Lace

by Shirley Conran

  She looked up at the ceiling. “Now I know that you don’t feel that way about me, because men don’t. And suddenly I want to be with you all the time. But intellectually I know I don’t want that.” She thumped the bedspread with her small fists. There was a short silence. Suddenly she sat up and he couldn’t help looking at her small rosy nipples. He threw the towel on the floor, moved toward her and bent to her breasts, but she pushed him aside.

  “Griffin, I want to keep my own privacy. If you laugh at this, I’ll kill you, but I want to be alone, quite often.”

  She slid down the bed again and pulled the covers up to her neck. “Even if you can’t keep your eyes off my tits.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and said seriously, “Why? Why do you want to be alone quite often?”

  “Because so many people are frightened of solitude, instead of valuing it. I was, once—and I never want to be like that again.”

  Slowly she pulled herself up to a sitting position against the pillows and said, “There’s a world of difference between being alone and being lonely.”

  He looked skeptical. She hesitated, then added, “Sure, it’s sometimes lonely to come home at night after a hard day’s work to a dark, empty apartment. But I’d rather be down in the dumps occasionally than trapped with someone I don’t really want to be with.”

  She scowled. “And I don’t want to play that part in some man’s life.” She clasped her hands behind her head and her nipples again tilted upward. “Are you listening to me, Griffin? Once upon a time if a man told me he was lonely I used to melt with sympathy. But now I run a mile.”

  “Sounds as if you want to have your cake and eat it.”

  “Neatly put, for a cake.”

  Laughing, he lunged at her.

  On her next trip to New York, Maxine was charmed by Griffin. “At last our lives seem to be sorting themselves out,” she said, as she stood in Judy’s kitchen, arranging an armful of arum lilies and pink roses that she’d brought in with her. “No, thank you, Francetta, I like doing the flowers. Pagan and I are happily married, with babies as well as jobs. Kate’s happily divorced and a successful writer. And at last you’ve fallen in love.”

  Reflectively, she sniffed the rounded, pale pink tip of a rosebud. “We all hoped it would be Nick, then we all hoped it would be someone nice.” She finished the vase and stood back to admire it “And then we didn’t care who it was, so long as he made you happy. Darling, what’s all this Dom Perignon in your refrigerator? . . . Well, tell Griffin you prefer our champagne. And now listen, because I have a little surprise for you.”

  43

  LONDON LIFE AND the afternoon traffic were totally disrupted, and Pagan and Judy were one of the reasons for it. Outside the gates of Buckingham Palace stood a very smart line of women in large, flowered, floppy hats and men in pale gray top hats and black suits. They were the honoured guests of H.M. the Queen at the annual Royal Garden Party. Pagan saw Kate, who had just been nominated woman of the year by the Association of Professional Women, so Pagan waved her invitation in the thick, cream envelope with the dark red, royal crest stamped on the back. It listed the time as four to six P.M., but you could enter through the magic gates at three-fifteen P.M. and a lot of people seemed to want to do it. Kate wore a cream Tuffin and Foale crepe suit with a flounced jacket, Pagan wore a trumpet-shaped silk dress with leg o’mutton sleeves in Jean Muir’s latest pink and gray art-nouveau pattern, and Judy looked unusually demure in a lemon linen suit from Guy’s summer collection, with slightly darker shoes and a big-brimmed straw hat.

  The best part was walking past the scarlet-coated sentry, through the big black curlicued gates beyond the barriers that held back summer tourists. Once inside the gates the three of them walked across the gravel and under the arch of the quietly elegant, pale gray facade. Then they were in the inner courtyard and climbing the wide, red-carpeted stairs to the Queen’s own doorstep.

  “It certainly was a surprise, Pagan. I still can’t believe I’m actually inside Buckingham Palace,” said Judy. “And I still can’t understand how you fixed it.”

  “Nobody can fix Buckingham Palace,” said Pagan. “Christopher suggested about a year ago that you might be welcome, because of the voluntary work you’d done for cancer research.”

  They found Maxine, the guest of the French Ambassador, in the main drawing room, which was decorated in gold and scarlet, like the entrance hall, and lined with glass cabinets containing priceless porcelain. Looking unmistakably Parisienne in light green chiffon, Maxine winked and moved toward them. The four women greeted each other in an unusually subdued manner.

  “Let’s go outside in the sun,” suggested Kate, so they moved onto the balustraded terrace that runs across the back of the palace. Beyond the vast lawn was a lake, and beyond the lake was a wood. It was difficult to believe this garden was hidden in the middle of London, it was like being in the country. On a circular bandstand the Band of the Royal Maxines was thumping out a selection from Oklahoma! as they’d done for the last twenty years. On the left of the balustraded terrace was the green-and-white-striped tea tent. Waitresses in pearl-buttoned black silk dresses already bustled around small circular tables set with cakes and teacups. Over to the right of the terrace was the small red-carpeted royal tea tent, with sumptuously gilded Regency chairs and a golden tea urn on the table.

  Everyone looked happy as they strolled over the lawn. It was like being at a favourite cousin’s wedding, but with no drunken uncles. Half the women were dressed like the Queen and the other half were dressed like Princess Anne. One guest wore black goggle sunglasses with a topless, shocking-pink sheath; among the white kid gloves and the rose-trimmed straw hats she stood out like someone from another planet. Considering that 1969 was the year when fancy dress was fashionable, it was odd to see nobody dressed as a flower child, no wealthy gypsies, no outrageously embroidered Afghans, no buckskin-fringed Indians or other ethnic oddities, although there were quite a lot of expensive-looking milkmaids, romantically ruffled by Laura Ashley.

  Toward four o’clock everyone suddenly moved toward the terrace as the band struck up the anthem, then everybody froze to attention. A small figure in turquoise stood out from the group that had appeared on the terrace. The Beefeaters leaped into action in a surprisingly sprightly manner to clear the royal path.

  The Queen wasn’t in turquoise—that turned out to be a lady-in-waiting. H.M. wore a red silk dress over a cream petticoat that the wind revealed quite often. She and Pagan were the only women who wore low-heeled shoes, but then it was Her lawn. Under a big-brimmed red straw hat, Her Majesty’s face was pale, neat and animated as she talked to guests whom the ushers beckoned forward at random, as she slowly moved toward her tea tent. Red-liveried footmen with white stockings served tea as Her Majesty chatted to the diplomatic corps.

  It was a perfect Edwardian tea: white-iced layer cake, pale-orange layer cake, chocolate cake, plates of bread and butter thin as vellum, cucumber rounds covered with cream cheese and minced gherkin. No liquor was served, but there was plenty of iced coffee, tea and fresh orange juice.

  “A neat place to have a reunion,” said Judy from beneath the brim of her huge straw hat. “None of us expected this twenty years ago.” She waved a hand at the resplendent scene as they sat at a table.

  “We never expected any of the things that happened to us,” said Kate, smoothing her cream lace ruffles as she sat down. “And we never got any of the things that we did expect, like Prince Charming.”

  They talked nonstop, with much infectious giggling, of children, husbands, lovers, houses, friends, enemies and all the paraphernalia of being alive. Then, more thoughtfully, they drifted into a grown-up version of the way they used to talk in the moonlight, after lights-out at school, as they discussed what they wished they’d been taught.

  “To earn my own living,” Pagan said firmly.

  “To handle my own financial affairs,” Kate said, thinking of how her father’s estate had been mi
smanaged.

  “To realise that we were going to run into trouble,” Maxine said thoughtfully. “You cannot expect to skip through life with a princess-and-the-pea attitude, hoping to find no lump under the bedclothes. The bed is always lumpy.”

  Judy said, “I wish we hadn’t picked up the idea that you were a failure if you didn’t have a man because then you would be without status and protection.”

  “We picked up that idea from our mothers as well as our fathers,” Kate pointed out. “It was our mothers who brought us up to be dependent and lazy where it matters most—in the head.”

  “I suppose we can’t blame our parents for not teaching us things that they didn’t know themselves,” Maxine argued. “They did the best they could.”

  Judy said, “That was the problem. Somehow you got this feeling that a dependent woman was feminine and an independent woman wasn’t feminine, that it was unfeminine to be responsible for yourself.”

  Kate agreed. “I might have avoided a lot of the problems I ran into if only I’d had the self-confidence to think for myself instead of relying on other people’s opinions.” They stood up and wandered over the lawn toward the lake and the rose garden beyond as Kate continued, “From birth we were all wrapped up in warm lace shawls and it’s very tempting not to struggle out of them, to stay snuggled up in the lace and let someone else run the world for you. But these shawls are spiderwebs of false security. . . .”

  “Which is worse than no security,” Maxine injected, “because they make you so damned vulnerable when you find that your lace shawl has been whipped away by Fate, leaving you naked and defenseless.”

  Judy nodded in agreement, thinking that it would be nice to pick a rose to send to her mother.

  But it was a very small rose garden.

  44

  SHORTLY AFTER JUDY returned to New York, Tom put his head around her door. “We’ve landed our first dirty movie. Empire Studios has bought that French film, Q. The title’s a pun, remember? It means ‘ass’ in French. Lili stars, and we’re going to tour her. We have to think up something special because her English isn’t so great. Okay if you handle it?”

  “Sure. Maybe we could tie in with the Jewelry Federation’s Year of the Emerald launch. How would Lili like to tour in two million dollars’ worth of emeralds? That’s pretty special!”

  Judy set up the tour for early January, which was always the dead season: nothing much was happening, everyone was at home in front of the TV. She decided to travel with Lili because Lili was definitely difficult and the emeralds could easily attract trouble. Anyway, it was time Judy visited her outposts.

  After delays from the Legion of Decency and innumerable Bible Belt organizations, Q was released just before Lili’s twentieth birthday, and after Christmas she flew to the States to promote it. Serge had come ahead of her. He wanted to talk to a few people on the Coast. Surprisingly, he didn’t meet Lili when she flew in, but the press agent waiting at the airport told her that Serge had been feeling ill, he’d see Lili by the hotel pool. Lili let him see that she wasn’t pleased. A likely story, she thought—probably a hangover. Or some girl. It was too bad, she’d just travelled halfway around the world to meet him and he couldn’t even be bothered to turn up at the airport.

  She sulked until they reached Beverly Hills.

  Lili found Serge lying on a yellow daybed, on the sunny side of the aquamarine rectangle. Opposite him was a row of lemon-and-white tented cabanas. A few children were jumping off the diving board at one end, but apart from that nobody seemed to be swimming—none of the women had the sort of hair that got wet, their hairstyles were all immaculate and twenty years out of date and several women even wore diamond jewelry with their swimsuits. Serge looked up at Lili and waved a languid hand. “God, I feel terrible,” he moaned.

  She forced herself to look concerned, solicitous, bent over to kiss his cheek. “What’s wrong, Serge?”

  He groaned again peevishly, scratched his hairy belly, lifted his sunglasses and said, “Liver. The hotel doctor says I need a rest. Christ, I can’t tell you how terrible I feel.”

  “Why aren’t you in bed then?” She still didn’t believe him, didn’t even believe he’d seen a doctor; it was simply too damn comfortable lying here in the sun, with palm trees waving beyond the high pink walls. He had some chick here, hidden away. “What’s that you’re drinking?”

  “Fucking orange juice, with nothing in it—doctor’s orders.”

  “May I?” She sipped his drink. It really was plain orange juice. Maybe he really was ill.

  “You want some juice or something, Lili?”

  “No, no thanks, but maybe something to eat. Has this doctor given you any medicine? How long are you likely to be ill? We’re supposed to start on Thursday, you know.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been worrying about it.” While Serge heaved his body off his couch and wrapped himself in a lemon towelling robe, Lili took another look around the pool. Middle-aged men in sunglasses were reading Variety. A couple of dark-brown old men, wearing heavy gold necklaces, were simultaneously smoking cigars, playing backgammon and talking on the telephone.

  “I didn’t expect Hollywood to be like this. These people look so ordinary, just like any families at a resort.” What sort of hotel had Serge picked? Where were the stars? Lili was disappointed.

  As Serge started to amble toward the cafe tables at one end of the pool, a pale, exquisite creature with waist-length golden curls appeared on the steps that led down from the hotel. She wore a burgundy one-piece swimsuit, burgundy high-heeled sandals and burgundy toenails. As gently and carefully as if she were tending a sick child, she devoted herself to rubbing oil on the chest of her escort, a tiny gnarled gnome with a head like a brown-speckled egg.

  “That’s not a starlet. That’s a whore,” Serge said, reading Lili’s thoughts. “They have wonderful ones out here, sweetheart. She’s seen more hotel rooms than a Gideon Bible distributor. Now come on, if you want lunch.”

  They moved up to one of the white banquettes, sat down and ordered Caesar salads. Serge picked morosely at his lunch.

  “The fact is, Lili, the doctor’s forbidden me to tour with you. I have to stay here, maybe move into a clinic, take tests—”

  “I don’t believe you!” Lili’s fork crashed to the table and she leaned toward him, raging in a low voice, so that the waiter couldn’t hear. After that Globe article written by Kate, Lili was terrified of seeing journalists without Serge. “I’m going to see this doctor for myself.” Except that there was no point, she thought. Serge would have fixed him. She’d guessed right the first time. He’d found some bitch. Her velvet brown eyes glared. “You’ve got a girl here somewhere!” Her voice was low, fast and angry. Serge knew she was building up to an explosion. “This is all I need, no protection on tour because my so-called manager is resting up in Hollywood, that well-known health resort.” She glared at him. “You’re pushing me off on tour so you can screw some other bitch in comfort on my money.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Lili, do we have to have a scene before you’ve been here five minutes? Even if they don’t speak French, they can hear that we’re having a fight. Keep your fucking voice down and use your fucking brains.”

  Three young men slumped into the banquette on their other side and ordered three black coffees and a telephone. “Think about it,” Serge urged. “I never allowed you to see one goddamn reporter on your own after that English bitch fouled you up, did I? So is it likely that I’d suddenly push you off on a goddamn important, expensive four-week tour all by yourself? My financial future is just as much at stake as yours is.”

  “That’s true.” But somehow it didn’t feel right. “You’re not telling me everything. Something’s wrong. You’re being evasive, I can feel it.”

  “Lili, darling, when I get you alone in our little pink bungalow, I’ll knock your fucking teeth in if you don’t shut up,” Serge said. “I’m feeling like death—in fact, I may be dying—and you have to start a sce
ne.” He was starting to feel self-righteous, because for once she was wrong. “There is no other chick here—and if there was I couldn’t do much about it. I feel so sick I can hardly raise my goddamn head, let alone anything else.” Serge pushed his salad away. “You can speak to the doctor yourself, when he calls tomorrow. Incidentally, I’ve also asked him to give you a quick physical—I thought it might be a good idea to check that you’re really fit before you start this tour. And don’t worry, you’re not going alone. The president of the PR firm that arranged the tour is going to travel with you, and I’ll telephone you every night. . . . Now could I please have a little sympathy?”

  He certainly didn’t look well. In fact, he looked terrible. Lili leaned forward, contrite, and patted his hand.

  Serge was ill. The truth was that he had syphilis. A couple of days before, he’d noticed two swollen lumps in his groin and then he found a small blister under his foreskin. Fuck, he’d thought, and phoned the doctor, because you didn’t kid around with that, it could rot your brain, paralyze you, eat your nose away, even kill you.

  The doctor had given him the usual caution about warning all sexual partners (which Serge ignored), and prescribed an immediate course of penicillin injections, which is why Serge had to stay in one place and dump the one-town-a-day tour.

  Thank God he hadn’t touched Lili for some time, Serge thought. But the doctor said she still had to have a physical. She’d be surprised when she found that the physical included a vaginal examination, but he’d let the doctor handle that one—he was getting paid enough for being discreet.

  If Lili was clean, there’d be no need to say anything to her. He didn’t want to upset her before she went on tour. But Serge was worried about that. He didn’t like sending his bank account off on her own.

  So Lili arrived alone at Kennedy, huddled in an ankle-length black fox coat, a cloud of black hair around the pale, feline face. Tired after her night flight, she hardly spoke to Judy on the trip to the Pierre, where two bodyguards and a security man from the Jewelry Federation were waiting for her. They all moved to the manager’s office, where the door was locked, then the safe was unlocked. A big, flat, dark-green leather case was brought out and put on the manager’s desk, then unlocked. Everyone looked at Lili. She moved forward, slowly swung the lid back, and they all caught their breaths.