Lace II (17 page)

March 1979

P
AGAN LAY AWAKE
listening to the early morning sounds of home: the click-whirr-click of a London milk cart, the chink of bottles, a blackbird piping with indignation in the mischievous March wind, a heavy thud on the doormat as the
Times
came through the letterbox, a lighter thud as the British Medical Journal hit the doormat, soft swishes as the mail was pushed through the brass door flap. Downstairs, her old sheepdog, Buster II, gave a token growl at each invasion of his territory by Fritz, the dachsund.

Sophia must be awake, thought Pagan, as she listened to her daughter’s rock music drift up from the basement. Seven o’clock in the morning and she’s playing the drums already. Pagan then heard the noises she had been unconsciously waiting for, the sounds of her husband getting up. She heard footsteps on the polished boards of his dressing room, snatches of Mozart, whistled while he shaved, then stairs creaking as he thumped down to the kitchen.

With much whirring of weights and rattling of ancient brass chains, the grandfather clock struck seven. Then there was silence until Pagan again heard Christopher’s feet on the stairs, then the rattle of her bedroom door-handle—and there
he was, gray hair still damp from the shower, deftly balancing her breakfast tray. “We seem to have run out of marmalade.”

“Christopher darling, I’ll never make a housewife, you must have noticed by now.” He rearranged the antique lace pillows behind her head, then took the
Times
from her tray and sat on the end of her bed, saying, “I thought the lack of marmalade was part of a plot to force me to divorce you.”

Pagan began to pour their tea. “Grabbing the newspaper first—
always
—is practically grounds for divorce in Britain.” Her primrose cotton nightdress slipped off her shoulder and her mahogany hair fell into her eyes as she leaned forward and handed him his cup.

“I once thought you might run off with a gigolo.” Christopher bit into his butterless toast. “When the cardiologist said it might kill me to make love to you again, my first thought was, how long will Pagan stand it?”

“Thank Heavens that medical opinion eventually changed its mind,” growled Pagan. “But I’ve always loved you for your brilliant conversation.” She never told Christopher how much she loved him. She was superstitiously afraid of doing so. Christopher was the mainspring of her life, the focus of her days, the theme of her thoughts. Only her husband’s care had transformed Pagan from a self-destructive, insecure, upper-class failure into a society figure famous for her outrageous glamour. Ironically, when Lady Swann, in some dazzling dress, swept into the room on the arm of her older, quieter husband, people naturally assumed that it was she who dominated the partnership, but the foundation of Pagan’s cheerful flamboyance was Christopher’s emotional stability.

For the first few weeks of their marriage, Pagan and Christopher had continued their rich and, for Pagan, revelatory sex life. When his first heart attack had ended that phase of their relationship, Pagan had been far more concerned about losing her husband than losing their good times in bed. “Sex is like opera, darling,” she used to tell Christopher. “Something that other people find fabulous, but which simply doesn’t thrill me.” She hadn’t really missed it that much.

“Are you ready for your joke of the day?” Christopher asked. Pagan crunched her toast and nodded.

“If you believe in the Virgin Mary’s immaculate conception, then Jesus Christ must have been a woman, because the Virgin’s baby could only have had X chromosomes!” He roared with laughter.

Pagan looked blank. “Don’t you remember my little lesson in genetics? Women have only X chromosomes, men have both X and Y. You can’t give birth to a boy without Y chromosomes. You can’t have Y chromosomes without spermatozoa. You can’t have spermatozoa without a man.”

Pagan still looked blank. “I can see you’ll never win the Nobel Prize for genetics, darling. Don’t you remember that I was able to predict when you were pregnant that Sophia’s eyes would not be brown, because the color of a child’s eyes depends on the genes of its parents. Two clearly blue-eyed parents can’t produce a brown-eyed child. More toast?”

“Tomorrow morning, darling, I’d like a joke that I can understand without a Ph.D.”

Pagan leaned back in bed, sipped her tea, then reached for her letters. She grabbed the one with the New York postmark and read it. “Half a million dollars!” She sat upright, waved the letter at her husband, then threw it to him. “See for yourself. That’s from Stash, Lili’s agent. That’s the profit they expect from the première and it’s all for the Foundation, as well as the money we’ll get from Spyros’s jewelry.”

“Tiger-Lili certainly wants to try out for the team.”

“I think she does; it’s rather sweet. She seems to have had such a rotten life, in spite of all the fame.” Pagan leaned back against the lace pillows. “She’s always on her guard, always wary, very conscious that people try to use her—which they do all the time. It’s perfectly disgusting. Lili can be a bit imperious but, basically, she’s a perfect pet.”

“She’s certainly a generous friend.” Christopher kissed the top of Pagan’s head. “I’m off. Cross your fingers for the new strain of hepatitis-B. It should either do the trick, or give us an epidemic.”

As he eased his elderly Rover into the flow of traffic heading south, Sir Christopher reflected that Pagan was probably the only woman he knew who would automatically feel nothing but sympathy for a voluptuous star like Lili. Perhaps Pagan understood her because both of them were a
mixture of surface shockingness and underlying insecurity, he reflected, as he waited in traffic between two container trucks.

A bread van cut into the line of vehicles ahead, then swerved violently out again. Sir Christopher checked a rush of anger. Traffic snarls were a classic stress-inducer; no sense in shortening his life over someone else’s bad driving.

Morning mists lay in ethereal slabs over the gray river as the line of traffic started to move along the Thames embankment, then picked up speed down the clearway. He wouldn’t be late, after all, thought Sir Christopher, still in convoy between the two massive trucks.

He never saw the bakery van shoot the lights, make an unsignaled right turn, then crash head-on into one of the graceful spherical street lights that stand on the stone balustrade of the River Thames.

But Sir Christopher heard the crump of metal, the thin crash of glass, then the louder impact as an oncoming automobile piled into the back of the bakery van. He slammed on his brakes at the same time as the orange truck ahead of him, which stopped abruptly, air hissing from the pneumatic breaking system.

The worn disc brakes of Sir Christopher’s car were not so effective, and he realized that he would not be able to avoid hitting the lurid orange truck ahead.

The driver of the green truck behind him reacted more slowly, and crashed into the back of Sir Christopher’s old Rover. The momentum slammed the Rover into the truck ahead. As if made of paper, the Rover crumpled into the back of the truck. The steering column slammed against Sir Christopher’s chest like a mallet hitting steak, smashing his ribs and heart to pulp.

He was rushed to St. Stephen’s Hospital and hurried into the intensive care unit.

Twenty minutes later, Pagan, in her primrose nightdress, held her husband’s limp hand.

“I’m afraid it’s hopeless, Lady Swann.” The doctor felt that he could talk bluntly to a fellow doctor’s wife. “Even if we obtained a replacement organ, there’s nothing left to attach it to—the thorax has been completely destroyed.”

In a daze, Pagan signed one form giving consent for the life-support system to be switched off, another giving permission for Christopher’s remains to be used for medical purposes, and a third, authorizing the undertakers to proceed. She felt very cold and, to her horror, very angry. “How could he do it?” she thought. “How dare he leave me now?” Then she thought, “How can I even think such a dreadful thing?”

*   *   *

“A mother-and-daughter conspiracy suit? What the hell is that?” Judy demanded, in the
VERVE!
office, wondering if she had correctly heard what Tom had said.

“Just what it sounds like,” he told her. “They allege that you and Lili hatched a malicious plot to ruin Senator Ruskington’s political career.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Judy protested, her heels angrily kicking up the apricot kelim rug as she paced her office.

“Of course it is.” Tom was being patient. “But conspiracy is a bitch, Judy. It’s the vaguest, stickiest area in the whole legal code. Just talking to someone, even on the telephone, can amount to a legal conspiracy, if the circumstantial evidence stands up. The fact that Lili has now moved in with you could be disastrous if the judge decides that it’s significant. Frankly, it’s a pity that you’ve asked her to stay in your apartment.”

“Lili and I have a lot of catching up to do. God! This is all so stupid,” Judy raged. “When Lili did this interview I hardly knew her.”

“Can you prove it?” Tom asked patiently. “You’ll have to go through all your papers tonight to see if there’s anything that we can produce at the hearing on Friday which will substantiate what you say!”

So Judy cancelled her entire afternoon’s program, then read through an 18-inch-high pile of legal documents. After that, she turned out her filing system, her desk drawers, her purse, and her briefcase in search of anything at all to prove her point. She finished at eight that evening, exhausted by the effort of concentration. “Damn that hypocritical old buzzard,” she said to Tom, as she shrugged on her lynx jacket. “Senator Ruskington has now lost me almost a day’s work on top of every spare cent we have.”

Tom nodded. “This case is wrecking our budget, Judy. We’ll have to make fast compensation cuts, as many as possible, no matter how small.”

“What do you mean by small?”

“Do we really need an exercise instructor? Couldn’t we let Tony go?”

“If we have to cut down, let’s switch to a cheaper printer; that would be the easiest, quickest saving.”

“And cut the quality? You’re only saying that because you’re angry, Judy.”

“But it would be a really big economy and I would watch the quality like a hawk. We could make the contract conditional on quality. And what we pay Tony is a drop in the ocean compared to what we’re paying the lawyers.” She jammed on her lynx hat. “The exercise class is good for morale, and it means that I’m too tired to lie awake at night, worrying about that damned Senator.”

“You?
Lie awake?” he queried. “What’s happened to the unstoppable Judy Jordan self-confidence?”

“It was always more fragile than you thought.” Judy’s voice was unusually low. For the first time, Tom realized the depth of her anxiety, and immediately switched into reassurance. Playfully, he ruffled her hair. “We’ve been in jams before, Judy, and you’re still top of the heap.”

“So there’s farther to fall. And you get no sympathy. You’re supposed to be invulnerable. Did Henry Kissinger stay awake at night, crying?”

“At least you’ve got Mark,” he comforted her. “I’m finding it tough without Kate.”

“I don’t want to burden Mark with the troubles in my life.”

“Do you mean you’re frightened of doing so? Frightened that he only loves the glamorous Judy Jordan that the world sees, not the real woman that I know?”

“Mark’s a lot bigger on moral issues than he is on practical ones. I can’t talk to him about business because he doesn’t understand it. And he doesn’t understand that a lawsuit is about a set of rules, not about justice.”

Fondly, Tom put an arm around her fluffy fur shoulders. “We’ll struggle through somehow.”

“Talking of struggling, how’s Kate?”

“She says the problem is much bigger than she had thought. It’s not just a tribal war, it seems to be systematic genocide. The Bangladesh government has tried to settle the Chittagong hills with their own citizens, and drive out the peaceful Buddhist peasants who live there. They’re trying to take away Kate’s visa.”

“And to think I didn’t even know where Chittagong was before Kate left.”

Judy said good night to Tom, then walked slowly down the dark corridor. She noticed a light shining under the boardroom door and opened it. Inside was Tony, sweating in his shorts and vest as he went through a sequence of fast turns and kicks in front of the mirror.

“Still here, Tony!”

“Yeah! Working out the new routine for tomorrow.” He leaped across the floor. “D’ya think the girls will go for it? I think they’re ready for this. I think they’ll manage. What d’ya think?”

Anyone who put in longer hours than she did gained Judy’s instant admiration. “Hiring you was the best decision I ever made, Tony,” she called as he whirled past her, spinning drops of sweat from his forehead each time he turned. He finished in a dramatic pose, kneeling on the floor with arms outstretched, then slowly stood up, panting. “Getting hired by you was the smartest thing I ever did. Did ya see my picture in
New York
magazine? My Mom’s shown it to everyone on the block.”