She was telling the story again to four men strutting and preening around the models. Two were tall and good-looking, two squat and ugly: a footballer, and the footballer’s agent, an actor and the actor’s agent. The actor had made his name playing East End villains in low budget British gangster films, but a public school drawl kept breaking through the studied cockney. The footballer was famous for biting the testicles of a more talented opponent, and this singular act of brutality had mysteriously given him access to the world of celebrity. I sensed that my presence was desired, and realised at once why – I’d round out the numbers nicely. But I knew I’d be stuck with one of the uglies. Life, like the agents, was too short. And Ludo, of course, was out there, somewhere. I smiled and moved on. Still, the footballer had been rather good-looking, decked out by some tame stylist in an Oswald Boateng suit, conventionally, almost boringly, tailored, but showing, when he moved, flashes of brilliant electric-blue lining, like a fish turning on a coral reef.
There were, naturally, endless journos on the lig. I knew most of the fashion writers, ‘the clittorati’, as Milo called them, as bitchy in the flesh as they are fawning on paper. They were never quite sure what to make of me. They knew that I was oily rag, a production pleb. But they also knew that I was heir presumptive to the Penny Moss throne. And, okay, it’s Ruritania, and not the Holy fucking Roman Empire, but royalty’s royalty, after all.
‘Hi Katie. So what are we all going to be wearing next year?’ said one, but with a flickering eye that added silently ‘as if you’d know’.
‘Oh, you’re in luck,’ I smiled back, ‘it’s kaftans, kaftans, kaftans.’ I pirouetted away without waiting to see if it detonated.
I preferred the non-fashion hacks, honest cynics, eyes peeled for the goody bags and the drinks tray, even if, as one of them slurred into my ear:
‘Christ, Katie, we stand out in this crowd like white clots of fat in a black pudding.’
Who else? Ah, the nervous group of execs from the Norwegian Vodka company, terrified in case they’ve made some dreadful mistake, but completely unaware of what a mistake, or a triumph, would look like. I thought about being nice and talking to them, telling them how well it was going but life, like a Norwegian winter’s day, is just too short.
In truth it wasn’t going that well. Jude Law had still not appeared. I wondered if Momo had perhaps borrowed the security people from Voyage and they hadn’t let him in – ‘sorry darling, this really is more of a snakeskin party’. The free drinks had run out and the journos were quick to follow. I went to find Ludo.
As I’d figure-of-eighted around the room, Ludo had waited patiently in a corner, moving only to reach for the trays of chocolate flavoured vodka, or vodka flavoured chocolate, or whatever, as they floated by. He was hammered, and had turned melancholic.
‘Fucking hell, Katie,’ he began, the language harmless in his gentle voice, ‘you’ve left me standing here like a cunt all evening.’ He’d taken to using the dreaded c-word. He claimed he wasn’t trying to shock, but that it was an attempt to reclaim it, like rap artists calling each other nigger. I didn’t quite see how that worked, with him being a man, and not a woman, and therefore not having one to reclaim, but I usually let it pass.
‘Ludo, you’re a grown-up; there are plenty of people here who you know. Why didn’t you talk to them?’
‘I tried a couple of times. But you know how it is: there’s nothing I have to say that would interest them.’
I pictured Ludo explaining some innovative use of a scientific metaphor in the poetry of John Donne to a ditzy Marie Claire stylist, and I felt one of my waves of affection. Perhaps I should have talked to him, or introduced him, or something. But I’d been trying that for aeons, and it never worked. I’d introduce him to someone nice in fashion, or a Channel Five TV director, and he’d bark into their ear about sea eagles and that would be that. And I had to be strict: every couple needs at least one set of teeth between them.
‘Oh come on, Ludo. It’s not my fault that you’ve got about as much small talk as a cactus. And you hate fashion people, and anyone trying to sell things, or make money, or enjoy themselves.’
‘Then why do you make me come to these bloody things?’ The tone was half whine, half grump. Not attractive.
‘No one made you come, and you know you’d only sulk if I didn’t invite you.’
‘I should have been marking,’ he slurred on. ‘I mean, look at these people. What have they got to offer the world? How would the world be a worse place if they were all burnt to death in a tragic airship disaster?’
‘But who would organise parties if Milo wasn’t around? And who would people take pictures of if there weren’t models? Really Ludo, you are silly.’
It was then that I noticed it arrive. I’ve no idea how it managed to pass through the security cordon: perhaps the heavies were shocked into torpor. The ‘it’ was a beige safari suit, fastened at the front with a mathematically ingenious system of leather laces and eyelets. And at the bottom, ohmygod, there they were in all their obscene glory: the matching knickerbockers, laced with wanton exuberance under the knee. This wasn’t seventies revival, oh no. This was seventies pure and simple, served straight up, as she comes, rayon in tooth and claw. It was prawn cocktail, and steak tartare, and Bird’s Angel Delight; it was Demis Roussos backed by the Swingle Singers. It was Penny.
The conversation came back to me. Days before in the office Penny had described the suit.
‘That’s so in,’ I’d said. ‘You have to wear it.’
It’s the kind of thing you always say when people tell you about the old stuff in their wardrobes.
‘Really? Perhaps I will,’ she replied, and I tuned out to concentrate on the dancing lines of figures in the costings book.
The problem, the mistake if you like, was the gap between the seventies in the seventies and the seventies now. You see, whenever there is a revival there are always touches, not necessarily subtle, that distinguish it from the real thing. Miss those touches and you look like a children’s entertainer. Penny was certainly providing entertainment. Her progress through the party was followed with rapt attention, the very intensity of which somehow drove out the wholly natural laughter reflex. Penny’s actressy poise, her wonderfully controlled refusal to glance around her, gave the whole thing something of the flavour of a visit by an aloof Habsburg dowager to a small town in Montenegro.
Ludo saw her too. ‘Mum, oh Mum,’ he mouthed, and shrank back into the shadows like a schoolboy who knows he’s about to be kissed in front of his mates. I was caught between admiration and horror. How I’d love to have a tungsten ego like that, such a flagrant assumption that my whims were a sure guide to glory. But for now it was good to be on the outside laughing in.
Bloodhound-keen, her nose led her to the bar and, coincidentally, into the middle of Milo and his courtiers. I winced in anticipation of the rebuff she must surely receive: would she perish by fire or by ice? Milo, abetted by his jackals, was adept at both.
Penny began a conversation.