Lace

by Shirley Conran

  But she had to check.

  The classic one-night-stand man only wants to get involved if he thinks the woman doesn’t; the classic one-night-stand woman is hopefully, unsuccessfully searching for Prince Charming and feeling forever guilty about it. Many women imagine that promiscuity brings conquests and pleasures. This may be so with a man—the sort of man who wants to try every biscuit in the tin—but unlike a man, a woman is rarely promiscuous if she has a wonderful love at home. A promiscuous man is afraid he might be missing something. A promiscuous woman is seeking something and—sadly—not finding it.

  So there Kate was, a classic case of potential nymphomania, until New Year’s Eve at the 1956 Chelsea Arts Ball where, among the balloons and the streamers, among the real and the bogus painters, Kate met her first Design Man. Toby was a twenty-eight-year-old architect who specialised in hospital design, and had just been made the youngest partner of his firm. Toby introduced Kate to the haute-Bohemian circles in which he moved, and Kate found his friends a refreshing change from officers of the Household Brigade and budding stockbrokers. In fact, she was fascinated by the Design Men. They were so world-weary, scornful of everything that wasn’t perfectly proportioned or that they hadn’t thought of first. They held up a cocktail and squinted at the proportions of the glass before sipping the drink, and they could only eat from plain white china.

  “The first night I slept with Toby,” Kate happily told Maxine (who had, of course, heard the intimate bits earlier), “he took three, black cotton cushions off the tangerine cotton mattress—which was on the black-painted floor—and put them on the black leather sling chair.” Sitting in front of the fireplace, Kate pulled her knees up and put her arms around them, then said in a dreamy voice, “There was no other furniture in the room.” She rested her head on her knees and continued, “Then he went behind the kitchen bar, stood on a stool, took two quilts from an overhead cupboard, bent down and pulled out two black pillows from under the sink, then threw the whole pile onto the mattress.”

  She heaved a long, sexy sigh. “After that he took off his jeans and lay there reading Design by the light of one of those chrome caterpillars that wriggle out of the wall, as if they were trying to read over your shoulder. Then he glanced up and criticised my panties.”

  “Super,” Maxine said politely, but to herself she thought, Oh, dear, another bastard.

  Kate was hopelessly dominated by Toby, who told her how to dress, look, think, feel, behave. When he criticised her in front of Maxine for being sloppy, clumsy and inefficient, Kate not only believed him, but to Maxine’s surprise actually promised she’d try hard to do better.

  Kate adored Toby’s self-confidence and shared his high opinion of himself. She was still a happy, grovelling doormat, thought Maxine, although she had to admit that Toby was quick-witted and entertaining, if not particularly handsome; he was obviously clever and passionately interested in his work; he took the trouble to explain it to Maxine as they all sat on the pale beech floor listening to the delicate, lacelike intricacy of a harpsichord toccata.

  “The drawback to hospital design is that it’s often very frustrating,” Toby told Maxine, as he mixed a Campari in a plain glass. “You haven’t got one client—there’s a whole bunch of them. Doctors who won’t bother to read plans properly, head nurses, the Regional Hospital Boards and the Ministry of Health.”

  He held the glass of red liquid to the light. Wonderful colour! “The boards and the ministries are old-fashioned; they have preconceived ideas and they won’t listen to new ones. They tell me to ‘economise’, when they’re really suggesting that I design overcrowded wards.”

  “It sounds extremely complex,” said Maxine politely. At last a friend of Kate with some sense, thought Toby.

  Kate listened adoringly. She loved to hear Toby talk about his work, loved to visit his calm, all-white office with the tilted desks and the vast blueprints. Unlike the doctors, she had quickly learned to read them.

  But Kate didn’t dare let Toby move into Walton Street, because her father would have exploded with rage. “Then I suppose we’ll have to get married,” Toby said ungraciously, and once again Kate’s eyes sparkled.

  Kate Harrington. Mrs. Toby Harrington. Mrs. Harrington.

  This time there was no marquise diamond—in fact, Kate only just managed to get a wedding ring at all, because Toby thought they were bourgeois, if not a primitive token of possession. However, he was reluctantly persuaded to buy a secondhand gold band with a worn heart pattern winding around it. The previous owner must have been a very worried woman, because all the hearts were worn away on the right side from nervous twisting.

  Toby’s widowed mother came up from Essex for the wedding. Major Hartley-Harrington’s widow was a big, brusque woman, with muscular legs and a nose she could look down. Although she wore navy silk, you sensed that mentally she wore tweeds and was worrying whether the dogs were all right in her absence. She said remarkably little, and during the dreary register office ceremony, she kept sniffing and hitching her fur stole up around her shoulders, obviously under no illusion that she was acquiring a daughter.

  She mellowed a little over luncheon at the Connaught, but due to the wine, rather than any growing affection for her new daughter-in-law. At the end of the first course, Kate’s father, who had been struggling to talk to Toby’s mother for half an hour and knew a tough nut when he saw one, banged the side of his glass with his knife and said he wasn’t a speechmaker, that young people’s lives were their own affair, that he realised things were done differently today—which was not to say that they were done better—but that two people couldn’t really live together in a dark hole, so he had bought the house in Walton Street as a wedding present.

  Kate flung her arms around him and wept for joy.

  After that announcement the wedding group relaxed, and happy laughter actually accompanied the bride and groom as they flew off for their honeymoon in Milan, where the Triennale Exposition was in progress. Toby could criticise any international award-winning designs that weren’t quite up to his standards.

  At first they were happy.

  Kate’s old basement apartment was gutted, painted white, covered with cork pinboard and transformed into Toby’s office. It was always full of his friends; they came pouring in to be fed, often without warning, and to talk about their work before, during and after meals.

  Kate loved it.

  The ground floor of the little Walton Street house was also gutted. All walls, ceilings and window frames were painted dull chocolate, the floors were covered with white vinyl tiles—which showed every footprint—a rash of spotlights appeared, and the balustrades were removed from the staircase. On one side of the “living environment,” a ten-foot run of kitchen units was installed, hidden by a sliding screen of louvered pine, so that you had to heave the heavy screen back ten feet if you wanted to get a teaspoon. The wall opposite the kitchen unit was hung with shelves that supported books, drinks, visually acceptable flowers (such as a bunch of daisies in a jam jar or one long-stemmed rose in a chemist’s beaker) and Toby’s collection of battered Victorian toys. Toby himself had designed the metal chairs. Some looked like tractor seats, and some were made of crisscrossed wire. “Ass traps,” muttered Kate’s father, thinking how bloody bare the place looked; when her parents visited, Kate hid the priapic African carvings and the privately printed Aubrey Beardsley engravings.

  In the evenings Kate worked hard and happily as a hostess, entertaining Toby’s clients, his useful contacts, architectural journalists and the other designers who were working on Toby’s projects. Kate loved learning to cook for them. After a couple of standard bride’s-dinner-party disasters (a casserole burned black, a salted ham she’d forgotten to soak overnight before cooking) she discovered Elizabeth David’s cookbooks, and from that moment on, only the breakfast boiled eggs were served without garlic. For a Christmas present she asked Toby for a hand-operated salt grinder and a jar of confit d’oie from Fortnum’s. She
served the preserved goose to her parents on Boxing Day. It was greasy, thought her mother, but this odd food phase will pass fast enough when she has a baby.

  As he kissed Kate on the doorstep, her father bravely said, “Usually I don’t like mucked-up foreign food, but I must say that was very nice, girl.”

  They were the last words that Kate heard him say.

  35

  THE NEXT DAY, Kate’s father managed to give himself a mild electric shock while changing a lightbulb in the loggia, fell backward off the ladder onto the flagstone floor and broke his neck. He was dead when Kate’s mother found him.

  Kate cried for a week and couldn’t really understand why, for she had resented his rages and his tyranny. She would never forget the quivering, nail-biting fear of her childhood.

  She was silent and strained after the funeral until the end of the month when, to Toby’s relief, Maxine came to stay. Kate poured herself a Campari, sat cross-legged on the green and blue, longhaired ryja rug from Finland and burst into tears.

  “It was the last thing I expected, Maxie—to feel depressed when the old bugger passed away. But I feel terribly tired and completely lacking in self-confidence. It’s as if I were a schoolgirl again!” She took a swig of Campari. “His death was such a horrible mixture of farce and tragedy. When I got to Greenways there he was, lying on a couch in the hall as if he were having a nap, stone-dead in his blue-striped pajamas and clutching an arum lily. Someone had put makeup on his face, his cheeks were bright peach, and they had tied a handkerchief over his head and under his chin to hold his jaws together before rigor mortis set in.”

  Kate took another large gulp, looked at the Campari with distaste, got up and poured herself a Scotch. She wanted “a proper drink,” as her father would have said. “If he could see himself, he’d die of shame, I thought, and it was only then that I realised that he was dead. That was the only point at which my mother nearly broke down. Apart from that she was bloody marvellous, brisk and cheerful at the funeral, just as he would have wanted her to behave at his last appearance.”

  Kate now started to snivel, looking sad and stunned. “Mummy kept saying if a bomb had got him in the Blitz he would have wanted us to feel happy when we thought of him.”

  She sniffed again. “He obviously hadn’t expected to die at fifty-five. His papers were in such a mess that it took me a whole day just to find his medical card.”

  “Poor baby,” said Maxine, and gave her a big hug. “You’ll feel better soon.”

  But instead, Kate had a row with her father’s lawyer on the following day. “Now, remember, Mummy,” Kate cautioned before they entered his office, “for heaven’s sake, don’t be overawed by him.”

  The two women were shown into a small Gray’s Inn office filled with shelves of red-leatherbound legal books, and to her surprise the normally timid Kate—feeling furious on behalf of her dead father—coldly reviewed the situation.

  “Last month, Mr. Stiggins, the day after my father died, you seemed to know very little about my father’s assets. You told my mother then she would be unable to lay her hands on any money at all for some time.”

  Stiggins nodded. “Now; there is no need for you ladies to be anxious. As you have seen from the will, the late Mr. Ryan’s entire estate is contained in a trust fund for his widow, which will, upon her demise, be inherited by her only issue, Mrs. Harrington. It’s just a question of waiting for probate. A few months . . . Perhaps a year.”

  He tapped his fingertips together. “The late Mr. Ryan named me personally as one trustee. The other trustee is his former partner, Mr. Jellaby—who, as you know, has unfortunately been in the hospital for the past two months after a stroke.”

  Portentously he continued, “Consequently, I am currently responsible for the late Mr. Ryan’s investments, and after much deliberation and discussion with this firm’s stockbroker, I have decided to sell all the shares. After death-duties have been paid, the remaining money will be invested in the British Widows Fund, which is a safe unit trust company.”

  “What’s a unit trust company?” asked Kate, aghast that apparently such financial decisions could be taken without her mother even being consulted.

  “A company with expert advisers that invests its funds in the stock market. It is, I might say, a very cautious company. Naturally, I cannot allow risks to be taken. . . .”

  Kate didn’t understand much of what followed, but she was determined to inform herself about the stock market.

  The first thing she discovered was that British Widows was so “safe” that it paid minimal dividends.

  “I can’t help thinking that Stiggins must be getting a cut somewhere,” Kate muttered to herself, grimly determined to keep checking on British Widows.

  She bought a child’s exercise book and started to take notes on the stock market.

  Two months later, Kate had another interest.

  She was pregnant.

  She was delighted. She rushed out and bought a wicker cot, an antique brass bed, some nineteenth-century Randolph Caldecott nursery rhyme prints and a large, traditional pram, like the ones the royal nannies push. Toby loathed it, especially as it blocked their narrow hall.

  Her mother returned from an expedition to Bond Street with a pile of minute lace garments that had been hand-stitched by French nuns. Mrs. Ryan was cheerfully living on a steadily increasing overdraft, for which the bank was charging her interest at two percent above the normal rate because the loan was unsecured. She had decided to sell Greenways. It was too big for her. She was going to buy a country cottage in the Cotswolds and live there with her sister.

  Kate was still absorbed by Toby’s work, fascinated by his theories and his missionary zeal. On her next visit, Maxine, amazed, watched Kate pounding a pestle in an ancient marble mortar as they all three lounged around the kitchen end of the living environment. That morning, for two hours after her arrival, Maxine has listened to Kate pouring out her heart, her hopes and her happiness. Kate now seemed a new person, a person in her own right, a person of some importance. She no longer looked quiet and worried. She wore a self-confident smile and a canary maternity smock made from upholstery linen that she’d bought from Harrods furniture department—although she hadn’t confessed that to Toby, because Harrods was terribly unvisual.

  Maxine admired every hand-smocked, lace-trimmed item in the layette and then listened to Kate’s plans, as they both sat on the tangerine linoleum of the newly decorated Visual Nursery and watched the mobiles stir in a slight breeze from the window. As Kate babbled on, Maxine suddenly realised that her friend longed for a totally unworried love relationship. Maxine herself knew that the charm of having babies is that Mother is in charge: she is the boss and she calls the shots. At last.

  For the following six hours Kate questioned Maxine nonstop about pregnancy, upon which, as usual, Maxine (being one step ahead) was the authority. They endlessly discussed how much it hurt, whether you called them pains or contractions, and what it really felt like. “Shitting a football,” said Maxine in French with unusual vulgarity but much feeling. All the other mothers she’d known when she was pregnant had soft-pedaled this aspect to Maxine and she still felt angry about it. They discussed whether Kate should attend the new natural childbirth trust classes in Seymour Street, how much bigger your breasts become, whether they sag afterward, how long it takes to get back to normal down below, whether you would still be the same circumference there and what you did about stretch marks.

  At this point Toby came back from a visit to the Design Centre and suggested that they all have a drink. As they carefully walked down the bannisterless staircase, Maxine reckoned that, more than any pregnant woman she’d ever encountered, Kate needed this baby. Toby didn’t seem nearly as interested as Kate in the baby, and whenever Kate mentioned hospitals (she was booked into St. George’s) Toby immediately started talking about cross-infection and Florence Nightingale. Toby was devoted to the theories of Florence, the famous nineteenth-century nurse:
he had a daguerreotype of her hanging in his office, and he spoke as if the famous lady with the lamp were still alive.

  “She talks such a lot of sense,” said Toby, meaning that he shared her views. “She says that patients should be the first concern of a hospital, although the first concern of any damn hospital is their damn medical routine. They wake you up to give you a sleeping pill and put you to bed at teatime, because that’s when it suits the nurses’ timetable.”

  Toby was pouring himself a Campari, as carefully as if he were splitting the atom. “Medical men don’t seem to realise that a patient isn’t an experimental dummy or a corpse to be dissected. They don’t seem to realise that a patient is a frightened human being.”

  “Watch out! He’s getting on to the subject of ward sizes,” said Kate. “Now where did I put the pine nuts? Oh, you’re eating them. Hand them over!”

  She waved her long, narrow hands at Toby. When talking, Kate used her hands a lot. She would flutter one like a fan, or bend her elbows to her waist and, with both hands, slowly make graceful, expanding motions away from her body. Now she waved the pestle in mock threat at Toby, who mock-dodged, then continued, unabashed. “Well, ward sizes are much more important to an illness than patients realise. Of course, nurses like open wards—except when they’re ill themselves—because they feel they can keep an eye on everyone.”

  “Toby, Maxine’s come for dinner, not a lecture.”

  Kate touched a button and the blender shrieked, drowning conversation for a few minutes. Kate tested her mixture, added more salt and pepper and said, “Tsatsiki, a cold Greek soup for a change. Taste it, darling.”

  She held out a spoonful to Toby, who waved it aside and continued to lecture Maxine, who accepted a pale-green spoonful and nodded approvingly (thinking it had too much garlic) as she listened stupefied to Toby droning on.