Judith Krantz (37 page)

Fernanda’s marriages were a disgrace, but it wasn’t her fault that she was so attractive that men wouldn’t leave her in peace. Valerie was stiff and dogmatic, but she’d never let anyone guess that she didn’t have the marriage she’d expected, and that, as Liddy well knew, was a quality much to be admired.

In any case, it was her clear duty to stay with them in New York, to keep her eyes open, listen well, test the waters around them and then tell them the things that children unfortunately never wanted to hear. If a mother couldn’t rub her daughters’ noses in a few home truths, who could? Who would bother? Everything she said to them was for their own good, and at heart she was sure they knew it and took her advice and warnings seriously.

A saleswoman at Saks and another at Bergdorf’s
were instructed in Mrs. Kilkullen’s needs and her schedule of visits. Pleased and flattered by her confidence, for she told them exactly where she went, whom she saw, how she needed to dress and, especially, exactly how much she had to spend, they set aside clothes for her as soon as inventory-taking began and last season’s garments were marked down. Often, when a dress came in that was clearly a buyer’s over-enthusiastic mistake, a dress they knew would be hard to sell because it was hard to wear, too highly styled for the average woman, they would keep an eye on it for Liddy. If it was snapped up by some clever woman before it was marked down, they felt a genuine pang. Soon they started to put those garments away in their private “hold” bins, before anyone else had a chance to buy it. Liddy never failed to write to her two saleswomen from Europe, on letter paper that bore the names of great houses, and give them the latest gossip and tell them how successful her clothes had been.

They knew her size, which had remained a perfect eight for the last thirty years, and they knew she wouldn’t buy any dress that demanded great jewels to make it work. They knew that Mrs. Kilkullen no longer liked to expose her underarms or her elbows; they knew that her slim waist, her magnificent shoulders and small bosom had remained highly presentable, that her legs were as good as ever, and that she didn’t have to wear a bra in an evening dress, so that she could afford to reveal a smooth and well-muscled bare back. Liddy had always watched her diet, and she swam two hundred laps daily in her pool. Mrs. Kilkullen was a pleasure to work with, each of them thought in satisfaction, and neither of them guessed at the existence of the other. They looked forward to the big sales as a chance to be of service to her again.

“After all, she is our mother,” Fern sighed finally, holding the telephone idly.

“There ought to be a statute of limitations on having given birth—it’s not that major an achievement.
Even you managed to do it three times without too much confusion.”

“Red Appleton, Val, that tramp Father’s been seeing—have you heard anything new about her lately?” Fernanda continued, ignoring Val’s words.

“I talked to a friend in Newport Beach this morning who said she’d bumped into them last night at some great little Chinese place called Five Feet. She said they were very, very cozy,” Valerie replied crossly.

“I don’t like the sound of that. Not at all. We’ve been hearing about them every week since the Fiesta.”

“She’s half his age,” Valerie estimated, “and gorgeous.”

“And there’s no question that Father’s crazy about her,” Fernanda ordained in a disapproving voice. “I wonder what he’s like in bed?”

“Now
that
is truly disgusting,” Valerie said. Fernie was so predictable.

“I couldn’t agree more, Val darling. Still, wouldn’t you like to know? No, you probably wouldn’t. Not an ounce of normal curiosity in your long, chic bones, is there? Anyway, talk to you tomorrow.”

Valerie began to change for another ordinary dinner with Billy, ordinary Billy, handsome Billy, none-too-bright Billy Malvern, who had always been good in bed, as Fern had managed to worm out of her years ago. At least she didn’t have to cope with that dreadful Nicolini person. She hoped Fern would get rid of him quickly. She was quite enough of an embarrassment all by herself, without her latest husband.

The next day, Valerie, who had reinforced her preferred mode of impenetrability by shielding her eyes with her wide-rimmed, lightly tinted tortoiseshell glasses, sauntered around the site of the future Madison Avenue Settlement show house. From time to time she gave a glance at the list of the rooms that had
been assigned and the decorators to whom they had been given, all based on a lottery system because of the impossibility of any committee making such decisions without a full-scale war.

One year Valerie had received a tiny maid’s room, tucked away at the top of the house, one year a ballroom, and yet another year, the most difficult of all, a kitchen. She was pleased with her assignment of a child’s room since it was neither too small, like the maid’s room, nor too technical, like the kitchen, nor too big, like the ballroom, which had been a nightmare to fill. People were so unreasonably sentimental about children that her second-floor bedroom would be seen by everybody.

Since her rude but potentially useful cousin, Casey Nelson, had been cool to her idea of a little boy’s Western room, Valerie had decided to go in a totally different direction. She would design a room for twin girls of ten. Ten was the ideal age at which all children should be quick-frozen. It avoided all the messy problems of puberty, so that the fantasy wouldn’t be interrupted by parents wondering what might be happening in the room while they were away on weekends in the country. It also bypassed dealing with the clichés of a small child’s room.

Valerie moved through the chaos of the house, wearing her useful glasses. She had perfect eyesight, but with her glasses on she could seem to be inspecting something with nearsighted attention while she was actually listening to what people around her were saying. Not eavesdropping, of course, but just keeping informed. It was amazing how invisible she could become by wearing glasses, and a blouse and skirt of flat beige, unrelieved by a handsome belt or interesting jewelry.

Experience with doing a room for a show house had taught Valerie the value of casing the competition during the first hour, while everyone’s guard was down. All the other decorators were standing in their stripped and often unpromising rooms, most of them complaining about the location, the size, the number
of windows, the height of the ceiling or some other undesirable feature they had just realized they were stuck with. Valerie had only given a quick look at her second-floor room, although her assistant, Crumpet Ives, was busy taking measurements there. While there was time, she wanted to cull hints about what her neighbors and competitors would be up to. There was much to be gained in testing the waters of today’s newest “ins” and “outs,” for in the world of interiors these could change overnight.

Valerie Malvern knew that she wasn’t an originator. If she occasionally wished that she were, it was in the abstract, the way a man might idly wish he were Kevin Costner, without bitterness or a spark of useless hope.

Her comfort was that there had only been a few genuinely original talents since the days when a young American woman, Elsie de Wolfe, created a new profession: that of a person who takes over an entire house and decorates it for money. Until that day the insides of houses fell within the province of cabinetmakers, architects and tasteful amateurs, Madame de Pompadour first and greatest among them.

Valerie was quite aware that her work was competent, so long as a client didn’t want the contemporary and innovative. Rare was the woman who had the stomach for contemporary, and even rarer was one who demanded innovation.

“I tell you, John, chintz is out. O-U-T. Oh, it’s still all right in England, if it’s been in the house for decades and has a faded, dusty patina. Your great-grandmother’s chintz is still acceptable, but in New York it’s become a joke. Remember what Rebecca West said, The chintz was singing its old vulgar song’? It’s not even nouveau riche now, no matter how much it costs, just O-U-T.”

Valerie edged closer to the two men, who were standing by a bay window against which a new building had just been put up, posing the problem of how to block out the lack of view.

“I don’t care what you think, Nicky, this room
isn’t doable without pattern everywhere. And that means chintz. It’s less of a yawn than toile de Jouy, for Pete’s sake, and people have used it for three hundred years. Doesn’t that tell you something? It’s timeless, not in or out.”

“Bore, bore,
bore
. That’s what it tells me, John. Saturation. I say we do this as a garden room. Outdoor furniture and trellises on the walls. We can bank these windows with marvelous trees—really big ones. It doesn’t matter that they’ll die without light; they won’t croak until the show is over. I see it as part of the whole new feeling about ecology. Didn’t you read that quote of Mark Hampton’s? It’s so delicious. ‘Even people who feel incapable of being natural should strive for natural interiors.’ ”

“What the hell do you suppose that means? Give me a break, Nicky. Cecil Beaton did the ultimate garden room a hundred years ago. What’s O-U-T are trees and green plants of all kinds.
That’s
what’s reached the point of no return. Also big bouquets of massed roses, all that Victorian starched white linen on tables and beds and pillows, and, need I say, the whole ghastly country-western look.”

Valerie moved on. Whenever decorators started griping about country-western they grew unreasonably nasty, since so many of them had installed vacation house interiors that were inspired by New Mexico just before the fad ended.

She collected a number of overheard tips in the next hour, each one negating another. What seemed to be in, Valerie decided firmly, pushing her glasses back on her head and putting on the earrings she’d left in her purse, was utter confusion about what was in and what was out.

New Yorkers put a monstrously unreasonable burden on having the perfect interior because the minute they set foot on the street they were confronted with the dehumanization and degradation of their city. Even the few steps from apartment house to limo exposed them to things they couldn’t allow themselves to see. The square feet of private space they owned or
rented gave them the only refuge they had from the crumbling outside world, and their frantic, obsessive efforts to turn their homes into islands of comfort and peace had seeped down to the decorators who catered to them.

Once decorators had been calm tyrants, semi-benevolent dictators for whose smile a client was grateful. Now the clients were so rich and so demanding, so aware of what other rich people had, thanks to
HG
and
Architectural Digest
and
World of Interiors
, that members of the decorating community were scrambling to keep ahead of each other, in much the way that the residents of the Hamptons did.

There was nothing to be learned from her colleagues, Valerie thought, as she confronted her own allotted space for the first time since she had taken a rapid glance at it earlier. It must have been a dining room at one point in its history, since it had two double doors on each side of the wall at the far side, doors which the fire laws dictated must be kept open, but otherwise it was a good size and shape for what she had in mind.

“We’ll simply have to work around those doors, Crumpet,” Valerie said to her young assistant, whose boarding-school nickname, Muffin, had become so common that she’d changed it officially, with a party at Le Club. “But otherwise the room seems adequate.”

“You won’t say that, Mrs. M., when you hear what’s going on in the next room,” Crumpet said, a look of alarm crossing her unexceptional features.

“What have you heard?” asked Valerie. That was the utter hell of show houses. Adjoining rooms could kill each other if there wasn’t some element of visual harmony between them, since you could see from one to another so easily.

“It’s been assigned to Lady Georgina Rosemont, and she intends to turn it into a man’s playroom paradise … a man whose hobby is electric trains. She’s planning tracks that will go up for seven levels across the back of her room, which means that our own open
double doors will be crisscrossed by the tracks up to eight feet.”

“She can’t do that,” Valerie snapped. “The fire marshal won’t let her.”

“He’s already been to see it. She promised to leave six feet open behind the tracks and he gave her permission. The trains will be running all day long, state-of-the-art electric trains with a whole miniature landscape built around them. They’ll be a terrible distraction, don’t you think, Mrs. M.?”

“That’s one way to put it, Crumpet.” Valerie looked for a windowsill on which to sit. She was weak in the knees.

Lady Georgina Rosemont was the new and uncontested winner in the top New York wives’ race, taking the prize the first year she had lived in the city. No, not just taking the prize, but being
accorded
it, Valerie thought, faintness turning to nausea. Only twenty-nine, she was more beautiful than Blaine Trump, she was richer than Carolyne Roehm Kravis, and she entertained more frequently than Gayfryd Steinberg, yet she had been entirely spared the habitual nasty sniping in the press that was growing more outspoken week by week, as envious journalists snarled, spat and bared their teeth at the ladies with new money.

Lady Georgina’s recent and worshipful husband, Jimmy Rosemont, who bought companies for breakfast and sold them for dinner, had given her a decorating business as a toy for Christmas. She operated it with the massive help of talented assistants lured away from the best firms in town by doubling their salaries.

She was also, most unfairly, an earl’s daughter, with a family tree that went back to William the Conqueror, which really, truly was the final, utter, bitter end, because who, among all the women jockeying for position at the top of the ladder, could tell you their grandmothers’ maiden names?

Valerie’s mind raced, trying to think of a way to somehow block out the noise of electric trains, but she knew that unless she turned the twins’ room into a
nursery for quintuplets and managed to keep five live and identical babies penned up in a crib in the middle of the room, she was doomed to failure. In any case, you couldn’t have animals in a show house, so that rule probably applied to babies too, assuming they could be procured.