I dozed and, without even noticing the tunnel bit, I found we were in France. You can always tell by the sudden profusion of small, erratically driven vans on the roads. And then the Gare du Nord. I was sent off to find a trolley, while Penny, swaying gently on the platform, defended our cases from the predatory French porters.
There are two quite distinct sides to our trips. The bad bit is the marathon trudge around the fabric stands that fill the three huge hangars, big enough for airships, of the Premiére Vision exhibition. That consumes days two and three. It’s no fun, but it’s worth it, because it buys me, us, the good bit.
The good bit is Paris itself. I don’t care how much cooler Milan and New York are; I don’t care if the food is better in London, or the weather nicer in Rome. For me Paris has always been my Emerald City, my Wonderland, my place of dreams. As a girl I used to think that if I could just get high enough in the park swings I’d be able to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower peeping over the monochrome, rain-dulled roofs of East Grinstead. I’d get Veronica to push. ‘Higher! Higher!’ I’d shout. But she was never up to the job, and I resented her for it.
And Penny is different, in Paris. Of course, she’s still a tyrant, and a bully; she still imagines that the world exists to pay her homage, or at least to make her life easy, and she still reacts with outrage when her importance is not acknowledged. But in Paris Penny manages to exude a light that warms, rather than dazzles. Somehow the hand thrust into the face of the waiter at L’Assiette charms his habitually pursed lips into obeisance. Somehow her attempts at the language, an extraordinary mixture of underworld argot, finishing-school refinement, and simple error (I once translated her instructions to a taxi driver back to her, with just the merest touch of editorial licence as, ‘Hey, fuck ears, we would be enchanted if you could direct for us your carriage to the front portal of our castle. You have the scrotum of a bat.’), is greeted with indulgent good humour by the snootiest of Parisians.
We always stayed at the Hotel de l’Université, on the Rue de l’Université in St Germain. This may surprise you, but we shared a room: it was another part of the strange intimacy of our Paris times. The payoff, the compensation to me of Penny’s gentle snoring, and to her, for my whatever it is that irritates her, is that we had the grandest room: a Neo-Classical cube of perfection. The Université could not have existed anywhere else in the world. It combined, in Penny’s words, ‘the stately grace of Racine with the panache and verve of Molière.’ The service was attentive, but restrained, and even the youngest of the doormen knew that Penny, and not I, was the one to flirt with.
Most of all, the Université was perfect for the shops. And when in Paris, boy did Penny shop. You see, she never bought other people’s clothes in London: it seemed to her too much like sleeping with the enemy. But in Paris, despite the fact that she chose the same designers that she shunned at home, it was somehow, okay. And for once there was some logic to her logic.
And so, after leaving our cases in our room, we skipped, on that first afternoon, as on every first Parisian afternoon, from Prada, to Paule Ka, to Kashiyama (not that it’s called Kashiyama any more, but Penny could never remember its silly new name, and would look helplessly at me if I used it), to Sabbia Rosa, and then back to Prada again. Leather was on the menu, and we both found something suitable; she in a rich chocolatey brown, me in camel.
Because I’m in fashion you probably think that buying clothes is something of a busman’s holiday for me. Working for fifty hours a week neck deep in the kind of clothes that ninety-nine per cent of the population can only dream about must, you surmise, dull the appetite? Wrong, so wrong. I still feel the near-erotic pleasure, the juddering, ecstatic, transforming joy of clothes. I love the foreplay: the touching, smelling, breathing of beautiful fabrics, before the sweet consummation of trying on, and the sublime climax of the purchase. I shiver still for satin-backed crêpe: cool, like a diamond, to the tongue. How thrilling it was to find out that silk velvet smells exactly as it should, of earth and leaf-mould.
It is still now as intense as the first time, that wonderful afternoon when Dad, for the only occasion in his sad life getting things exactly right, brought me home a perfect princess dress of polyester pink taffeta, studded with rosebuds, with a satin sash and a net underskirt. It was my sixth birthday. At the party Veronica spilled jelly on the dress and I pulled her hair until she cried. She was lucky I didn’t drown her in the jelly bowl.
The first evening we had dinner in a little bistro that Penny claimed to have been coming to since her honeymoon, when she and Hugh had spent a month living in a brothel. Or that was Penny’s story, and a very amusing one it was, full of comic misunderstandings of a classic French farcical kind. Hugh told me it was actually a perfectly respectable hotel, that just happened to have a lot of velvet about the place. But Penny never let truth get in the way of a good story, or, for that matter, a bad one.
The bistro was like a thousand others in Paris, although it claimed distinction by virtue of an assumed connection with an ancient guild of carpenters, or wheelwrights, or hairdressers. (Penny could never get the story straight, and it had a habit of changing depending on which of the waiters you asked, should you have the curiosity to enquire.) In honour of this association there hung from the ceiling an intricately carved something, a kind of gothic parrot cage. Again depending on the whim of the waiter, this could be a model of the vaulting of Notre Dame, a Medieval clock, or ‘une machine pour fabriquer les cigarettes’.
As usual Penny asked me what I’d like, and then ordered something else for me altogether. And as usual it was an unmentionable part of a pig, with a gizzard garnish. Before our food arrived, but well into the second glass of wine, Penny broke off from a rambling monologue on what we should look out for at Premiére Vision the next day, and gave me a long and searching look, her eyes seeming both to widen, and yet sharpen their focus. That look was one of her specialities, and perhaps her single greatest business asset. No man, and few women, could sustain eye contact with her in Basilisk mode for long. It was her complete self-confidence of course, the total absence of those goading, middle-of-the-night doubts that riddle most of us, that gave her gaze its power.
‘Katie, darling, do tell me what’s wrong.’ That was a bit of a shock. It seemed that Penny had had another of those rare, invariably cynical flashes of insight.
‘Nothing. Why?’
‘Katie my dear, I know you. I know how you are. I know your ways.’ None of those things, I must add, was true, or even nearly true. Penny knew Penny; Penny knew the fashion business; Penny may well have known how to dance the Highland Fling, but Penny did not know me. The trouble was that something was wrong. I simply couldn’t stop thinking about Liam. His face was projected onto elaborate eighteenth-century façades; his voice whispered through elegant corridors, his smile glimmered at me from the silver highlights on the grey-brown waters of the river.
‘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