Lace (56 page)

When Kate was seven months pregnant, her father’s former partner died, so Stiggins was left the sole trustee of her father’s will. Kate consulted her stock market
exercise book and found that in the previous six months British Widows had fallen by eight and a half percent, more than the rest of the market, and there was a huge lawyer’s bill to pay for
settling her father’s affairs. Kate telephoned the Law Society and found that nothing could be done to get the Ryan money out of British Widows unless Kate’s mother was willing formally
to accuse the trustee solicitor of gross negligence. This complaint would have to be made through another solicitor, and it might be difficult to get a solicitor to take on a case that meant suing
a colleague.

“Oh, I couldn’t
possibly
change my lawyer, dearest,” said Kate’s mother, aghast. “I could never look your father’s lawyer in the face again.”

That night Kate woke with bad, cramping pains and found that she was lying on a sheet that was wet and soggy with her own blood. Toby rushed her to St. George’s Hospital
where, four hours afterward, he was told that she had lost her baby.

Later, Toby sat by his wife’s bed and comforted her, held her hand for hours as she lay weak and speechless, brought her a bowl of blue hyacinths and was quietly advised by the doctor to
get her pregnant again as quickly as possible.

He did so.

Again Kate lost her baby.

Three years later, on May 6, 1960, when Anthony Armstrong-Jones married H.R.H. the Princess Margaret, Toby went to the wedding at Westminster Abbey, saw the royal bride walk
gravely down the aisle in her billowing white satin Norman Hartnell gown, then saw her grave demeanour change to happy exuberance at the Buckingham Palace reception afterward.

Kate didn’t go because, although she had been invited, she was again in the hospital, recovering from her third miscarriage.

Passing through London on her way to New York, Maxine visited her. Kate lay alone in a very small, very high green cell. A tangle of pipes wound around the walls like serpents. “Poor
baby.” Maxine thrust an armful of daffodils at Kate, then blushing, she realised she’d said the wrong thing. “What goes
wrong
, my darling?”

Kate sighed and nothing was heard except the grumble of water-pipes. “The first two were miscarriages at the twenty-eighth and twenty-seventh week, but this one was at the thirty-second
week, and he was born dead.” She pulled a face. “I can’t explain how tough it is, how
depressing
. You get the contractions and it hurts like hell and you feel what
it’s like to be in labour, and all the time you know that there’s only going to be a poor little dead body at the end of it.”

“But isn’t there some warning? Couldn’t you lie down and stop its starting?”

“The first time I started to bleed when I was asleep and
then
got pains and lost the baby. At the hospital they blithely quoted statistics as if they were batting averages.
‘Cheer up, one in six pregnancies ends in a miscarriage, try again.’ But I
knew
they were lying to be kind. I knew nearly all those miscarriages would have been before the
fourteenth week. . . .”

She sniffed the sour, spring-scented yellow flowers. “No vases left, I’m afraid, darling. I asked this morning. There never are any bloody vases in hospitals.”

“Damn, I forgot. Should have brought you a plant.” Maxine put the flowers in the washbasin as Kate continued.

“The second time was worse. I didn’t even have time to get to the hospital. D’you know that if you miscarry you’re supposed to keep the fetus and the afterbirth and put
it in a clean kitchen bowl or plastic bag and take it to the hospital so that the lab can analyze it and tell you why you miscarried? Neither did I, so it was lucky that the doctor got to me in
time.”

“Yes, but
why
do you miscarry?”

“Don’t think I haven’t asked that. The first time they said that the fetus had detached itself from the placenta, and the second time they said I had a weak cervix because it
dilated too early. So I had some treatment for it. But I had exactly the same trouble again this time. Now they’re going to give me a D-and-C to clean my uterus out.”

There was a pause, then she added, “The doctors have quite nicely suggested that we shouldn’t bother to try again.”

She lay with her hands limp on top of the sheet and she sounded almost indifferent, but in fact Kate had taken the news very badly—worse than most women, said the doctors, who suggested to
Toby that they consider adoption, whereupon Kate had become hysterical and said that he was
never, never, never
to suggest such a thing again.

“Don’t overreact so,” Toby said soothingly. “It’s just because you’ve never
considered
adoption.”

“I have, I have. Oh, God, yes, I have.” Kate became even more frantic, until a nurse rustled in with a syringe and pushed Toby out.

Kate went home weak, exhausted and unutterably sad.

Toby couldn’t understand why she felt such depth of loss, such misery. It wasn’t as if she had even held the child that she had just lost. She couldn’t talk to anyone, she
wanted to be alone, but at the same time she didn’t want to
be
alone, and she cried for days. Toby was comforting, but he couldn’t be around much because he was finishing a big
job near Swindon—ironically, a children’s convalescent home.

It made Kate sad to see her breasts go back to normal size and feel her stomach grow floppy again, when only the month before it had felt hard and firm. She felt again what she had felt at her
father’s funeral—an odd sense of loss and bewilderment.

What had she done wrong?

She must have done
something
wrong! Why else this perpetual disappointment when she only wanted normal human happiness? Other people had it, why was
she
being punished? Why
couldn’t she feel, even for a brief moment, that she was a complete woman? Kate distracted herself from her sense of emptiness with a determined round of business entertaining and the more
frivolous ambiance of the Chelsea set. Her little house was only five minutes’ walk from the King’s Road, and at least three evenings a week, Kate and Toby would drop in for a drink at
the Markham Arms, the elaborate Edwardian pub that stood next to Mary Quant’s little shop, Bazaar.

Bazaar was a sort of nonstop, free-drinks cocktail party, to which the prettiest girls in London dragged their husbands and their lovers. As Bazaar had only one minuscule dressing room, the
girls all had to try on the clothes in the middle of the shop, where every passerby could gaze through the plate glass and enjoy the view.

Suddenly, Chelsea seemed to have sprung into fashion as Britain’s San Francisco or Left Bank. As its cellars, espresso coffee bars, beat joints, clothes and “fab” girls were
internationally publicised, the little London borough ceased to be a geographical location and became synonymous with a way of living and dressing. Kate loved the excitement that throbbed from the
artery of the King’s Road into fashion, design and show business; she adored the new clothes and wore skimpy, high-waisted, gray flannel tunics with white knee socks or a scarlet leotard with
scarlet vinyl boots. She wore plum and ginger outfits with swashbuckling black leather coats and fur hats as large as those of the sentries outside Buckingham Palace. Outwardly, she looked a
Chelsea girl, a dishy bird, challenging, confident, leather-booted and black-stockinged, in the vanguard of the youthquake, which was establishing the fact that the second half of the twentieth
century belonged to the young (or so they thought) as they went about the business of trend-setting.

Kate was a little in awe of Mary Quant, a small, redheaded girl who was terrifyingly silent most of the time. She and the other dishy birds, the Chelsea girls, seemed shatteringly sophisticated
and
with it.
Beside them, Kate felt hopelessly unbrilliant and untalented. Oh, to have been at art school! Oh, to be able, like Mary, not only to invent but to
wear
with aplomb the
Look of the Moment whether it was the Lolita Look, the Schoolgirl Look, the Leather Look or the Wet-Weather Look with yellow plastic skirt and fisherman’s sou’wester.

Kate tried. She bleached her hair and had it cut in a sex-kitten tangle of curls and black-rimmed her eyes above pale-pink lipstick (worn over a white base) and she felt utterly forlorn and
unbelonging. She thought of joining Chelsea Art School and learning to paint, she timidly told Toby one evening, as they hurried through a drizzle to the Markham Arms. Toby dug his hands deeper
into the pockets of his hairy duffle coat, which he wore over black drainpipe trousers and sweater (he dressed like Audrey Hepburn), frowned at his beige suede boots, and said, quite kindly, that
he didn’t really think Kate had what it
took.

Then Kate heard that Pagan was back in England and had been for a long time. Kate and Maxine both had heard rumours that Pagan’s marriage had broken up. They had both written to her in
Cairo and also care of Trelawney and neither of them had received a reply. Kate had heard that Pagan was living in Beirut and vaguely imagined her in baggy pink trousers, munching Turkish delight
on a pile of silken cushions. Maxine was far too absorbed in her own marriage and her businesses to try to track down Pagan, especially if
she
didn’t want to keep in touch. If Pagan
wanted to see Maxine, well, Pagan knew where she could find her.

Then, one evening, at an art gallery opening, Kate met—and instantly recognised—Phillippa, the long-nosed, ginger-frizzed bridge player, whom Kate hadn’t seen since her visit
to Cairo. Phillippa was the sort of person who made a life’s work of keeping up with people, never allowing them to escape her inexorable United Nations Christmas cards. She told Kate that
Robert had divorced Pagan ages ago and that Pagan had returned to England and buried herself in the country. “Nobody was surprised when they split up,” added Phillippa. “Robert
was always impossible—that dirty trick he played on you both was absolutely standard behaviour for old Robert.”

“What dirty trick?” Kate was puzzled.

“But surely you know . . . ?” Kate’s surprise grew into indignation, then fury, as Phillippa told her how Robert had deliberately separated Pagan and Kate so long ago—and
that the whole of Cairo knew of it: you couldn’t keep a secret from the servants east of Gibraltar.

Kate instantly guessed that Pagan would be at Trelawney, and suddenly she longed to see her friend again. She longed for the comfortable, noncompetitive companionship of Pagan. Perched on the
plastic, inflatable, see-through armchairs that Toby had designed for an art gallery, Kate thought it was like suddenly yearning for a comfy old armchair instead of this tortured balloon she was
sitting in.

She would telephone Trelawney tomorrow.

Kate returned from her visit to Pagan’s cottage feeling loving and protective and with an object for her thwarted maternal instinct to focus on. She proceeded to spend a
fortune on telegrams and was as anxious as any worried mother during Pagan’s brief and dizzy courtship. After her marriage, when Pagan came to live in London, Kate found to her joy and relief
that their friendship was still as strong as if they had never been separated by miles and years and bitterness. They immediately resumed their odd half-sentence, no-verb, one-word, shorthand
conversations, unintelligible to their husbands or to anyone else who hadn’t known them for fifteen years.

J
UDY
’
S PHONE RANG
at three in the morning. Sleepily she fumbled for it.

“Did I wake you up?” asked a charming, solicitous male voice.

“Yes.”

“Good!
Because you
need
to wake up. This is Tom Schwartz of Empire Studios. You’ve just had the nerve to make a public announcement about one of our major new film
purchases for 1963 without so much as
consulting
Empire. Yes, I’m referring to the Joe Savvy deal. Didn’t it occur to you that a major studio might like to handle its own news?
Or were you expecting thanks for saving us the trouble? Perhaps I underestimate your influence? Does Walter Winchell always consult you first?”

“Look, buster,” Judy said in a sleepy voice, “you wanna fight, that’s fine with me. The most maddening way to end a fight is by slamming the phone down, which is what
I’m about to do. I’ll come around to your place tomorrow around ten and let you shout at me for exactly seventeen and a half minutes, because it certainly was inconsiderate of me.
I’ll be wearing sackcloth; you bring the ashes.”

She slammed the phone down, took it off the hook and sank back to sleep.

“Would I have
intentionally
upset someone as important as you, Mr. Schwartz?”

For seventeen minutes they had screamed at each other with increasing enjoyment in Tom’s elegant office.

“As I’ve already indicated, I don’t give a shit. But if you really want to make amends, you can start by putting your glasses back on your nose so you can at least see the top
of my desk. I’ve seen pictures of you with that little French guy and you were wearing glasses in all of them. A woman who wears glasses for a photograph can’t see without
’em.”

Judy fished her enormous, black-rimmed goggle glasses out of her purse, stuck them on her nose, sat up and threw him a hopeful smile. If she deliberately made herself vulnerable, people
generally forgave her. But Tom was used to being wooed by ravishing starlets of both sexes. “Cut it out,” he said. “Let’s stop wasting time.”

After they’d been working together for two months, Tom took her to lunch at Côte Basque and said, “You’re good.”

“I know.”

“I’m good.”

“I know. Together we’d make a great team.”

“Then why not?” Tom leaned over the table and covered her hand with his.

“Then take your hands off me. If you’re really serious, you’re the one man I’ll never go to bed with.”

“With you a little hand goes a long way,” Tom said sourly. “D’you say that to every man who asks you out to a meal?”