Slave to Fashion Read online

  “But some things will have to stop now, won’t they, Katie?” He unfurled a smile. It was simply impossible not to smile back.

  There was no way he could have known about my one or two little flirtations. And you’re not going to like this, but I had, it’s true, been thinking about one last, final, meaningless, harmless little fling before settling down in utter and complete faithfulness with Ludo. The idea had half formed itself in my mind. I knew it was there. It nudged and winked at me. And without explicitly acknowledging its presence, it became part of me, and I knew that I was going to do it.

  But who with? No one in my circle. The best-looking men were, naturally, gay. The sexiest men were married—and I may be naughty, but I’m not bad. No, it had to be an outsider. There was the aforementioned divine Dante, who always put chocolate on my morning latte (which I always spooned off with a shudder back in the office). Handsome, in that baby Vespa way that Italians have. But really, no. I thought about Max from Turbo Sports next door but one. I once saw him, glistening with sweat, at the gym. Body hard as a pit bull terrier. He had the cold eyes of a serial cat strangler, which I rather liked. So different from lovely, helpless Ludo. But again, no: his head was too small, and he conversed principally in grunts and lewd gestures. There was always the queer little man who came in to fix our Mac whenever it crashed. He once gave me a big, embarrassing sunflower. But beware geeks bearing gifts, as I always say.

  So it went with all of the men I met: too old, too silly, too ugly, too gay, too small, too close, too far.

  “What does your girlfriend think about you working with all these glamorous fashion women?” I asked shamelessly.

  “And what makes you think I’ve got a girlfriend? Could I not be a sad, melancholy soul, drifting forlorn and loveless through life?”

  “No,” I said.

  “As it happens, I am between girlfriends at the moment, which is saving me a fortune in roses, but costing me one in Guinness.”

  “I hate Guinness,” I said. “Tastes like old man’s bile to me.”

  “Well, you see, it all depends on where you drink it, and—”

  “Who you drink it with?”

  “I was going to say how it’s poured. But now you mention it . . .”

  “There’s a rather good Irish word I’ve heard occasionally,” I said sweetly. “Gobshite.” For the first time he laughed. The laugh was less studied than the fabulous smile, but lovelier for it.

  “Gobshite, is it? Will you look at the tongue on her! She’ll be calling me an auld bollix soon.”

  “So where should I be drinking Guinness?”

  “The only place for a pint of slow-poured black stuff, amid convivial company, with your ears caressed by the finest fiddle playing, is the Black Lamb in Kilburn.”

  “Kilburn. Is that where you live, then?”

  “Not every Irishman lives in Kilburn, you know.”

  I did know. About half the people you meet at parties are Irish: Emerald Tiger types, fresh out of Harvard Business School or journalism college, sleek, clever, ambitious. The girls are all beautiful, if a touch wholesome and buttery, and the boys are all puppy faced and eager. They’d no more live in Kilburn than I would. Of course, I’d been to the Tricycle Theatre a couple of times, dragged by Ludo. Once we saw a version of some Brecht play performed by Eskimos. The second time was less commercial. The whole show consisted of a man buried up to his neck in a heap of broken watches, screaming, “It’s later than you think! It’s later than you think!” Even Ludo agreed we shouldn’t go back after the interval.

  I looked out of the window and caught a glimpse of myself in the wing mirror. I’d just had my highlights done at Daniel Galvin’s. I always think I look better in bad mirrors, caught in movement or glanced at an angle. Unless you’re obviously at one end or the other of the spectrum, it’s impossible to really know how attractive you are. Models know they’re gorgeous. They might pretend to be riddled with doubt, but that’s just them trying to seem more clever than they are. And people with harelips and things. I suppose they must know that they’re ugly. Sorry, sorry—beautiful on the inside, I’m sure, but, whatever you might say, ugly on the outside. Actually, in my experience ugliness does something horrid to the soul. Knowing that whoever you’re talking to can only think, God, but she’s ugly, must burn into you like acid. Unless you’re especially stupid. Which makes it all the sadder that pretty people are so often dim, and ugly ones clever. (I know it’s a cliché, but clichés get to be clichés because they’re true. Sometimes, anyway.) Hugh once gave me a very good piece of advice. I don’t know where he got it from. “Katie,” he said, “always tell pretty girls that they’re clever, and clever girls that they’re pretty. They’ll love you forever.”

  “And what do you say if they’re pretty and clever?” I asked.

  He smiled and patted me on the bottom. “You say yes, Katie. You say yes.” Naughty man.

  But I’m drifting off my point. Which was, unless you’re at the extremes, you really don’t know where you are. And I thought, as I looked at myself in that wing mirror, Are you pretty, Katie? Or are you plain? If you’re pretty, how pretty? If plain, how plain? I’d always had boyfriends and men to tell me that I was pretty, or better than pretty. But men lie. And even the ones who didn’t lie, who believed it, did they know, were they right? If you get the devotion of some poor simpleton who thinks that because you don’t buy your clothes from a shop with two letters with an “&” in the middle you must be pure class, does that count? Any man will say he loves you, any man will say you’re beautiful, when he has a fistful of your knickers and his nose in your Wonderbra. Girls know, of course. We can cast our cold eyes over one another. But knowing that girls think you’re pretty is like drinking alcohol-free wine or decaffeinated coffee: it just doesn’t hit the spot. No, what we want—or at least what I want—is for men to find us, me, beautiful, and for them to be right.

  But after all that, I think I know what the truth is. The truth is that I am quite (a lovely word that can mean “really quite a lot” or “not really very much at all”) pretty. I’m not very tall, perhaps about five six. I’m slim, but not, by anyone’s reckoning, skinny. My hair is naturally a dark browny yellow, the color, as Ludo once said, not meaning to be horrid, of a nicotine-stained finger. Hence the highlights. My eyes are gray, which is good. I have no eyebrows, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. My eyelashes are too pale to be of any use, so I have them dyed. The second time we slept together, Ludo lay gazing into my face. “Your eyelashes,” he said, his breath heavy with wine and cigarettes, “they’re amazing. They’re so dark and long! I love them, and your eyelids and your eyes and your face and your head and your everything.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I still haven’t. It’s one of the things Penny thinks she has over me. My breasts are small enough not to embarrass me in the world of fashion and big enough not to embarrass me in the world of men. And all the bits in between? Oh, God! Who knows?

  My point is, and I know I’ve come the long way round, that I’m a good-looking girl, but not good-looking enough to be blasé, not good-looking enough not to need the glances, the praises, the presents, the adulation, the worship, the flattery, the fawning, of men. You see, what makes me interesting is that I’m close enough to be able to reach out and grab these things, these meaningless, gaudy, pointless baubles, but too far away for them to drop into my lap.

  And now I was reaching, foolish, foolish, girl, for the bauble that was Liam Callaghan, van driver, Irish blarney merchant, borderline beautiful boy.

  “Your Black Lamb doesn’t sound like the kind of place a girl could just wander into on her own.”

  “Ah, Jesus, there’s plenty of girls come into the Lamb, but it’s true enough none at all like you. A good-looking lady by herself might attract a bit of attention, but then you wouldn’t have to be by yourself.” It was coming. “You know, if ever you wanted a taste of the dark stuff—the real thing, mind you—then I could show you the place.
It might be the making of you.”

  I have no idea how serious he was up to this point. Was he just playing the Irish rogue to pass the time on our way into town, his mind in neutral? Was this just a diversion? The bluff, if bluff it was, was about to be called.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?” I noted with pleasure that he was a little taken aback.

  “Okay, why don’t you show me what a good pint of Guinness looks like.”

  Now there was no smile at all.

  “When can you come?”

  “Today’s Wednesday, isn’t it? I’m in Paris from Thursday through till Sunday. How about a week tomorrow?”

  That “I’m in Paris” was precious. Thank heavens for Première Vision.

  “Thursday week it is, then. What if I meet you in the pub at, say, eight o’clock?”

  I suddenly felt giddy. Was I in control? I thought I had been. But here I was, agreeing to meet an almost complete stranger, in a desperate pub in Kilburn, a part of London I knew about as well as I knew the courtship rituals of the white-tailed sea eagle.

  “Jesus, look, it’s Regent Street,” said Liam. “Why don’t you leap out here?”

  “Thanks for the lift,” I said.

  He said nothing, but looked at me and smiled. It was like being overwhelmed by a warm Caribbean wave: giddy, intoxicating, engulfing, fatal.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Technical Interlude,

  Concerning Leases,

  and the Provenance of Penny

  I cannot say that my endeavors that afternoon represented the triumph of the production manager’s art. Whatever Penny might think about me, she knows that I work hard and efficiently. Being good at anything is all about focus, filtering out the white noise. Ludo told me once that some scientists had done an experiment where they monitored the eye movements of different types of chess players, you know, grand masters or whatever they’re called, and ordinary chess club hopefuls, with tank tops and dirty cuffs. The really great players, it turned out, spent all of their time scrutinizing just a couple of squares—the ones that really mattered. The eager amateurs, on the other hand, roamed busily over the whole board, eyes darting feverishly from square to square, in search of the secret, the code that they would never crack.

  Ludo, of course, was useless at chess. He was too softhearted; he could never bear to lose a piece and could no more sacrifice a pawn than he could drown a puppy in a sack. Not that I used to play him. His chum Tom would come round, and they’d disappear into the Smelly Room with the board and a bottle of whiskey.

  No, that afternoon I couldn’t focus at all. My eyes were all over the board. Or off it altogether. I oscillated wildly between the fear of what I was getting myself into and a bubbling, uncontrollable excitement. Sitting at my desk, I found myself, amazingly, turned on. I crossed my legs and thought of Ireland.

  I could tell Penny was getting annoyed: she kept making a little noise that began as a tut and ended in a grunt. Her mind was turning slowly as she tried to find something to throw at me. I pictured an ox tied to one of those big grindy things they have in biblical epics.

  “Katie,” she called slyly from her place under the skylight, “have you spoken to Liberty yet about the reorder? We have to let them know today.”

  “You know I haven’t. Couldn’t you have done it while I was at the depot?” I didn’t normally bite back at Penny, but as I say, I was elsewhere.

  “No, Katie, you dear thing.” Ouch! One of the things I remember from “A” level English was that in Restoration comedies whenever the level of explicit courtesy rises, you know a sword is being drawn somewhere beneath a frock coat. Penny was like that. “Lady Frottager came in drunk and peed on the ottoman.”

  “What, again?”

  “Yes, again.”

  “Someone,” I said in a half-conscious echo of Penny’s own grande dame manner, “ought to tell that woman our ottoman is not a public convenience.”

  “Well, anyway, she was terribly distressed, and I had to comfort her until the taxi came.”

  “Did she buy anything?”

  “I coaxed her into one of the pashminas, but that’s hardly the point. And then that ugly brute Kuyper came a-calling.”

  “Still banging on about the rent rise?”

  “Without a . . . a . . . bazooka, there is simply no stopping that man.”

  Kuyper, a South African who’d learned his social skills as a torturer under apartheid (well, he might have), really was a brute. His company, Kuyper and Furtz, had bought the freehold on our shop and three other units in the lane, one of which was empty and officially cursed after a string of businesses had tried, and failed, to sell, in order, posh bras, camping equipment, cameras, and, inevitably, candles.

  The first thing Kuyper and Furtz did was to invite the utterly pointless Anita Zither, who was currently between retail outlets, into the empty unit. Pointless, because despite being the press’s darling, and the Establishment’s pet English designer, she’s never managed to put together a collection anyone would want to wear or buy, and every two years she goes bust, owing her suppliers tens of thousands. The day after she’d signed her lease, Kuyper came to us claiming that she was paying three times the rent we were. And there it was, in black and white. As it was time for our rent review, this spelled serious trouble. Kuyper ranted on about market rates, his bullet head and fat neck glowing red with greed, his fat finger pointing away, like a school bully bursting balloons. We couldn’t afford anything like what he was asking, nor, surely, could Anita Zither.

  The next day we got at the truth. One of Anita’s girls was an old bitching partner of Nester, our rather stately manageress. They went off for a coffee, and word came back of the dastardly scheme. The enormous rent existed only on paper. The Anita Zither shop was to be given a two-year rent holiday. After that she could renegotiate something more realistic or just do her usual evaporating trick. The bogus agreement was the perfect stick for beating the rest of us into submission.

  Penny, tough cookie that she is, stonewalled, and Kuyper became more and more aggressive, issuing all kinds of threats, legal and physical, and cursing in Afrikaans.

  (Sorry if that was all a bit drab and technical, what with leases and freeholds and things, but it wasn’t completely irrelevant, as you’ll see later. Look on it as being like the half-talky bits in operas that fill in between the nice songs, the recitative, I think it’s called. Ludo took me to see The Marriage of Figaro when we were first seeing each other. I read the program, which went on for pages. Too many notes.)

  Back to Penny and her mood.

  “Sorry I wasn’t here to help.” Conciliation seemed a good idea. “I’ll call Liberty’s now.”

  “No need to apologize, I am one-third American, after all,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  There was a pause as I did a quick calculation.

  “Can you be a third anything? Doesn’t it have to go in halves and quarters and eighths, and things?”

  “Of course you can. I’m one of three children. My mother was an American. And everyone knows that American flows through the female line.”

  “Isn’t that Jewishness?”

  “Ah, no, you see, I’m two-sevenths Jewish as well.”

  And so the afternoon passed.

  Paris meant an early start, so I was quite pleased that nothing was happening that night: not a dinner party, not a launch, not a soiree, not drinks, not clubbing, not anything. Ludo always loves it when there’s nothing to do: he bumbles about making silly remarks, giving me pointless, spontaneous cuddles. He’ll find a way of nuzzling the back of my neck, and unless I’m very discouraging, he’ll end up carrying me to the bedroom. No, at home I really couldn’t ask for a sweeter boy. It’s the social world he can’t cope with; my world.

  But Ludo’s lack of engagement with my world wasn’t why I was contemplating the mad, bad thing. You’re probably wondering what reason there could be. Here I was with a good man; not perfect, but good. P
erhaps even very good. Kind, handsome(ish), and just about rich enough. Yet I was setting out on a course that could lead only to disaster. You despair of me, I know. I suppose I’d better try to explain.

  It’s all to do with the trouble with people, the fact that all of the different bits of them are connected up. I don’t just mean the knee bone connected to the thigh bone and all that. I mean the different bits of their personality. If you try to get rid of one bit, a bad bit—say, Penny’s towering self-regard—you find that it’s attached to a piece of string, and you pull and pull at the piece of string and then out pops some other bit, a good bit, that you don’t want to get rid of at all, like Penny’s drive. People come all jumbled together, and you know you’re supposed to accept them or walk away, although of course there’s always the fashion option of smiling to their faces while deftly sinking a stiletto between their shoulder blades.

  So, you see, Ludo’s good bits—all the loveliness stuff—were joined up with the bad bits. And one particular bad bit buzzed away in my mind, like a bluebottle at the window. It really wasn’t the social misfit business. It wasn’t the mess. It wasn’t the obsessions with things that nobody else cared about—the plight of the white-tailed sea eagle or the rights of reindeer-herding nomads in the wastes of Finland. It wasn’t the brooding or the sulking whenever I did anything a teeny-weeny bit naughty, like putting a CD back in the wrong case or the case back on the shelf—sin of sins—out of alphabetical order. It wasn’t the way he sometimes licked his plate before putting it in the dishwasher. It wasn’t his habit of tweaking distractedly at his crotch whenever he was nervous, although we are getting a little warmer.

  No, the problem was that Ludo, lovely, helpless, hapless Ludo, just didn’t have the sexiness gene.

  And now you want me to define my terms. Ludo’s always telling me to do that—it’s another of his annoying habits. The only way to shut him up is to say, “Well, define ‘define,’ then,” a trick I learned at school for dealing with clever boys. But sexiness is strange, and you really do have to say what you mean. Or at least say what you like.