The Decision (22 page)

‘Well – might he – marry you? If you told him?’

‘Unlikely,’ said Scarlett. ‘He’s married already.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes. Bit of a bind.’

‘Bit.’ Diana was silent for a moment, then said, ‘What have you tried?’

‘Oh – you know. Castor oil. Gin. Gin and castor oil together. In a very hot bath. That did give me terrible stomach ache; I was quite hopeful for a bit. But – no good. I spent the night on the toilet and in the morning – right as rain. Or rather the baby was. Don’t know what else I can do.’

‘Look, I’ll ask around,’ said Diana. ‘Some of the girls are pretty clued up, you know. Amanda, for instance. I know she got preggers once. She swore it just sorted itself out but I never believed her.’

Scarlett’s heart lifted just a little.

It had been Eliza’s idea, their Paris fashion feature. At the beginning of January, when the plans for shooting the collections were being put in place, and Fiona, always highly strung, became tearful on a daily basis.

Jack Beckham had been dismissing her suggestions for weeks. ‘I’m not having that sort of predictable crap in my magazine,’ he said. ‘If you can’t come up with anything better than that, Fiona, best not go at all.’

‘We have to go,’ Fiona wailed, ‘we’ll lose all credibility as a fashion magazine if we don’t. And it hasn’t helped that Mary Quant and Jean Muir have both come out and said Paris is dead. Well they would, wouldn’t they?’

It was something Jeremy said that gave her the idea; she had told him that she would be going to Paris as Fiona’s assistant and he had said, first having told her how proud of her he was, ‘Several of my mother’s friends go to the collections to order their clothes for the following season. Most couturiers spend their time dressing middle-aged women, once the razzmatazz of the press shows is over. It must be quite depressing for them, I always think.’

Eliza had reported this to Fiona next day, simply by way of a distraction after another tear-inducing session with Jack Beckham, and she had sighed and said yes, it was true, but there were a few young women, ‘mostly film stars’, who famously bought couture. ‘Like Catherine Deneuve for instance, and Elizabeth Taylor and of course Audrey Hepburn is Givenchy’s muse.’

‘Are there any young ones who aren’t film stars, do you think?’ asked Eliza, and Fiona said yes, she supposed there must be, millionaires’ third wives, that sort of thing.

‘Well, maybe we could find one, follow her round all the collections, feature what she liked—’

Fiona stared at her in silence for what seemed like a very long time. Then, ‘Eliza, you are a genius,’ she said, ‘whizz over to the picture library and get out all the files on the Best Dressed Women, that sort of thing. Photocopy any you think look really good, and let’s have a look.’

Terrified at the responsibility, Eliza went to one of the big picture libraries in Fleet Street and came back with a bulging file.

‘There aren’t many young ones,’ she said, ‘mostly older people like the Duchess of Windsor and Diana Vreeland. There’s poor Jackie Kennedy of course – oh and Princess Grace of Monaco.’

‘No, none of them would do it, and anyway, Jack would say they were too obvious,’ said Fiona distractedly: and then suddenly, ‘but here, Eliza, look at this woman, she’s gorgeous. Who’s she?’

Mariella Crespi gazed at them from the fading pages: a dazzlingly chic brunette, thirty-seven years old, married to Giovanni Crespi – ‘he’s much older than her, gosh, over seventy, clearly she’s an old man’s darling’ – one of Italy’s richest men. ‘It says industrialist,’ said Fiona. Mariella, who had been a debutante according to the cuttings, and had worked in the art world, had married him on her thirtieth birthday. She had never quite made the top spot on the best-dressed lists, but had appeared on several for the past four years. According to
Woman’s Wear Daily
, fashion was her religion and the salons of Paris, Milan and New York her places of worship.

‘One day I will make it,’ she was reported as saying, ‘right to the top. It is my big ambition.’

‘It’s worth a try,’ said Fiona, ‘she might think it would be fun and it would up her profile a bit. Let’s send her some copies of the magazine and a grovelling letter, and courier them off absolutely straight away – oh, no wait, I’d better run it past Jack, but I know he’ll like it.’

He did. Fiona wrote and rewrote the letter seven times and it was parcelled up with the magazines to go to the villa on the shores of Lake Como, which was the Crespis’ main residence.

‘I’m not very hopeful,’ said Fiona, handing the package to Eliza to dispatch, ‘but you never know. And it’s terribly short notice.’

‘I think she’ll do it,’ said Eliza. ‘I just feel it in my bones.’

Mariella Crespi was in bed eating her breakfast of brioche and caffè latte when her maid delivered the package from England. She read the letter swiftly, then started to leaf through the magazines. As she read, her expression, initially cool, became increasingly enthusiastic; after half an hour she pulled on a robe and went to talk to her husband.

He was in his study, dictating letters to his secretary, as he had been for over an hour already, for he still ran his industrial empire with great energy and enthusiasm; when he had finished he would work his way through the long list of phone calls a second secretary had compiled, ignoring the ones in which he felt no interest.

Mariella adored her husband as he did her; she was well aware that people assumed she had married him only for his money, and the assumption was wrong. Of course the money was very nice, and acquired for her everything it ever occurred to her she might want, but she also found him interesting, thoughtful, concerned and of course admiring. He was also, even in his seventies, an extremely attractive and beautifully dressed man; she was proud to be seen on his arm.

The only demands he made of her were that she should be his constant companion, look beautiful at all times and run his houses – in addition to the main residence on Lake Como, there was a small ski chalet in the mountains at Cervinia, and an apartment in Nice.

The story told in the newspaper cuttings of a lovely young debutante, who had met Signor Crespi at a ball, was not entirely correct; she was not in the least aristocratic, but the youngest of five sisters who had grown up in a two-bedroom apartment in a poor area of Milan. When she was sixteen, her widowed mother Nina had looked at the treasure in her midst, the olive-skinned, dark-eyed, full-bosomed beauty, with her mass of shining hair and deep throaty laugh, and entered her for a local beauty contest. Mariella won, and then another and then another and at the age of nineteen was competing at national level.

Signor Crespi was chairman of the judges at one such event and pronounced her the winner. The prize was five thousand lire and Mariella used it to attend a course on the history of art. She gained a qualification and was employed as a guide in one of the smaller galleries in the city, where Signor Crespi was a frequent patron; he remembered her, invited her to dinner, fell in love with her, and in a fairly short space of time asked her to marry him.

It was, astonishingly, a happy marriage. Mariella adorned Giovanni’s life, and truly loved him. She was a tender and devoted wife; and, most importantly, there had never been the slightest whiff of scandal.

Her only regret – and it was a deep and sad one – was that he had been unable to give her any children. When they were first married, Giovanni was in his late sixties, and very far from impotent; but as the years passed, it became evident he was equally far from fertile.

Giovanni had only one child, a son, by his first wife, who was a great disappointment to him. Benino was not the high-flyer his father might have hoped for, an ambitious heir to his large industrial empire, but a gentle creature, who at the age of twenty-five had announced he was entering the priesthood.

However, Mariella was a pragmatic creature, not given to regret; she was a successful member of Milanese society and enjoyed it greatly, only occasionally allowing herself to admit to a certain ennui in her life; the letter from
Charisma
magazine therefore fell into it like manna from heaven.

She had appointments that day in Milan, at both Elizabeth Arden and her hairdresser Mario Petris, for the social season – traditionally launched by the opening night at La Scala at the beginning of December – was in full swing; but before setting off, and having sought the permission of Giovanni, she cabled the fashion editor who had written so charming a letter, saying she would like to meet her and summoning her to Il Grande Hotel Milano in a few days’ time.

‘She’ll hate me, I know,’ wailed Fiona. ‘She’ll be horrible, all spoilt and hard and condescending,’ but she came back starry-eyed and dizzy with excitement.

‘She is just amazing. So, so nice, absolutely beautiful and terribly excited about it all. She loved the magazine and all Rob’s stuff, and she’d heard of Daniel Thexton, said she’d seen his stuff in
Vogue
. She’s going to go to all the collections and we can talk to her after each one and hear what she has to say about it and then photograph the clothes.’

‘But not on her?’

‘No, no, of course not, they wouldn’t fit her, they’re all model sizes, although she’s so glamorous we can certainly do some pictures of her outside each house or something like that. She wants as much exposure as she can get. She wants to come to the sessions too, amazingly. I told her they were often in the middle of the night and she laughed and said, “so much the better”. And, best of all, because she’s an actual client and such a high-profile one, we’ll be able to borrow the clothes that bit more easily. It’s perfect, Eliza. Really perfect.’

‘I know she can’t model the actual clothes for the sessions,’ said Eliza slowly, ‘but maybe – maybe if she wore her own example of whatever designer we’re doing, we could include that in some way. Shoot her alongside the model, or separately, but on the same page or spread. Do you think she’d do that?’

Mariella said she would adore to.

She was staying at the Meurice; she invited Fiona for cocktails the evening before the first show. Fiona came back overflowing with excitement.

‘Jacques Fath tomorrow. She always orders at least three things from them, she says. And then she’s going to Cardin, Chanel of course, Balenciaga, Balmain, Dior – oh Eliza, it’s so exciting.’

She dressed by preference at Jacques Fath and Cardin, ‘and Pucci, naturally, I adore Emilio so,’ but she was not above the ready-to-wear market as well, ‘of course I wear Missoni, who would not?’

Most importantly she was nice: good-natured, patient and enthusiastic. (‘How does she get to be that way?’ Fiona said wonderingly. ‘Most of these women are frightful.’) When the directrice of Balenciaga told Fiona coldly she could only have the dress that Mariella had chosen at eleven that night, ‘
Vogue
will have it until then, maybe later, you will just ’ave to wait,’ Mariella simply shrugged and said, ‘Is fine. We will have dinner first. I will bring a very very tight girdle, so my stomach is holded in. Eliza, you must come too.’

She had taken a fancy to Eliza, who she had met in the studios, and who kept her supplied with the Italian Murillo cigarettes she loved, as well as playing cards with her while the hairdresser did her hair.

‘I think it’s because you’re posh,’ Fiona said. ‘Takes a nob to know one.’

‘I’m not a nob,’ said Eliza crossly. She spent a lot of time trying to shed this image, in what was supposed to be the new classless society; nothing seemed to work.

‘Course you are. If they cut you down the middle, it would say “posh” all the way through, like Brighton rock. Anyway, I’m grateful, anything that keeps Mariella sweet.’

Keeping her sweet wasn’t very difficult, Eliza reflected, as they sat chatting in the dressing room of the studio waiting for the make-up artist, presently working for
Vogue
, to grace them with her presence.

‘This is all such such fun for me, you have no idea. So much of my life is always the same, day after day after day. One day I will tell you all about it, and then you will understand.’

Eliza supposed living with a man in his seventies must have its drawbacks. Even if he was a multi-millionaire.

Eliza had only seen one show: Chanel. In spite of the savage heat, a poor seat (gained by sheer force and elbowing other people out of the way – ‘it’s like a rugby scrum,’ Fiona said, ‘you really do have to fight, I warn you’), an hour-long wait for the start and a thumping headache, she would not have missed it for the world. She was amazed by the length of the thing – over two hours, one girl after another, showing almost identical suits, and completely identical dresses, the differences often as infinitesimal as a change of button – and the solemnity of the occasion, it really was rather like being at some hugely important religious ceremony. What made it work for her really, she had to admit, was the fact that Chanel herself was there, a small, rather forlorn little figure, sitting at the top of the famous spiral staircase, dressed in a pale pink tweed suit and a boater hat, smoking throughout; Eliza hadn’t quite believed she would be there, had thought it was some kind of legend. Which Chanel was, of course, a living legend; I shall be able to tell my grandchildren about this, Eliza thought.

There was a huge drama one day which Fiona and Mariella regaled her with later, goggle-eyed: one of the newspapers had smuggled a photographer in, another got wind of it and there was a great chaos as the show was halted, he was identified and thrown literally out of the doors. The newspaper photographers were used to such hardship; the directrices of the salons despised them absolutely and would only allow them to take two pictures after each collection ‘of the ugliest girls, and more or less in the dark’, Fiona said.