And, you know, it really wasn’t all pretend. Underneath all that hair and cobwebs and mustiness, I found a perfectly nice looking man, with a lovely, shy smile and really quite kissable eyes. Even if he hadn’t been my big chance, I still might have fallen in love with him.
We made it back just before Penny – I was always a good judge of a lunch time. Zuleika was fuming, but that didn’t matter. Penny made her entrance and enveloped Ludo in her customary critical embrace. And instantly, with that famous low cunning of hers, she knew.
‘Darling, have you been getting in the way of the girls?’ she declaimed, and without pause swept Ludo up the stairs to write the cheque. But on his way out, a long, long half-hour later, he asked for my number, and his fate was sealed.
Of course Penny tried to fight it. Penny understood me very well. Because, I suppose, we’re really quite alike. Or could it be that she always thinks the worst of people and the worst, on this one occasion, just happened to be true? I always had an ally in Hugh. Hugh loves women and the prettier they are the more he loves them. And whatever they might say in the shop, or the studio, or anywhere else, I am pretty. Hugh always thought I was good for Ludo. ‘You’re good for Ludo,’ he’d say. ‘You bring him out of himself. Stop him from brooding and sulking all the time like a wolf in its lair.’ It became clear that Ludo was a disappointment to him. Hugh was big and bold and successful and confident. He’d sent Ludo to his old school, hoping it would turn him into a copy of himself. Instead poor Ludo emerged broken and resentful. To Hugh and Penny’s despair, and despite insanely good grades, he refused to even apply to Oxford, but went instead to some college in Wales, ‘Not even a wretched redbrick,’ as Hugh bemoaned, ‘looks like a Bulgarian nuclear power station.’
It was always hard working out Hugh and Penny as a couple. Hugh was posh, you couldn’t escape that. He had that faint sheen that only posh people seem to carry with them, even into late middle-age. Not like my parents. Not, I suspect, like Penny’s. Penny had been an actress. She would rattle off titles from TV series in the sixties I’d never heard of. She talked about a play. There had been a couple of films. Sean Connery was mentioned, but I never worked out in what connection. She said that she had given it all up for Hugh and Ludo. Penny Moss – her maiden name – began as a hobby. She made her own clothes in the sixties – tie-dyed headscarves, crocheted ponchos with matching berets, that sort of thing, I imagine. People liked them. She began to sell them to friends. The next thing she knew she had a Saturday stall in Portobello, just a bit of fun, really. And then the first shop.
All this time Hugh’s enterprises – things in the City, investments, speculations – were starting to ‘go a little stale’ as he put it. And then, sometime in the early eighties, there came a point when Penny Moss began to bring in more than he did. Rather than pick up the gauntlet, he capitulated. Drew up the drawbridge and took to golf. Penny used to drag him into the office, occasionally, to help with hiring and firing, but it was more symbolic than anything. He didn’t seem too bothered about it. He’d bought the fabulous house in Kensington. He still had a few investments, and Penny Moss was doing nicely. Why work when, again in his words, he could simply ‘live off his hump’?
But this had all led to a power shift in the relationship. And Penny was never one to miss an opportunity. As Hugh retreated, so she advanced. She’d been attractive (I’d seen – who hadn’t? – the photographs) as a young woman, but as a woman of a certain age, she was a stunner. She went every year to Cannes during the festival, and there were rumours of affairs with the most surprising people. Could Peter Sellers really have proposed, one moonlit night on a yacht chartered by the French Minister of Culture? She claimed she kept the ring as a memento, when he refused to take it back. Did Luchino Visconti really suggest a spot of troilism with a Scandawegian starlet? Penny used to talk about these things in a wistful sort of way, as though it were something she’d desired rather than achieved, but Ludo’s grumpy silence on the subject offered some kind of authentication. I got the feeling that he’d been teased about her at school. I found it hard not to laugh, whether or not the stories were true.
But that’s all ancient history. I’ll cut to the chase. Ludo was mine, whatever Penny thought about it. We lived together in the Primrose Hill flat, and we were engaged, although Ludo could never quite remember when or how he had asked me to marry him. When it became clear that she could not manoeuvre me out of Ludo’s life (she’d tried both blackmail and bribery), Penny had the good sense to draw me up to the office, to avoid the shame of her sweet boy consorting with a shop girl. I was made an assistant to Carol, the previous production manager. But Carol must have known the writing was on the wall and after a week, to everyone’s relief, she left to do VSO in Egypt, and was never heard of again. I used to like to think that she’d been eaten by a crocodile. I know that might suggest that I’m a bit lacking in the generosity of spirit department, but I used to be much preoccupied by the question of whether it would be better to be eaten by a crocodile or a shark. Crocodile always seemed more likely, because of Tarzan. You see I could always imagine myself as Jane, whereas sharks mainly seem to eat Australians, and imagining oneself as an Australian is out of the question.
With my new job I soon found that I had new friends. The London fashion world is a small one. There are six people that you have to know. Enter that blessed circle and you will never miss a party, and never brunch alone. If I hadn’t quite made it into that circle, I was at least a satellite of a moon orbiting a planet that was part of the circle, and for now, that would do.
And then – could it really be just nine months ago? – came that phone call from Penny, and my usual smart reply. But it was not to end there.
‘Katie, darling.’ A bad sign, that ‘darling’.
‘Yes, Penny?’
There’s some trouble at the depot. Cavafy says he can’t find the right interlining. I know it’s there, somewhere. You couldn’t go out there tomorrow morning and check for me could you? There’s really no one else I can ask. You can do it on your way into work.’
I pulled my Jean Muir face, and hissed out three shits and a fuck. The depot was the worst thing about my job. A hideous warehouse in outer Mile End, full of toiling women whose lives were simply too awful to contemplate. Cavafy was the old Greek who ran the place, with his idiot son, Angel. And the ‘on your way into work’ was typical Penny. Mile End was no more on my way into work than my arse is on the way to my elbow.
‘Don’t look like that, Katie,’ said Penny, which was clever of her given the miles of phone line between her and my grimace. ‘You’ve got Paris the day after tomorrow to look forward to, and Mile End won’t kill you.’
Paris meant Premiére Vision – the world’s biggest fabric fair. For the past two years I’d gone along with Penny, as her Girl Friday/translator/minder. It was the polar opposite of Mile End, the good to its bad.
‘Anyway,’ she added with her characteristic contempt for logic, ‘aren’t you going to a party tonight? I haven’t been to a party for months and I don’t complain.’
‘What about cocktails at the Peruvian Embassy last Thursday to push vicuna yarn?’
‘Darling, that was business and not pleasure. And I still don’t know what a vicuna is, which was the main reason I went.’
‘But didn’t you get legless and have to be escorted out for biting a general’s gold braid to see if it was real?’
‘I was only being playful. And he wasn’t a proper general. But he did have such a virile … moustache.’ The line paused as Penny drifted off into a romantic Latin American reverie involving, or so I imagined, an abduction by the besotted colonel, adventures with wild gauchos, a palace coup, a forced wedding, the adoring crowds, the assassin’s bullet, a coronation … ‘Anyway,’ continued