New York and London, 1956–9
WHENEVER JULIAN MORELL was asked by the press, or eager young men with visions of following in his footsteps, how he had conceived each stage of his empire, he gave the same answer: ‘It’s all there,’ he would say, tapping his head gently, smiling (most charmingly at the journalists, slightly more coldly at the eager young men), ‘in your mind, maturing, honing down. All you have to do is release it. And know when to do so, of course.’
He did sincerely believe this; he had never consciously sat down and thought anything through, worked anything out; he had immense respect for the power of experience, instinct and logic to merge into something original, desirable and commercially sound and in his own case at any rate, the respect was totally justified. Certainly the phase of his empire that occupied much of his attention for much of the late fifties was not something that sprang from any brainstorming session or carefully formulated marketing plan. Nevertheless it was absolutely right for its time, with that perfect blend of the original and the familiar that leads the onlooker to believe that it was precisely what he or she had been waiting for and wanting for quite some time.
He was wandering through Harrods when the idea actually surfaced, looking at the cosmetic counters, chatting to the Juliana consultants and reflecting on their very pleasing sales figures; he suddenly had a vision of a very different kind of establishment: rather more than a beauty salon, a little less than a store: something small, intimate and totally extravagant. It should be, he thought, about the size of a large house, on two or three floors, rather like that of an infinitely luxurious hotel in feel, supplying his perfume and cosmetics and all the allied beauty business paraphernalia – treatment rooms, masseurs, steam baths, saunas, beauty therapists, hair stylists – that had become a most necessary accessory to well-heeled life on both sides of the Atlantic. But it would offer other things too, things to buy, all compatible with a mood of self-indulgence, the atmosphere rich and rare, a place that enticed, beguiled, encouraged women into extravagance.
Each department should be small and exclusive, leading from one mood and set of desires to the next: logically extending from cosmetics to lingerie, dresses to furs, hats to shoes. Shopping there would not be a chore, or even a business, it would be a beautiful experience and his establishment would provide a series of different settings for the experiences, a world apart, an excursion into a charmed life; and it would not consist of departments and counters and salesgirls and tills, it would be carefully designed into spaces and areas and moods.
Women would come in initially for the cosmetics and the beauty treatments, that would be the lure; but then they would stay; and it would be the beautiful things they could acquire that kept them there: it would all be glittering, and unashamed luxury, outrageously expensive, and totally unique, so that a customer, should she only have bought a silk scarf, a leather belt, would feel she had acquired just a tiny portion of that charmed and charming life.
All these things Julian thought almost without realizing he had thought them; later, talking to Philip Mainwaring (the marketing manager for Juliana he had decided with some misgivings to employ) he found himself describing them in the finest detail. Philip listened politely, as he was paid to do, found himself more impressed than he really wanted to be – he found Julian’s capacity for creativity made his job pattern more complex and difficult than he had ever envisaged when he took it on – and tried, like the good businessman he was, to talk him out of it.
‘I can’t see it working here,’ he said, ‘not yet. London has come a long way in the last three or four years, but I don’t know that it’s ready for that kind of concept.’
‘It’s not that new a concept,’ said Julian, ‘I mean it’s not that far removed from the Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door idea, but I see it as being much nearer a store. With a wider range of merchandise perhaps.’
‘Your other retail outlets wouldn’t like it,’ said Philip gloomily, ‘have you thought of that?’
‘Can’t see why not. I mean yes, we’ll be in competition with them in a way, but it doesn’t make Juliana less good a selling proposition. Arden still sells everywhere, after all. And the salon side of the business would provide a perfect cover, if you like, so that we’re not actually trying to beat the stores at their own game. We’re just giving women what they want, and a lot more besides.’
Philip looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I still don’t feel it’s right for London. Not yet. Have you thought about doing it anywhere else?’
‘No, not really. You mean somewhere like Paris?’
‘No, New York. It’s so busy over there at the moment. There’s so much money about. And there’s nothing they like more than a new idea.’
‘Well,’ said Julian, ‘I don’t know New York at all. But I’m ready to have a look at it. You could be right.’
‘How would you stock it?’
‘Obviously we’d have to employ buyers. Who’d buy stuff from designers and so on in the normal way. And we could have our own designers as well. Exclusive to us. Sign them up.’
Philip shuddered. ‘It sounds horrendously expensive.’
‘That’s not an argument against it. We can raise the money easily. Morell is on an extremely sound footing. OK. I’ll have a look at New York. I’m going over next week anyway, to see how much headway we’re making with Juliana. Come with me. I need your opinion on some of those people over there anyway. There’s a new woman on the scene called Estee Lauder. She has some interesting products, and her marketing is just extraordinary.’
‘OK,’ said Philip. ‘I’d like to come. Thanks.’ He looked at Julian and grinned. ‘What does our financial director have to say about all this?’
‘Haven’t told her,’ said Julian shortly. ‘I think I’ll sort out the money first.’ He returned Philip’s look a little coldly. He found the attitude of his younger staff towards Letitia’s position in the company (that she must only be there out of some kind of misguided family feeling, that he must have a relationship with her that was odd to put it mildly) at best irritating and at worst insulting. It seemed to him patently obvious that a company as successful as Morell’s was clearly in excellent financial hands and there was no more to the matter than that. Letitia now had a department of five which she ran with crushing efficiency; she was an innovative and exacting force in the business, and Julian’s only anxiety about her was that she was nearly sixty now and could surely not work on into the unforeseeable future. He said as much to Susan Johns one day over lunch at the Caprice; Susan laughed and said she was quite sure that Letitia would outlive them all.
‘Including you,’ said Julian, watching her happily devouring a double portion of profiteroles. ‘You’ll have a heart attack any day now. Do you want some more of those?’
‘Wouldn’t mind. Do you think they know about second helpings here?’
‘They should if they don’t. Have you ever put on any weight, Susan?’
‘Never.’
‘You’re very fortunate,’ said Julian with a sigh, looking at the dozen or so outrageously expensive grapes which he was eating for his own dessert. ‘I have to be extremely careful what I eat these days. Middle-age coming on, I suppose.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Anyway if you’re middle-aged so am I.’
‘How old are you, Susan?’
‘Thirty-five.’
‘You really were a child bride, weren’t you?’
‘I was. Seventeen years old. Criminal really.’
‘Yes,’ said Julian, looking sombre. ‘It’s too young.’
Susan, reflecting on the fact that Eliza had only been eighteen when Julian had married her, decided they were on slightly dangerous ground and briskly changed the subject. She had gathered from the occasional remark of Letitia’s that the Morell marriage was not quite as idyllically perfect as it had promised to be and it was a subject she preferred to keep not only from talking, but also thinking, about.
‘I hear you’re going to New York.’
‘Yes. Do you know why?’
‘I imagine to sell Juliana into the stores there.’
‘Yes. And I have another project too.’
‘Am I allowed to hear about it?’
‘Well,’ said Julian, signalling to the waiter to bring some more profiteroles, ‘I suppose as a director of the company you have a right to hear about it. But there is a condition.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You don’t tell my mother.’
Susan looked at him and shook her head in mock disapproval. ‘My goodness. It must be bad.’
‘Not bad. A bit risky, perhaps.’
‘All right, I promise. You need one sensible opinion. Come on, tell me.’
He told her. Of his vision; of how he saw it adding breadth and quality to Juliana’s image; of the kind of feel it would have; the sort of women who would be attracted to it; the people he would hope to have working on it and designing for it; where it might be, how it might look. Eliza would have given all she owned to be entrusted with half, a quarter of such a confidence.
‘It’s a new phase altogether, a new venture. I feel I need one.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, you know, boredom, restlessness. I always want to be on to the next thing. What do you think, anyway?’
‘I like it. I think it’s terrific.’
‘Good God.’ He was surprised.
‘Didn’t you think I would?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Why not? Not my style, I suppose. Too upmarket.’
‘Now don’t start getting touchy, Susan.’
‘I’m not. I’m just teasing you.’
‘Good. No, but seriously, I’d have thought it was a bit out of order, from your point of view. Expensive. For the company, I mean, new ground. All that sort of thing.’
‘New ground is its lifeblood. But it will be expensive, won’t it? How are you going to finance it?’
‘I think I can get the money in New York. If not, I’ll raise it here. I’m sure I can.’
‘What does Eliza – Mrs Morell think about it?’
‘I haven’t talked to her about it,’ said Julian shortly.
‘I see.’
‘I’m going to have a brandy. Do you want anything?’
‘Of course not. I never drink at lunch time.’
‘Or any other time, I know. Except Bucks Fizz of course.’
‘Yes,’ she said smiling at him, able at last to remember that evening with pleasure rather than pain. ‘But not at lunch time. Anyway, you go ahead. I’ll have a cup of tea.’
‘Now that really will upset the Caprice. How’s the Labour Party?’
‘It’s fine. I – I hear Mrs Morell is taking an interest in it.’
‘Oh,’ said Julian lightly, ‘only its politicians. She likes having them at her dinner table.’
‘What is Foot really like?’
‘Absolutely charming.’ He was clearly impatient of Eliza’s political leanings. ‘What about you? Are you going to end up an MP, do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said very seriously. ‘I’d like to, I really would. I do love politics, and I’d enjoy getting something done about some of the things I care about. But I don’t know if I’d ever manage it, they’re not too keen on women in the Labour Party, you know, although they certainly ought to be. It would be such a huge struggle to get adopted even, years of fighting and in-fighting, and I’m not sure if I’m ready for that. And it would mean my giving up my job, probably, and I certainly don’t know if I could face that.’
‘Well, I certainly couldn’t,’ said Julian.
He spoke very seriously. There was a silence.
‘Well, anyway,’ said Susan lightly, ‘it’s out of the question at the moment. The girls are still at home. Maybe when they’re grown up.’
‘Maybe. I must say I can’t quite adjust to the thought of you shirking a fight. You used to thrive on them.’
‘I know. But I’m older now. Maybe a bit wiser. Anyway, for the next two or three years my work on the South Ealing council will keep me quite busy enough. Then I’ll see.’
Julian looked at her. She was one of those women who improve with time, who grow into their looks and their style. When she had been young, her features had been too angular, too harsh for beauty, prettiness even, and she had had neither the money nor the skill to improve upon the raw material. She was still very thin, and not classically beautiful, but she had developed an elegance, she wore clothes well; her hair hung smoothly on her shoulders, a beautifully cut bright brown. She dressed simply but with distinct style; today she was in the shirt dress so beloved of the fifties, in soft navy wool, with a full skirt that swirled almost to her ankles, and pulled in tightly at the waist with a wide, soft red leather belt, and plain red court shoes. Her skin was pale, but clear, her eyes a dazzling light blue; on her mouth, her most remarkable feature, she wore a shiny, bright pink lipstick. She looked expensive, glamorous even; what was missing, Julian thought to himself, was jewellery, she never wore any, and her look needed it, it would suit her and her stark style.
‘You look terrific,’ he said with perfect truth. ‘Is that the new autumn coral?’
‘It is. Mango, it’s called. I like it best out of the range. Mum says it’s tarty, so I know it must be good and strong.’
‘It’s terrific. Sarsted’s doing a good job, don’t you think?’
‘Very good.’
‘And how is Mum?’
‘Much the same.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Well, I don’t have to live with her any more.’
‘Susan,’ said Julian suddenly. ‘Why don’t you come to New York with me? I could use your opinion, and it would be fun.’
Susan looked at him very steadily for a long time.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said at last.
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘Don’t you want to come?’
‘Oh, Julian,’ she said, with a sigh that seemed to consume her entire body, ‘I’d love to. You know I would. But I can’t. And I do think it’s a terrific idea, your store. Now let’s get back. It’s late.’
‘I do hope,’ he said, half smiling, half serious, ‘you know what you’re turning down. A whole new chapter in your life.’
‘Julian, don’t play games with me.’
‘I’m not playing games,’ he said, ‘I mean what I say. I think I’ll need you there.’
She looked at him sharply, trying to interpret his words, to disentangle his motives. It was not easy, and most people didn’t begin to try; he had a capacity to talk on two or even three levels at once, leading people deliberately to think that he was talking business when he meant pleasure, that he was serious when he was not, that he was careless when he was deeply concerned. He had brought it to a fine art; he used it to trap people, to confuse them, to disorient them; and it meant he could play cat and mouse in a business or a social or sexual context until he had manoeuvred his opponents into a position from which it was very hard for them to escape, without looking foolish. Susan was one of the very few people who was unfazed by this; she dealt with it as she did with everything: directly.
‘Julian, if you’re tempting me with promotion, some lofty new position, I would like it spelt out before I waste weeks of my very busy life finding out exactly what it might be, and if you’re tempting me with yourself I can resist. Just.’ She smiled at him. ‘So either way, probably we should get back to the office.’
He sighed. ‘Will I ever get the better of you, Susan? Persuade you to do something you don’t totally approve of?’
‘Certainly not. Are you coming back? Or are you going to waste even more company time than you have already?’
‘You go on,’ he said, ‘I’ll follow.’
When her taxi was out of sight he walked along Piccadilly, up Regent Street and into Mappin and Webb. He spent a long time there, looking, selecting, and rejecting; finally he chose a two-strand pearl necklace with a diamond clasp and a pair of pearl and gold stud earrings. When he got back to the offices he went into her room and put the box on her desk.
‘What’s that?’
‘Thank-you present.’
‘What for?’
‘For liking my idea. For not coming to New York. And because you deserve it. No strings. But I shall be very offended if you don’t take it.’
Susan opened the box, looked at the pearls in silence for a long time, and then at him. Her eyes were very bright and big, and suspiciously moist. ‘You won’t have to be offended. Of course I’ll take them. And wear them every day. They’re simply beautiful. Thank you very much, I – I just don’t know what to say.’
‘Well,’ said Julian lightly, ‘you are simply beautiful too. So you suit one another, you and the pearls. I’ll keep you informed about New York. Just in the hope you might change your mind.’
But they both knew she wouldn’t.
New York in the autumn of 1956 was a heady place. It had taken a long time to recover from the depression; in 1939 half a million people in the state were still receiving public assistance. But by the mid-forties the big business giants – IBM, Xerox, General Electric – were all becoming corporations; a new governor, Thomas Dewey, had set schemes for state universities and new highways into motion – six were built in the decade following the war – and Harriman and Rockefeller poured money into the state. In 1955 the new state thruway from New York City to Buffalo was opened, and soon after that construction began on the St Lawrence Seaway.
The new highways meant the real birth of the commuter to New York, and the birth of the suburb; paving a way for ambition, opportunity, and the American dream; they also paved an increasing drift, for the less fortunate, to the ever-growing ghettos. But in the commercial heart of the city there was money, real money, more and more of it, up for grabs. And Julian Morell was in grabbing mood.
He stayed, with Philip Mainwaring, at the Pierre Hotel, shrine to luxury and a slightly old-fashioned glamour, just on Central Park – and an inspiration for their cause, filled as it was with spoilt, lavished-upon women and extravagant, indulgent, men.
They had a huge success with Juliana; Bergdorf’s, Bonwit’s and Sak’s all bought it, and promised Julian special displays and promotions when he launched his new young perfume, Mademoiselle Je, in the spring. He set up a recruitment drive for consultants selling his range in the stores, interviewing them every morning in his suite; he was looking not just for women who could sell the products but who could communicate with the customers, sympathize with their anxieties, reassure them, make intelligent suggestions. It was a difficult task; he was looking for a type of woman who would not normally consider selling cosmetics behind a counter. He had managed to find them in London, but it was more difficult to find this particular breed in New York, mecca of the hard sell. At last, after days of intensive interviewing, Julian found a handful and hired them at just over half again the salary all their rivals were getting and said he would pay them no commission. ‘That way,’ he said to Philip, ‘they aren’t hammering away pushing unsuitable stuff at women who don’t want any more than advice. It works in London; it’ll work here.’ Then he turned his attention to looking for his building.
They worked their way steadily through central New York for days, marvelling at the soaring erratic beauty of the place; up and down the huge avenues. Sixth and Fifth, Lexington and Park; down the side streets; examining new buildings, conversions, buildings in use as offices, even already as shops. It was exhausting, depressing and began to feel hopeless.
‘Maybe,’ said Philip as they walked slowly back to the Pierre one evening, ‘we should think of building.’
‘No,’ said Julian, ‘no, I know we shouldn’t build. I know we need something with a past.’
‘Julian, we must have looked at everything with a past in New York City and a lot without a future,’ said Philip, ‘this place doesn’t exist, you have to rethink.’
‘No,’ said Julian, ‘I’m not going to rethink. We’ll find it. There’s no rush. Come on, let’s have a martini, it’ll cheer you up, and then I’ll see if anything’s come in for us during the day.’
He ordered two martinis and went to the desk to pick up his mail: a huge armful of real-estate agents’ envelopes. He carried them over to Philip in the bar, laughing. ‘Come on, Philip, plenty to do. We needn’t be bored.’
‘I long to be bored,’ said Philip gloomily, downing his martini in one.
‘Oh, nonsense. Where’s your spirit of adventure? Have another one of those to stiffen your sinews a bit and – Oh, look, here’s something from a residential agent. That’s interesting.’
He opened the envelope. A photograph fell out of a beautiful house, about a hundred years old, tall and graceful, five storeys high, with beautiful windows, classic proportions. It was just off Park Avenue on 57th, and it was being offered for sale as a possible small hotel. Julian looked at it for a long time in silence.
‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘that’s my building. Jesus, that’s it. What do they want for it?’
‘Julian, that’s a house,’ said Philip. ‘You can’t convert that into a shop.’
‘Of course I can,’ said Julian, smiling at him radiantly, ‘a house is exactly what I want. I don’t know why I didn’t realize before. Come on, Philip, let’s go and look at it now.’
‘But it’s dark,’ said Philip plaintively, ‘we won’t be able to see it.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, man, don’t be so negative. Haven’t you heard of electric light? It’s all the rage. Come on, we can do it easily before dinner.’
They got in a cab and travelled the few blocks down to 57th. There they got out and walked slowly along the street until they reached the house. It was nestled between two other, taller buildings, a small elegant jewel. A light hung over the front door like a canopy, showing off its perfect shape, its delicate fanlight. It was a very lovely house. Julian looked at it in silence; he crossed the street and looked at it still longer. Then he crossed again and knocked at the door.
It was over two years before the store opened. An expensive two years.
The first thing Julian had to do was find the money to buy the house, and to do the conversion. Most of the larger banks were not over-helpful. Morell’s, and indeed Juliana did not have the substance, hold the authority in New York, that they did in London. Julian tried the merchant banks in London, but they were reluctant to put money into an untried venture in New York.
He was just about to try to raise a personal loan when he was put in touch with a young man called Scott Emerson, who headed up one of the investment divisions at the Chase Manhattan Bank and who was earning a reputation as having a shrewd eye for a clever investment. Julian went to see him, armed with photographs, cash flows, prospectuses, his own company history and his burning, driving enthusiasm; he came away with a cautious promise – ‘a definite maybe’ Julian told Susan and Letitia on the phone to London – and a life-long friendship. Scott lived with his wife Madeleine and their two children (‘Nearly four,’ he told Julian proudly over lunch that first day. ‘Madeleine’s expecting twins’) on Long Island; he invited Julian to spend the weekend there, and Julian fell promptly in love with American family life. Unlike most Englishmen, he found the way American children were encouraged to talk, to join in a conversation, to consider themselves as important as adults, charming and interesting; he thought of his small daughter brought up by Eliza and her nanny in the nurseries at the top of the house, and resolved to change things.
‘You must bring Eliza to stay here next time you come,’ said Madeleine, smiling at him over Saturday breakfast. ‘We would just love to meet her, she sounds so interesting and so young. It’s quite an undertaking, marrying a man with such a huge and demanding business at her age. She’s obviously a coper.’
‘Well, she’s very busy,’ said Julian, carefully ignoring the comment on Eliza’s capacities as a wife. ‘Our child is very young. But yes, I’m sure she’d like New York, and of course to meet you. Perhaps for the opening of the store.’
‘Well, that’s –’ Madeleine had been going to say ‘two years off but decided against it – ‘a really good idea.’ Something in Julian Morell’s face told her he was not a man to argue with, especially on the subject of his wife.
‘How old is your daughter?’
‘She’s nine months old,’ said Julian.
‘Well, that’s a lovely age,’ said Madeleine. ‘I wish they could stay like that. Our C. J. is just a little older. He’ll be down in a minute, his nurse is taking him out for a walk. Maybe when they’re older he and your Rosamund can be friends. I’d really like that. Oh, look, here he is now. C. J. come and say hallo to Mr Morell.’
The nurse, smiling, carried C. J. over to Julian; the child looked at him solemnly and then buried his head in her shoulder.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Julian, ‘don’t I even get a smile?’
Madeleine held out her arms, took the child; he turned and smiled suddenly at Julian. He had brown hair, and large brown eyes; they held a slightly tremulous expression. Madeleine kissed him and then handed him back to the nurse. She went out, talking quietly to the baby under her breath.
‘He’s sweet,’ said Julian. ‘What’s his real name?’
‘Well, he was christened Christopher John, but the nursemaid we had then called him C. J. and it kind of stuck. He’s so terribly different from his sister, it’s funny how you can tell so early. He’s quieter, and he doesn’t try and push the world around like she did at that age. I don’t think he’s ever had a temper tantrum. She’ll be running for president by the time she’s seventeen. But he’s such a nice little boy. I suppose he may toughen up.’
Julian thought of C. J.’s soft brown eyes, his shy smile, and thought it would be rather a pity if he did.
Julian spent most of those two years in New York working harder than he had ever worked in his life, even during the very early days of the company, in a total commitment to seeing his vision become reality. It was not unusual for him to work right through the night, and occasionally half of the next one as well; he missed meals, he cancelled social engagements, and he expected precisely the same dedication from everyone working with him.
Nathan and Hartman, considered to be the finest architects in New York, had initially been hired to work on the store, and were fired within weeks because their plans didn’t meet with Julian’s absolute approval; a second firm met the same fate. Then a young French architect, Paul Baud, arrived at the Pierre one evening and asked to see Julian. He had a small portfolio under his arm, and he looked about nineteen. Julian had sighed when he heard he was downstairs; then he said he would give him five minutes and if he hadn’t convinced him by then he would have to go away again. Baud drew out of his portfolio the plans for a tiny hotel in Paris and a small store in Lyons which was the only work he had ever done, and spent the entire night in the bar at the Pierre with Julian, drawing, talking, listening. Then he went away for a week and came back with the plans complete. Julian hardly altered a thing.
He went to Paris for his beauty therapists, knowing that only there would he find the crucial combination of knowledge, mystique and deep-seated belief in the importance of beauty treatment that would have the women of New York paying visits three or four times a week to his salons. He installed on the fifth floor an extraordinary range of equipment and treatments, massage machines, passive exercisers, seaweed and mud baths, steam cabinets, infra-red sunbeds, saunas, and a battery of masseurs, visagistes, hair stylists, manicurists, dietitians. There was a small excessively well-heated swimming pool, a gymnasium, a bar that sold pure fruit and vegetable juices, and a few dimly lit cubicles fitted out with nothing but beds and telephones, where the ladies, exhausted from a morning’s toil, could sleep for an hour or so before setting forth to buy the clothes, jewellery, perfume and make-up to adorn their tortured, treated, bodies.
Buyers were brought in from all over the world: from Milan, Rome, London, Paris, Nice, San Francisco: men and women who did not just know about fashion and clothes but had it in their blood, who could recognize a new line, a dazzling colour, a perfect fabric as surely as they could tell their own names, their own desires.
Julian hired a young greedy advertising agency called Silk diMaggio to promote the store, ignoring the sober advice of Philip Mainwaring to go to Young and Rubicam or Doyle Dane.
Nigel Silk was old money, new style, born of a Boston banking family, who had perfected the art of appearing establishment while questioning every one of its tenets; he was tall, blond – ‘By Harvard out of Brooks Brothers,’ Scott Emerson described him – charming and civilized.
Mick diMaggio, on the other hand, was no money at all, the youngest of the eight children of a third-generation Italian immigrant, who ran a deli just off Broadway. Mick talked like Italian ice cream spiked with bourbon, and wrote the same way; Julian looked at the creative roughs he produced for the poster campaign – a young beautiful woman, lying quite clearly in the aftermath of sexual love, under the headline ‘The absolute experience’ – and threw up his hands in pleasure.
‘This,’ he said, ‘will empty Bergdorf s.’
They were a formidable team.
One of its most formidable parts was Camilla North.
Camilla North was born ambitious.
So eager had she been to get out into the world and start achieving that she had actually arrived nearly four weeks early; she was walking at seven months old, talking at nine; she was at dancing class at two, riding at three and reading and writing at four.
By the time she was ten she had become a superb horsewoman, an accomplished dancer, and was gaining honours in examinations in both the piano and the violin; by way of recreation she was also learning the classical guitar. She promised to be a brilliant linguist and mathematician, and was the only pupil at her exclusive girls’ school ever to have gained a hundred per cent mark in Latin at the end-of-year examinations three years running.
The interesting thing about Camilla was that she was not actually especially gifted at most of the things she excelled at; she had talents, minor facilities, but because she had a fierce, burning need to do everything better than anybody else, she was prepared to put sufficient, monumental even, effort into it to fulfil that need. A rare enough quality in an adult, it was an extraordinary thing to find in a child; her piano teacher, coming to the house to give her her lesson, frequently found her white with exhaustion, on the point of tears, labouring over some difficult piece or set of scales; her mother would often tell people in a mixture of pride and concern that ever since she had been a tiny child she had got up half an hour earlier than she need, in order to practise her ballet; she was hardly ever to be seen simply fooling around and enjoying her pony, but spent long hours practising her dressage skills, endlessly crossing and traversing the paddock, changing legs, pacing out figures of eight; she even insisted on learning to ride side-saddle; and if she was ever found to have fallen asleep over a book, it would be her Latin grammar and not a story book.
She even extended this capacity to what would normally be regarded as fun; when she first was given a bicycle she went out to the back yard with it and said she wouldn’t come in until she could ride it. Five hours later she was still out there, in the dark, both knees cut, both elbows badly bruised, a fast swelling lip where she had struck it on the handlebars – and an expression of complete triumph on her face as she rode round and round the lawn.
Nobody could quite work out what drove her. She was the much-loved oldest child and only daughter of Mary and William North; amateur psychologist friends of the family said she was trying to hold her own against the competition on offer from her three younger brothers but as none of them were nearly as clever or as successful as she was (although it had to be said none of them worked nearly so hard) this did not seem an entirely satisfactory explanation. Neither did it seem to be genetically determined; William North was old money; a charming, and gentle-mannered man, with a large and successful law practice in Philadelphia that he had inherited from his father. He worked hard and he was a clever man, but his instinct in confrontation of any kind was to withdraw, and he had no serious desire to see his firm taking on the world – or even the rest of Philadelphia. Mary North was even older money, still more charming and gentle-mannered, with no serious desire to do anything at all except keep her household running smoothly and happily; she was slightly frightened by her restless, brilliant little daughter and felt more at ease with her sons. But William was fiercely proud of her; they were very best friends, and would sit for hours after dinner, discussing politics, playing chess (this was the only time Camilla could bear to lose at anything) or simply reading together, while the boys loafed around, watching television and playing rock and roll records.
Camilla went, inevitably to Vassar, a year young; she graduated, summa cum laude, in languages, and also studied fine arts. She left in 1956, with a reputation as the most brilliant girl not just of her year but several years; and also as the most beautiful.
Camilla sometimes wondered what she would have done if she had been born plain. Being beautiful was as important to her as being clever; she simply could not bear to be anything but the loveliest, and the best-dressed woman, in a room. Fortunately for her she almost always was. She had a curly tangled mane of red-gold hair, transparently pale skin, and dramatically dark brown eyes. She was very tall and extremely slender; she had in fact a genetic tendency, a legacy from her mother, to put on weight, and from the age of twelve when she had heard somebody say she was developing puppy fat, she had been on a ferocious diet. Nobody had ever seen Camilla North put butter on her bread or sugar in her coffee; she never ate cheese, avocados, cereal or cookies; she weighed herself twice a day, and if the scales tipped an ounce over eight stone, she simply stopped eating altogether until they went back again. She quite often went to bed hungry, and dreamed about food.
She always dressed superbly; sharp stark slender clothes, in brilliant red, stinging blue, or emerald. At college she had been famous for her cashmere, her kilts, her loafers, a supreme example of the preppy look; but as soon as she left, she abandoned them and moved into dresses, suits, grown-up clothes, the severity always relieved by some witty dashing accessory, a scarf, a big necklace, a wide leather belt in some brilliant unexpected colour. She loved shoes; she had dozens of pairs, mostly classic courts with very high heels which she somehow managed to move gracefully in; but she looked best of all in her riding clothes, in her white breeches, black jacket, and her long, wonderfully worn and polished boots, her red hair scooped severely back. She occasionally hunted side-saddle; it was an extraordinary display of horsemanship and she looked more wonderful still, in a navy habit and white stock, a top hat covering her wild hair. So much did she like her habit that she had a version of it made in velvet for the evening; she wore it without a shirt, and with a pearl choker at her throat, her hair cascading over her shoulders; it was a sight that took men’s breath away, and it was this that she was wearing when she first met Julian Morell.
She was living in New York by then, in a small, walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village. It was several months since she had left Vassar, and she had not yet found a definite job to do. She had found the debutante and the social scene boring, and she had, besides, considerable hopes and ambitions for herself; she came to New York to seek her fortune, preferably in the field of the arts. She had hopes of working in the theatre, as a designer; or perhaps in the world of interior design. She met Paul Baud at a party; he was immediately impressed by her, and told her he was looking for designers for a new store; why didn’t she let her talents and imagination loose on a department or two. It was a new concept for Camilla; she sat at her drawing board virtually without food or rest for almost thirty-six hours before she was even remotely satisfied with what she had done. She delivered the drawings to Paul’s office without even asking to see him, so sure was she that she would never hear from him about them again.
She had chosen to live alone, against considerable opposition from her parents, for two reasons; one was that she liked her own company. The other was that she had hardly any friends. Camilla had no idea how to make friends. All her life she had been entirely occupied with struggling, striving, working; she had never had a best friend to talk to, giggle with, confide in, not even as a small girl. She had gone to children’s parties, she was pleasant and friendly and nobody disliked her, but nobody liked her particularly either. She was too serious, too earnest, there was too little common ground. Later on, in her teens, she went to fewer parties, because she tended to get left out; she didn’t mind, because she was so busy. But at college she became much sought after, because of the way she adorned a room, set a seal on a gathering; she was not exactly popular, but she was a status symbol, she was asked everywhere.
Nevertheless she remained friendless, solitary; and she had no gift for casual encounters. On Sundays for instance, when the other girls went for walks or spent long hours chatting, giggling, talking about men, making tea and toast, she would sit alone in her room, studying or reading, declining with a polite smile any invitations to join them.
She was perfectly happy; her friendlessness did not worry her. It worried and surprised other people, but it was of no importance to her. What would have surprised other people, also, and was perhaps of a little more importance to her, was that at the age of twenty-one she was not only a virgin, but she had never been in love.
Julian was immediately impressed by Camilla’s drawings, brought to him by Paul late one Friday evening; feverish with excitement about his project, desperate to progress it further, he asked to meet her immediately. Paul phoned the number of Camilla’s apartment in Greenwich, and got no answer; urged on by Julian’s impatience to see her, he tried her parents’ number. Yes, they were told, Miss North would indeed be back that night; she had gone to the opera with her parents and was coming home for the weekend.
Julian looked at Paul; it was nine o’clock. ‘Let’s go and meet her at the opera,’ he said. ‘Then I can arrange to see her over the weekend.’
They waited patiently in the foyer of the opera house; they heard the final applause, the bravos, to Callas’s great Carmen, and as the doors from the auditorium finally opened Julian felt in some strange way this was an important moment; as much for him as for his store. Then the great surge of people began to come out and he wondered if what he was doing was not rather foolish. How could they expect to find one girl he had never seen, and Paul had met briefly only once, in this melee? It was hopeless.
But he had reckoned without Camilla’s great beauty, and the talent she had for parting crowds; as she walked through the foyer of the opera house in her blue velvet habit, pearls in her throat and in her wild red hair, her brown eyes tender with pleasure at the music she had just heard, people stared; and they did not just stare, they drew aside just a little to look at her. Julian, standing at the main doors, looking in, found himself suddenly confronted by her coming directly towards him. Not knowing who she was, he forgot Camilla North, and gazed at her, then smiled; drawn to her, moved by her beauty and her grace. She looked at him, recognizing, acknowledging, his appreciation, and then turned and said something briefly to her father who was just behind her.
Paul stepped forward. ‘Miss North. Good evening. I am so sorry to intrude upon your family evening. But I liked your drawings so much and Mr Morell, here, was anxious to meet you as soon as possible to discuss them.’
Julian, astonished and amused that this beautiful creature could be his prey, held out his hand to her. ‘Miss North. I am Julian Morell. Let me add my apologies to Paul’s. And extend them to your family. It is an unforgivable intrusion. But I am in a fearsome hurry with my project. And I think we can work together. I wondered only if we could arrange a meeting over the weekend.’
Camilla looked at him, and recognized immediately a kindred spirit, a fellow fighter, an accomplice in the struggle to do not merely better but best. Where many people would have considered his behaviour in haunting the foyer of the opera house all evening a little excessive, ridiculous even, when a phone call on Monday morning would have done nearly as well, to her it seemed entirely reasonable. She smiled at him and took his hand.
‘Mr Morell, I am delighted to meet you. How very very flattering that you should hunt me out. These are my parents, William and Mary North, Mother, Father, this is Julian Morell, who I hope very much to be able to work for, and Paul Baud, his colleague. Paul, Mr Morell, would you care to join us for supper? We are going to Sardi’s, and it would be so nice to have you with us.’
It was interesting, Julian thought, that she did not defer to her parents in this suggestion; the evening was hers and she had taken charge of it. He noticed too, and liked, her formal manners, her serious self-confidence; he could work with her, and work with her well.
‘That would be delightful,’ he said, ‘providing we shall not be intruding?’
‘Not at all,’ said William North, ‘please do come. So nice to meet an Englishman too.’
Camilla, sitting next to Julian and opposite Paul Baud, discussing initially the opera, New York, the latest exhibition at the Metropolitan, felt acutely aware that she had crossed a threshold, that this was the most important evening she had ever spent. And the feeling was not entirely confined to her career.
She and Julian worked closely together for weeks before anything more intimate took place between them than drinking out of the same cup of coffee. Professionally they were completely besotted with one another: they recognized each other’s talents, admired each other’s style, inspired each other’s creativity. Julian, initially overwhelmed by Camilla’s capacity for work, by her perfectionism, by her ability to work to the highest standard for countless hours without food or rest, very swiftly came to take it for granted, and simply to accept her and her talents as an extension of his own. Camilla accepted this as the highest compliment and regarded his impatient arrogance, his insistence on achieving precisely what he wanted, his disregard for any other views but those which concurred with his own, as an essential element in her work for him.
She had initially been hired to design the lingerie and jewellery departments; while she worked on those Julian instructed Paul to search for others to set their mark on the more specialist area of the beauty floor, the precise demands of the fur department. But looking at the drawings she produced, the soft, sensuous fantasy she set the lingerie in, the rich, brilliant hard-edged greed she created for the jewellery, he abandoned his search and told her she must do the rest. While they worked in the close tension so peculiar to a shared ideal, she grew to know everything there was to know about him, as a person; she knew when he was angry, when he was discouraged, when he was afraid of what he had taken on; she could tell in moments whether he was worried, excited, pleased. She could see he was arrogant, demanding, ruthless; she found it absolutely correct that he should be so.
She was, she realized, for the first time in her life, absolutely happy.
She was a little less happy after she had been to bed with him. Camilla had for quite a long time realized that she had to go to bed with someone, before very much time elapsed. It was one thing maintaining your virginity through college, and indeed in the fifties that was what any well-brought-up girl was expected to do. They might not all live up to the expectations, but a lot did. But living as a successful career woman in New York City, and maintaining it, was something altogether different. There was something faintly un-chic about it, something gauche and awkward – almost, she felt, slightly ridiculous. The trouble was, if a man was to relieve her of it, he had to know it was there; if he was to know it was there he had to be told (or to find out for himself under rather difficult circumstances) and how, she wondered, did you do that? How did you say to a would-be lover, who had been drawn to you by your sophistication, your woman of the worldliness, who assumed that you were as accomplished in bed as you were in your career: Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t actually know how to go about this? She supposed to a certain extent that you would know how to go about this, that your instincts would guide you, and she had very carefully read, in her painstaking way, a great many books on the subject, she knew a great deal of the theory, about positions and foreplay and virtually everything there was to know about contraception: (and there was another thing, she had been carefully fitted for a dutch cap by a very fashionable New York gynaecologist, that was the modern, chic answer to such things, and it lay unworn in its pink tin in her underwear drawer, waiting to be used) but she still couldn’t imagine anybody being deceived into thinking she really knew what she was doing. And it was important to Camilla that she appeared to know exactly what she was doing, all the time.
She also, she had to admit, still found it a little hard to imagine that it could be as wonderful as it was supposed to be. Because of her friendless adolescence, she had totally missed out on the giggly intimate exchanges of sexual knowledge, and the lack of it; she had continued, as children do, to regard the whole thing as something people had to do rather than that they wanted to. Even now, when from time to time, usually in the company of some attractive man, she did feel slightly pleasurable stirrings of what she could only assume were sexual desire, she couldn’t imagine being so overcome by them that she would get carried away, and risk pregnancy, scandal, and even being cited in the divorce court.
Just the same, she obviously had to do it, and do it soon; and Julian Morell seemed to her the ideal accomplice in the matter. He was much older than she was, so he would be experienced and presumably skilled; he would be more likely to be understanding and even charmed by her lack of experience; she knew he found her extremely attractive; and her opportunities for seducing him were legion. She did not give his wife a great deal of thought. She was three thousand miles away, and it was clearly a marriage of convenience, otherwise she would come to New York much more often; and besides this was 1957, it would be an adult relationship, and she had no intention whatsoever of breaking up the marriage.
She laid her plans with care.
None of it, however, had quite worked out how she had expected. She had managed to present him quite late on Friday evening with some drawings that were just sufficiently below her usual standard to require further discussion and work; she had suggested they talked over dinner at a new Italian place in the Village near her apartment; she had asked him to see her home (as it was Friday night and there were more than the usual number of drunks about); she had made them both coffee and poured them both brandy (which he had drunk rather less enthusiastically than she had) and then sat, edgy and dry mouthed, hoping rather desperately that some overpowering natural instinct would propel them both into the studio couch (made up freshly this morning with some new thick linen sheets she had bought from Saks) without her having consciously to do any more about it.
Julian had not seemed, however, in the least danger of being overpowered by anything; he sat totally relaxed, leafing through the pages of Vogue and Bazaar, pointing out the occasional reference to himself, to Mrs Lauder’s new range, to a forthcoming promotion from Mr Revson; finally he had leant back on the couch, looked at her and said, ‘What’s the matter, Camilla?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘nothing at all.’
‘Oh yes there is,’ he said, ‘first you present me with some damn fool designs and pretend you can’t do any better. Then you tell me you’re afraid to come home on your own, when you’re the most independent woman in New York and that includes the Lady on Ellis Island. Now you’re shaking like a teenager on her first date. What is it?’
She had said nothing, nothing at all, that she was simply tired; and he had laughed and said she was never tired; and had taken her hand and said, ‘I may be being presumptuous but are you out to seduce me?’
And she said, half angry, half ashamed, no of course she wasn’t; that it was time he left, it was late; and he said he would certainly leave if she liked, only he would much rather stay if she would like that; and then she started to cry, and said please, please go, and then he had put his arms around her, to comfort her, and that had been cosy and comforting and reassuring, and she had stopped feeling frightened and silly; and then somehow everything had changed and he was kissing her, really kissing her, and holding her and stroking her, and at first it was nice, and then as she realized what was happening, she stopped being relaxed and she tautened and shivered violently; he had drawn back from her and said, ‘Camilla, what is it, what’s the matter?’ and she had suddenly taken a deep breath and said, ‘I’ve never done it before.’
She would never forget to her dying day the look of absolute amazement on his face; how he had sat back from her, just staring at her, and she had been sure he was going to be angry, or amused; and then he had said, very gently, reaching out and touching her face, ‘Then we must take great care that you will want to do it again.’
After that it had been all right; she had had a moment of panic when she had suddenly remembered the cap, sitting expectantly in its drawer, but by then she was undressed and so was he (and neither he nor it had looked nearly as alarming as she had expected) and she was feeling relaxed enough to be able to say she had to go to the bathroom; and when she came back he had been waiting for her with an expression of such tenderness, such patience that she had stopped being frightened altogether.
Nevertheless, she had not found it as wonderful as she had hoped; indeed it had been rather more as she had feared; and she had felt strangely detached, almost disembodied, as if she had been watching above the bed as he fondled her and kissed her, and stroked her breasts and kissed them; and kept asking her if she was happy, if it was all right; and finally, as the moment arrived, as he gently, tenderly entered her, patiently waiting again and again for her to follow him, as he began to move within her, as eventually the movements became urgent, bigger, more demanding, as he kissed her, stroked her, sought out her most secret, tender places: as he shuddered tumultuously into her, murmuring her name again and again, all she could feel, all she could think as she tried dutifully, earnestly to respond, was a sense of huge relief that it was over at last. Afterwards, of course, she had lied; she had said it had been lovely, that no, she hadn’t quite come, but she had felt marvellous, that (and this much at least was true) it couldn’t have been more wonderfully, more gently accomplished, and that she was truly truly happy. They had fallen asleep then; later, waking thirsty and uncomfortable, unaccustomed to the restless invasion of her quietly peaceful bed, she had got up and gone to the kitchen for a drink of water; when she came back he was awake, waiting for her, his hand outstretched, asking her back to bed; and he had done it again, less carefully, more urgently, and it had been a little nicer and she could almost have said she enjoyed it. And when she awoke in the morning, and got up and showered, and made him coffee and sat drinking it with him, she had felt quite wonderful, to think at last, at long last, she was like everyone else, every other woman; no longer set strangely and awkwardly apart.
What Camilla had not been quite clear about was whether she was now actually Julian’s mistress. It was one thing being seduced by him, that was what she had absolutely wanted; what was quite another was being emotionally and physically involved with him long term, and she was not sure if she wanted that at all.
There were many things she did want from him: recognition, power, prestige; but these sat curiously at odds with other such things as love, tenderness and physical pleasure. Indeed, as she lay in her bed in her parents’ home on the Saturday night, after parting at midday from Julian, she had wondered, with a touch of panic, if she had actually done the right thing; if in asking him for sex she had forfeited her career. He must, indeed he had told her so, now see her rather differently; no longer the cool, self-confident Camilla North, possessor of a formidable talent, but a tender, tentative lover; possessor (as he himself had said, as he kissed and caressed it joyfully), of a formidable body. What was that going to do to her position, her future, in the company? Had she in an uncharacteristically feckless, reckless act, thrown away what mattered most to her in the world: her own success?
But it was actually quite all right. She need not have worried: on either count as it turned out. Julian simply could not afford to lose her, as a considerable force within the company – and at that particular point in time he did want to have any long-term commitment. His marriage was still alive, and if not well, certainly not sick enough to abandon, and he most emphatically did not want to subject himself to the scandal and trauma of a divorce. He had made these things charmingly and patently clear to her over lunch on the following Monday; he had told her she was the loveliest thing that had happened to him since he had arrived in America, that if she had enjoyed Friday’s encounter even half as much as he had, then she was a very lucky girl, and he hoped that she would invite him to dinner again very soon; and then, lest she might find this ever so slightly dismissive, he had told her that he would like her to work closely with the advertising agency in future, as he wanted her input and visual judgement in that area.
‘This has nothing whatever to do,’ he added, raising his glass to her and smiling, ‘with the great pleasure you were able to give me the other evening. It is because I think, I know, that you are an extremely talented person, and I want your expertise wherever it is needed. Also I happen to consider that your talents don’t stop at what is known as the creative area. You have a commercial sense as well.’
Camilla’s heart had thudded, her pulses had raced, far more pleasingly, more passionately than they had when she had been in bed with him. This, she thought, meeting his eyes with an expression of absolute pleasure and confidence, was what was really important to her. Everything else came an extremely bad second.
Nevertheless, over the next few weeks she and Julian were together almost all the time – day and night.
She felt absolutely no guilt whatsoever about Eliza: her attitude towards her was completely dispassionate. She could clearly see that Julian did not love her and she felt besides that Eliza did quite well enough out of her marriage as it was, without demanding or even requiring fidelity from her husband. She studied her with great interest when Eliza finally came to New York, rather as a biologist might a rare, hitherto undiscovered species; she noted her great beauty, her unmistakable chic, her rather naive if sparkly manner; she probed her conversational skills, she analysed her cultural and intellectual abilities, she examined her grasp of the affairs of Julian’s company and found her wanting on almost every count. It seemed quite incomprehensible to her that a woman in Eliza’s position should not be totally au fait with every possible aspect of her husband’s world: not only in the broader matters, in the workings of the cosmetic and retail industry, but also in the minutiae of the people he employed and their role within the company. That seemed to Camilla to be the very least a wife should offer her husband; if she did not, then she deserved absolutely everything she got.
It did not occur to her that Julian saw to it quite deliberately that Eliza was able to offer almost nothing.
Eliza, left alone in London, was not only lonely; more miserably, more significantly indeed, she felt isolated, shut out; she tried very hard at first to persuade Julian to tell her about his project in New York, she asked him endless questions, even tried to make suggestions of her own about what the store might be like, what it might sell, what she would like herself to find in such a place. But Julian would not be drawn, answering her questions as briefly as possible, ignoring her suggestions, and totally rejecting any requests she made to accompany him on one of the many trips. He would phone her quite often when he was there, asking how she and how Roz were, he would send her funny cards, he would have flowers delivered, and he would return to her with his arms full of presents, impatiently ardent, with a string of funny stories and amusing gossip; but of what he had really been doing, actually achieving, she learnt almost nothing. In the end, inevitably, she came to reject the presents, to resent the gossip, and to find the ardour unwelcome.
‘Eliza,’ said Julian in an attempt at lightness as she turned away from him for the third night in a row, ‘forgive me if I’m wrong, but you seem to find me marginally less attractive than you did a short while ago.’
‘Yes,’ she said flatly, ‘yes I do. I’m surprised you have taken so long to be aware of it.’
‘Do I have to look to myself for the reason? Am I growing fat? Boring? Perhaps if you would be kind enough to enlighten me I might be able to do something about it.’
‘No, Julian,’ said Eliza, turning over on to her back and looking at him, her green eyes hard and oddly blank, ‘you’re not in the least fat, and I don’t suppose you’re boring. Although it would be a little hard for me to tell.’
‘I don’t quite know what you mean.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so dense. I see so little of you, and talk to you so seldom, how can I possibly know what you’re like any more?’
‘That’s not fair. You know how busy I am. And I took you out to dinner this evening, and devoted myself very thoroughly to your interests. Which were, I have to say, a little less than riveting. A nursery school for Rosamund, I seem to recall, and the advisability of refurnishing Marriotts throughout. Oh, and of course your latest purchases from M. St Laurent.’
‘Shut up, shut up!’ cried Eliza, sitting up, her eyes stinging with sudden tears. ‘How can you possibly expect me to have anything to say to you that you might find interesting when I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re doing from one week’s end to the next?’
‘Other wives seem to manage. To occupy themselves with something more than total trivia.’
‘Julian,’ said Eliza, controlling her voice with an effort, ‘I don’t want to have to occupy myself, as you put it, with anything. I want to be busy with you. With our marriage. I want to be involved.’
‘Eliza, we’ve been through this before. I have not the slightest desire to have you mixed up with my company. I want a wife, not a business partner.’
‘And how can I be a wife when I don’t even know what kind of areas your business is extending into? I don’t want to work for your lousy company, but I would like at least to be able to answer people when they ask me what you’re doing in New York, and whether the cosmetics are doing as well there as they are in London. I’ve never even been to New York, I don’t know what it looks like, and I’m expected to be able to comment on the comparative merits of Bergdorf’s and Saks. How can I begin to understand what might be worrying you, interesting you, exciting you, when you answer me in monosyllables and treat me as if I was some kind of half-witted child? You diminish me, Julian, as a person, and then you expect me to be wholly responsive to you in bed. Well, I can’t be. Don’t ask me any more.’
There was a silence for a moment. Then Julian got up and walked over to the door.
‘I think I’ll sleep in my dressing room,’ he said, ‘I won’t say if you don’t mind, because clearly you wouldn’t.’
‘Don’t you think?’ said Eliza sitting up in bed, tears streaming down her face now, ‘don’t you think there is at least something in what I say?’
‘No,’ he said very finally. ‘No, I don’t. I married you because I thought you could offer the kind of undemanding support and understanding I desperately need. I was obviously wrong.’
‘You were,’ said Eliza, a cold calm descending on her, ‘and I wish to God you had looked for it in somebody else.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘on that note I will say good night.’
She thought with some satisfaction that for the first time she had managed to hurt him, however slightly.
He never apologized or referred to the conversation again. But he came in two days later with an envelope which he tossed down on to the dinner table, and looked at her with a slightly odd expression in his dark eyes.
‘I wondered if you might like to come to New York with me next time I go. I’m thinking of getting an apartment there and it would be very nice if you could help me with it. There are a few photographs in there of the site for the store. I thought it would amuse you to see them.’
Eliza looked at him, unsmiling, slightly wary. ‘I’d like that very much. Thank you.’
‘Well,’ he said with a sigh, ‘I hope you’re not disappointed.’
She wasn’t. She thought New York was wonderful. She loved the wide, windy streets (it was autumn), the sculptured beauty of the skyline, the pace of life, the glamour, the shops. Most of all the shops. They drove up Fifth Avenue the first evening past Lord and Taylor’s, Saks, Tiffanys, Henri Bendel, Cartier, Bonwit’s, and at every one she grew more excited, twisting and turning in her seat like a small child at a party. Then she caught a glimpse of Julian’s face, oddly severe, almost pained, and remembered she was supposed to be presenting him with a more sophisticated, intelligent front.
‘I’m sorry, Julian. I’ll calm down tomorrow. But it’s like seeing a fairy tale come true, and I know that’s a cliché, so don’t tell me, having heard of all these places for so long and suddenly they’re really there. And this is where your store is to be?’
‘Yes,’ he said, motioning the driver to pull in, pointing out to her the corner where the building stood. ‘Look, there, see, that place there, just past Gucci.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘yes, I do, and it’s lovely. But isn’t it –’
‘Isn’t it what?’ he said, and there was ice in his voice.
‘Well, a bit small.’
‘Eliza, that was the whole idea. That it should be small. Not large and lavish and predictable. I thought you realized that, at least.’
‘No,’ she said, her voice small, her excitement gone. ‘No, I didn’t, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.’
In the morning, his mood still distant, he took her round the building briefly, then said he had a series of meetings and would see her for cocktails.
‘No, Eliza, not lunch. I have to take three buyers out.’
‘I could come too.’
‘No, you’d be a bored.’
‘Julian, I promise you I wouldn’t be bored.’
‘Eliza, I’m sorry, I just don’t think it’s a very good idea. You have plenty to do. You can start looking at all those apartments. Make a shortlist, and then I’ll look at them.’
‘Look on my own?’
‘Yes.’
She sighed. ‘All right.’
She worked hard that day; she looked at seven apartments, drew up a comprehensive list, with an outline of the advantages and drawbacks of each one, and presented him with it at dinner.
‘There you are, Julian. I think the one on 57th is the best. Lovely and near your building – what are you going to call it, by the way?’
‘What do you mean? Juliana of course.’
‘But it’s more than Juliana. I think it should have a name of its own. That will give it an identity.’
‘Eliza,’ said Julian with a sigh, ‘Juliana has plenty of identity.’
‘Yes, but it’s a cosmetic. The store will have much more to offer than that.’
‘And what sort of name do you think it should have?’
He spoke as if to a child, humouring her, not as if he wanted to hear the answer.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Something beautiful. Something classical maybe. Something out of mythology perhaps.’
‘My darling, I don’t think you know what you are talking about. It really would be much better if you confined your efforts to finding our apartment. But thank you for the thought.’
Even when he had actually called the store Circe, he failed to give her any credit for it whatsoever.
The store finally opened in the spring of 1959 with a party that was lavish even by New York standards. It was devastatingly beautiful throughout, a shrine to luxury and vanity; it was also an extraordinary tribute to Julian Morell’s taste, commercial instinct and crushing determination to get what he wanted.
The party he threw to open it was more like a theatrical production than a commercial launch. Lucky (as he so often was) with the weather, it was a tender spring evening, and still just light when the huge white doors of Circe were opened to New York for the very first time. A wide awning stretched from the door right across the sidewalk; looking up through it, all that could be seen from the street were banks of white lilies and what appeared to be a million dancing candles. A string quartet played at the top of the beautiful double curving staircase, a jazz trio on the second floor, amidst a tumble of furs, and in the main room on the ground floor where the huge cases of jewellery, all the colours of some exotic darkened rainbow, shimmered against the candlelight, a pianist in white tails sat at a white grand piano and played the music of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin.
Champagne flowed ceaselessly, recklessly, into white glass flutes; the cocktail waiter from the Savoy had been flown in from London for the occasion and the canapés were entirely black and red caviare, smoked salmon, Mediterranean prawns, monster strawberries dipped in chocolate.
‘Well, it was certainly worth coming for these, anyway,’ remarked Susan Johns to Letitia through a mouthful of several of them. ‘What a party, Letitia. Is New York always like this?’
‘A bit,’ said Letitia, who was enjoying herself more than she could remember for years, and had already received several invitations to supper after the party from attractive smooth-faced, grey-haired suntanned almost indistinguishable gentlemen. ‘I must say, Susan, I was a little opposed to this store, but I do think I was probably wrong. Julian has done something quite remarkable. I think it will be a great success.’
‘Let’s hope,’ said Susan. ‘It’s cost enough. And in terms of Julian’s time as much as money. Letitia, is that perfectly beautiful woman over there, talking to the pianist, Camilla North? The designer lady? The one we’ve heard just a bit too much about lately?’
Letitia looked over at the piano and at the undeniably beautiful Miss North, tall and very slender, with a mass of wild red hair and large brown eyes, dressed in a long slither of black satin that clung somewhat tenuously to her surprisingly full bosom.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, that’s Camilla. And she is beautiful, I agree. Very clever too, I believe. But if you’re thinking what I think you might be thinking, you’re wrong. No sense of humour whatsoever and a dreadful tendency to bang on in that heavy American way. She is absolutely not Julian’s type.’
Eliza, who had decided that evening once and for all that she was not Julian’s type either, was trying very hard to enjoy the party. And failing. Miserably. Everything had gone wrong from the moment she arrived, when the ghastly Camilla North had said in her earnest way, ‘What a lovely dress, Mrs Morell. I always loved Chanel,’ in tones that most clearly implied Chanel was best left in the past; Eliza, not easily demoralized in matters of dress, had felt an almost overwhelming urge to rush back to the apartment and change. From there it had been downhill all the way; everyone seemed to be friends, colleagues, to have worked on the project, to know a million times more about it than she did. She had tried very hard to keep abreast of Circe’s development; had pestered Julian to talk to her about it, had visited it whenever she came to New York in the process of doing up their new apartment in Sutton Place (‘You’d love it,’ she had said to Letitia, ‘it’s exactly like London there right on the river’) but it had been difficult, humiliating even, to have to keep asking people about it, to question them and betray her own ignorance.
But looking at the store that evening, in the company of Paul Baud who had taken it upon himself to look after her, she was still amazed, dazzled by Julian’s achievement: by the design of each department, the way each was so different, yet blended so perfectly into the whole; at the selection of merchandise, the range of exclusive designers on offer, the wit and style of the accessories, the imaginativeness and scope of the beauty floor, the grace and charm of the entire building. ‘It’s truly beautiful, Paul,’ she said, ‘you must be very very proud.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘not proud perhaps, but pleased of course. It was a wonderful opportunity for me. Your husband is a very good person to work with. So – let me think, what am I trying to say – so easy to talk to, to explain things to, so understanding, such an – an inspiration. It is very unusual, I think, for a business person to be so in tune with the creative side of things.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Eliza, trying to reconcile this patron saint of communication with the man she had been endeavouring to talk to for nearly five years.
‘Camilla says the same thing, very very often,’ said Paul. ‘She says it is quite extraordinary to work with a man who so appreciates so quickly what you are trying to do. She has adored working with him, I know.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Eliza sweetly, ‘I’m so glad. Shall we go and find some food, Paul? I’m hungry.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, keeping you up here away from the party,’ said Paul, looking stricken. ‘Come, we’ll find some food and some more champagne, and then perhaps you will dance with me. I do admire your dress. Chanel is my favourite designer of all time. And it is nice to see a woman not in black this evening.’
‘Thank you,’ said Eliza, feeling just slightly soothed.
‘Come, then. And perhaps you will tell me about the people in the company in London, while we go down, particularly the grandmère. She is beautiful, that one. She has style.’
‘Don’t let her hear you referring to her as the grandmère,’ said Eliza, laughing. ‘But yes, she is beautiful. And clever, too.’
‘So I believe. And the other lady? The one with the glorious legs. She looks as if she might be a dark mare – is that the expression?’
‘Nearly,’ said Eliza, laughing, ‘that’s Susan Johns. I’d never honestly noticed her legs. But she is terribly clever too. And maybe a bit of a dark mare. She virtually runs the company in London while Julian is away.’
‘She has chic, that one,’ said Paul. ‘I admire her look.’
It had never occurred to Eliza that Susan had a look. She resolved to study her more closely in future. The world suddenly seemed full of beautiful, clever women, all of whom appeared to know her husband a great deal better than she did. She sighed.
‘What is it, Mrs Morell? Did I say something wrong?’ asked Paul anxiously. He hoped he was not upsetting his patron’s wife on such an occasion; that would never do. Only that evening Julian had said he would like to think about opening a Circe in Paris. It would be terrible not to get the contract because of a little tactlessness or indiscretion. Besides, he had a kind heart; and he found Eliza charming. She was beautiful, he thought (only there was a sadness in her huge green eyes that puzzled him); and she looked ravishing in her white beaded shift dress, so elegant, so discreetly noticeable. Most of the Englishwomen he had met were loud and badly dressed; not chic or sympatique.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘let us find the champagne. And we can study the celebrities on the way. So many, we have done well.’
They had; moving so gracefully up the stairs she appeared to float, they passed Audrey Hepburn, stunning in a black Givenchy sheath dress, a drifting mass of black ostrich feathers on her head; Zsa Zsa Gabor rippled through the crowd, in a cloud of red ruffles; Cary Grant smiled his way round the room.
‘Camilla invited Jackie Kennedy. She knows her, it seems. She might come. But I fear not now. They are out of town. They say he has a very good chance of becoming president. I hope so,’ he added fervently. ‘It would be nice to have some chic in the White House. I would certainly vote for him, if I were allowed.’
Eliza liked the idea of a president elected in the cause of chic. ‘Then I hope for your sake he gets in,’ she said. ‘Come on, Paul. Let’s dance.’
When the party finally ended, with a rain of golden fireworks over the city from the roof garden, they had gone out in a huge party to Sardi’s, with the Emersons, Paul, Camilla North, Letitia, Susan, and the Silks and the diMaggios.
Eliza, who had drunk a great deal of champagne by now, in sheer nervousness and desperation, and was sitting in between Scott and Mick, talked and giggled loudly a great deal, flirted with them both outrageously at first and then, as she became increasingly drunk, more and more recklessly garrulous, suggested to Scott that she should have a place on the board, that Mick might like to give her a job in his studio, and even that she might open up her own department at Circe, selling children’s clothes. Everyone humoured her, fielded her suggestions gracefully, laughed at her jokes, but that could not hide the fact that she was, of all the people present, with the possible exception of Madeleine Emerson, a total outsider, and an awkwardness in the party. And despite the champagne, she knew it very well herself.
While they were waiting for their dessert she got up and walked round to Julian; he had been engrossed in conversation with Camilla for some time, and she felt an overpowering urge to disrupt them.
‘Darling, move over,’ she said, ‘I want to share your chair.’
‘Don’t be silly, Eliza,’ said Julian coldly, ‘there isn’t room.’
‘Then let me sit on your knee. Just for a minute. I’ve hardly been near you all evening.’
‘Eliza, please.’
‘Oh, Julian, don’t be so stuffy. All those celebrities must have gone to your head.’ She picked up his glass and drained it. ‘But we’re with friends now. Aren’t we? Or aren’t we?’ She looked round the table. ‘We’re all friends aren’t we?’
Nobody spoke. ‘Of course we are. Great friends. So come on, Julian, be friendly. I’m your wife. Remember? Move up.’
Camilla stood up and smiled at her graciously. ‘Here, Eliza, do take my chair. I’m going to the ladies’ room anyway.’
‘Thank you,’ said Eliza, ‘thank you very much. How kind of you. How very very kind. Julian, Miss North is very very kind. And beautiful, don’t you think? Yes, of course you do. You always notice beauty, don’t you, my darling. Lots of beauty here, isn’t there, among our friends. Well, just your friends, really, until tonight. You’ve been keeping them to yourself. I hope they’re my friends too, now.’
The table had fallen into a ghastly silence. Julian stared at his plate, white faced, pushing back his hair compulsively. Eliza picked up Camilla’s glass and raised it. ‘A toast,’ she said. ‘To Circe. I named it, you know, in a way. It was my idea to give it a classical name. Julian’s forgotten, of course, but we’re all friends, so I can tell you. To Circe, then. Raise your glasses.’
Mick diMaggio, who had been watching Eliza intently, half admiring, half fearful for her, suddenly raised his glass. ‘I echo the toast,’ he said, ‘to Circe. And to Eliza, who named it – her. And to all of us – friends – who sail in her,’ he added quickly. It was a charming and graceful gesture; it eased the situation totally. ‘To Circe,’ they all said, even Julian managed a shadow of a gesture, mouthed the words.
Susan, who had been watching the scene with particular horror, her heart constricted with panic and sympathy for Eliza, spoke suddenly. ‘It is such a good name,’ she said. ‘Who was Circe, anyway?’
‘She was a magician,’ said Nigel Silk, in his impeccable Boston tones. ‘She turned Ulysses’ companions into swine.’
‘A sorceress,’ corrected Camilla.
‘Same thing,’ said Nigel.
‘Not quite.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Oh, my goodness,’ said Letitia under her breath to Madeleine, ‘Vassar versus Yale. Who would you put your money on?’
‘Vassar, I think. More staying power.’
The conversation had become mercifully more general. Camilla and Nigel were engrossed in a dazzling display of mythological knowledge and had moved on to the influence of Sappho on modern poetry; Letitia was making Mick diMaggio laugh as she described how no fewer than three of her would-be suitors that evening had asked her if she could introduce them to the Queen; Madeleine Emerson had managed to engage Eliza in conversation about interior designers in London, and the possible career she was planning for herself among their ranks. Susan looked at Julian, silent and withdrawn, and felt suddenly and inexplicably sorry for him. She went and sat down next to him.
‘It’s been a lovely evening. A very special occasion. You must be really happy.’
She had chosen her words carefully.
‘I was,’ he said shortly, as she had known he would.
‘Oh, Julian, don’t be silly. It didn’t matter. She’d had a bit too much to drink, that’s all.’
‘She looked stupid. Ridiculous.’
‘And your wife is not allowed to look stupid?’
‘No. She isn’t.’
‘Never?’
‘Never. And certainly not on an occasion like this.’
‘Well,’ said Susan, ‘I’m glad I’m not your wife.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Julian, ‘I wish you were. As you very well know.’
‘Maybe. But I can assure you if I was I’d look stupid a great deal more often than Eliza does. She’s a great asset to you, Julian, and she’d be more of one if you’d let her be.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you shut her out.’
‘How do you know? Has she been talking to you?’
‘Of course not. She hardly ever talks to me, about anything. I wish she would. I like her. But anyway, she’s very very loyal. More so than you deserve.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I know you shut her out because I have eyes in my head. It’s extremely obvious, Julian. You never talk to her. You don’t tell her anything. It’s ridiculous. She could be such an asset to you. You should talk to her and you should listen to her. Then this sort of thing wouldn’t happen. It was very sad, seeing her tonight, pretending she knew more about everything than she did, talking away, covering up for herself.’
‘Stop lecturing me, Susan.’ But he looked less angry, more relaxed.
‘It’s a bloody sight more interesting lecture than the one that’s going on on my left.’
‘Oh, Lord.’
Camilla and Nigel had left mythology for primitive American art; Letitia, who was now nearly as drunk as Eliza, was regaling Mick diMaggio with her stories of the Prince of Wales; Scott Emerson was nodding gently over his bourbon.
‘I think,’ said Julian sotto voce to Susan, ‘that it’s time to go home.’
‘I agree. Now promise me you won’t be angry with Eliza.’
Julian sighed and raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘All right. I promise. Why is everyone on her side? You, Madeleine, Mick.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Susan with some asperity, ‘because we’re sorry for her.’
Eliza, waking in the morning to a hideous hangover and an empty apartment, knew they had been sorry for her, and decided it would never ever happen again. If she could not persuade Julian to share his life with her, then she would have one of her own, and make sure she didn’t share that one with him.
She had apologized to him on the way home for behaving badly, and he had said shortly that it hadn’t mattered so very much as they had after all been with close friends, and clearly wished to end the discussion. But he had slept in his dressing room, after giving her the briefest good night kiss, as increasingly often now he did.
She booked her flight home immediately, instead of waiting another week; she phoned Madeleine to tell her.
‘Eliza, I hope this isn’t because of last night,’ said Madeleine, ‘because that would be very silly.’
‘Well,’ said Eliza in a rather tight voice, ‘it is and it isn’t.’
‘But darling, it just didn’t matter, and nobody minded if that’s what you mean. Nobody.’
‘Yes, they did,’ said Eliza, ‘I minded. I made a fool of myself. And in front of a lot of people who matter to Julian. People I hardly know. People like the Silks and – and Camilla North.’
‘I see,’ said Madeleine quietly.
‘But thank you for being on my side. You were wonderful. And when you come over next month, you will come and stay, won’t you?’
‘Of course we will. Now Eliza, promise me you’re not going to rush off back to London and do anything silly.’
‘Oh, Madeleine,’ said Eliza with a sigh, ‘I’ve spent the last five years trying to be sensible. It doesn’t seem to have worked. I feel a bit disillusioned with it all. I just want to get home.’
‘Eliza, you sound so sad,’ said Madeleine. ‘Please, please believe me, I know Julian cares about you very much.’
‘Maybe he does,’ said Eliza with a sigh, ‘but he has a very strange way of showing it.’
‘Well, I know so,’ said Madeleine. ‘He talks about you so much. And if – if you’re worried about – well – Camilla North, you shouldn’t be. They just work together. I’m quite sure there’s no more to it than that.’
‘Oh goodness,’ said Eliza, dangerously bright, ‘Camilla North is the least of my worries. It’s nothing like that, Madeleine. Really. I just need to get away from it all. I feel like an outcast here. Can you understand that?’
‘Yes,’ said Madeleine, ‘yes I think I can.’
‘And besides,’ said Eliza, ‘you never know, I might even find a job of my own to do. Who knows what Fate might have in store for me?’