Lace Page 27

  Judy turned to Guy. “Was this what was at the back of your mind when you first came to New York? Was this what you were hinting at on the East River?”

  “Of course. You’ve helped us to start. Now we intend to help you.” He stood and raised his flute of champagne. “To Judy!”

  They all echoed his toast. Judy cried.

  Charles allocated nearly all his small publicity budget to PR, rather than to advertising. He quickly became intrigued by Judy’s ideas, by her straightforward approach and the impressive results. At first he found it difficult to work with a woman who talked in such a brusque, forthright fashion: Charles was used to business conversations that were more circuitous and women who flattered men, but he realised that to survive, new ideas were needed; he also realised that as Judy was starting her own business she would work as hard as she could on his account. Which she did.

  It was not difficult to promote an account as glamorous as champagne; had Judy been trying to sell brushes or sensible walking shoes, she might have had a far more difficult time. From the beginning she pushed three linked words: “Paris-Champagne-Maxine.” She used Maxine rather than Charles because Charles hated publicity. Maxine understood it much better and enjoyed being a professional celebrity. The second reason was that “Maxine” was very similar to “Maxim’s,” the name of the world-famous Parisian restaurant. When Judy devised a new letterhead that read “Paris • Champagne • Maxine”, there was an immediate, reproachful protest from Maxim’s restaurant, which felt that they were inextricably associated in the public’s mind with Paris, and that the use of Madame la Comtesse’s Christian name might confuse the public. But Judy—delighted—begged to disagree and refused to change the letterhead.

  Maxine became increasingly well-known as a French celebrity. She was always able to provide a quotable sentence, a joke or a shrewd comment when it was needed. Judy warned her never to talk in public about money, politics or religion and never to complain to the press about anything at all; when the odd spiteful article appeared, she was to ignore it. “Yes, I know that there are boxes and boxes of splendid press cuttings,” said Maxine sadly, “but unfortunately, it’s only the bitchy ones that one pays any attention to—these are the only ones that upset me.”

  “Well, you’ve got to learn to live with it,” Judy said firmly. “I don’t mind how loudly you voice your feelings in private as long as you don’t ever try to get an apology out of a newspaper. Sue them or forget it.”

  Judy also stressed that Maxine should always be beautifully dressed. Maxine did not find this instruction difficult to obey. As soon as she could afford to, Maxine also shopped at Christian Dior, although at first she could only afford a couple of outfits a year. After visiting Dior, Maxine would take a leisurely stroll up the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré to choose a few boutique items and restock her lingerie drawers.

  Maxine needed a great deal of underwear for a very private reason.

  Charles was an affectionate and indulgent husband. After a certain amount of initial irritability, he let Maxine take over the organization of their lives and was both proud of and quietly amused by the way she did it. Once in a while he put his foot down, but this happened rarely. Most of the time she had her own way and was allowed to win their occasional arguments, but Charles liked her to remember that this was not because he was doting or henpecked, but simply because he chose to indulge her. He had a special way of reminding his wife of this.

  Sometimes on formal occasions Charles would make Maxine gasp or blush or even forget what she meant to say. He could manage this by directing one meaningful look at her. It was a power that he had over her and he enjoyed it immensely, this ability to destroy her calm with that one look that, he knew, made her heart lurch and her groin moisten. Maxine knew exactly what the look meant.

  One night, shortly after they were married, Charles had murmured, “I don’t want you to wear any underwear to the de la Fresange ball tonight. I want to know that if I care to feel you at any time, you will be ready for me.” Maxine thought he was joking, but during the course of the evening he danced her out of the ballroom and onto a dark corner of the terrace, then swiftly felt beneath the pale-pink net layers of her ball gown.

  Maxine was wearing panties.

  Charles ripped them off and flung them to the ground and then, with his left arm, he held her pressed against the stone balustrade. From the back they looked like any courting couple, but his fingers were feeling fiercely for her. She was terrified that they would be seen, that she was going to fall backward over the low stone balustrade as he pressed against her, but she could not resist Charles’s rhythmic fingers. Quickly he undid his clothes and she felt him inside her body, demanding her with a selfish fierceness that she had never felt from him before. After he climaxed, he kissed her gently on the lips and said, “Darling, in just a few matters, I expect to be obeyed by you without question.”

  After that, upon occasion, he would casually ask Maxine not to wear underwear, particularly if they were going to a very formal function. When this happened he gave his driver the evening off, somewhat to the man’s surprise. In the car, Charles’s hand would search under Maxine’s skirt and feel between her quivering white thighs to find out whether he had been obeyed. Once when he hadn’t been (because Maxine wanted to see what would happen), he had stopped the car and roughly told Maxine to get out. There on the grass verge of the country road he made her wriggle out of her panties, then he threw the flimsy scrap of peach chiffon over the hedge, pulled Maxine into the backseat, put her over his knee and spanked her. He was not joking.

  A few days later, after they had dined à deux at home, Charles took her by the hand and led her to the office that they shared. The deserted room was like a comfortable drawing room, although around it were spread typewriters, tape recorders and filing cabinets. In the middle of the room was a six-foot-square green leather-covered antique partners’ desk, with drawers on both sides so that two people could work at the one desk.

  Charles threw himself onto his office swivel chair.

  “Get your clothes off,” he said softly, “now. I want to see you naked.”

  “But the servants haven’t gone to bed yet. Can’t we go upstairs?”

  “Now! Here!”

  He watched with a slight smile as Maxine undressed, then he leaned forward and tugged roughly at her neat chignon so that the blond hair tumbled forward and over her heavy breasts. Then he pulled her onto his lap so that she sat astride him, facing him, nervous, puzzled and more than a little worried. He bent his lips to one full, blue-veined breast and sucked passionately until Maxine, arching her back so that her tangled straw hair fell toward the floor, no longer knew where she was or what she was doing. Then he lifted her buttocks and pulled her body gently onto his, starting slowly to thrust inside her, until, as Maxine was about to climax, he murmured in her ear, “Do you care if the servants hear?”

  “No, no,” she gasped, “don’t stop, don’t stop!”

  “Do you care if anyone sees us?”

  “No!”

  On another moonlit night in the office, he again made her undress and sit on the edge of the great desk. He caressed her back with silken strokes, voluptuous and oddly objective; softly he ran his fingertips over her rounded belly, tasted her warm, musky female odour. Then he gently pushed her backward so that she was quivering naked on the leather desk and strands of blond hair fell over the dictaphone as Charles bent his head and flicked his tongue over her pale body. Afterward, when she lay still and gasping, he quickly tore off his clothes and mounted her on the desk. Then he tantalizingly stopped and said, “You wouldn’t mind if Mademoiselle Janine were to see what happens here out of office hours?”

  “No! Oh, please, darling Charles, come back inside me.”

  “You don’t mind if she knows that Madame la Comtesse, so correct, so elegant, turns into an abandoned hussy if I simply slip my hand between her thighs?”

  But Maxine was groaning too hard wit
h pleasure to answer.

  As Maxine became more and more famous in France, as she was courted and quoted and photographed with this or that celebrity, Charles loved to think that he could shatter her poise with a single glance. He would look hard at her, across a room full of impeccably dressed, important people, and he would have the immediate satisfaction of seeing Maxine give a little jump and blush.

  Later that night he would tear off her thin nightgown—he rather liked to tear fragile, lace-covered garments off his wife—and say, “That was what the General wanted to do to you, wasn’t it?” Or he would roughly grasp her breasts and bury his head between them muttering, “Was that what you wanted from the Newman man?”

  Maxine had never dreamed that married life would be so laced with hazard and surprise or that her lingerie bill would be so large.

  She loved every dangerous moment of it.

  Most of Maxine’s married friends had been involved with other men, but Maxine had long ago decided to be faithful to her husband—an unusual decision for a Frenchwoman of her class. Maxine felt—hoped—that she did not need any added excitement in her life.

  In spite of Charles’s amiability, he turned out to be an exceedingly jealous husband, but only if he saw—or thought he saw—that some particularly handsome man was interested in Maxine. He was not the sort of husband who checked her every movement.

  With one exception.

  In the winter of 1956, without warning, without mentioning her intentions to anyone and leaving only a brief message with Charles’s secretary, Maxine suddenly went away for a week. Just before her little green MG disappeared, there had been much long-distance telephoning in the privacy of her boudoir—a room that she rarely used.

  After seven days, Maxine returned looking white and haggard, distraught and tearful. She told a furious, worried Charles that she’d suddenly decided to see Colette Joyaux, an old school friend in Bordeaux who had suddenly been taken ill.

  Her husband exploded with jealous rage. She couldn’t even be bothered to lie to him with her usual efficiency. He sarcastically said that he found it hard to believe that a friend whom she rarely saw, who was little more than an acquaintance, in fact, should suddenly be stricken with an illness that required the presence of Maxine.

  What was the illness? What was the name of Madame Joyaux’s doctor and his telephone number? Why did Maxine leave without warning, but with a packed suitcase? Why had she packed her own suitcase instead of asking a maid to do it? Why hadn’t she told him of Colette’s illness before she left? Why had she telephoned during the morning when she knew that Charles was never in the Epernay office to say that she’d be away for a few days? Why hadn’t she telephoned once in the morning or the evening when she might assume that he’d be at home?

  Maxine tried to answer his angry barrage of questions. Clumsily she clambered out of one lie with an answer that immediately plunged her into another, but she stubbornly refused to give any explanation of her absence. She looked white and ill, and Charles had never seen her look so sad. She seemed not to care what Charles felt, thought or said. She didn’t even bother to hide her indifference. Although she was physically present, Charles could see that her mind was far away. With somebody else.

  He strode out of her boudoir, charged down the circular staircase, jumped into his Lagonda and drove to Paris for a week, giving no details of his whereabouts to Maxine. After his departure she found that two photographs of Pierre Boursal had been taken from her school scrapbook and had been left, in torn-up shreds, on her dressing table.

  When Charles returned after dinner one night, looking grim but smug, they had a fierce fight that ended roughly and happily in bed. The matter was never referred to again.

  Charles had made his point and knew when to let well enough alone.

  20

  AS SOON AS Elizabeth saw the dim lights in the valley below, in the safety of Austria, she felt lonely and anxious. She almost didn’t want to reach those lights. Out of breath, the small, tired child paused to rub her chilled hands and then trudged on through the Austrian snow down a twisting path that led to Eisenstadt.

  An hour later, she staggered up the steps of the first house she reached and wearily jumped to bang the door knocker. There was a sudden glare of light, a big man’s silhouette, then she heard someone say, “More soup, Helga, here’s another one.” Dazed and silent, the child was only vaguely aware of a steamy kitchen and strange adults in nightclothes fussing around her. Then she went to sleep, wrapped in a blanket and huddled in an armchair.

  The following day she was taken to the Eisenstadt refugee camp, a collection of bleak old army huts with a constant stream of people plodding from one to the other—some of the hundred and fifty thousand Hungarian refugees who surged over the border in 1956. Hastily recruited voluntary workers moved from hut to hut taking particulars of the forlorn, silent groups who wore overcoats with turned-up collars and clutched knobbly shopping bags, potato sacks or small attaché cases that held their only possessions.

  An impatient, harassed, whey-faced woman who carried a clipboard asked Elizabeth her name. She spoke at first in broken German and the bewildered child didn’t understand what she was saying until she switched to French. “Speak up, child! There’s a string around your neck but no name tag on it. Was it torn off? I must have your name before your medical inspection.”

  Eventually the child croaked, “Lili.”

  “Lili what?”

  “Quoi, s’il vous plaît, madame?”

  “Your family, what’s the name of your family?”

  “Da . . . da . . .” No, she was no longer called Dassin. . . . Lili sobbed “Ko . . . Ko . . . vago.” The woman wrote “Lily Vago (French-speaking) born 1949” at the head of the sheet of paper and so, at the age of seven, Lili acquired her fourth surname—the name on her birth certificate, then Dassin, then Kovago, and now Vago. She was then handed a piece of soap and a piece of black bread and stood in a line of sad-eyed adults for her medical inspection. Lili felt a singing in her ears and, from far away, a chill stethoscope on her chest. “It sounds like pneumonia. Shock and exposure. Take her over to the hospital hut. Next one, please.”

  As soon as the child was well enough to travel, a refugee committee worker told her that she was being sent to a family in Paris. “You’re a very lucky little girl, Lili. We haven’t been able to find homes for half the people in this camp.”

  During the long, uncomfortable train journey, the child hardly said a word to the group of other anxious and exhausted refugees. When they arrived at the acrid smelling station they were met by another refugee committee worker, carrying the inevitable clipboard. She ticked them off her list, then took them to the waiting room where they sagged on hard benches until their lives were reassembled.

  “Lili . . . Lili Vago, there she is, over there, Madame Sardeau. Stand up and say hello, Lili. You’re going to stay with Madame Sardeau, who has generously offered you a home.”

  The couple who stood in front of Lili did not look generous. They were bundled up against the cold, sharp noses and pinched mouths showing from behind dark scarves.

  Oddly formal, this middle-aged couple shook hands with the child. Then the woman said sharply, “But we were expecting a much older girl. We asked for a girl of twelve to fourteen!”

  Equally sharply the refugee committee worker said, “Madame, in this situation, while we appreciate your hospitality and concern, one cannot order children as if the refugee camps were a department store.”

  “No luggage? No passport?” the man asked.

  “No papers tonight,” said the refugee committee worker in a tired voice. “If you would just sign here, and here, and there, we’ll expect you at the office tomorrow—anytime—to fill in the forms and complete the other formalities.”

  The child walked out of the station to her new home and life with the Sardeaus. She sensed that something was wrong, that she disappointed and vexed them. In silence they caught the metro to Sablon, then
hurried through darkened streets to an old-fashioned apartment building. The huge arched entrance to the inner courtyard was covered by a pair of black doors, big enough to let a wagonload of hay pass through. Lili followed her new parents, too tired to notice anything but the ache in her calves, the ache in her chest and the fog inside her head. They paused outside a door, then, as Monsieur Sardeau fished for his keys outside the apartment door, the child slid to the floor.

  “Henri, you don’t think they’ve given us one that has something wrong with her?” Madame Sardeau asked anxiously. “We didn’t agree to an invalid; we don’t want doctor’s bills; we want a strong girl who can do the housework.”

  “Nevertheless, we’d better call a doctor tonight.” Monsieur Sardeau picked up the fragile little body. “You put her to bed and I’ll get Dutheil.”

  Doctor Dutheil was sympathetic. “There seems to be nothing basically wrong with her. Children are remarkably resilient. She’s suffering from exhaustion, and from what she says, it sounds as if she’s recently had pneumonia and hasn’t fully recovered. She’s also had a bad emotional shock and won’t discuss it; that’s also normal and understandable. She’s not strong enough at this stage to relive the experience by talking about it, so please don’t press her to say anything. Just leave her quietly in bed, give her good food, plenty of hot milk and keep her very quiet.”

  He looked uncertainly at Madame Sardeau, but could not imagine her in the role of comforter. He took off his spectacles, wiped them with his handkerchief, paused and shrewdly said, “You are a heroine, madame! You are a saint to have rescued this poor child! I will come and see her again tomorrow and until she has recovered, and there will be no charge for my visits. Pray allow me to make this contribution to your noble action.”