Lace

by Shirley Conran

  It had been exactly seven minutes since takeoff.

  54

  IN THE LATE June sunshine, Lili’s scarlet Jaguar dipped along the highway, heading east of Paris. Five kilometers after Epernay, she turned off the N51 toward Le Mesnil-sur-Oger. On the right, meadows of brilliant yellow mustard flowers alternated with stretches of golden corn, sprinkled with scarlet poppies, blue cornflowers and white marguerites. On the left the dark green, seven-foot box hedge bordered the de Chazalle estate.

  Lili swung the car to the left through a pair of open, black, curlicued iron gates. The hedges and trees looked unusually neat, the grass was freshly cut. Half a mile away, at the end of a straight gravel drive, was the eighteenth-century French château, a perfectly proportioned stone building, with row upon row of tall windows that glistened in the sunshine.

  Zimmer was right. It was time she started to go out by herself again. She had sheltered—or rather hidden—under his wing for eight months.

  For all those months Lili had lived alone with her grief for Stiarkoz, refusing to discuss him even with Zimmer, with whom Lili would only talk about her work. Then one day Zimmer had entered the dressing room where Lili sat in a mauve flowered wrapper, wiping off her makeup in front of the brilliantly lit mirror. Without asking, Zimmer shoved past her dresser and locked the door. Then he stood behind Lili with his hands on her shoulders, looking at her in the mirror, and said, “Lili, I’ve tried to hint, but you refuse to listen, so I’m telling you directly that to shut yourself off from the world and everyone in it is bad for your acting. My dear, Jo is dead and you are alive. You must make a conscious effort to interest yourself again in all the things that you pursued with Jo—and you must also make an effort to make new friends and have some fun. Fun is good medicine; moping is self-indulgence.”

  In the mirror Lili had glared at Zimmer, but she knew that isolation was bad for her acting. Which was why she had accepted the invitation from Madame de Chazalle.

  Lili stopped the red Jaguar in front of the imposing portico, climbed out and rang the bell.

  Nothing happened.

  She had expected at least two liveried footmen to swoop out and pick up her luggage. She peered through the glass panels of the door and saw a stone-flagged hall flanked by pillars, between which hung gold-framed portraits. Still no sound.

  Puzzled, Lili rang the bell again. A masculine voice behind her said, “There must be another crisis in the kitchen. Let me carry your suitcase.” She turned to see a very tall young man wearing a turtleneck navy sweater and jeans so tight that they might have been sprayed onto his long legs. Untidy, toffee-coloured hair fell over hazel eyes and a thin, tanned face. His overlarge mouth slowly widened in a welcoming grin.

  “No need to ask who you are.” At the age of twenty-four, Lili was world-famous. He took her navy leather suitcases, kicked the door open, and stood aside to let Lili walk through. As they ascended the six-foot-wide, curving marble staircase, they met Maxine descending.

  For ten seconds, Lili found her formidable, then Maxine smiled. “So you’ve already met my youngest son, Alexandre. I’m delighted to see you again. It is not often that I meet anyone so charming on a charity bazaar platform. I was really only there for publicity, so to make a friend was a bonus.”

  She led the way downstairs, still chattering. “As I said in my letter, this weekend we celebrate our anniversary. It’s been eighteen years since the château was opened to the public.”

  “Where is everyone, Maman?”

  “The entire staff is on the terrace preparing the fireworks display. You should be helping them, Alexandre.” She ruffled the toffee-coloured hair. But her son, who had no intention of leaving Lili, ran upstairs, dumped the suitcases at the top and then followed the two women into the salon.

  Beyond the terrace was a silver rectangle of water into which fountains gently splashed. The sixty-foot-long, white-panelled room shimmered with reflected light from the lake outside and from the great antique mirrors that hung along one wall. Little glass tables held seventeenth-and eighteenth-century objects. They stood on soft lavender and gray Aubusson carpets. A sleek gray Weimaraner was trying to gnaw a hole in the arm of one of the brocade sofas.

  “Sheba gives the place that lived-in look,” Maxine observed. “I’m always being told that I am overneat. The whole place would look like a museum if it wasn’t for my sons and my dogs.”

  “The whole house is a museum,” Alexandre explained to Lili, “but it isn’t dull or dusty. Maman has made it most fascinating. You’ll see when you tour the public rooms. The lighting changes by remote control, the rooms are full of flowers and the room in which Diaghilev stayed is daily sprayed with Mitsouko because it was his favourite perfume.”

  Lili’s suite overlooked the park. The bedroom walls were covered in pale yellow silk, as was the couch in front of the hand-carved, white marble fireplace. The big bed was set back in an alcove of dark topaz velvet. On either side of the alcove were shelves, upon one of which lay a pile of the latest best-sellers and a history of the castle entitled “Chateau de Chazalle—A Place to Make Friends.” There were also a candle in a brass holder, an ivory telephone, notebooks with little gilt pencils, a velvet box of tissues, an antique gold box containing biscuits, and several little china dishes of pink sugared almonds and peppermints. A silver nightcap tray offered different sorts of expensive bottled water and cut-glass decanters of whiskey and brandy. Beside the telephone was a list of the guests, with room numbers as well as telephone extensions.

  Lili picked up the thick cream card engraved in green with the de Chazalle crest—a rearing lion with a rose in its paw. Under the date—June 21, 1974—her fellow guests were listed: two ambassadors; a producer and his ballet-star wife; a Hollywood film director; a Greek shipowner whom she had met with Stiarkoz; three other very rich men; a world auto-racing champion and his beautiful wife; a red-headed, jet-setting jeans designer from New York with her sixth husband, an Italian prince; a British duke and—aha—Andi Cherno from Paris Match. So there was going to be photo coverage of the party. No wonder the guest list was so ostentatious. Lili mentally ran through her clothes. They had already been unpacked by the Portuguese maid and were hanging in a dressing room lined with cupboards that lit up when opened. The maid had run her bath, told Lili to ring if she wished to be helped with her dress and hair and had disappeared.

  On Friday evenings Maxine served an informal buffet dinner so that guests could move around and meet each other. Although there were sufficient footmen in green and gold livery, Charles de Chazalle circulated about the silver salon carrying a bottle of the estate champagne. Monsieur le Comte hadn’t his wife’s ability to slide into an animated conversation for ten minutes, then extricate herself and glide gracefully toward the next cluster of guests. Charles used the champagne bottle as an entry and exit device. He would wander up to a group of guests saying, “Everybody got a drink?” and he would detach himself by saying, “Well, I’d better move on,” slightly lifting the bottle in a farewell salute as he went about the duties of a host.

  Tall and thin, he stooped slightly as if a chill wind were blowing on the back of his neck. His fair hair was turning gray and had started to recede, but this only made him look more distinguished. His face reflected amiability and slight astonishment at the way his wife had altered his life. Personally, he preferred the place as it used to be, although it had been a bit shabby when he was a boy. But if it wasn’t for all this razzmatazz, they wouldn’t be able to live here at all, and he didn’t know if he could bear that. So Charles viewed the glittering celebrity occasions, the crowds, the applause and the wall-to-wall photographers as a sort of penance that had to be endured in order that he might be able to vanish to the library.

  As women always expected Lili to pounce on their husbands at parties, she always made a point of talking to the women first. Linda, the red-headed jeans designer, was surprisingly funny and charming as they talked about the universal difficulty of doing up the
zip of a garment that women always bought one size too small. “But then, jeans are the modern equivalent of corsets; you squeeze into them and they mold you into a predetermined shape,” the designer said. “If Scarlett O’Hara were alive today, she wouldn’t be lacing up her corsets. She’d be wriggling on the floor trying to zip up her jeans.”

  Andi Cherno pointed his lens at them and the two women immediately stopped talking and posed as if they were talking. They were both used to being photographed and knew that if you really talked, then the picture would probably show you with your eyes shut and your mouth falling open above three chins. “Ecco belle!” grinned Andi and asked them to stand by the window with the Hollywood director and the Greek shipowner, whose eyes brightened hopefully as Lili moved toward him.

  “Hello, Steni. Last time I saw you was on the Creole.”

  “Yes, it took two weeks for my nose to stop peeling and ten weeks for my liver to recover.”

  Maxine worked hard to make her parties look effortless. She had been up since six o’clock that morning, consulting her lists and ticking off items or conferring with the head gardener, her chef or her butler. She had checked the fireworks display on the far side of the lake, as well as the one on the terrace, and then inspected the food, the wine, the ballroom, the cloakroom, the first-aid room and toilet arrangements for the band and disco. At nine in the morning she had been joined by Mademoiselle Janine, who had been busy removing all small valuable objects in the public rooms, to avoid theft.

  Maxine moved around the château, working steadily until eleven, when she went to her bathroom, satisfied that her home was ready for the four hundred guests who would be at the ball that evening. Maxine hated the formality of traditional country house parties. She always offered her guests plenty of amusements, but she also made it clear that if they wished to stay in their rooms, or if they wanted to wander alone over the wooded estate, that was fine, too. Today, Maxine had organised horseback riding, a miniature-golf party, and tennis for the Americans. But the men would probably laze around the swimming pool while the women rested or had their hair done by the two hairdressers sent from Paris.

  Nobody appeared until lunch time. The meal was served on small tables on the terrace. The fountains were soft silver plumes in the sunlight, ice clinked in glasses and scrunched in buckets; the tinkle of silver cutlery and laughing conversation were the only sounds to accompany the meal.

  Alexandre had arrived on the terrace before anyone else and changed the place names so that he was next to Lili. He could not take his eyes off her, as his mother noticed with exasperation. She had never allowed her sons to behave with familiarity toward her guests. They were not allowed to speak to the press, or be photographed with a celebrity or ask for anyone’s autograph. She would call Alexandre to her dressing room that evening and remind him of his manners and his youth.

  Lili’s nipples were only just hidden by the white taffeta dress that Zandra Rhodes had given her as a twenty-fourth birthday present. The enormous puffed sleeves emphasized her tiny waist, pulled in by a tight cummerbund above swirling folds of taffeta skirt. She wore a pair of blazing diamond chandelier earrings, all that remained of her Stiarkoz collection. (On the day Jo died, they were being repaired by Van Cleef in Monte Carlo.)

  Lili looked like a delicate, eighteenth-century Spanish princess as she slowly moved down the marble staircase. The scent of jasmine and warm grass from the countryside outside the windows mingled with the more sophisticated fragrances that rose from soft, bare shoulders. The gentle buzz of conversation sparkled with an occasional burst of laughter, and in the long, chandelier-hung ballroom the orchestra softly played “I’ll Be Seeing You”. Beyond the row of open glass doors that led to the terrace, a warm, hay-scented dusk hung over the lake.

  An elegant buffet, un repas rose, had been laid out in a salon next to the ballroom. Everything was pink. Pink tablecloths were hung with swags of dark green laurel and crystal vases of palest pink rosebuds stood behind the food. White-hatted chefs carved slices of York ham and paper-thin slices of dark red prosciutto. There were piles of translucent rosy prawns, silver bowls of sauce aurore, great, dark-red mottled lobsters, brittle crayfish, delicate, pale-pink poached salmon and seafood salad of squid and octopus. One long table was banked with salads that still smelled of early morning gardens; another pink stretch of linen held four-foot-high pyramids of rose meringues Chantilly, silver dishes of strawberries Romanoff and deep crystal bowls of raspberries and cream. And naturally there was pink champagne.

  Maxine knew that Charles’s sisters would think it all unspeakably vulgar, but the press would love it.

  In contrast to the ballroom elegance, a couple of wine cellars on the other side of the château had been turned into a darkened, strobe-lit disco, where even the bottles at the bar pulsed to the exuberant thump, thump, thump and vibration of rock music.

  Not until six in the morning did the last car vanish through the summer mist at the end of the gravel drive. Lili had been asleep for three hours. She had snuggled into her warm bed thinking that the evening could not have been more perfect. She had been on her best behaviour, had danced with all the men in the house party and had posed endlessly for photographers. As usual, she had been besieged by men and had flirted with a couple of them, but she carefully did not dance with anyone in particular. She still didn’t feel Jo had gone.

  Not a guest was seen before Sunday lunch, which was a very quiet, sleepy meal. After Alexandre had carried coffee over to Lili, he asked if he could show her the woods and the rock pool where he and his brothers swam. He had spent the last two days planning how to get Lili away from the other guests.

  Lili was not displeased by this youthful adoration. After drinking her coffee, they strolled over the spongy lawn, sprinkled with buttercups and daisies, and into the forest.

  Alexandre couldn’t believe his luck. If only his classmates could see him! He felt as lighthearted as one of the Weimaraners as he bounded along the path, occasionally leaping up to grab high overhead branches. Lili felt relaxed and curiously young as she followed him. His naturalness, his directness and his exuberant boyish energy were a contrast to her sophisticated, brittle fellow-houseguests.

  When the path became overgrown, Alexandre held the beech branches back so that they didn’t tear Lili’s white voile dress.

  The pool was a shallow, pebble-floored bulge in the river, edged by tall green reeds and bulrushes. Willows leaned over to caress the water and their branches trailed soft, gray leaves dappling in the sunlight. They pulled off their shoes and dangled their legs in the river, watching the clear water shiver and distort their pale feet.

  Suddenly Alexandre could bear it no longer. He had to touch her. With gauche determination, he slowly lifted Lili’s hand off the grass and kissed the little finger with grave ceremony. His lips pressed her pink nail, then quivered apart, and the end of her finger slid into his mouth, up to the first little joint, then farther to the second joint, then he sucked her whole finger in his mouth, between his wide, quivering lips. Panting, he held her finger gently between his teeth, rolled his wet tongue around it, pulled softly and insistently on her flesh, tasting the soft skin.

  Lili had half expected something of the sort, but she certainly hadn’t expected the violence of her reaction. She had thought she would gently push him away. He was too young. But at his touch her back arched, her stomach tightened, her nipples tingled and she felt as if they were connected to her groin by two invisible, tugging threads. She gasped, and for a few moments she didn’t move, but her trembling body demanded that she respond. Unable to stop herself, she pushed her trembling fingers through his thick, strawlike hair, and stroked the sunburned nape of his young neck. Neither of them spoke as he raised his eyes to hers. Her lips slowly parted as she gazed at the golden down on his cheeks, the aristocratic nose.

  His hazel eyes looked oddly dazed as he lunged toward Lili; his large mouth brushed her cheek, then his mouth was on hers and she felt his
insistent, silky lips.

  Slowly, they fell back on the grass. Alexandre lay half on top of Lili and his eyes closed languorously as he sucked her mouth into his. At each pull, Lili’s stomach contracted, and her body stiffened under Alexandre’s smooth hands. Suddenly she remembered that the hands of Jo Stiarkoz had felt like wrinkled walnuts. She felt a sudden stab of disloyalty as she smelled Alexandre ’s musky odour, the erotic odour of fresh sweat on a young body. She sniffed the sweet fragrance of his hair, mingling with the green scent of the crushed grass beneath them.

  Her slim arms wrapped around his body, then slipped up inside his T-shirt. She felt the rippling muscles of his back as with his eyes shut, he edged his way further onto her body until she was firmly imprisoned beneath him. As if possessed, her hands slipped down the back of his jeans, slid under the rough, tough fabric and over his silken, hard buttocks. Oh, God, she thought, young, firm flesh. For a fleeting second she again remembered, with guilt and against her wish, the tortoiselike, slightly pendulous pouches of Stiarkoz, the doughlike sinking of his flesh when touched.

  Clinging to Alexandre, she felt his hardness through the bulging denim. Slowly he pushed his quivering hands inside her dress, slowly undid each pearl button, his lips still sucking at her mouth. Her tingling nipples were erect and waiting for his hands. Gently he squeezed the soft whiteness and felt her hard little rosebuds under his palms. Then his hands brushed farther down her body, as his lips ran clumsily over her breasts, sucking insistently first one pink nipple and then the other. Harder and harder he sucked, and with each gentle tug Lili felt a matching, yearning tug deep in her groin. With one hand he pulled up her skirt and felt beneath the fragile fabric. Lili felt the hard warmth of his hand press against her naked stomach, then slowly slide downward beneath the scrap of white lace. Softly, hesitantly, he touched her and she arched toward him, helpless beneath his hand. With growing confidence he stroked her, laced his fingers in her dark silken hair and tugged it gently; then rhythmically, insistently, he stroked until she arched her half-clad body to the sun and gave one sharp, high cry among the rustling trees.