Lace (7 page)

Nick was lying on the iron bed. His white shirt-sleeves were rolled up, his black trouser legs were crossed and a toe poked through one of his gray socks. “The year 1928 was almost as good
as 1945,” he said. “An exceptional vintage for Medoc, Graves, St. Emilion and Pomerol, not quite so good for the dry white Bordeaux wines, but excellent for the Sauternes.” He
threw his textbook down. “Vintner’s exam next Tuesday. Got time to test me on the vintages, Judy?”

“Not a hope, Nick. I’m late. I only looked in to ask if you could scrounge me something to eat from the kitchen in case I don’t get a chance.”

“You’re too young to starve,” he said, swinging his legs off the bed and sitting up. “Promise to spend Sunday with me, and in my oilskin-lined waiters’ pockets,
I’ll steal a meal that will last you three days.”

“It’s a deal. I’ll test you on the vintages then.”

“Okay. I’ll drop into the Chesa later for a cup of coffee before going on duty. Anything to catch another glimpse of you.” She blew him a kiss in reply, then dashed out,
heading for the hundred and twenty-two steps down to the coffee shop.

In spite of her abundant physical energy Judy felt very tired—in fact, she would have preferred to stay in bed on Sunday. This was only her fourth month in Switzerland but already she felt
exhausted all the time. The hours of the Gstaad Language Laboratory were from eight in the morning until three-thirty in the afternoon and she did her homework in the hour allowed for lunch. Then
until one in the morning, six days a week, she worked as a waitress at the Chesa coffee shop with only a short break for a snack. There were no union regulations in Switzerland, but no working
permit problems either. She had been lucky to get the job. Pastor Hentzen had arranged it at the start of the summer season when the hotel had needed every pair of hands it could get. She had been
taken on for a couple of months, then retained, at a wage far lower than any of the other waitresses. It was hardly enough to pay her laundry bill, but she got bed and board, which was all that
mattered.

Maxine, Kate and Pagan were already sitting in the Chesa with a fourth girl who had been invited for one reason only—she had a brother at Le Mornay. However, Pagan had
already decided half an hour ago that if Nigel was anything like his silly cow of a sister, there was no point in getting to know him.

“Daddy says it’s really
changed
Nigel, he’s made
unbelievably
good contacts.” Francesca droned on, “Daddy says he looks upon the fees as a good
investment because he wants Nigel to have an
international
outlook and at Le Mornay you only meet people with money and names. All the oil children go there, you know. It doesn’t look
like a school. It’s in an old castle on Lac Leman.” She bit into a cream cake. “They can go into Geneva or Lausanne on their evenings off, and they’re allowed away for the
weekend if their parents give permission.” Francesca took another
tête de nègre.
“They have plenty of work to do, but they’re not cooped in, like us
Hirondelles. And of course the boys can come to the Saturday night dances. Every Saturday night during the winter a public dance is held in one of the hotels, you know, although Nigel only goes to
the
smart
ones at the Imperial or the Palace.”

“We’ve never been to a dance,” Kate said. “In fact, we can’t dance.”

“Except for the polka and Highland fling—we learned those at school,” Pagan amended.

Boys, dances, grand hotels, it was all tremendously thrilling and alarming. Lucky, lucky Francesca to have an older brother, they thought.

“When are the Le Mornay boys coming here?”

“They’re in Gstaad for three months, from January to March. Mummy says it’s
so
well planned—after the Christmas holiday Nigel’s trunk is simply sent to
Gstaad instead of Roue.”

“That reminds me,” Pagan said, lying quickly, “Matron asked me to tell you to go to the post office, Francesca. There’s a parcel waiting there for you with three francs
to pay on it.”

Francesca squealed in anticipation, paid her bill and rushed off.

“I couldn’t stand much more of her,” Pagan said loudly.

“Neither could I,” said the tiny waitress. Pagan turned around and suddenly realised that the girl in the traditional Swiss costume was the girl she had rescued on the mountain. Her
short blond hair looked as if it had been hacked with a pair of kitchen scissors, which it had. Gravely she said, “You saved my life . . .”

“. . . I’m glad you realise that!” snapped Kate.

“. . . and you’ve broken your arm!”

“No, only sprained the shoulder,” said Pagan. “Are
you
all right?”

“Hardly a scratch, but I was really frightened. My knees wobbled for hours afterward. I don’t know what to say except thank you. I know I shouldn’t have rushed off . .
.”

“It’s okay, Nick explained,” Pagan said.

“
You
may be all right,” Kate snapped, “but Pagan wasn’t. She fainted, and her poor hand as well as her shoulder were torn to bits. She was kept in bed for two
days.”

“Shut up, Kate, what’s the point of making her feel guilty? After all, she didn’t fall off the cliff on purpose.”

“I didn’t even fall off. The ground gave way beneath me. But I was almost more worried about being late on duty than ending up a corpse.”

“Well, let’s forget it,” said Pagan, embarrassed. “Hey, look who’s arrived!”

She waved to Nick, who had just opened the heavy carved oaken door. He waved back, ducking his head to pass under a low beam, blackened by hundreds of years of smoke from the hearth. The Chesa
was older than the rest of the hotel and had once been a seventeenth-century farmhouse, with walls as thick as an arm’s length.

“I can’t talk anymore,” said Judy, “but Nick and I are off on Sundays and we’d love to meet you properly—and thank you properly. And I’ve got something
for you.”

She hastily refilled the cups with hot chocolate and dashed off with her tray as Nick gazed after her, clearly besotted.

The following Sunday afternoon the Chesa door burst open and a blast of cold air came in with Judy, followed by Nick. She was wearing her Sunday uniform of blue jeans rolled up
to midcalf, saddle oxfords, white socks and an American navy pea jacket. She looked around, then beamed when she saw the girls.

“Hi there!” she called. She presented Pagan with a large gift-wrapped box tied with white satin ribbon. Inside was a pair of scarlet knitted knee socks with leather soles. Pagan was
delighted. “They match my red silk sling,” she said, insisting that Kate put them on her immediately.

Maxine turned to Judy. “Why did your parents send you to the language laboratory and not one of the finishing schools?”

“They didn’t send me anywhere. I didn’t tell them I was entering for the exchange scholarship, because I never thought I’d win it—and when I did my mom was furious.
She thought that fifteen was too young to leave home and anyway she can’t understand why I want to learn foreign languages, but our minister persuaded her that I ought to use the talent that
the good Lord gave me.” She grinned. “The pastor of the Lutheran church here is supposed to keep an eye on me. He seems to think I’m going to be an African missionary so
I’ll need French and German for the heathens of the Belgian Congo and East Africa.”

“And aren’t you?” Maxine carefully smoothed the skirt of her best tangerine dress, which she was wearing because Nick was, after all, twenty-five percent her date.

“No, I’m going to Paris,” said Judy in a firm voice.

“Alone? Will your parents let you go alone?”

“They won’t know. I’ll tell them when I get there after I’ve got a job. Otherwise they might say no,” Judy explained.

There was an awed silence from the three girls around the table who had never thought about the future, never planned further ahead than the next holiday. As in a child’s colouring book,
everything in the picture of their future life was clear and simple and the responsibility of someone else. Eternal bliss awaited each of them beyond the altar, and the only bit that hadn’t
been filled in was Prince Charming’s face. To the Hirondelles, Judy’s work sounded
real,
as opposed to chopping onions for the cookery mademoiselle or half-heartedly typing,
“Please believe in my most distinguished sentiments” at the bottom of a business letter copied from a textbook.

Eagerly, Kate questioned Judy about the language lab.

“Yes, the courses really
are
concentrated,” Judy answered, “and it’s just as well, because I’ve only got one year to learn fluent French and German. All the
other students are in just as much of a hurry. They’re all older than me,
really
old—some of them are over thirty! If they need an extra language for business, they fly into
Gstaad from all over the world and sit all day in little booths with earphones. My German isn’t yet good enough for conversation. I shouldn’t really talk to Nick at all, I suppose. I
should be practicing German instead.”

Nick looked at her fondly. “We hardly get any time to talk as it is. We only get to our bedrooms to sleep. I start at seven laying tables for breakfast, then we work in the restaurant
straight through until three in the afternoon. Then there’s a break until six-thirty and we’re back in the restaurant until eleven. Unless there’s a function, in which case we
work until two in the morning and
still
get up at seven.”

“We’re lucky to have such good sleeping quarters here,” Judy said. “The student waiters who are on loan from the Lausanne Palace say that there it’s five to a room
under the roof, and at the Palace Saint Moritz I hear that the temporary staff have to sleep in the basement.”

“Goodness, I feel as if l’Hirondelle is a rest cure,” said Pagan, who rather enjoyed the slack tedium of the school routine—unlike Kate, who was exasperated by the
laziness and boredom of the lessons.

After that meeting, Judy always saved a table at the Chesa for the girls on Wednesday afternoon when they each took two hours to drink one expensive cup of chocolate, and Nick
took them all out for tea on Sunday afternoons when they ate their heads off.

Judy’s obvious independence immediately fascinated the other three girls, who envied her energy, her stamina and her cheerfulness, not realising that Judy had to push herself every morning
to survive the drudgery of her day. Reluctantly, the girls followed their school timetable, but Judy set her own harsh timetable, and she stuck to it grimly. The Hirondelles were also intrigued by
the forceful way that Judy spoke. She said exactly what she thought, whereas the three more privileged girls had been brought up to hide their feelings and not express their own wishes and
opinions.

The girls quickly realised that while Nick was besotted with Judy to the exclusion of anyone else, here was the older brother they had all longed for—to admire them, to protect them, to
tease them, to provide them with introductions to other boys and to pay for their outings. Nick was safe. He wasn’t part of the sexual success-or-failure, scalp-collecting game, so the three
Hirondelle girls instinctively developed a special way of flirting with Nick. They could be outrageously provocative with Nick with no fear of the consequences; they could practice their act with a
safety net, as it were.

Nick was flattered and delighted with his new role as escort to three attractive but undemanding girls. Brought up in the stone-cold confines of the traditional British boarding school, a timid
child, living in the country, he hadn’t had much chance to meet girls, attractive or otherwise. But he had beautiful manners and once his blushing was under control, he was as proud as a
pasha when escorting the four of them. Playing such an important part in what the other girls at l’Hirondelle enviously christened “the Set” also meant that Nick soon lost the
bashfulness of an only child and the agonised self-doubt of a British teenage male.

The girls knew that they would eventually meet other boys once the weekly dances started in mid-November, but despite Nick, they were sometimes restless and thirsty for adventure.

“Maybe we could sneak out the back door one night and go to some divine nightclub, somewhere like the Gringo,” Pagan said with a yawn one Sunday afternoon, after an enormous banana
split.

Nick looked up sharply and brushed his black hair back from his face. “You’d better be careful, you know. You’ll get expelled if you’re caught . . . and there’s
something else.” He blushed. “Something nasty. You know old Chardin’s driver, Paul?”

“Yes, the chauffeur,” said Kate.

“No, he’s a
driver,
” Pagan corrected. “Unless you’re speaking French, a chauffeur is someone you hire for the evening. A driver is in your permanent
employ.”

“Whatever you call it, you all know what I mean. Well, Chardin is a . . . er . . . homosexual and his . . . er . . .
friend
is Paul. I know it’s true because Paul is also
carrying on behind Chardin’s back with one of the chefs at the Imperial.” He turned even pinker. “The next bit is just a strong rumour, but I’ve heard it several times. You
all
know that what Chardin really loves is money.”

Everyone nodded.

“Well, it’s rumoured around town that if a girl is caught outside the school with a boy, she’s immediately expelled—unless her father pays hush money to avoid the
disgrace. The girl might just have been out for a lark, nothing serious, but Chardin exaggerates to parents over the long-distance telephone. It’s always her word against Chardin’s, and
the girl has to admit that she got out, so the parents usually believe the worst and pay up.”

“I can’t believe it!”

“How do you know?”

“Do people realise he’s homosexual?”

“All the waiters around here know that Chardin’s queer,” said Nick. “For years he’s had handsome male drivers when he doesn’t need a driver at all.
There’s a bar at the back of town called Le Cous Cous—some pretty odd types hang out there—
I
wouldn’t walk into the place, I can tell you!”

“But wouldn’t he be afraid of being blackmailed?” Pagan asked.