“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
Penny blinked away my objection. “Darling, I’m here to help. I know what it is. It’s Ludo, isn’t it?”
Ludo? What did she mean? There was no way she could know about anything. Unless Liam had . . . no, that was impossible. She was speculating, trying to lure me out. Play, I thought, the innocent, which, after all, I was.
“Ludo’s a sweetie. What could be the matter there?”
“Katie, you’re being brave. But I know you must be in anguish on the inside.”
I wouldn’t have called it anguish. What the hell was she getting at?
“You must be a bit tipsy,” I said without any malice.
“Darling,” she said, ignoring me, “you must understand that men are different from us. They have stronger . . . passions. You cannot blame them as individuals; it’s the species that’s to blame. I saw it on the television: their genes make them do all kinds of horrid things. We must learn to tolerate, to turn and face away. Victorian hypocrisy has something to be said for it.”
I was now completely baffled.
“What do you mean, stronger passions? What horrid things?” I asked. But as I spoke, I began to realize what the old witch was up to. She was suggesting that Ludo was having an affair, or at least indulging in what Hugh would call “a touch of oats, wild, the sowing of.” And that rubbish about not blaming. If poor old Hugh ever did anything more than flirt, she’d be at him with the pinking shears quicker than you could say Lorena Bobbitt. And why would she intimate that her beloved son was acting the young buck to his prospective spouse? There could be only one answer: She had not yet renounced her goal of driving us apart, of saving the family silver from the counter jumper. I had no idea if this latest stratagem was devised in advance or improvised on the spot. Either way, I had no intention of allowing it to succeed.
“But Ludo hasn’t got any passions, except for the sea eagles, and socialism, and curriculum reform, and things. They are a bit boring, but I don’t really mind them.”
“Of course, there are those . . . enthusiasms Ludo permits you to know about, and then there are those which are secret.”
“Penny, enough. Ludo is the most transparent, least secretive person I’ve ever met. I’m sure you as a mother like to think of him as a roguish blade, irresistible to women, but that’s just not the way he is. I love him, but that’s because of what he . . .”
“Has?”
“No, Penny, because of what he is on the inside.”
I felt a bit stupid because of that “on the inside” stuff, but I knew I had won the moral high ground: not, generally, a terrain I’m particularly familiar with, but a rather satisfying place to find oneself. In any case, Penny was silenced, although that might have had more to do with the arrival of her sole, and my snout, than my redoubtable defense of her son’s honor, and our love.
I wish I could make Première Vision itself sound more interesting or glamorous. Of course, it’s very heaven if you’re a fabric junkie. Every important, and most unimportant, European manufacturer is there. How many? I don’t know; a thousand, maybe? Two thousand? And that’s an awful lot of luscious silk velvet, fine wool crepe, and oh-so-wearable viscose. So it draws the world’s designers. They come here eager for inspiration, desperate to find that look, the same and yet different from the others, strange and yet familiar, unusual enough to be a must-have, practical enough to become a must-wear.
And they come also to eye each other furtively, to chart slyly the course woven by competitors, to kiss and to smile and to joke insincerely; to cut, occasionally, an old foe, or a new friend; to drink champagne on the terrace bar; to sneer, to snoop, to gossip, and to weep.
As soon as you negotiate your way through the surely exaggeratedly Gallic security (Penny never seems to mind the intimate body searches, offering herself up like those fish you hear about that go to special parts of the sea to be nibbled clean by other, smaller fishes), you find yourself in the first of the three colossal, hangarlike halls. Colossal and yet, because of the oppressively low roof, with its sinister girders and gantries, strangely claustrophobic.
Gliding from stand to stand, her fine head high, her step majestic, Penny was in her element. Penny Moss may be only a little company, but with Penny in the ring, it punched above its weight. Junior assistants would be imperiously thrust aside and factory managers summoned from dark corners, from which they would emerge, brushing away crumbs and smiling meekly.
My job was to see to it that Penny made no major mistakes, ensuring that her (now irregular) flashes of brilliance were not undermined by (the increasingly common) gaffes. Who, after all, could forget the Year of Lemon and Purple? The tactic, as you can probably guess, was to make Penny think that everything was her idea anyway. Flicking through the samples, she’d find something that caught her eye, and she’d make a noise, indicating pleasure or revulsion. I would join in with subtle harmonies or really quite delicate dissonance. Either way, the right decision would emerge. There may, at some deep level, have been a knowledge that I was contributing to, perhaps even determining, our choices. But at the level of consciousness, or at least insofar as that consciousness found itself transformed into words, the job was all Penny and my role merely that of factotum, sandwich girl, and drudge.
I was on my best behavior and in my worst mood. Penny’s clumsy attempt to prize Ludo from my arms had, if you’ll pardon a moment of melodrama, frozen my heart. And in Paris, of all places, where we were supposed to be friends, sisters, almost, with our shared room, and our suppers together, and the world to be won. I know that revenge is a dish best served cold, but that shouldn’t necessarily limit your range: I planned whole buffets.
But then I’d done that before, and my plans always ended up like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. I always mean to be vindictive, but when it comes down to it I tend to forget what I was supposed to be angry about, or I just lose interest, so I settle for a good long bitching session with Veronica. Anyway, Penny was a special case. I’d worked too hard to get where I was to risk losing it. Penny being a cow was always part of the deal.
So, over the course of the day, I let slip my plans for punishment beatings, sabotage, slander, and fraud. But by some weird alchemical process, as these silly thoughts fell away, they left behind a strange residue. That residue solidified into the form of an Irish driver of vans. It certainly wasn’t that I decided to use Liam as revenge against Penny. Penny couldn’t possibly be hurt by that. The opposite, in fact. It would be to offer her my head on a plate. It was more a moral thing. Being treated badly by Penny made it okay to do something harmlessly wicked myself.
Toward the end of the day, as Penny was having a grappa with Signor Solbiati, a sad figure in crumpled linen, happy to escape into nostalgia with an old acquaintance, I noticed a familiar, elegant frame sliding toward me, followed by a less familiar, less elegant shadow.
“So Milo,” I said, “what did you make of Penny in the all-too-solid flesh?” I was expecting viaducts of archness, but I was to be disappointed.
“She was something of a hit. Added much to the gaiety of what was becoming a rather tiresome party. After all your griping, I had no idea she was going to be such a scream.”
“So”—I laughed—“she was right, then.”
“Right about what?”
“You do fancy her.”
His reply was more thoughtful than bitchy: “Well, perhaps if she were forty years younger and a boy. Let’s go for an ice cream. This, by the way, is Claude, Claude Malheurbe.”
I looked blankly at the middle-aged man by his side. He was profoundly unattractive, with one of those faces that looks as if it’s been put on upside down. He was wearing a black silk shirt, unbuttoned to show his pale chest, tight black trousers, and a pair of disastrous black pixie boots. His hair was long and smelled strongly of mousse.
“Claude Malheurbe,” repeated Milo with emphasis.
“Bonjour, Claude,” I
said, none the wiser.
“Deconstruction Malheurbe,” hissed Milo.
Of course. What was it—five years ago? that fashion got hold of some wacky French ideas and decided to make explicit the hitherto hidden fact that clothes are made rather than whatever the alternative was supposed to be. It did this by showing seams and generally having things inside out or upside down. Malheurbe was behind it all with his book The Hermeneutics of Cloth, the fashion world’s favorite unread book. The previously unknown philosophe was courted by couturiers and was whisked from his provincial lycée to burn briefly as a media star. In those days he was much more beret and Gauloises, which was why I didn’t guess immediately.
His second book, Visceral Couture, which advocated wearing clothes on the inside of the body as a way of exposing the last fallacy of “biologism,” that the internal organs escape the endless play of signification, had mysteriously proved less popular than the first, and he disappeared from the fashion firmament.
There, you see. My three years in fashion college were not wasted.
“What are you doing here, Milo?”
“All rather secret. Really can’t tell you. It’s not as if you’re known for your discretion. I assume that’s why they call you flabby lips.”
Malheurbe sneered, or leered, or sleered, showing one brown tooth.
“Fine. Really couldn’t care less, anyway,” I said. Milo knew I meant it and panicked.
“Oh, all right then, no need for the Gestapo treatment, I’ll tell you. You know how XXX”—Milo mentioned here a terribly familiar chain that I really cannot tell you the name of, however flabby my lips—“are going down the pan? Well, I’ve been asked to help. I’m here to let it be known, subtly, that I’m working for them.”
“But I thought Swank did their PR?”
“Yes, they do.”
“So what are you doing?”
“Well, you see, I’m here to give the impression that I’m doing it.”
“But you’re not doing it?
“No.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Look. It’s quite simple. What kind of image has XXX got?”
“Worthy, dull, cheap.”
“Exactly. And what kind of image has Smack! PR got?”
“Pretty cool, I suppose. Exclusive. Young. A bit druggy, a bit clubby.”
“On the head, darling, thank you. So, you see, as soon as word gets around that XXX has signed up Smack!, the whole world, by which I mean the whole world that matters, our world, is going to think that they’re revamping their image, dragging in new, younger people, all that jazz. And you know what that means for City confidence and share prices.”
“But you’re not actually doing their PR!”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because the kind of PR I’d do would scare off the grannies once and for all. This way, those in the know think XXX is cool, and the rest just carry on buying their knickers. Inspired, really.”
“Doesn’t Swank mind? It doesn’t make them look too good, does it?”
“It was Swank’s idea.”
“What’s in it for them?”
“They get a load of industry kudos for thinking up the scheme and hiring me. There’s awards in that kind of work. It’s exactly the kind of thing PR pros love. One day PR shall talk only unto PR.”
So here was Milo, paid by a PR firm to pretend to be doing the PR for a company whose PR was really being done by the firm who paid Milo to pretend to do their PR. Unfortunately for XXX, as I found out later, Milo told everyone who’d listen that he was only pretending to do their PR. This, of course, was good PR for him, but bad PR for XXX. I think.
By this point we’d queued for ice cream, and I’d shelled out a hundred francs for three tiny Häagen-Dazs—Milo’s meanness in small things was legendary, an understandable if unattractive relic of his days of penury. We went to eat them in a bleak little garden, enclosed on all sides by glass walls and staring Japanese midget women.
I was a little unsettled by Penny’s success with Milo, so I threw him a couple of examples of Penny’s comical linguistic misunderstandings and consequent confusion, mainly concerning the admittedly rather bemusing system of signs in the building. Milo liked to squirrel away the Penny stories I gave him, which he could then, in other contexts, attach to whichever designer he felt the need to bitch about.
At the mention of “linguistic” and, even more so, “signs,” Claude hurriedly swallowed the last of his ice cream (omitting, however, to wipe away a chocolaty smear from his upper lip) and started to speak, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the air above my head, as if he were addressing a lecture theater.
“Ah yes, I can here explain for you your mother”—MOTHER!—“and her fear of the sign.”
He drew out the word sigheeeeeen in a vaguely fetishistic way.
“It is not just here. The whole world is now a text, a written text: everywhere there are words.”
Although I tried to listen out of politeness, Malheurbe’s voice soon took on the quality of birdsong: not unmelodious, but basically just noise. Occasionally it would float back into focus:
“We are unconsciously, passively, enmeshed in writing, in decoding and decrypting.”
Only to fade out again. Quickly bored, I looked over his shoulder and saw Penny reemerge from her grappa with Signor Solbiati. From her excessively regal gait, it looked as if it may have been some grappi (or whatever the plural is) rather than a grappa. And with that ability that people have for seeing you when you least want to be seen, she spotted our little group, waved, and advanced toward us.
“For preliterate societies this natural impulse to comprehend the environment takes the form of a deeper engagement with the natural world. So, every physical feature has a meaning, every rock, every tree, every animal spore, a significance, a narrative, a myth.”
Before Penny could get to the glass corridor, she had to negotiate a huge art installation. There was a new one every season, and this time it was a monstrous construction called L’Esprit de Tissu, consisting of a wigwam-shaped chrome frame draped with millions of tatty lengths of yarn.
“With civilization man loses the ability to read nature.”
Rather than walk around the obstruction (which, to be fair, would have taken a good five minutes), Penny opted, in a very Penny way, to go through it.
“It was only with the arrival of the Romantics and the invention of the sublime that nature could again be comprehended, albeit as something ‘incomprehensible.’ ”
I suppose the side she was facing may well have looked, to her grappa-fuddled mind, not unlike an easily navigated bead curtain, and the installation had a certain airiness that invited an internal exploration. With barely a pause Penny thrust her way into the interior.
“You see, when you call nature ‘sublime’ you have substituted a single, although admittedly complex, signifier for the multiplicity of meanings that primitive man saw in nature.”
I could see Penny’s outline through the gauzy curtains of yarn. She’d become disoriented inside the wigwam and was feeling her way along the various internal planes and angles.
“And then even the sublime goes away—who other than I now talks of the sublime?—and all we have is the simple good thing, the new ‘nature,’ which is completely benign, that thing which people with no style, no élan, walk through on a Sunday afternoon, with his ugly wife with his ugly children and his ugly dog. I’m sorry, but I hate these peoples.”
As her efforts to fight her way out became increasingly frantic, I noticed with alarm that the wigwam itself began to wobble. I was not the only one: nervous officials were moving toward L’Esprit de Tissu; among them were a couple of gendarmes excited by the possibility of being able to shoot an art terrorist in the act of desecrating a national monument.
“But as the natural world has become lost to language, so our social world, and the built environment, has become, as I said, all writing. And so what happe
ns when a person finds himself in a country where he does not speak the language (this has never, of course, happened to me: I speak all the languages)?”
The gendarmes and PV flunkies reached the wigwam but seemed reluctant to break in, despite the now precarious state of the structure, which was being vigorously shaken by the one-woman earthquake within: who, after all, could know how heavily armed the terrorist might be? A fair crowd had gathered: sober-suited sales executives and flamboyant fashion junkies united in their lust for blood and the faint but not forlorn hope that L’Esprit de Tissu might implode.
“For example, your mother? I’ll tell you. She is again in the position of the civilized person who cannot read nature and so feels again the giddy fear, the vertigo, terror, loss, panic. I think you will find this explains your mother. Now we go for sex, please, yes?”
With the mention of sex I tore my attention away from the engrossing spectacle beyond. I looked around. Milo had disappeared, the serpent. He’d probably been looking for the chance to dump the philosopher on somebody all day.
“Sex?” I said a little more loudly than I intended, resulting in a couple of turned heads. I had been caught off guard, but Parisian propositions were hardly novel, and I had a coping strategy to hand. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m a little busy right now. Why don’t I meet you tonight?”
I named a café in Montmartre, a place to which I’d never been nor had any intention of ever going. It’s my standard way of dealing with that sort of pass. It always works. And when you don’t turn up, they either think something poetic and tragic might have happened to you and hold you in a special place in their hearts all their lives, or they curse you for ten minutes and then forget all about it.
Penny burst forth from the wigwam. Her hair, which had been tightly and precisely coiled into a chignon, had broken free and hung raggedly across her face, with a stray clump pointing to ten o’clock. Somehow her neat knee-length skirt had revolved 180 degrees, and the split pointed accusingly at her navel. The audience broke into spontaneous applause and hissed the gendarmes as they laid rough hands upon her.
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