‘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 defence of her son’s honour, and our love.
I wish I could make Premiére 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 crépe, and oh-so-wearable viscose. And 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 who 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, hangar-like 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 only be 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 behaviour, 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, and so I settle for a good long bitching session with Veronica. And 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.
Towards 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 towards 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 like 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 favourite 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 Gauloise, which was why I didn’t twig 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