Slave to Fashion Read online

  I kissed my way to the door with Ludo clinging to my hand, and we went to find a taxi. As always, the taxi worked its aphrodisiacal magic on him, but I really couldn’t be bothered with it.

  And that isn’t like me at all.

  So that’s the immediate background to my trip to the depot. It isn’t quite true to say that I was in two minds over marrying Ludo. I loved him, by which I mean that whenever I said it or even thought it, it rang true to me, and I never felt that I was pretending. I never thought for a moment of dumping Ludo. Apart from the love thing, there were practicalities: life would be impossible without him. Where would I live? What would I do? My life was built, not around him, exactly, but directly above him. It assumed his continued existence, as a city assumes the continued existence of good drains. Sorry if that sounds unkind, but I’m trying to be honest.

  But despite the love, and despite the need, I was still tingling with that faint, unpleasant dissatisfaction that comes when you know you have to do something, and you know that it is for the best, but it means not being able to do lots of other things that you’d really rather like to do. Yes, I was desperate to get married and frustrated about his dallying over the date. But equally, if I was going to do something naughty, and on balance I thought I probably was, then time was running out.

  CHAPTER 3

  Cavafy, Angel,

  and the

  Loading Bay of Doom

  The tube was full of the usual freaks, psychopaths, and mutants. It really annoyed me that Penny would never pay for a taxi out to Mile End. She always said, “But Katie darling, the tube’s so much quicker. And think of the environment, you know, the hole in the rain forest, and whatever it is that’s wrong with the ozone layer. Save the whale, and the pandas and things.” She hasn’t set foot on public transport since they put the electronic gates in the tube stations, the operation of which proved to be completely beyond her mechanical capabilities.

  I say the usual freaks and psychos, but there were actually two rather good ones. One was a woman, normal looking, prim even, but about once a minute her face would convulse and contort into a hideous grimace, as though she’d just found half a worm in her apple. The awful thing is that she obviously knew it was going to happen, and she would try to cover her face with a newspaper, but she was always a split second too late. It was impossible not to stare, not to wait, breath held, trembling with expectancy, for the next fit.

  Because of the convulsion lady, I didn’t notice Rasputin until a few moments before my stop. Everything about him was long and filthy: his hair, his nails, his smock, his teeth. He had a big rubber torch in his hand that he kept switching on and off. And he was staring at me. He’d been staring, I guessed, for the whole journey. I felt myself blushing. Please God, let him not speak to me, I prayed. You see, nutters on the tube are bearable until they speak to you. If they speak to you, you enter a whole new world of pain.

  “He’s dead. We’ve killed him.”

  That was enough. I got up and walked down to the other end of the carriage. Mercifully we were just coming into the station. I’d never been so pleased to reach Mile End. As I hurried along the platform, I glanced back. Rasputin was staring at me through the window, his face pressed to the glass. Over his shoulder I saw, for one last time, the woman’s face contort.

  It’s only a ten-minute walk up the Mile End Road to the depot, but it always manages to get me down. People outside fashion think it’s all about Milan and catwalks and supermodels. It’s only when you find yourself on the inside that you see the sweatshops, and the depots, and the dodgy deals, and Mile End.

  I hate Mile End. I hate its dreary streets, its horrid little houses, its crappy shops. I hate the people with their cheap clothes and bad hair. I hate the buses in the high street, and the fish-and-chip shops offering special deals for pensioners. I hate the way it always rains. I hate it because it reminds me of home. I hate it because I know it wants me back.

  It’s okay—I’ve stopped now. I promise no more whining about Mile End, which I don’t doubt is a fine and noble place, beloved of its denizens, admired by urban historians for its fascinatingly derelict music halls and art-deco cinemas, and seen as Mecca by those who worship the Great White Transit Van. The Mile End I rage against is a Mile End of the mind, a metaphor, a symbol. And what is it a symbol for? Well, you’ll know when we get to East Grinstead in, oh, I don’t know, about another hundred pages.

  Back to the depot. The depot is where we store our cloth. “Depot,” believe it or not, is actually too grand a word for what we have. Who would have thought that depot could be too grand a word for anything? And what we have is a room, about the size of your average two-bedroom London flat, stuck onto the side of Cavafy’s Couture. Cavafy’s is a big shed, in which toil four rows of six machinists: middle-aged women with fat ankles and furious fingers. I always make a point of chatting to the machinists as I walk through to our depot. They make jokes about me being a princess, and I suppose I must look like some exotic bird of paradise dropped down into a suburban back garden. I always pause by the woman who sits nearest the door that leads off into our depot. She’s probably the last woman in the country to have been called Doris. She must have been born right on the boundary between “Doris” signifying something sophisticated and classy, cigarette holders and champagne flutes, and it meaning “Look at me, I clean other people’s houses for a living, and I wear special stockings to support my varicose veins, and my hair will always smell of chip fat, and I will never be happy, or fulfilled, or loved.”

  “How’s that chap of yours, then, my love?” she said, her fingers never pausing as she worked her way along a seam.

  “Oh, you know men,” I replied, smiling and shrugging.

  Doris shrieked with laughter, as if I’d just come out with the joke of the century. As she laughed, her fibrous hair, the texture of asbestos, moved as a piece. Her dress, a gray white polyester, sprayed with pink flowers of no particular species, picked up I guessed from the local market, having failed C&A quality control, would have looked almost fashionable draped over a girl half her age and weight.

  “Men! Oooo, men!” she cooed, as if she’d sampled them all, from lord to serf, and not just the abusive, hunchbacked railway engineer who’d stolen away her, in truth, rather easy virtue twenty-six long years ago and left her with the baby and no teeth. “But you’ve a good-un there, you know. And I says when you’ve a good-un, you ’ang on in there.”

  I blushed a little and looked around. Cavafy was in his office—a glass-fronted lean-to affair at the other end of the factory. Angel was there, too. Angel was, is, Cavafy’s son. He loves me.

  Everybody loved Cavafy. He’s one of those tiny old men you just want to hug. I’d never seen him without his brown lab coat, with at least six pens crammed into the breast pocket. I think he rather hoped something would happen between Angel and me. He’d invite me into the office for a coffee and embarrass the poor boy by listing his many accomplishments: “. . . and the high jump . . . only a small one, but the jumping, the jumping he could do. . . . And the running. And the GCSEs, look, we have them all on the wall, see, in frames: geographia, historia, mathematica, only a D, but a D is a pass.”

  But Angel, Angel. Years ago, when I was still in the shop, I’d come up here to the depot to help schlep stuff around. Angel had just started working for his father. He’d trained as an accountant, without quite passing his exams. I shouldn’t really have called him Cavafy’s idiot son. That was ungracious and unnecessary. In fact we used to have a bit of a laugh together: he’d make fun of Cavafy, and I’d make fun of Penny. Tight curly hair, fleshy lips, really rather good-looking, except for the height thing. Angel, you see, was a good three inches shorter than me. And that really wouldn’t do.

  It all came to a head one afternoon when I was sorting through some rolls of linen for a remake on that season’s best-selling outfit: an oyster duster coat that would fall open to reveal a tight sheath in a pale pearly gray to match the
coat’s luscious silk satin lining. Even doughy-fleshed, big-boned country girls became simpering Audrey Hepburns (such was the Penny Moss magic recipe). Suddenly I felt a presence. I turned round and Angel was close enough for me to smell the oil in his hair and pick out individual flecks of dandruff. He didn’t say anything: he just had a look of utter determination in his eyes, and I could see his jaw was rigid with fear or anxiety or lust.

  “Angel!” I said breezily, determined to avoid a confrontation. “How about a hand with this stuff. It weighs a ton.”

  But Angel still stood there, straining forward, apparently unable to move his feet.

  “Angel, you’re being silly,” I said, beginning to feel uncomfortable. And then he reached out and put his hairy hand on my bottom, where it stuck clammily to the pale silk. Somehow I knew that this wasn’t intended as a gross sexual assault, and I never felt my virtue was at stake: Angel simply couldn’t get the right, or indeed any, words out and his mute gesture was his only way of expressing his feelings. Had his pass been verbal, I would have been happy to parry verbally. But it wasn’t, so I felt that there was only one way to bring the incident to an end. Anyway, I suspected that Angel’s hand would leave the damp print of his palm and fingers on the skirt, and that annoyed me. So I slapped him.

  I’d never slapped anyone before: it always seemed like such a pointlessly feminine gesture, an admission that you haven’t the wit to inflict a more serious injury. Almost as soon as I’d done it, I regretted the act (and I certainly had cause to regret it later). Angel took his hand off my bottom and put it slowly to his cheek. A fat, oily tear built in the corner of his eye and rolled down his face until its way was blocked by the broad fingers, whereupon it found some subterranean passage and disappeared. Still without saying a word, Angel turned and walked away.

  Boys don’t understand how hard it is to break a heart. They think we have it easy, dispensing joy or misery with a nod or shake of the head, as they cavort around us, offering themselves for humiliation. But you really have to be a complete bitch to derive any pleasure out of kicking some hapless youth in the teeth. In fact, the only thing worse than having to reject a boy is having no boy to reject at all.

  Anyway, after a few minutes I went out to apologize to Angel. I liked him, and I didn’t want things to be awkward. I saw that he was in the office. Cavafy had his arm around him. He looked at me blankly and made a slight shooing gesture when I began to walk toward them.

  It was shortly after the Angel incident that it all began with Ludo, and for one reason or another it was a couple of months before I went back to the depot. On that first post-Ludo visit, Angel was nowhere to be seen, and Cavafy stood silent and stony-faced in his office, staring coldly through the plate glass. Even Doris sat aloof and barely returned my smile. Penny must have told Cavafy. The two of them had known each other for decades. The old Greek had made her first collection. Now that Penny had moved on to bigger and better things, she would still send him the dockets for fifty or so skirts or a couple of dozen jackets, for old times’ sake. I can imagine what kind of spin Penny put on it: Katie the gold-digger, Katie the counter jumper, Katie who thinks she’s too good for your son, Katie servant of Beelzebub, Katie mistress of the secret arts, Katie who suckles her cat familiar with her third teat. That sort of thing.

  But I toughed it out (and in truth it wasn’t that tough, bearing in mind that everything else in my life was starting to go so well), and it seemed that things had blown over. After a couple of months you’d hardly have known about the crisis, except for the sullen yearning you sometimes saw in Angel’s eyes and, if I’d been more perceptive, something colder in Cavafy’s.

  I sensed the sullen yearning thing as I slipped by Doris and through the door into the depot. It didn’t take me long to sort out the interlining: it was hiding under a roll of wool crepe. The depot has an exit out to the loading bay, and I didn’t fancy going back through the factory with Angel moping at me. The exit leads onto a ramp, and, as you know, heels hate ramps, so I usually sat at the top with my legs dangling over the edge and let myself down the few extra inches. I was just doing that when something emerged from the shadows.

  “Give you a hand there, Katie,” came a voice, the type of gorgeous Irish voice that just cries out to be called “lilting,” and bugger the clichés. I managed to feel both startled and soothed at the same time. A face followed the hand out of the shadows. It was vaguely familiar.

  “Do I know you?” I asked harshly, trying hard to mask the fact that I had been caught by surprise.

  “Sure you do. I’m Liam . . . Liam Callaghan. I drove for you last year at the London Designer Show.”

  Thaaaat was it. Normally I’d go with the clothes, helping to set up the stand, arranging the stories—a story, by the way, for you fashion know-nothings out there, means that part of a collection made out of the same cloth—and all that, but last season I went in the car with Hugh, and he insisted on stopping off at his club for a G’n’T, which turned into about seven, and by the time we got to the stand all the work had been done. Penny was furious but didn’t say much because it was all Hugh’s fault. I just managed to catch Liam as he was leaving, an empty clothes rail balanced on each shoulder. As he’d passed me, he’d half turned and thrown me a wink, which was naughty.

  “Oh, hello, yes, Liam. Of course. What are you doing skulking back here?”

  “Skulking’s a little harsh now, isn’t it? What could be a more natural habitat for your common or garden van driver than a factory loading bay?”

  He had a point, although the “common or garden” bit was fooling nobody, as he well knew. Although I’d only come across him that one time, I knew that Liam Callaghan drove for almost every designer fashion company in London. He was reliable, hardworking, relatively honest, and heterosexual. In the fash biz, any one of those would have set him apart; taken together, it meant you had to book him weeks in advance. And yes, Liam was something of a looker, in an almost caricatured Irish rogue kind of way: dark curly hair, blue eyes, a long face that had a suggestion of melancholy about it, you know, as if he’d just finished playing a piano concerto, until he wheeled out his smile. And that was some smile: a smile that could stop trains. And hearts. It was a smile he must have worked on in front of the mirror. It began, like all the great smiles, with the eyes: a barely perceptible widening, followed by an irresistible crinkling. And then the lips would purse for a moment before collapsing exuberantly into a lovely white roller coaster.

  “Well, are you going to give me a hand down or will I have to leap and sprain my ankle?”

  He gave me a smile for that: not an all-guns-blazing, blow-your-knickers-off special—perhaps just a 7.5 on the Richter scale of smiles. But it made me want to bite him, for all that.

  He was strong and lithe: not a pumped-up gym-fairy strong, but a lifting, shifting, working strong. His hand stayed in mine for a second or two after I landed.

  “Are you going back into town?” I asked.

  “I am that. Do you need a ride?”

  “Mmm. Anything’s better than the tube. Even a smelly old van cab, with fag ends on the floor and porno mags under the seat. I know what you drivers are like.”

  “Well, you know, you could always give it a wee tidy for me, if you’ve a mind.”

  The van, of course, was spotless. He opened the door for me and again offered me his hand, saying, “This is habit-forming.”

  Despite the traffic, the drive back into town was fun. We joked about all the appalling old dragons he had to work for: the cranky, tight-fisted Elland sisters, who’d always make him show his hands were clean before he was allowed to touch any of their precious hats; Emelia Edwards, who’d once actually pinched him for eating an orange, for which fruit she had a notorious aversion; Kathryn Trotter, who wouldn’t let any of her actual employees carry Kathryn Trotter bags, as they simply could not convey the right image.

  “And Penny Moss?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t say a word against th
e lady. Fierce as two ferrets in a bag, but never rude unless provoked. And always pays her bills on time. And I’d hardly say otherwise when you’re set to marry the precious boy, now, would I?”

  “I wouldn’t tell.”

  “Well, maybe you would and maybe you wouldn’t. And how do you feel about getting wed? All a-tingle?”

  “I’m slightly past the tingle stage.”

  “Second thoughts?”

  “I can’t quite see how that’s any of your business.”

  “I’m only making polite conversation, am I not?”

  “Of course I haven’t got second thoughts. Everybody loves Ludo. He’s a honey.”

  “And you’re the bee.”

  When you thought about it, that was really rather a horrid thing to say. But he said it with such a charming twinkle that I didn’t mind.

  “Won’t you miss all the parties and suchlike, when you’re wed?” he continued.

  “What do you mean, miss them? Why should I stop going to parties?”

  “Ah, there’s no reason under the sun. But when did you last meet a married couple at a fashion shindig? Isn’t it all single people, or boyfriends and girlfriends? There’s something about the married state that leads you on to quiet nights by the telly and Ovaltine before bed. And that’s before we even start talking about the kids. No, let’s give you a couple of quiet years first, then the time of chaos with the children—let’s say you have two, a couple of years apart, and they stay like millstones round your neck till they’re eighteen and they go off to college. Well, that’s twenty-two years before you’re clear of the last of them. And then you might be in the mood for a party, but who the hell’s going to invite you then?”

  I laughed, but it sounded hollow even to me.

  “If you knew me better, you’d realize that nothing could stop me going to parties. Anyway, it’s my job. How else could I know who was wearing what, or who was wearing who? How could I keep up with the scandal and gossip? My life isn’t going to end when I get married.”