Lace

by Shirley Conran

  Griffin and his wife both tried hard but they both knew they were trying to rekindle cold ashes. Griffin then asked Delia for a divorce on any terms she wanted. But although she finally agreed to their living separate lives, she asked him to continue to live in their home for the sake of their children; whatever happened she wanted to keep their family together. When Griffin pointed out that their youngest son was fifteen and would soon leave home, Delia had threatened suicide and hauled in her doctor. From then on, they had lived in a sexless truce under the same roof.

  Or was it sexless? Judy sometimes wondered. Men always said they never made love to their wives, but they always did. What else could they say to you?

  As the theatre curtain fell for the last time, Judy felt the same old sadness returning, those same pangs that she firmly called sentimentality, that longing to share Griffin’s life as opposed to seeing a lot of him. As always when she was fighting misery, she turned a little truculent.

  Tom was annoyed at not getting more reaction to his morning news that they were about a million dollars richer and his evening news that he ’d done as Judy wanted. As they took their table in the Four Seasons, he shrugged his shoulders and said to nobody in particular, “Naturally, I didn’t expect to be thanked.”

  “Thanks for some things and no thanks for others,” said Judy, staring hard at the chain draperies that shimmered like cascades of water. She wished they’d gone somewhere gayer; she really only liked the Four Seasons for lunch. “Of course I’m glad I’m not poor anymore, but we’ve now been in business for nine years and you no longer have any interest in LACE or VERVE! You’re only interested in making more money. I’m interested in being paid up so I can sleep at night without counting all the money we owe.”

  “For nine years I’ve been telling you that your old-fashioned virtues are a poverty trap.” Tom mimicked a mindless, singsong female voice. “Save up for the purchase price before you buy something, never borrow money, don’t buy real estate because it’s cheaper to rent and if you’re going to save money, then stick it in government bonds. I am making you rich, and all you do is whine. Where are your guts?”

  “Never mind my guts. I know where your heart is. In that cluster of money boxes called Wall Street.”

  “It’s sad to see an insecure poor girl turn into an insecure rich one. Originally you aimed high, remember? Don’t get frightened just because you passed your target.”

  They ordered baked oysters followed by roast pheasant. Tom continued in a low, angry voice. “If you really want to split, I’ll sell you my shares in LACE and you can sell me your shares in VERVE! Or vice-versa.”

  “Judy doesn’t want to give up anything and neither do you, Tom,” Kate interjected. “Perhaps Judy would be a little happier if she were a bit less rich. And you, Tom—I love your speculative streak because I’ve got one myself, but you are turning into a walking, talking investment company.”

  She stopped talking while they were served and then continued, “You think Judy’s ungrateful, but she’s not, she’s very grateful for what you’ve done for her, but there’s a sort of tension that she loves and a sort of tension that she can’t stand. Surely, with this latest gain you can sort out the LACE portfolio and separate the investment business from the rest of the company?” She paused and sighed, then said crossly, “I don’t know what’s gone wrong with this evening, but I wish you could stop arguing about money and tell Judy our news.”

  Tom fiddled with his wineglass, raised his eyebrows, opened his mouth, shut it again, then said, “Uh, I don’t know how to put this, but Kate and I are going to be married. The full commitment.”

  Judy flung herself toward him and kissed his ear.

  “Tom, you dear old-fashioned fellow! Why, that’s wonderful.” She gave a Cheshire cat grin. “I know exactly what I’m going to get you for a wedding present. Kate will love it and you’ll loathe it because it’s a conditional gift.” The happy couple both looked quizzical. “On condition that you have it standing in your living room, I’m going to give you half of the T’ang horse.” Kate shrieked with surprise and joy. Tom looked uneasy.

  “Well, that’s wonderful, Judy, but . . .”

  “We do still have that horse, don’t we?”

  “Yes, but it’s really not feasible to have it in the apartment where it might get broken; it’s a museum piece; it’s too valuable to have out, Judy.”

  “I don’t think the guy that made that horse intended it to be stabled in a bank vault. I think he’d want Kate to have it.”

  Tom looked at Kate ’s excited face. “Yes,” he agreed, “I guess he would.”

  Over the breakfast grapefuit, one warm October morning in 1978, Griffin’s wife suddenly freed her husband from the tentacles of guilt and duty that had bound him. They were eating at a walnut dining table that was big enough to seat forty, and as usual, Griffin was tearing through the morning papers as he ate.

  Suddenly, triumphantly, Delia had said, “Griffin, this is the last goddamn time I have to sit here and listen to you eat grapefruit.”

  Griffin put down his spoon, mumbled sorry, read another inch of The Wall Street Journal, then did a double take and jerked his head up. “What do you mean, the last time?”

  “I’m leaving you, that’s what I mean!” She looked exultant. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Well, that’s what you’re getting for Christmas. For two years now, Griffin, there’s been another man and you haven’t even noticed. . . .”

  Quickly he did a flashback in his mind; no, he had noticed no man. . . . Except . . .

  “That guy who fitted my contact lenses, Greenburg, Granheim, something like that. . . . The optician.”

  “Greenheimer, right. Right as usual!”

  Griffin said nothing, but over the top of the Journal, she had his complete attention for once.

  “We ’re going to Israel together to start a new life on a kibbutz before it’s too late.”

  Griffin put down his paper and looked warily at his wife. He couldn’t see Delia labouring in the fields and eating communal meals. He suspected a trick. “What about the kids?”

  “Fred’s hardly a child. When he’s home from school he’s practically never here as it is—he’s always out with that girl. I think he’s going to move in with her. He’ll need a little financial help from you of course, and so shall I. But I know I can rely on you to look after me. In fact, I’ve already had a word with Marvin about it.”

  Griffin dashed down his paper, stood up and roared. “You’ve already been to a lawyer without so much as mentioning to your husband the fact that you’re leaving him?”

  “Do you think I’m a fool?”

  That evening Judy opened the door of her apartment to see Griffin leaning against the living room wall, swirling his usual predinner glass of ginger ale. He looked oddly taut and gauche. As soon as she untwisted her key from the lock he strode across the room, and without pausing to kiss her, he grabbed both her wrists. As if he could no longer keep it to himself, as if he couldn’t believe that it was true, he burst out with his news.

  Judy’s mouth fell open. “You mean she wants a divorce? Really wants one? Do you believe it? This isn’t another of her cat-and-mouse games?”

  “Yes, I believe it this time. She’s never been like this before—gloating, exultant, almost vengeful.”

  “Griffin, to be honest, I don’t blame her.”

  “None of that has anything to do with you, Judy. Delia and I had a relationship that didn’t work and she didn’t want a divorce. So we regrouped.” Gently he shook her wrists. “Now look, I didn’t come here to discuss that guilt-and-responsibility thing again. I’m here to ask you, now that it’s possible—will you marry me, darling?”

  To her surprise, upon hearing the words for which she had waited ten years, Judy found that she couldn’t say yes.

  She simply didn’t know.

  PART

  TEN

  53

  BEYOND THE ORANGE trees and marigo
ld beds at the end of the palace gardens, a scarlet Kiowa waited on the concrete helipad. The small, orange windsock hung limp. Two armed guards in khaki fatigues stood smartly to attention as the royal party approached.

  Although in 1972, many educated Eastern women wore Western clothes in their home, Queen Serah always wore traditional robes in Sydon. Now she flicked up her long white burka as she was helped into the front of the helicopter. Squealing with pleasure at the prospect of the coming flight, ten-year-old Prince Mustapha and his white-uniformed servant climbed into the three backseats of the transparent bubble. A stickler for detail, Abdullah walked around the machine to see that all the doors were shut and handles latched. He completed his circuit at the right door, climbed in and settled himself in the right-hand seat of the opulent custom-built cabin. The trip from Dinada Palace to the hunting lodge in the eastern mountains, which would have taken nearly eight hours by car, was only twenty minutes in the five-seater jet turbine helicopter.

  Heat shimmered on the sand as Abdullah strapped himself in. He went through the start sequence and a sudden wind whipped up the sand as the helicopter roared, shaking the bones and teeth of the passengers. Abdullah clapped on his earphones, turned on the ADF and dialed in the eastern mountains frequency; the needle on the instrument face immediately pointed in the direction that they were to take. As he rolled the twist-grip throttle away from him, the noise was deafening, as if their ears were being pierced by a pneumatic drill. The royal pilot flicked a last look at the dancing numbers on the control panel, checked that pressures and temperature were stabilized, then smoothly lifted the helicopter clear of the ground.

  Once in the air, the noise wasn’t so bad, more like the steady throb of a submarine. Peering down from the rear window, the small boy waved good-bye to the shrinking white Dinada Palace as their magic dragonfly rose, then turned east before settling on a straight course. On the perimeter of the helipad below, a small cluster of guards and courtiers still stood at the salute and would remain so until the machine had vanished over the horizon.

  A sudden gust of turbulence distracted him momentarily, so Abdullah didn’t notice the needle on the oil pressure gauge shudder for a moment, then draw toward zero. At 300 meters above the desert, Abdullah leveled off. He was looking forward to a few uninterrupted days with his son.

  On the previous afternoon, a mechanic had suspected that an oil line running on the outside of the engine to the front engine bearing was cracked and he had replaced it. It was almost unbearably hot in the hangar, and just as he began to tighten the front end of the line, he felt a buzzing in his ears and his knees gave way. He grasped the side of the aircraft with suddenly weak hands, slid down from the ladder and took a swig from the water bottle at his waist. When he felt better, he climbed the ladder again, checked the connections and signed off the machine as airworthy for flight. But he forgot that the oil line connection was only finger-tight.

  Suddenly, sound blared from the overhead panel. Every faculty alerted, Abdullah swiftly checked the instrument panel before him. Adrenaline flooded his blood and he tensed like a runner waiting for the starting gun. It was unlikely, the odds were against it, but it was happening!

  Then the engine-failure horn sounded. All three engine indicators were fast unwinding to zero; the continuous loud screaming from the low rotor speed horn meant that the blades were slowing down. To Abdullah, everything that was happening so swiftly appeared to be in slow motion, but the long hours of pilot training rendered his movements fast and automatic.

  He had no time to be frightened, and there was no need for fear. In the event of engine failure a helicopter doesn’t drop like a stone, it glides to the ground like a glider. Abdullah lowered the pitch control on his left, which put the helicopter into a glide, and it entered the stabilized autorotation which Abdullah knew, after hours of practice, would safely land the aircraft.

  The helicopter dropped and for a moment became weightless.

  As toys hit the cabin roof and a teddy bear was flung violently against the Queen’s head, all passengers were thrown against their safety belts and the servant in the rear began to scream with fright.

  As the helicopter dropped, the Queen instinctively grabbed the front panel and cried, “Stop playing tricks, you’re frightening the child!” She turned to look at her husband. His face was tense and masklike as his hands and feet worked in perfect coordination, fighting to regain control of the aircraft.

  The Queen had never seen him look like that and she panicked. “You’re not to let it crash, it will frighten Mustapha!” she screamed, pulling at his shoulder. “Stop it, I say, Abdullah, stop it!”

  Abdullah heard neither his wife nor the screaming servant. All his concentration and willpower were focused on the machine. He realised with relief that he had the autorotation under control, and that when he had gone into the glide, the machine had felt exactly as it had in practice long ago, when his instructor had been sitting on the seat beside him.

  Confident once more, his mind ran swiftly through the emergency checklist. He could touch down almost anywhere ahead in the sand.

  “Stop it! Stop this machine immediately!” the Queen shouted hysterically. It was the first time she had ever dared raise her voice to her husband. She started to pummel his left arm with her fists and then, screaming, she lunged for the black control stick between Abdullah’s knees.

  The helicopter shuddered and dipped.

  Once more his wife lunged toward him. Abdullah hit her as hard as he could with the side of his left fist. It caught her on the cheekbone, split open the side of her mouth and knocked two teeth inward. She fell back, clapping both hands to her bleeding mouth, still screaming with fear and panic as Abdullah turned once more to the controls.

  He was now down to twenty miles an hour and dropping, which was far too slow. He would have to regain a speed of at least sixty miles an hour if he was to avoid a crash. Abdullah shoved the stick forward to regain speed by diving. Suddenly he was frightened and sweat started to run into his eyes.

  Again the helicopter dropped violently and correctly, but the needle didn’t climb fast enough, and at fifty feet above ground Abdullah knew that he would have to make a sloppy emergency landing. He flared the aircraft, easing the control stick back toward his body, in order to haul the machine out of the dive and bring it to a halt before touching ground.

  Obediently the machine slowed up and started to sink. Abdullah realised that it would probably be a walkaway crash; it wouldn’t be his first. He prepared to level the helicopter before touchdown, easing the stick forward.

  It was at this moment, with touchdown imminent, that the Queen again threw herself against him, beating Abdullah’s body with her fists and wildly shouting through her bleeding mouth, “My child! My child! You don’t care about my child!” She lunged toward him and with both hands, she yanked the control stick toward her, bent her body over it and clung to it with surprising strength. The aircraft obediently rolled to the left.

  There was an enormous, bucking jolt as the travelling blade in the back struck the ground hard and dug deep into the sand, then stopped dead.

  The braces that held the blades in position snapped cleanly, but the huge and very expensive pin that held the blades to the aircraft did not snap. The tip of the 150-pound blade was still travelling counterclockwise and near the speed of sound when it smashed into the front of the cabin and crashed downward, slicing through the overhead panel, silencing the screaming horns, and slashing the Queen’s head roughly from her body.

  The severed, bloody head was flung backward onto her son’s lap. Little Mustapha screamed and pushed the bloody horror away from his bare knees, down among the toys on the cabin floor, as, with one last tremendous jolt, the blade finally hit the ground and the aircraft jerked to a halt.

  A gush of blood spurted up from the severed lump of crushed bone and tattered flesh that had been the Queen’s body. The sticky scarlet fountain drenched Abdullah, the incarnadine, inescapable
spray clung to his hands and soaked his clothes, his arms, his hair and his face. He tried to wipe the blood out of his eyes, but with fingers that were red, wet and dripping.

  For a few seconds he was mentally and physically paralyzed. After one look at the bloody lump of flesh on his left, Abdullah’s conditioned pilot’s mind registered that he wouldn’t need to help her—his priority was to get the screaming servant and child out of the wreckage as soon as possible, because apart from the stench of blood and vomit from the back, he noticed two distinct smells—the burning electrical wires in the smashed overhead panel, and the fumes from the seventy gallons of volatile jet fuel that was pouring into the back of the cabin from the tank beneath the back seats.

  He jerked into action, tore off his safety belt and tipped off the headphones. He levered his body upright, neck and shoulders protruding from the smashed and buckled front window. Then, less than sixty seconds after the helicopter had touched ground, there was a sudden roar. Abdullah felt as if a huge hand had picked him up and flung him through the air and across the desert sand.

  He landed on his stomach, winded, gulping and gasping for breath, with his leg twisted beneath him. He felt no panic or pain, although in fact he had suffered a concussion, a compound fracture of the leg and broken several ribs. For a moment he lay dazed, then, with enormous concentration and willpower, he lifted his head.

  Slowly, steadily, sickeningly, the horizon tilted forty-five degrees to the left. Trembling with the strain, Abdullah hoisted his body on his arms, the jelling blood dripping, as he faced the helicopter. The machine had turned into a roaring ball of fire. Impotent, Abdullah gazed at the flaming mass of debris. Grimly he started to drag himself forward on his hands toward the fireball before he collapsed unconscious on the sand. Apart from the searing, roaring flames, there was no sound in the impersonal silence of the desert.