Lace

by Shirley Conran

  Kate woke before the bell sounded and immediately realised that something odd had happened overnight. The street sounds were muffled and the room seemed unusually light. She dashed to open the window and push aside the lace curtain. The frost pressed white flowers against the glass. Barefoot in her blue nightgown, she leaned out. The trees were sprinkled with snow, the roofs of the chalets below were covered with thick white blankets that glistened in the early sun, the turrets of the Imperial Hotel shone white like a child’s frosted birthday cake. Beyond the town, the pine forests looked ghostly, like gray lace.

  Snow fell heavily for several nights and in a week the little town was transformed. The ski-rental shop hardly ever closed; skiers slid along the streets; children wrapped like bulky parcels pulled little coloured sleighs, the milk was delivered by dog sleigh and the local stable immediately brought out its magnificent horse-drawn sleighs. It was, at last, The Season.

  Overnight a new elite appeared. Any man who could ski well was attractive, and any man who couldn’t, wasn’t. Men who had spent the summer being ignored as farm labourers and bricklayers suddenly became gods in the form of ski instructors. Every plumber’s winter hope was to marry one of the heiresses from the finishing schools, consequently the girls were given preferential treatment in ski class and a great deal more attention than they deserved. The suntanned, lithe instructors, in their red wool hats and sweaters, captured every girlish heart as they coaxed, scolded and helped the stragglers, swooping back and forth with effortless grace that every girl envied, for to ski well was the ultimate social distinction.

  Also worshiped, but from a greater distance, was the Swiss ski team, in training at Gstaad. The merits of the four team members and two reserves were endlessly discussed, but the team members themselves had time for nothing except training. They lived in a chalet on the edge of the town and were hardly ever seen. Which, of course, made them even more attractive.

  One morning at breakfast, Pagan interrupted the now nonstop speculation as to what would happen next Saturday at the first dance of the season. She looked up from a rare letter from her mother. “Guess what?” she asked. “My mother knows Nick’s father. I told her about him in my last letter and she thinks he might have been at Eton with my cousin Toby. She says that if his surname is Cliffe with an ‘e,’ then he’s Sir Walter Cliffe’s son and he’s going to inherit an enormous family hotel business.”

  “It can’t be the same or he would have mentioned it,” said Kate.

  “If he’s Sir Walter Cliffe’s son then he certainly wouldn’t have mentioned it,” Pagan said, adding for Maxine’s benefit, “It’s British understatement, you see.”

  Later, in the cloakroom of the Chesa, they told Judy, who said, “No kidding! He’s never said anything to me about it. I thought he was learning to be a waiter so he could be a waiter.” They went back to their table. Nick edged his way over to them through tightly packed tables. To the embarrassment of the other girls Judy immediately pounced on him.

  “Is it true that you’re going to inherit the Cliffe hotel business one day?”

  Nick blushed. To give himself time to think he pushed his hair back from his face, then stammered, “Well, yes—I’ll have to run it, but it won’t actually be mine; it’s in a family trust. It’ll be my job to look after it . . . for the family.”

  “Does that mean you’re rich?” Judy asked. There was a pause.

  “I’m not poor,” Nick admitted unhappily, “but I’m going to have a lot of responsibility.” With unusual firmness he added, “Now d’you mind very much if we don’t discuss it anymore?”

  Later, in the cloakroom, Maxine turned to Judy and beamed. “Well, now you know about Nick, this will be the end of Jim in Virginia, I suppose?”

  “Why?” asked Judy, astonished.

  “Well, Nick is obviously mad about you. And it would be a very good proposition, no?” Maxine asked.

  Judy laughed. “Look I’m not sixteen yet. I don’t intend to get married to anyone now, let alone a guy I’m not in love with. I promised my mother I wouldn’t even go out with a boy while I was here, and it was only because of that that she allowed me to come. I think it was a sensible promise, and I’m going to keep it. I know it must seem crazy to you rich kids, but I’ve got to earn my living. It’s hard keeping up with the French classes as well as the German ones, and working as a waitress doesn’t make studying any easier. But I’ll only get this one chance, so I’m grabbing it. There’ll be men around for the rest of my life. They can wait.” She hesitated, then admitted, “If you want to know the truth, I don’t have any beau at home. Jim in Virginia doesn’t exist. He’s just a smoke screen that I tell other guys about if they get interested in me. It lets their vanity off the hook. Men hate being told no for no’s sake.”

  “But if you make a good marriage you won’t need to work,” said Maxine, puzzled.

  “Wanna bet?” said Judy.

  That evening the school supper table buzzed with excited discussions as all the girls decided what to wear for the dance. Maxine had her blue silk strapless gown, with a puffed-sleeve bolero; Kate would wear her dull, Debenham’s cream moiré dress with a sash and a modest heart-shaped neckline, filled in with a lace fichu. Maxine offered to recut the front in a daring low scoop, and her offer was immediately accepted, but that didn’t solve the problem of what Pagan was to wear.

  “It’s no use. I can’t go. I haven’t got a long dress,” Pagan said gloomily.

  “But you’ve got a full black taffeta skirt,” said Maxine, “and your grandmother’s white silk blouse. Suppose we buy a couple of meters of shocking pink taffeta and make a huge frill around the bottom of the skirt so that it reaches your ankles and pleat the leftover material around your midriff in a cummerbund, then unbutton the neckline of the blouse so that it’s low?”

  Pagan cheered up. In an odd way Maxine sounded just like old Mrs. Hocken in the village, and Pagan liked nothing better than converting a garment into something for a totally different sort of occasion than the one for which it had been intended.

  That evening Maxine chalked a new, daringly low scoop on the cream moiré, and Kate shut her eyes and crossed her fingers as the scissors bit into it. Then, on her knees, Maxine moved around Pagan, pinning newspaper to the bottom of her skirt to make a pattern for the frill. All over the school girls were trying on their dance dresses. Some of the continental girls wore an entrancing garment called a “Merry Widow,” which encased the wearer from armpit to suspendered thigh in black satin and lace. It was backed with steel strips as uncomfortable as the whalebone stays worn by Victorian women, but it was sexy.

  All over the school girls without one wrote home by airmail, begging money for extra violin lessons. . . .

  The Imperial, with its fairytale towers and turrets, is one of the most beautiful hotels in the world. As the unheated green school minibus drew up to the glittering glass porch, the pupils took off their unchic winter coats (few of them had evening wraps) because it was better to freeze than look dowdy. Escorted by two harassed mademoiselles they trooped across red carpet under crystal chandeliers to the ballroom, where people were already sitting at small white candlelit tables. The girls sat down in the row of dark red banquettes that had been reserved for the school and ordered gin fizzes—the girls had to pay for their own drinks, and gin fizzes were supposed to last longest. Politely formal, Nick was one of the waiters who took their orders.

  All the girls were nervous; they dreaded being asked to dance, they dreaded not being asked to dance, they dreaded dancing badly or stepping on their partner’s toes. They pretended to ignore the stag line that was beginning to form at the far end of the room as they prepared for—possibly—their first major public humiliation. Pagan was glad she was sitting down so the boys couldn’t see how tall she was. She was too tall for half the men in the room, although she couldn’t imagine why they hated her height—she didn’t mind small men.

  “I think I’ll go to the ladies’ room,” Ka
te said casually.

  “No you don’t,” said Pagan. “One thing’s certain, nobody’s going to ask you to dance if you’re in the ladies’ room. Don’t be in such a funk. Look at me! That will take our minds off this horrible ordeal. I’m terrified I’m going to step on this damned fuchsia frill and rip the whole thing off.”

  The band struck up “La Vie en Rose”, there was a sudden scuffle and their table was surrounded by boys who all wanted to dance with . . . Kate! Stunned, Kate accepted the invitation of the nearest one, who led her off for un slow as she thanked God for Maxine’s lessons. Soon all three girls were on the dance floor, saved from the awful fate of being wallflowers.

  At the end of the dance they were escorted back to their table, where their partners bowed and left them. Then, as the band struck up a samba, there was the same wild rush to ask Kate to dance. She couldn’t believe it as she floated around the dance floor with a handsome, loose-limbed fellow called François, a student at Le Mornay.

  François was—according to prescription—dark and handsome. In the arms of this loose-limbed fellow (so confident, even when reversing in the waltz), Kate wafted around the dance floor in a haze of joy as his masterful arm pulled her closer to his white starched shirt front, and her heart thumped as she felt his unfamiliar warmth against her breasts. The second dance was a rumba, which François did with all sorts of tricky variations. Before it had finished Kate suddenly flushed. This room’s too hot, she thought, then she felt an unfamiliar sensation; a simultaneous wooziness of the head, a lurch in the stomach and a weakness in the knees. She thought, I’m going to faint, how odd it feels. But then she suddenly realised what was happening. This must be it, Kate realised, bursting with happiness as she mistook lust for love.

  François had a smooth, well-practiced line of small talk. As they floated around the floor, or as he bent her body back and forth against his in an increasingly close samba, he spoke very politely, as if they were having tea with his family. Kate found it was oddly erotic to feel his body hardening against hers (or was she imagining it, because he obviously hadn’t noticed) as he suavely described the best forest walks, ski runs, guides, bars, hotels and ballrooms in the district.

  Kate said very little. Her green eyes just looked up adoringly into his tanned face as François explained that there was one stumbling block to the Saturday night dances. After the dance was over, the girls from l’Hirondelle were forbidden to speak to the men they had met. On Saturday night you could cling to the man of your dreams through innumerable accordian renderings of “La Vie en Rose,” but should you meet him on the street on Sunday morning, you were meant to ignore him, to look straight through this potential love of your life.

  From the headmaster’s point of view, the girls were supposed to dance perfectly by the time they were shipped back to their parents. François explained that other inadequacies could be blamed on a girl’s inherent inability, laziness, pubescent nervousness or premenstrual tension, but the parents got angry if their daughters couldn’t dance. A good, cheap way of finding partners willing to teach them and getting the girls to practice their French was to allow pupils to attend public dances at the expense of their parents. However, Monsieur Chardin didn’t trust a single one of the pubescent young women for whom he was responsible, and he wanted no irate grandparents-to-be on his doorstep demanding compensation or (even more difficult) identification. The easiest way to ensure his tranquillity and to keep his pupils safe was to lock them in every night, like chickens.

  It was an invitation to trouble.

  By midnight Kate felt like Cinderella. She was, in fact, too dazed to notice that when she went to the cloakroom none of the other girls spoke to her. They were not simply jealous of Kate’s success. What made them angry was that they couldn’t understand it. Kate looked so ordinary. “I can’t think what they see in her in that boring old dress,” sniffed one girl “It’s not as if she’s pretty. Thin hair—not even long—and those odd, green, hooded eyes.”

  Kate had just had the first taste of a disbelieving jealousy that she would have to endure from women for the next thirty years. Because they could not understand why men were attracted to her, women thought that Kate was sly, that she had tricked them, that no man was safe with her. In fact they were wrong; Kate was safe with no man.

  With a crash of cymbals the spotlight shone on the bandleader as he announced that the competition to elect “Miss Gstaad” would take place after the next dance, during which the voting slips would be passed out to each table. “Well, it’s quite obvious who’s going to enter it from our table,” beamed Pagan. “Kate is the belle of the ball; she’d better be Miss Gstaad as well.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Kate. “I’m not going to go up on that stage and make a fool of myself.”

  “I dare you,” said Maxine. “It’s not serious, it’s not Miss World, after all, it’s only a little village hop.” She gave Kate a firm push, shoving her off the maroon velvet bench. “Don’t be so bloody British.”

  Kate stood up. Reluctantly, she shuffled onto the dance floor and was pushed into line by the majordomo, who handed her a large card marked number 17. A couple of other finishing schools had also come to the ball, so there were about thirty girls in line on the dance floor, including a voluptuous Italian girl in a black velvet, strapless gown. Kate saw she had no chance of winning, but it was too late to back out. Slowly the girls formed a circle.

  But Kate had reckoned without Nick, who walked over to the waiter responsible for passing out the voting slips, gave him a smile that meant, “I’ll settle with you later,” shoved a handful of slips into his own pocket, dashed into the men’s cloakroom and quickly scribbled “17” on all of them. Then he walked out and picked up the top hat that was to be passed around the tables to collect the voting slips. Simple.

  The lights were lowered, and an erratic spotlight illuminated each competitor as she slowly walked up the steps that led to the platform, stood centre stage, beaming or looking embarrassed, held up her number and then walked down the steps.

  Amid applause and wolf whistles the lights came up again as everyone dropped his voting slip in the hat that Nick held out to each table.

  Each girl in the competition tried to look unconcerned. To them, the beauty contest wasn’t a minor evening’s diversion, decided upon by the bored-but-professionally-jolly majordomo; for each of them, it was their first taste of public sexual competition, and their hearts thumped and they found it hard to breathe until after the next samba when the majordomo stepped forward and announced that the new Miss Gstaad for 1948 was, Ladies, Lords and Gentlemen—number 17!

  Kate shook her head in disbelief, Maxine flung her arms around her and hugged her, Pagan whooped with delight and a flock of knowing waiters lined her path to the little stage where, scarlet with surprise and pleasure, a pale blue sash that read “Miss Gstaad 1948” was draped around her by the majordomo, who then propped a diamanté tiara on her hair, presented her with two magnums of champagne and stood at her side in an avuncular pose as photographers’ flashlights popped.

  “We’ll be having trouble with that one,” muttered one of the harassed mademoiselles who had been sent to escort the Hirondelle girls.

  It was an accurate forecast.

  4

  BY THE END of November nearly all the schoolgirls had steady boyfriends and had discovered that the little town was astonishingly full of places for secret meetings. They met behind the church, in stables and in barns, crouching in the backs of cars, in the back of the ski shop, in tearooms on the outskirts of town or on top of the ski runs. On the weekends the Eggli, the Wasserngrat, the Hornberg and the Wispile each had their quota of courting couples, as did the inns and cafés of nearby villages such as Saanen and Château d’Oex, which had already catered to generations of foreign finishing-school girls suffering from the symptoms of puppy love.

  After a Saturday night spent with their hair twisted up in paper curlers and their faces covered in crea
m or dried mud to prevent wrinkles, the l’Hirondelles invariably headed for the Chesa. Their show of self-confidence barely hid their uncertainty and indecision. One remark or laugh could produce an instant, hateful blush—and it was doubly humiliating to be betrayed by one’s own neck. Flirtatious and pert, conscious only of their appearance and their audience, the girls appeared not to notice the young men who were sitting at nearby tables, tilting their chairs back, impatient but resigned to all this feminine playacting, as the girls pretended to ignore them.

  Unexpectedly, for the first time in their lives, the girls had discovered they possessed a sort of power. Once she realised this, each girl felt a strange pride in being able to enslave a boy—or two or three, which made a girl twice or three times as powerful. None of them realised the strength or dangers of this sudden sexual power; they never realised that it could be black magic or white magic, depending on how you used or abused it. In 1948, sex appeal was power, the only power these girls were ever likely to get, and you used as much of it as you had as hard as you could and full blast! Naturally, the girls knew their own prim petting cutoff points, but it never once occurred to any of them that a man might find it difficult to switch off his own powerful urges at the moment when it suited the girl to do so. It never occurred to any of them that the power they had raised in the man was not only passion but, if thwarted, the power to rape or kill. The reactions of a frustrated man had never been explained to any of them.

  Judy acted as postbox for all the adolescent lovers. For the first time since term started, dictionaries were thumbed, grammars consulted and Maxine was much in demand as a translator. Judy also passed messages about meeting places, which often depended on the weather. When she placed a bill or a paper-lace napkin on a table it might well be accompanied by a note that read, “Sheila, Nursery slope ski lift at five,” or “Hélas! Gérard chéri, impossible cette semaine. Samedi prochain à trois heures, ton Isabel.”