared about had dumped her.

Why?

Kate told herself she had been obedient, faithful, loyal, trusting and truthful. Well, almost always. So what was wrong with her?
Why
had she been kicked in the teeth?

“Why?” she asked Maxine, who was on a buying trip to London. They were sitting on the purple rag rug, drinking cocoa in front of the lavender gas flames.

“Maybe you give too quickly?” Maxine suggested. “No, of course I don’t mean your body, stupid. But maybe you are too eager for love—too quick to be affectionate,
too clinging, too claustrophobic.” She blew on the drink to cool it. “More than anyone else I know, Kate, you need love. One can see that. So when you think you have found it, you are
all over the man, like a puppy.” She put the tip of her tongue in her drink and quickly withdrew it. “Perhaps you should be more reticent, more elusive. Men value what is difficult to
get. But with Francois, I remember, you threw yourself at him, threw yourself in front of him like a doormat with ‘welcome’ printed on it. So, as we say in France, he wiped his feet on
you.”

“But I was being emotionally honest,” Kate said.

“And you paid heavily for this pleasant self-indulgence and lack of self-discipline,” said Maxine, with Gallic cynicism. “If you are difficult to pursue, if you make a man
think and worry and invest a lot of his time and effort in pursuing you, then he will—of course—justify these efforts to himself by deciding that you are unusually worthwhile and
desirable.”

“Deliberately playing hard to get is nasty psychological exploitation,” said Kate, “
and
it’s phony.”

Maxine shrugged her shoulders. “Then call it something else.” She blew again on the hot cocoa. “I feel you lack discrimination. I see you with some real creeps.”

“That still doesn’t explain why I have this sense of loss. I mean, I hardly ever think about those two bastards who dumped me. Thank heaven, I don’t want either of them. But I
want to identify this sense of loss. If it’s not them, what is it?”

Maxine took a cautious sip. “Kate, you may laugh, but I think what you have lost is your trust. You don’t really trust people anymore. No, you
do
trust me; maybe it is only
men
you don’t trust?”

Kate had been conditioned to love bastards. Without knowing or realising it, she had duplicated in adult life the pattern she had learned at her daddy’s knee: Kate was hooked on rejection.
When men started to criticise her, she always fell in love with them. And when she fell in love with them, she fell into bed with them. And when she went to bed with them, she never climaxed. And
she never dared to tell them. So Kate faked.

But Kate was always frightened that the man would guess. She was afraid he would leave her if he thought she was frigid. As Kate was terrified of rejection, she never had an honest relationship
with a lover. Untrusting and nervous in her obsessive search for Mr. Wrong, she felt so insecure that as soon as there seemed to be even a remote possibility that he might abandon her, Kate
immediately left him or pushed him out of her life.

Though she was tense and defensive in her most intimate relationships, it wasn’t obvious unless you were in bed with Kate. Fully clothed, her aura of intense sexuality attracted hordes of
admiring men. Kate didn’t see herself as attractive: since apparently she had been unattractive to the men she had loved, she became haunted by the feeling that no worthwhile man could ever
really love her.

But she had to check.

The classic one-night-stand man only wants to get involved if he thinks the woman doesn’t; the classic one-night-stand woman is hopefully, unsuccessfully searching for Prince Charming and
feeling forever guilty about it. Many women imagine that promiscuity brings conquests and pleasures. This may be so with a man—the sort of man who wants to try every biscuit in the
tin—but unlike a man, a woman is rarely promiscuous if she has a wonderful love at home. A promiscuous man is afraid he might be
missing
something. A promiscuous woman is
seeking
something and—sadly—not finding it.

So there Kate was, a classic case of potential nymphomania, until New Year’s Eve at the 1956 Chelsea Arts Ball where, among the balloons and the streamers, among the real and the bogus
painters, Kate met her first Design Man. Toby was a twenty-eight-year-old architect who specialised in hospital design, and had just been made the youngest partner of his firm. Toby introduced Kate
to the haute-Bohemian circles in which he moved, and Kate found his friends a refreshing change from officers of the Household Brigade and budding stockbrokers. In fact, she was fascinated by the
Design Men. They were so world-weary, scornful of everything that wasn’t perfectly proportioned or that they hadn’t thought of first. They held up a cocktail and squinted at the
proportions of the glass before sipping the drink, and they could only eat from plain white china.

“The first night I slept with Toby,” Kate happily told Maxine (who had, of course, heard the intimate bits earlier), “he took three, black cotton cushions off the tangerine
cotton mattress—which was on the black-painted floor—and put them on the black leather sling chair.” Sitting in front of the fireplace, Kate pulled her knees up and put her arms
around them, then said in a dreamy voice, “There was no other furniture in the room.” She rested her head on her knees and continued, “Then he went behind the kitchen bar, stood
on a stool, took two quilts from an overhead cupboard, bent down and pulled out two black pillows from under the sink, then threw the whole pile onto the mattress.”

She heaved a long, sexy sigh. “After that he took off his jeans and lay there reading
Design
by the light of one of those chrome caterpillars that wriggle out of the wall, as if
they were trying to read over your shoulder. Then he glanced up and criticised my panties.”

“Super,” Maxine said politely, but to herself she thought, Oh, dear, another bastard.

Kate was hopelessly dominated by Toby, who told her how to dress, look, think, feel, behave. When he criticised her in front of Maxine for being sloppy, clumsy and inefficient, Kate not only
believed him, but to Maxine’s surprise actually promised she’d try hard to do better.

Kate adored Toby’s self-confidence and shared his high opinion of himself. She was still a happy, grovelling doormat, thought Maxine, although she had to admit that Toby was quick-witted
and entertaining, if not particularly handsome; he was obviously clever and passionately interested in his work; he took the trouble to explain it to Maxine as they all sat on the pale beech floor
listening to the delicate, lacelike intricacy of a harpsichord toccata.

“The drawback to hospital design is that it’s often very frustrating,” Toby told Maxine, as he mixed a Campari in a plain glass. “You haven’t got
one
client—there’s a whole bunch of them. Doctors who won’t bother to read plans properly, head nurses, the Regional Hospital Boards
and
the Ministry of Health.”

He held the glass of red liquid to the light. Wonderful colour! “The boards and the ministries are old-fashioned; they have preconceived ideas and they won’t listen to new ones. They
tell me to ‘economise’, when they’re really suggesting that I design overcrowded wards.”

“It sounds extremely complex,” said Maxine politely. At last a friend of Kate with some sense, thought Toby.

Kate listened adoringly. She loved to hear Toby talk about his work, loved to visit his calm, all-white office with the tilted desks and the vast blueprints. Unlike the doctors, she had quickly
learned to read them.

But Kate didn’t dare let Toby move into Walton Street, because her father would have exploded with rage. “Then I suppose we’ll have to get married,”
Toby said ungraciously, and once again Kate’s eyes sparkled.

Kate Harrington. Mrs. Toby Harrington. Mrs. Harrington.