Chanel Bonfire by Wendy Lawless Page B

guests. It was a smorgasbord of golden roast ducks and turkeys, whole suckling pigs with apples in their mouths, and rows of long, poached salmons with cucumber scales and green cocktail olives for eyes. Pink lobsters lay on rafts of jiggly aspic, and mounds of shrimp all stared blankly through black bead eyes. Each cooked beast was manned by a server wearing a puffy chef hat and wielding a carving knife that he sharpened dramatically in the air, making it look like the beginning of some strange sword dance or offering ceremony to the gods of the sea. Vegetables steamed in silver chafing dishes—asparagus as thin as soda straws, haricots verts glistening with butter and spotted with slivered almonds, and crusty broiled tomatoes served alongside four different kinds of potatoes. I had never seen so much food in one place. A separate table was just for the desserts. In the center, surrounded by mounds of profiteroles, Bavarian creams, and babas au rhum, stood a two-foot-tall, all-white cake in the shape of a swan.
    My sister and I gasped, being careful not to point—a punishable offense. If we were to be less than perfect and behave rudely, it would reflect poorly upon Mother and there would be a price to pay—maybe not here, in the fancy diningroom in front of other first-class travelers, but when we returned to our stateroom.
    Since our parents’ divorce, Mother had occasionally spanked us with a hairbrush, which, according to the way she had been raised, was a mild form of punishment. She had also sent us to bed without supper. But refusing to speak to us for extended periods was her most effective tactic. It made us feel small, almost like we’d disappeared. The threat of being abandoned by the only parent left in our lives was far more frightening than anything else. It was this fear that kept us in check.
    All during dinner we stared at the cake, which looked as if it had just flown in from the land of the Sugar Plum Fairy. After we had eaten, we excused ourselves from the table and held hands as we walked over to gaze upon its sweet loveliness. The swan was gliding across a lake of spun sugar, its iced wings raised as if it had just landed there. Its wings were adorned with baby pink roses made of sugar. Robin and I stood in front of it mesmerized and asked the young man behind the table if we could have some.
    He laughed at us, his white teeth smiling. “Oh, you don’t want to eat that, misses.” His West Indian accent reminded me of our nanny Catherine’s.
    “Pleeeease,” we begged, holding plates from the buffet table up to him for our pieces of cake.
    “No, you don’t want that.” He waved us away with his gloved hand. “It’s just for show. It is not . . . real.”
    We looked at him confused. It sure looked like cake.
    “What’s it made out of?” Robin asked, flashing her mostinnocent smile. I followed suit, hoping we could kill him with cuteness.
    “Chicken fat, miss.” Our smiles vanished. “I’m afraid it’s only to look at, miss.”
    Disappointed, we took some chocolate mousse and returned to our table, where Mother was in mid-dazzle, explaining to a handsome man in an expensive suit that we’d all grown tired of dreary New York and were moving to London for a change of pace. “Isn’t that right, darlings?” she said, turning to us, her well-turned-out daughters. We nodded and smiled as required, a smear of chocolate mousse on Robbie’s upper lip the only piece of the picture out of place. The handsome man grinned at us and returned his gaze to Mother. She worked her smoke-and-mirrors magic, presenting a sleek image to the world, but the truth was that we were just as fake as that swan.
    At night before bed, my sister and I would watch the dolphins, shiny in the moonlight, swimming alongside the ship outside our porthole. Unlike us, they seemed to know where they were going.

    Our first flat in London was a posh town house on Cadogan Place, near Sloane Square—the future stomping