Lace

by Shirley Conran

  As Abdullah rummaged in his bureau for a missing Latin grammar, he heard voices that he recognised outside the door.

  “Can you believe it? Look, Horton, the baboon’s on the House Side.”

  “No! Bugger me!!! Can’t think why we even have to have him in Coleridge’s. We certainly shouldn’t have a dirty little wog representing us on the House Side. Couldn’t they have kept him in the Sine?”

  “I suppose he’s not bad at dribbling, but he’s always cornering and sneaking . . .”

  “Some nigger lover will put him up for Pop next. . . . Expect he’ll get a record number of blackballs. . . . Black balls, ha, ha, ha! What colour balls do baboons have, royal purple, d’ye think?” There was a burst of hoarse laughter as a bell rang and the malicious voices drifted away from the notice board.

  Abdullah didn’t dare face them. All three were members of Debate, so it was inconceivable that he should complain about them—he would only be laughed at. Abdullah’s hands started to shake with impotent fury. Why should he care what that trash thought? They were destined merely to be farmers, soldiers or politicians, whereas he was destined to be a king, the leader of his people, beloved of many tribes, cheered by his men and his women.

  Suddenly he took a deep breath. . . . Women! Those arrogant nonentities hadn’t been instructed for three weeks by the hakim in Cairo. . . . Standing there, shaking with rage, his battered Latin grammar book in one hand, a sweet revenge occurred to Abdullah.

  He decided that he would have their women.

  Pagan left Abdullah’s suite earlier than usual. Instead of leaving the Imperial, she took the elevator to the top floor and ran up the remaining stairs to Nick’s room, to which, by now, the girls had all made giggling visits. She was in luck, because Nick had just come off duty. He answered her knock in his shirt-sleeves.

  “Slumming?” he inquired coldly, as Pagan pecked him on the cheek.

  “No, just wondering why you can’t stand Abdullah. You can’t expect to have all the attention of all four of us, you know, especially when we know that you’re besotted with Judy.” The springs sagged as she sat on his iron bedstead. Nick looked unhappy.

  “Your private life is none of my business.”

  “But what is it, Nick? Has Abdi already got a girl?”

  “I’ve no idea. Anyway, it’s none of my business, and I wouldn’t tell you if I knew. . . . But . . . we were at school together, and I promise you that bastard Abdullah is not what he seems. Of course women think he’s irresistible. He’s obviously attractive.”

  “It’s not only that,” said Pagan with a giggle, “it’s the stage props that are such fun. The bodyguards and the flowing robes and the fierce black mustaches and the . . . er . . . precautions.” She suddenly wondered if Abdullah was officially allowed to carry firearms in Switzerland. Presumbly he travelled on a diplomatic passport and could do anything he pleased. She sighed. “I can’t think why I haven’t fallen for him, but I haven’t. He’s fascinating, but I’m just not besotted, the way you are with Judy.”

  “Well, you’re bloody lucky, because Abdullah doesn’t treat women like a gentleman, he uses them. I mean he doesn’t care about women. Not the maids or chaps’ sisters or even their mothers.”

  “Nick! Surely you don’t mean—?”

  “What I mean is that he’s oddly . . . objective about women.” Nick didn’t know how to say that Abdullah was calculating and deliberate in his attitude toward Western women. He used them. He learned from them. His lovemaking was to prove his power over them and their menfolk.

  “Oh, Nick, he’s wary about everyone, wary of being exploited or shot or whatever other things princes have to be wary of,” Pagan said, thinking Nick merely had a case of straightforward jealousy.

  “And that combination of menace and charm is just what women find irresistible,” Nick said bitterly, and with a tinge of envy.

  “Am I to understand that you think Abdi might deliberately play cat-and-mouse with me? Make me miserable?”

  “Pagan, stop talking about silly sex games and listen to me. I’m very fond of all four of you, and you know how I feel about Judy. But I’m your friend. I wouldn’t use any of you, and that’s what Abdullah does. He has no respect, no understanding of chivalry and he’s . . . no gentleman.”

  Pagan threw her head back and laughed. “Darling Nick,” she said, “you are an old auntie! In the future, I’ll wear barbed wire instead of knicker elastic.”

  What Pagan wanted to know—and what the whole school wanted to know—was whether Abdullah would invite her to the St. Valentine’s Day Ball. Abdullah was rarely seen in public, especially after he had hired the horse sleigh one Sunday afternoon and a street photographer took a picture of Pagan and the Prince together. The negative was swiftly sold to Paris-Match, and within twenty-four hours it had appeared in newspapers around the world.

  Every two days an armful of long-stemmed red roses, with no card attached, arrived for Pagan. “You said red roses were vulgar,” Kate said gleefully, and had a pillow thrown at her. After the third sheaf, Pagan was summoned to the headmaster’s study and told that she could not accept any more flowers. Monsieur Chardin sounded unusually agitated. Half the gossip writers of Europe had been plaguing him. No doubt the publicity was good for the school, but he was obliged to display disapproval.

  A few evenings later Pagan was called down to the headmaster’s study again. She returned looking bemused. “What happened?” asked Kate, lying on her bed, one foot in the air, having her toenails polished by Maxine.

  “Telephone.”

  “Who?” A telephone call was always an event in their lives.

  “My cousin Caspar. He’s our Ambassador in the Emirates. He said that he’s heard I was seeing a great deal of Prince Abdullah, and that I should be most prudent.” She giggled nervously. “Caspar also said that in Sydon, women are regarded as possessions and once defiled they’re discarded. In fact, they’re sometimes stoned to death. Can you imagine?”

  Maxine said, “Bloody well keep still, Kate.”

  Pagan flung herself on the other bed. “So I asked what had defiled Arab women got to do with me?” She was wearing a tattered Victorian nightgown that was over a hundred years old and a pair of scarlet Turkish slippers with the toes turned up.

  The other two sat up and nail polish dripped on Kate’s ankles as Pagan continued. “Old Caspar said that Abdi was pushed into power long before he was old enough, because his father is apparently very religious and a bit mad and lives in total seclusion. But Caspar said that although Abdi is very, very tough, he isn’t nearly as sophisticated as he thinks he is, and not nearly well enough equipped to handle the twentieth century, and if he feels he’s being laughed at or humiliated he can turn nasty.” She giggled. “He went on and on about Abdullah really being two people—a Western-educated ruler who will negotiate diplomatically with Western politicians and a ruthless, immensely powerful Arab leader whose word is the law and whose instincts are violent, dangerous and medieval.”

  She kicked off the Turkish slippers and jumped on the end of Kate’s bed. Sitting cross-legged, she added, in an offhand manner, very fast, “Caspar also told me that Abdullah is engaged to be married.”

  “What!” Maxine, in her white nightgown, stopped climbing into bed. “Who?”

  “To some Arab Princess who’s only ten years old! Can you believe? They’re going to be married when she’s fifteen.” Pagan tried to sound unconcerned. Her voice broke and she said unsteadily, “I hooted with laughter, so Caspar got cross and said he was going to phone Mama.”

  Suddenly the lights went out, switched off as usual from the headmaster’s apartment, and the moonlight, streaming through the lace curtains, cast a wreath of intertwined pale gray roses on Maxine’s bed as she tossed back the sheets and rushed over to hug Pagan. “Poor darling, poor darling! He is a bloody two-timer, a rat, a sheet.”

  “If it’s true, it sounds medieval,” exclaimed Kate.

  “That’s exact
ly Caspar’s point. Abdi isn’t like a rich Western teenager trying to behave like a man of the world. He’s sort of . . . a ruthless, very powerful desert hood.” She paused. “I rather think that’s what I find so fascinating.”

  “He’s certainly not to be trusted!” Maxine said. “But then of course no man should be trusted.”

  “Cut out that sophisticated act,” Kate said. “Who can you trust?”

  “We can trust each other,” Maxine said firmly. So rather solemnly, they all sat on Kate’s bed in the moonlight and promised lasting friendship.

  “Through thick and thin,” Pagan said wildly, shaking her hands over her head like a bruised but victorious boxer.

  “Thick and thin,” giggled Kate, “especially thin.” She prodded Maxine’s still well-covered ribs.

  “Sick and sin,” said Maxine, who, like all the French, pronounced “th” as “s.”

  “Well, yes, that too,” Kate said thoughtfully.

  The next morning Pagan was called out of the classroom, where chunks of Lamartine were being analyzed by Mademoiselle as, in their heads, the girls planned what to wear for the St. Valentine’s Day Ball and how to get more money from home, supposedly for needlework but really for cigarettes. The lessons were a farce, Kate thought crossly as she continued (under cover of her sheet of pink blotting paper) to hack out her initials with her nail scissors on the grafitti-covered wooden table. A nimbus of lethargy hung over the schoolroom, which smelled of chalk and underarm odour; the only noise was the squeak of chalk on a blackboard and the thump of the old upright piano upstairs; maddeningly, the unseen player kept faltering, making the same mistake, then starting again.

  Pagan came back giggling from her telephone call and sat down demurely.

  “What was that?” The harassed mademoiselle whipped around from the blackboard just too late to see Pagan, with the top of her wooden ruler, flip a note to Kate. Kate didn’t send a note in reply because Pagan’s little paper pellets never needed a reply. She only sent them to relieve her boredom. The note said, “Getting ball gown, whoopee!”

  When class was finished, Pagan immediately rushed over with her news. “Mama was quite agitated. She just tried to make me promise not to see Abdullah alone. I asked if she could please send me some decent clothes—which stopped her in her tracks, rather—but I explained that he might invite me to the St. Valentine’s Ball and she knows perfectly well I’ve nothing to wear. However, I thought I’d better make sure of a dress, so after she’d been cut off, I phoned Grandfather and asked him if he couldn’t please see that I had a proper ball gown. In fact,” she added, a little ashamed, “I hinted that if I wasn’t sent a dress Abdi might cough up for one. Grandfather said he’d be happy to buy me a dress, but made me promise not to accept any presents from Abdi.”

  A few days later a huge dress box was delivered by special messenger to Pagan. The whole school crowded behind her as she ran into the dining room, flung the box on one of the long empty tables, tore off the wrapping, plunged her arms into crisp layers of white tissue and drew out a beautiful cloud of pale gray net that sparkled with diamond droplets. It was a Norman Hartnell ball gown with a heart-shaped neckline demurely high, but not impossibly so.

  The whole school sighed longingly.

  After her next meeting with Abdullah, Pagan returned somewhat more subdued. “I asked whether he had a ten-year-old fiancée. He looked rather displeased and pointed his chin at me and said he did, but that it was entirely a matter of diplomacy and nothing to do with us. He was a bit odd for about ten minutes, then he went into his bedroom to make a telephone call and—can you imagine—about twenty minutes later there was a knock on the sitting room door and one of those grim bodyguards came in with a little man from the Cartier boutique. He handed Abdi a box and backed out of the door very fast. Then Abdi turned to me and gave me this blissful crimson velvet box lined with white satin, and in it, sparkling frantically at me, was an utterly divine diamond necklace. If I hadn’t promised Grandfather, I’d have accepted it on the spot. So I told him I couldn’t accept anything from him. I don’t think he’s used to people turning down diamond necklaces or saying no in general.”

  On the following four occasions when Pagan turned up at teatime in Prince Abdullah’s suite, he tried to give her gifts of jewelry. Always a crimson velvet case was produced, but Pagan would never so much as try on the emerald earrings, the tiara of golden birch leaves, the bracelet of aquamarine or the enormous uncut sapphire ring. But the only thing Pagan accepted, with her mother’s permission, was Abdullah’s offer of his grandfather’s old riding cloak, which he made her reluctantly promise to wear to the ball, as a penance for not accepting his valuable gifts. Pagan wasn’t sure that she wanted to wear a smelly old Arab horse blanket to the ball, but, she thought, she could take it off in the school bus before entering the Imperial.

  The following night there was another small dance, this time at the town hall. The girls from l’Hirondelle, wearing clumsy après-ski boots and tweed overcoats over long dresses, carried drawstring cotton bags for their dancing shoes as they climbed onto the little green school bus. As usual, Mademoiselle counted each head as they got on, as she would again when they reentered the bus to return after the dance.

  Pagan had coaxed Maxine into lending her the pale-blue taffeta Christian Dior dress, although she couldn’t shed the bolero because she couldn’t pull the zipper completely up. Maxine had tacked up the hem a couple of inches to make it ankle-length for Pagan. As she and her partner whirled around the dance floor to the music of a gypsy band, Pagan was tapped on the shoulder by one of Abdullah’s bodyguards, ill at ease in a Western dinner jacket that was at least two sizes too large for him. “My master, the Crown Prince Abdullah, wishes to dance with you,” he said.

  “Well, he’ll have to wait,” said the Danish student who was dancing with Pagan, and moving his arm more firmly around her back, he started to dance again. The bodyguard took a swift step forward and suddenly the Danish student was sprawled on the floor.

  Pagan turned around indignantly and saw Abdullah standing in the doorway. Slowly, with a small smile, she moved over to him, propelled by his bodyguard’s iron hand in the small of her back. Still smiling she said, “May it please your Royal Highness to tell your thugs never to touch me again. And remember that I’m not one of your subjects. You don’t own me, and I shall dance with whom I please.”

  Suddenly she dropped her hauteur and said in a quiet voice, “Oh, Abdi, why bother to humiliate Hans and draw attention to me?”

  There was a pause, then Abdullah said stiffly, “Most regrettable. My servant was overzealous.”

  “Oh stop talking like an Indian Raj phrasebook,” said Pagan crossly. “Of course I want to be with you, but you really can’t push people around as it suits you and expect them to like you. I hate it when you’re suddenly imperious. This is just an ordinary dance, and if you didn’t want to be treated in an ordinary manner, you shouldn’t have come.” Wickedly she added, “I hope you aren’t going to be as bossy with your poor little ten-year-old fiancée.”

  Abdullah’s mouth tightened and his eyes blazed with anger. For a moment Pagan thought he might hit her, but instead he put his arm around her and they danced off in silence. Unseen by Abdullah, Pagan blew a kiss over his shoulder to Hans, who scowled back at her.

  Suddenly, Pagan found that she was trembling as she leaned against Abdullah’s muscular body—closer to him, suddenly more physically aware of him in that crowd of dancers than she had ever been when alone in his suite. Tonight, Pagan felt different, reckless, as she felt his warm breath on the side of her neck, then the tip of his tongue against it, erotic and inviting.

  For the rest of the evening Pagan moved around the dance floor in an erotic trance. As the midnight curfew approached, Abdullah looked straight into her eyes and murmured persuasively, “Come back with me and let me show you what love is. I’ll make you feel as you’ve never felt before.”

  “Mmmmm,” sighed Paga
n, as his hand lightly touched the nape of her neck. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because when I was sixteen I spent three weeks in Cairo with the hakim Khair al Saad, who taught me how to make love, to think only of your pleasure.”

  “You had lessons in love for three weeks? You studied it, like geography?” Pagan was astounded, impressed, intrigued. She longed to ask what he had learned and how it was taught. Were there real live women or a blackboard and chalk, and what was the homework and what difference had it made? Instead, she simply blurted, “How?”

  He nibbled at her earlobe and purred, “Come back to the Imperial and let me show you.”

  Fascinated, Pagan couldn’t stop staring into those self-assured black eyes. She found herself following Abdullah toward the main door. But then she remembered her cousin, her mother, the fiancée and the paparazzi, and stopping, she said with real regret, “I can’t, I simply can’t, Abdi. Look, Mademoiselle is waving us all to the cloakroom.”

  Aching with desire, Abdullah pulled her to him as Pagan tried to break away.

  “What do you expect a man to do?” he growled. “You arouse me and then you vanish into the night. In my country we have a name for such a woman.”

  “Oh, in my country too.” Then Pagan couldn’t resist adding, “but after all, you are engaged to be married.”

  Abdullah’s black eyes blazed again, as an impatient Mademoiselle waved a beckoning finger at Pagan. Prince or no Prince, she wanted to get to her bed. Once more Abdullah pulled Pagan tight against his body and she felt his throbbing arousal. Then Abdullah turned on his heel and stalked angrily out of the room.