Old Sins (24 page)

Julian looked at Paul; it was nine o’clock. ‘Let’s go and meet her at the opera,’ he said. ‘Then I can arrange to see her over the weekend.’

They waited patiently in the foyer of the opera house; they heard the final applause, the bravos, to Callas’s great Carmen, and as the doors from the auditorium finally opened Julian felt in some strange way this was an important moment; as much for him as for his store. Then the great surge of people began to come out and he wondered if what he was doing was not rather foolish. How could they expect to find one girl he had never
seen, and Paul had met briefly only once, in this melee? It was hopeless.

But he had reckoned without Camilla’s great beauty, and the talent she had for parting crowds; as she walked through the foyer of the opera house in her blue velvet habit, pearls in her throat and in her wild red hair, her brown eyes tender with pleasure at the music she had just heard, people stared; and they did not just stare, they drew aside just a little to look at her. Julian, standing at the main doors, looking in, found himself suddenly confronted by her coming directly towards him. Not knowing who she was, he forgot Camilla North, and gazed at her, then smiled; drawn to her, moved by her beauty and her grace. She looked at him, recognizing, acknowledging, his appreciation, and then turned and said something briefly to her father who was just behind her.

Paul stepped forward. ‘Miss North. Good evening. I am so sorry to intrude upon your family evening. But I liked your drawings so much and Mr Morell, here, was anxious to meet you as soon as possible to discuss them.’

Julian, astonished and amused that this beautiful creature could be his prey, held out his hand to her. ‘Miss North. I am Julian Morell. Let me add my apologies to Paul’s. And extend them to your family. It is an unforgivable intrusion. But I am in a fearsome hurry with my project. And I think we can work together. I wondered only if we could arrange a meeting over the weekend.’

Camilla looked at him, and recognized immediately a kindred spirit, a fellow fighter, an accomplice in the struggle to do not merely better but best. Where many people would have considered his behaviour in haunting the foyer of the opera house all evening a little excessive, ridiculous even, when a phone call on Monday morning would have done nearly as well, to her it seemed entirely reasonable. She smiled at him and took his hand.

‘Mr Morell, I am delighted to meet you. How very very flattering that you should hunt me out. These are my parents, William and Mary North, Mother, Father, this is Julian Morell, who I hope very much to be able to work for, and Paul Baud, his colleague. Paul, Mr Morell, would you care to join us for supper? We are going to Sardi’s, and it would be so nice to have you with us.’

It was interesting, Julian thought, that she did not defer to her parents in this suggestion; the evening was hers and she had taken charge of it. He noticed too, and liked, her formal manners, her serious self-confidence; he could work with her, and work with her well.

‘That would be delightful,’ he said, ‘providing we shall not be intruding?’

‘Not at all,’ said William North, ‘please do come. So nice to meet an Englishman too.’

Camilla, sitting next to Julian and opposite Paul Baud, discussing initially the opera, New York, the latest exhibition at the Metropolitan, felt acutely aware that she had crossed a threshold, that this was the most important evening she had ever spent. And the feeling was not entirely confined to her career.

She and Julian worked closely together for weeks before anything more intimate took place between them than drinking out of the same cup of coffee. Professionally they were completely besotted with one another: they recognized each other’s talents, admired each other’s style, inspired each other’s creativity. Julian, initially overwhelmed by Camilla’s capacity for work, by her perfectionism, by her ability to work to the highest standard for countless hours without food or rest, very swiftly came to take it for granted, and simply to accept her and her talents as an extension of his own. Camilla accepted this as the highest compliment and regarded his impatient arrogance, his insistence on achieving precisely what he wanted, his disregard for any other views but those which concurred with his own, as an essential element in her work for him.

She had initially been hired to design the lingerie and jewellery departments; while she worked on those Julian instructed Paul to search for others to set their mark on the more specialist area of the beauty floor, the precise demands of the fur department. But looking at the drawings she produced, the soft, sensuous fantasy she set the lingerie in, the rich, brilliant hard-edged greed she created for the jewellery, he abandoned his search and told her she must do the rest. While they worked in the close tension so peculiar to a shared ideal,
she grew to know everything there was to know about him, as a person; she knew when he was angry, when he was discouraged, when he was afraid of what he had taken on; she could tell in moments whether he was worried, excited, pleased. She could see he was arrogant, demanding, ruthless; she found it absolutely correct that he should be so.

She was, she realized, for the first time in her life, absolutely happy.

She was a little less happy after she had been to bed with him. Camilla had for quite a long time realized that she had to go to bed with someone, before very much time elapsed. It was one thing maintaining your virginity through college, and indeed in the fifties that was what any well-brought-up girl was expected to do. They might not all live up to the expectations, but a lot did. But living as a successful career woman in New York City, and maintaining it, was something altogether different. There was something faintly un-chic about it, something gauche and awkward – almost, she felt, slightly ridiculous. The trouble was, if a man was to relieve her of it, he had to know it was there; if he was to know it was there he had to be told (or to find out for himself under rather difficult circumstances) and how, she wondered, did you do that? How did you say to a would-be lover, who had been drawn to you by your sophistication, your woman of the worldliness, who assumed that you were as accomplished in bed as you were in your career: Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t actually know how to go about this? She supposed to a certain extent that you would know how to go about this, that your instincts would guide you, and she had very carefully read, in her painstaking way, a great many books on the subject, she knew a great deal of the theory, about positions and foreplay and virtually everything there was to know about contraception: (and there was another thing, she had been carefully fitted for a dutch cap by a very fashionable New York gynaecologist, that was the modern, chic answer to such things, and it lay unworn in its pink tin in her underwear drawer, waiting to be used) but she still couldn’t imagine anybody being deceived into thinking she really knew what she was doing. And it was important to Camilla that she appeared to know exactly what she was doing, all the time.

She also, she had to admit, still found it a little hard to imagine that it could be as wonderful as it was supposed to be. Because of her friendless adolescence, she had totally missed out on the giggly intimate exchanges of sexual knowledge, and the lack of it; she had continued, as children do, to regard the whole thing as something people had to do rather than that they wanted to. Even now, when from time to time, usually in the company of some attractive man, she did feel slightly pleasurable stirrings of what she could only assume were sexual desire, she couldn’t imagine being so overcome by them that she would get carried away, and risk pregnancy, scandal, and even being cited in the divorce court.

Just the same, she obviously had to do it, and do it soon; and Julian Morell seemed to her the ideal accomplice in the matter. He was much older than she was, so he would be experienced and presumably skilled; he would be more likely to be understanding and even charmed by her lack of experience; she knew he found her extremely attractive; and her opportunities for seducing him were legion. She did not give his wife a great deal of thought. She was three thousand miles away, and it was clearly a marriage of convenience, otherwise she would come to New York much more often; and besides this was 1957, it would be an adult relationship, and she had no intention whatsoever of breaking up the marriage.

She laid her plans with care.

None of it, however, had quite worked out how she had expected. She had managed to present him quite late on Friday evening with some drawings that were just sufficiently below her usual standard to require further discussion and work; she had suggested they talked over dinner at a new Italian place in the Village near her apartment; she had asked him to see her home (as it was Friday night and there were more than the usual number of drunks about); she had made them both coffee and poured them both brandy (which he had drunk rather less enthusiastically than she had) and then sat, edgy and dry mouthed, hoping rather desperately that some overpowering natural instinct would propel them both into the studio couch (made up freshly this morning with some new thick linen sheets she had bought from Saks) without her having consciously to do any more about it.

Julian had not seemed, however, in the least danger of being overpowered by anything; he sat totally relaxed, leafing through the pages of
Vogue
and
Bazaar
, pointing out the occasional reference to himself, to Mrs Lauder’s new range, to a forthcoming promotion from Mr Revson; finally he had leant back on the couch, looked at her and said, ‘What’s the matter, Camilla?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘nothing at all.’

‘Oh yes there is,’ he said, ‘first you present me with some damn fool designs and pretend you can’t do any better. Then you tell me you’re afraid to come home on your own, when you’re the most independent woman in New York and that includes the Lady on Ellis Island. Now you’re shaking like a teenager on her first date. What is it?’

She had said nothing, nothing at all, that she was simply tired; and he had laughed and said she was never tired; and had taken her hand and said, ‘I may be being presumptuous but are you out to seduce me?’

And she said, half angry, half ashamed, no of course she wasn’t; that it was time he left, it was late; and he said he would certainly leave if she liked, only he would much rather stay if she would like that; and then she started to cry, and said please, please go, and then he had put his arms around her, to comfort her, and that had been cosy and comforting and reassuring, and she had stopped feeling frightened and silly; and then somehow everything had changed and he was kissing her, really kissing her, and holding her and stroking her, and at first it was nice, and then as she realized what was happening, she stopped being relaxed and she tautened and shivered violently; he had drawn back from her and said, ‘Camilla, what is it, what’s the matter?’ and she had suddenly taken a deep breath and said, ‘I’ve never done it before.’

She would never forget to her dying day the look of absolute amazement on his face; how he had sat back from her, just staring at her, and she had been sure he was going to be angry, or amused; and then he had said, very gently, reaching out and touching her face, ‘Then we must take great care that you will want to do it again.’

After that it had been all right; she had had a moment of panic when she had suddenly remembered the cap, sitting
expectantly in its drawer, but by then she was undressed and so was he (and neither he nor
it
had looked nearly as alarming as she had expected) and she was feeling relaxed enough to be able to say she had to go to the bathroom; and when she came back he had been waiting for her with an expression of such tenderness, such patience that she had stopped being frightened altogether.

Nevertheless, she had not found it as wonderful as she had hoped; indeed it had been rather more as she had feared; and she had felt strangely detached, almost disembodied, as if she had been watching above the bed as he fondled her and kissed her, and stroked her breasts and kissed them; and kept asking her if she was happy, if it was all right; and finally, as the moment arrived, as he gently, tenderly entered her, patiently waiting again and again for her to follow him, as he began to move within her, as eventually the movements became urgent, bigger, more demanding, as he kissed her, stroked her, sought out her most secret, tender places: as he shuddered tumultuously into her, murmuring her name again and again, all she could feel, all she could think as she tried dutifully, earnestly to respond, was a sense of huge relief that it was over at last. Afterwards, of course, she had lied; she had said it had been lovely, that no, she hadn’t quite come, but she had felt marvellous, that (and this much at least was true) it couldn’t have been more wonderfully, more gently accomplished, and that she was truly truly happy. They had fallen asleep then; later, waking thirsty and uncomfortable, unaccustomed to the restless invasion of her quietly peaceful bed, she had got up and gone to the kitchen for a drink of water; when she came back he was awake, waiting for her, his hand outstretched, asking her back to bed; and he had done it again, less carefully, more urgently, and it had been a little nicer and she could almost have said she enjoyed it. And when she awoke in the morning, and got up and showered, and made him coffee and sat drinking it with him, she had felt quite wonderful, to think at last, at long last, she was like everyone else, every other woman; no longer set strangely and awkwardly apart.

What Camilla had not been quite clear about was whether she was now actually Julian’s mistress. It was one thing being
seduced by him, that was what she had absolutely wanted; what was quite another was being emotionally and physically involved with him long term, and she was not sure if she wanted that at all.

There were many things she did want from him: recognition, power, prestige; but these sat curiously at odds with other such things as love, tenderness and physical pleasure. Indeed, as she lay in her bed in her parents’ home on the Saturday night, after parting at midday from Julian, she had wondered, with a touch of panic, if she had actually done the right thing; if in asking him for sex she had forfeited her career. He must, indeed he had told her so, now see her rather differently; no longer the cool, self-confident Camilla North, possessor of a formidable talent, but a tender, tentative lover; possessor (as he himself had said, as he kissed and caressed it joyfully), of a formidable body. What was that going to do to her position, her future, in the company? Had she in an uncharacteristically feckless, reckless act, thrown away what mattered most to her in the world: her own success?