Lace

by Shirley Conran

  He rested his left arm along the backseat and was silent for a moment, then he continued: “I can’t help wondering if poor Serge knows the difference between a good director and a second-rate one. A second-rate director will spot the obvious things about you, but he’ll probably miss the wistfulness, the fragile charm, that hopeful trust that you project. But those are the magic qualities that will keep you a star, Lili.”

  As the limousine crossed the Pont de la Concorde Zimmer sighed. “Now we come to the part that’s none of my fucking business,” he said. “Christ knows why I’m telling you this, because I’m careful not to get involved in other people’s lives, but do you know that we paid you a fee of twenty thousand dollars, to a Zurich bank? Of course we had to pay a lot more to get Valance, but we needed an international name. Now, I can’t help wondering how much of that money you’re going to see? Christ, Lili, why don’t you get away from him? You don’t need the bastard.”

  “Yes, I do,” Lili said, suddenly sad. “I’m afraid without him. That’s why I need him. He’s the only . . . family . . . I’ve got.”

  “That’s why you cling to him—for security. But you’ll never get security from Serge,” Zimmer said. “Look, it’s only natural to be afraid. You’re still in your teens. You’ve been through rough times. But you’ll never develop into anything until you get away from him. He wants to keep you dependent on him. That way, you’ll be frightened to leave.” He patted her shoulder, and sighed again as they drew up outside the Lipp brasserie.

  Outside there were more flashguns, more photographers, a little burst of spontaneous applause from the other diners as they slowly moved to their table, where champagne was waiting in a silver bucket and a huge bouquet of lilies was surrounded by telegrams.

  With a bow, Zimmer handed the bouquet to Lili, saying, “From tonight, Lili, you will be famous.”

  “I wish I felt famous inside,” she said in a perplexed voice, as she hugged the lilies. “Inside I just feel worried.”

  “That’s understandable after the tension,” Zimmer said fondly, “and you’re anxious about the newspaper reviews. You’ll soon get over that. Just remember, you’re going to be a star. I don’t need to see the reviews to know that. You wouldn’t remember Elizabeth Berner, but she had a fragile charm with heart-rending appeal. You found yourself holding your breath as you watched this vulnerable little waif on the screen. She had the sweet sadness of a rose petal fluttering to the ground. And you have that same delicate quality, Lili.”

  “I’m no rose petal,” Lili said.

  For the past three months, Lili had listened very carefully to what Zimmer said—in fact, she’d got into the habit of trusting him. So after the party, Lili pondered his advice. Twenty thousand dollars was a fortune—it would buy her a house of her own, maybe even a little car. Then she could learn to drive. Serge wouldn’t let her drive his new Mercedes.

  In the chill gray dawn, as they undressed, she casually asked Serge, “How much money did they pay for me to make Q?”

  “Jesus, what a question to ask at this hour! You’re going to be the toast of Paris today after those reviews, and all you can think about is money!”

  “Yes, but how much?”

  “It all depends on whether you’re talking net or gross, and you don’t even know what the fucking words mean, Lili.”

  “What I would like to know is the total sum that Zimmer paid to you. That’s gross, isn’t it?”

  “Christ, it’s six o’clock in the morning, Lili! Don’t I do enough for you? Aren’t I even allowed to sleep now? Get to bed or I’ll beat the daylights out of you. We’ve got to be on a plane to London tomorrow evening, and you start shooting the day after, so sleep while you can. You look after your side of the business and I’ll look after mine!”

  “Serge I want to know. Did they pay twenty thousand dollars?”

  The flat of his hand hit the side of her head. Systematically, Serge hit her so there would be no bruising, but he didn’t hold back. He put all his considerable strength into each blow.

  Lili fell to her knees. Seeing her on all fours, sobbing with fear and humiliation, Serge couldn’t resist a kick in the ribs as he snarled, “All you got going for you, kid, is me and those boobs. You lose me, you’re nobody.”

  When she opened her eyes it was nearly midday and she was in bed. Her head felt as if it would burst apart. Along the passage she could hear Serge chatting with his secretary. It was no use, there was nothing she could do. She was now as frightened of living with him as she was of living without him. There seemed only one way out. She staggered out of bed toward the fluttering lace curtains of the open window.

  39

  JOUJOU WAS THE first article that Kate sold to the Globe. Kate’s tongue-in-cheek interview was given half a page, and the Globe immediately asked her for more articles. Kate started to freelance for the newspaper, aware that when Scotty, the feature editor, phoned with an assignment, she had to drop whatever she was doing and run. When Scotty asked her for ideas he expected six good ones within half an hour and if following up one of them meant sitting up all night, then that was what she did.

  What Kate at first thought to be the brusque, unfriendly atmosphere of the vast, cream-painted, windowless editorial floor of the Globe turned out to be one of concentration against the constant noise of typewriter fire, teletype clatter, telephone chatter and the pressure of deadlines.

  As Kate had no training or experience, Fleet Street life was tough for her. Everybody was working against a deadline and there was no time to explain things to a beginner; either you were right or you were out, and anyway beginners weren’t supposed to start on Fleet Street. Kate learned by listening to the other desks to cultivate a good telephone voice. She learned to keep her notebook always within reach, never to alter a quotation and to check, check and check again.

  Scotty was unusually kind as well as fast, funny and deadly serious. Kate was devoted to him. Once, when he found her rewriting an article for the ninth time, he patted her shoulder and said, “Nobody’s piece is ever perfect. Just try to get it as good as possible under the circumstances and then sling it in. And remember it’s not your piece—it’s a team product and you’re only the beginning of the chain.” Again he started to chew his horribly maimed pencil.

  Kate knew that she was lucky. In her first year on Fleet Street she often worked from eight in the morning until eleven at night because she hadn’t yet discovered how to take shortcuts. She loved the calm, fast world of daily papers, she loved the excitement, the knife-edge deadlines, and she loved working for the engaging, humorous Scotty, who protected her, encouraged her, egged her on and ruthlessly cut her copy.

  One spring morning in 1966, Kate was called to Scotty’s panelled office. Against the right wall, at chest height, stood a ten-foot-long sloping shelf upon which the newspaper layouts could be spread. Scotty never sat at his impressive mahogany desk, he always lolled by the shelf, scribbling, or propped himself against the shelf as he talked. A stream of feature writers was always shuffling in and out, lining up if there were others ahead of them.

  That morning the Globe had run Kate’s interview with an Israeli tank commander, General Nakte Nir. Talking to this hero in the lounge of his modest London hotel, Kate quickly realised that someone must have put her name on the wrong press list. Nonetheless, the article had turned out well—she was coming along very fast.

  “Sit down a moment, Kate,” Scotty said. “The editor liked your piece this morning.” He gave her an odd look. “D’you faint at the sight of blood? Have you ever slept in the open? Could you leave home for a month? D’you want a permanent job on the Globe? We’re thinking of sending you to Sydon.”

  “But there’s a war going on!”

  “Shrewd girl, very observant. We’ve already got a couple of reporters there, but we want something different from the stories they’re sending back. We can get all that stuff from the wire; we want a few unusual feature articles.”

  “But
I’ve never . . . Yes, Scotty, of course. When?”

  “There’s a flight this evening. Five P.M. check-in at Heathrow. Change at Rome. Don’t take too much gear, travel light, just pen and clipboard. Remember we don’t want any woman’s page stuff. We’re not sending you out for the woman’s angle. The editor is sending you out because we want background material from someone with a fresh eye. And don’t forget to fill in your expenses properly,” he said. “I’m sick of rewriting them for you.”

  Kate hurried to Gamage’s in Holborn and bought a pair of sneakers, a groundsheet, a backpack and a water bottle that could be slung from a waist belt. There wasn’t time to buy anything else, in fact, there was just enough to telephone her mother and ask her to look after the house. Then there was an exasperating wait for her visa at the Sydon consulate in South Kensington. Luckily, it was only five minutes from home, where she had ten minutes to pack before catching a cab to the airport.

  The plane landed a couple of hours before dawn, then there was a six-hour drive in the battered little airport bus to Fenza, where the Globe had reserved a room for Kate. It was not very clean, and there was no hot water. Nevertheless, Kate fell onto the hard bed and slept until noon when, following the hall porter’s directions, she headed for the press centre, in the bar of the converted Majestic Hotel.

  It was the first time Kate had been in a city at war, unless you counted the London blitz, and she’d never been in the centre of London during a heavy raid. But Fenza, near the front line, was a city that had already had the heart torn out of it. It was almost deserted—looters were shot on sight and anyone who could flee had fled. It was impossible to drive because of the debris that blocked the streets: walking was dangerous because a wall might topple on you at any minute.

  Kate hurried through the blackened, exhausted town. Defying gravity, wrecked buildings leaned drunkenly over the forlorn rubble-filled streets. A bed hung, the ludicrously striped mattress still on it, from the wrecked upper story of a house that had no front, patterned wallpaper hanging in strips from the broken walls.

  Kate smelled the heavy odour of charcoal from burned wood beams and window frames as she picked her way around piles of sandbags, ragged heaps of bricks and plaster, hurried past a broken-spoked bicycle that lay in the road among fragments of smashed furniture, past a burned-out car, and finally past a gutted truck lying black belly up on the sidewalk outside the semiderelict Majestic Hotel.

  The next day she was up at four o’clock because the bus left at five. To Kate’s astonishment, large buses were used to take the press corps up to the front, as if they were on a church outing. Under clear blue skies, it was hot as they bumped into the beige desert. The grit quickly got everywhere. Kate could feel it in her head, in her hair and eyes, under her eyelids, down her bra and in her pubic hair; she itched everywhere. Kate’s broken-nosed, tough-looking neighbour, as she sat in the cigarette-stinking bus, said, “What’s happening here isn’t just one lot of Arabs fighting another lot of Arabs; it’s really the Americans playing Sydon against the Russians playing the Saudis; all the equipment that’s been captured was manufactured in Russia.”

  The weary-looking man in fatigues who sat on Kate’s other side added, “Sydon’s only a little country, but it’s got those southern oil fields and that’s what everyone wants, so any excuse will do to invade the place. Officially, Moscow has refused to interfere in the battle for the oil fields, but that’s mainly because the Kremlin doesn’t want to provide a pretext for an American initiative in the area.”

  The man sitting in front of Kate clearly thought that the Globe was mad to send her. “I suppose they haven’t sent the fashion editor or the gardening editor out with you?” he growled. “War isn’t the game they seem to think it is . . . bang, bang, you’re dead, then get up for nursery tea.” He twisted around to glare at her. “It’s dirty and bloody disgusting.”

  He gave her a cold look of disapproval and then added, “Somebody should tell your editor that the Sydonian men won’t let their women go to war because of the rape and mutilation. You don’t want a hand grenade stuffed up your er . . . or suddenly find that your breasts are being cut off. And if you’re a correspondent, you’ve got no protection whatsoever. No correspondent ever carries a gun.”

  They jolted on in silence.

  The distant thunder changed to a nonstop, ear-splitting crack as the bus bumped closer to the front line through a harsh giant wasteland of ankle-deep dust and faded, gray-green scrub. Heavy fighting had scattered the desert with damaged tanks, twisted wrecks that once were jeeps and burned-out trucks stuck headfirst in deep sand drifts. The gunfire noise was painful.

  As they got out of the bus, a bomb hit a Sydonian field gun and another hit a truck that must have been carrying ammunition, for it began to explode by itself, a stream of noisy stars. Planes flashed overhead, the ground shuddered and heaved with the concussion of the blast. Under heavy shell fire, upended, sparkling orange chandeliers streaked to the ground around them.

  The front line straggled, it hid, it stopped. It was a series of little, dusty, khaki groups moving forward while other little groups tried to stop them, as men crept or dashed, bent double, from bush to bush, moving forward yard by yard. Corpses dotted the sand, flung down as if they were sunbathing with their clothes on. There was a stink of rotting flesh—although the Sydonians removed their dead every evening, they left the enemy corpses where they lay.

  The sharp, acrid stink of cordite hurt Kate’s nostrils and her throat. The flames and hellish cries frightened her ears and eyes. It was difficult to see. Kate crawled forward on her hands and knees through a pepper-coloured mist, peering through it to the thick ocher fog beyond, hazily striped by billowing plumes of black smoke from burning tanks and overturned trucks. She was terrified.

  Two weeks later Kate had changed. Instead of being nervous, tense and anxious, she was simply too busy to be neurotic or afraid. She was on her own for the first time in her life. There was no one to tell her what to do, no one to criticise her, no one from whom to seek approval. Kate alone had to decide what to do and how to do it, and survival, as well as success, depended upon her decisions.

  Kate found this situation curiously exhilarating. She was thirty-four years old and she felt fifty, but the concentration that was necessary to do her job blotted out all the feelings, even the constant exhaustion. Kate now easily understood how war photographers took what civilians called “crazy risks.” They probably didn’t notice them; there wasn’t time.

  The male press corps weren’t what Kate had expected. A serious, exhausted air hung over them at the Majestic bar, everyone looked under strain and nobody got drunk. There simply wasn’t time. No one made passes at her; they were all too busy and too tired. Like them, Kate became wary, furtive and untrusting, guarding a possible lead as if it were a map of Treasure Island. Like theirs, her head never stopped thinking, speculating, plotting, interviewing, translating, drafting copy and sending it off. She set off at dawn, never knowing whether she would get a story, and thought herself lucky if she’d dispatched one by ten at night.

  She concentrated on reporting the effects of war on human beings, perhaps in a town that was being bombarded, perhaps from the battlefield, using her interpreter—Ali, a twelve-year-old boy who had been to missionary school and pretended to be a lot older than he was and know a lot more than he did—who trotted along behind his white woman like a devoted dog.

  “Where King, Ali?” she said sharply one evening, as they stood in front of the Majestic. “Much, much money for Ali if Missus see King.” What Kate most wanted was an interview with Abdullah, and she didn’t realise that this was impossible because nobody had told her that the King didn’t give exclusive interviews, only an occasional press conference.

  For two days there had been a lull in the fighting. After initially being taken by surprise, the Sydonian army had forced the Saudis back east, toward the border between their two countries. They had pulled back behind a line of low
hills that lay between the front line, now thirty kilometers east of Fenza, and the border, which was another forty kilometers beyond it. For two days, nobody had known the whereabouts of King Abdullah. He had been at the front line leading his troops, but now he seemed to have vanished.

  “King in eastern hills with Hakem tribe.” Ali beamed. “Now, money please, Missus.”

  “But the eastern hills are behind the enemy line.”

  “Yes, Missus, but enemy still in Sydon.”

  “How do you know, Ali? I’m not going to pay you until I know it’s true.” It was one of the rumours floating about, but Kate wasn’t paying for rumours.

  “I take Missus,” offered Ali.

  “How can you? We haven’t got a car, and we can’t take a jeep farther than the front line because the Saudis would immediately fire on it!”

  “Jeep to front line like before, then camel of my cousin you pay,” said Ali airily.

  Camels! thought Kate. They might not fire on a woman and a boy and a couple of camels. . . . What was an expense account for, she thought, and started to argue with Ali about the cost of a jeep and two camels.

  The next day it took two hours to get to the front in the fly-ridden, buzzing, shimmering, sandy heat, along a track marked by empty gas cans, past which their outrageously expensive jeep jerked, bumped, bucked and bounced. Kate hung onto the wheel with both hands, binoculars bouncing painfully against her breasts. Her stomach had been upset since the day she arrived, and now she felt as if she was going to be sick as well, as they passed burned, blackened corpses, twisted like overdone kippers. They bumped past a hut for collecting the dead, then the field hospital that lay ahead of it. At the hospital, a doctor and two orderlies were kneeling to attend to the wounded, and flies hung in a black-peppered cloud over men who lay silent, near dead, or screaming in agony. There was a sickening stench of flesh and blood as their jeep lurched past.

  Finally, Ali pointed to what had once been a small hut and was now a crumbling heap of rubble with a few gaping holes. Bullet scars on the dirty white walls testified to close fighting. The green, tattered shred of the Sydonian flag still hung from one wall.