I SHALL ALWAYS be grateful to Shirley Conran. Halfway through last summer hols, when my children were about to murder one another, my daughter bought Lace. For five days total peace reigned, until she emerged from her bedroom declaring it: ‘Absolutely brill, far better than Jane Eyre.
Unable to have a read, because another teenager whipped the book, I had to wait for Lace Two. Sadly it’s a frightful disappointment, pretentious, pornographic, with non-existent characterisation and excruciating dialogue.
‘The secret of a best-selling novel,’ Shirley Conran advised me recently, ‘is to write about rich, very successful people doing things the public aren’t familiar with.’
Thus in Lace Two, we have Maxine, the French Countess, ‘with only ten guests to consider, organising a simple programme: partridge shooting on the estate, riding through the vineyards, cards and conversation for those who hoped to say warm inside, and on Sunday a stag hunt on a neighbour’s estate’.
During the stag hunt, the Countess, who has abandoned her sables, ‘so heavy and dark’, for more flattering red fox, is rewarded for her sartorial discrimination by a bunk-up in a hayloft with an old admirer.
Thousands of readers perhaps do justify getting a cheap thrill from such junk on the grounds that they are acquiring knowledge at the same time. Thus as well as stag hunts, we learn about female circumcision, stocks and shares, motor racing, women’s magazines, middle-eastern customs, how to decorate our houses and ourselves tastefully, and how to improve our sex lives. Superwoman rides and rides again.
All Miss Conran’s female characters are, like herself, achievers – even the tarts. In a totally unnecessary flagellation scene, Therese is only conscious, as she whacks the hell out of an ancient client, of how much she is improving her backhand drive.
Silliness reaches pyrotechnical levels when King Abdullah, of goldfish fame in the first Lace, bangs Lady Swann on a billiard table in a London club during a bomb scare. Detail is so elaborate, one half expects the King to chalk the tip of his member before play commences.
Despite her regret that she is only wearing ‘chainstore pantihose’, Lady Swann enjoys it all enormously, telling herself: ‘I am lighting up like the sun rising over the Swiss Alps, when the mountain peaks get that living pink glow that spreads slowly down the valley.’ Sounds rather like German measles.
The jacket blurb tells us Miss Conran is an experienced textile designer and colour consultant. Certainly no fabric or paint shade goes unremarked on, no garment undescribed. But why doesn’t she provide us with out-of-town stockists as well?
She is also heavily into fruit and food imagery, what with peach négligées, apricot sofas, cinnamon-tipped nipples, and best of all ‘claret-coloured private parts’. I guess they only perform at room temperature. Perhaps I’m needled by Miss Conran’s pronouncements that brass beds are passé (I’m very fond of ours) and, even worse, that no woman over thirty should wear grey – which means junking half my wardrobe.
Worst of all was the information that the sex goddess heroine has breasts weighing a pound each. Whimpering, I rushed to the bathroom and watched in alarm by several cats and dogs, measured my length on the carpet, and tried to weigh one of mine on the bathroom scales. Utter horrors – only two ounces. Reminding myself the bathroom scales deliberately underweigh, I tore downstairs, and tried the kitchen scales. By cheating and leaning heavily, I notched up three kilograms, but a straight single boob could only achieve four ounces. Frightfully depressing being only twenty-five per cent sex goddess.
Finally I suppose one must grudgingly admire Miss Conran for making so many millions. Perhaps, as a fellow author, I’m just suffering from Pennies Envy.