Lace

by Shirley Conran

  Once inside his first floor apartment, Lili started to shake again from the tension. “My God, Simon, it was terrifying when they charged!” She couldn’t talk properly because her mouth was still swollen.

  Simon gently lifted the coat from her shoulders. “What were you doing down there?”

  “Leaving your dentist. I was in there for over an hour. Then before I knew what was happening, I found myself in the middle of that mob and . . . I was helpless . . . I couldn’t understand what was happening. Then suddenly that cop attacked me.” Lili caught sight of herself in the cherub-encrusted hall mirror. “No wonder he didn’t recognise me! I look terrible.”

  “You don’t to me. To me, you look wonderful.”

  Lili peered at herself. “I think I’ve got a black eye. Zimmer will kill me on Monday . . . I don’t know how you can say I look wonderful, Simon!”

  He gave a Gallic shrug of the shoulders. “I like you without makeup. I like seeing the real you.” He added, “You ought to have some tea; sweet tea is how to treat shock. Let’s go to the kitchen.”

  He took her hand and led her through his apartment. She noticed the rich, dark colours, the book-lined corridors, the antique horse portraits, the cozy, luxurious warmth.

  The kitchen, gleaming with copper saucepans and smelling of fresh herbs, was a country-style kitchen executed by John Stefanidis for a price that no peasant could afford. Simon pulled a walnut rocking chair forward. “Sit down and let me wash the blood off your cheek.”

  Lili collapsed onto the chair. “I feel awful,” she snuffled. The Charvet silk handkerchief was whipped out of Simon’s breast pocket. A runny nose merely made Lili look more vulnerable and appealing. He liked the idea that very few people had seen her so defenseless, he thought, as he boiled the kettle and then served tea at one end of the long, pine harvest table.

  “I don’t take sugar.”

  “You do today. Four lumps.”

  Reluctantly, Lili reached forward for the sugar bowl at the same time as Simon reached forward to push it toward her, and for a moment their hands met. Lili almost gasped as she felt the light touch of his warm flesh, unexpected and thrilling. Incredulous, her swollen lips slightly apart, she stared up at him. Simon stared back at her in the same way, a blank look of surprise on both their faces. Then Lili’s caution about men got the better of her and she jumped to her feet. She didn’t want to get involved with anyone. Clumsily, she started to button up her raincoat. “I really ought to get back home and go to . . .”

  Simon walked across to the window and stared out of it with his hands in his pockets and his back to her. “Yes, of course, you must go,” he said.

  Lili sat down again. Then she stood up again. He turned from the window and she took a step toward him, her hand automatically outstretched to say good-bye, as is the French custom.

  Simon took her hand. But he didn’t let it go.

  As Lili nervously tried to pull her hand away, she said jokingly, “I can’t leave without my hand, Simon.”

  “You can leave without it or stay with it.”

  59

  FROST HAD LEFT a pattern of white lace that veiled the gray rooftops of Paris beyond the bedroom window. Snow started to fall, the scene grew paler and less distinct. Inside the bedroom Simon gently tickled Lili’s toes, often a prelude to his lovemaking. For two years now they had lived together here in her flat in peace and relative quiet. Never in his life had Simon known such calm happiness. To his astonishment he found Lili undemanding. Apart from moments of sudden rage when she saw some lie printed about herself in the papers, Lili was quiet and liked a quiet life. They read a lot and listened to music, and Lili still painted on Sundays.

  Simon wiggled Lili’s left little toe. He started to stroke her thighs, to feel the little dark forest. On Sunday mornings he liked to wake her like that, and she loved to drift back to life, conscious of erotic sensations that slowly deepened into passion. Now, eyes still closed, she fumbled sleepily for him.

  Later he brought in a tray of coffee. Lili sat up, gazing as she did so at a small oil painting that hung between the two windows opposite the vast cream bed. It was a picture of a twisting mountain river that she had bought the week before from Paradis in the rue Jacob.

  “I’m not sure I like that, hanging there,” she pondered. “It’s too small to see from this distance, but it’s so pretty. It reminds me of the river when I was a child at home; you couldn’t see it from our chalet because it was in a deep gorge and we weren’t allowed to go there, but my brother Roger often took me. We used to catch trout there and splash in the shallows.”

  Her voice softened as, holding her bowl of coffee in both hands, she gazed at the picture opposite the bed. “There was a rickety old suspension bridge over it; the water was very deep in the middle, always ice-cold and very clear, always twisting and turning, always rushing and noisy, especially in the spring when the snow was melting on the mountains.” She took a sip of the café au lait, not taking her eyes from the picture. “It was always prettiest in the early morning when the mountain slopes were covered with silver mist and the far hills just a smudge against the sky.” She shut her eyes and smiled. “It used to be very quiet, except for the rushing water and the whine of the sawmill in the valley, cutting pine planks and stacking them, ready to metamorphize into another little chalet in no time at all.”

  “I wonder if you realise how constantly you dwell on the past,” Simon said, with mild irritation. “Why aren’t you thinking of building a future with me? We could build our own chalet in Switzerland with the planks from that sawmill. And you could start your own family, instead of always harking back to the one you lost. We’ve been together nearly two years now, and I’m damned if I understand why you won’t marry me.”

  “Such an old-fashioned idea.”

  “And a good one. I want a commitment, Lili. It’s 1978, I’m thirty-five and I want children. What puzzles me is that I know you do as well. Yet time and again you’ve wriggled out of talking about this. Is it that you don’t love me? That you don’t believe I love you? That you don’t want to commit yourself because you’re afraid that if you do, I’ll dominate you like Serge and Stiarkoz and that bastard Abdullah?”

  “No, it’s not that.” She was hesitant. “It sounds so silly. I just don’t feel settled. You know where you belong, but I don’t” She put the empty coffee bowl back on the tray. “Most women long to have a baby by the man they love and I’m no exception, Simon.” She looked at him—a sad, long look. “A baby would be a new life, my rebirth, a wiping-out of the pain of the past, a fresh start with a family of my own. Don’t think I don’t want that. I long for it. But how can I have a baby, how can I take on such a responsibility, when I’m so unsure of myself, when I don’t know who I am? I want my baby to feel rooted, settled. So I want to wait until this restlessness of mine has passed.” Her voice shook, then hardened. “But it hasn’t and sometimes I’m afraid it won’t. I don’t think it will disappear until I know who my parents are. And although I desperately long to know, at the same time I’m frightened of finding out. Because they might be—oh, unpleasant in some nasty way. After all, they abandoned me.” She sighed. “Anyway, it’s probably impossible to trace them. It’s hopeless.”

  Simon said thoughtfully, “No, I’m sure I can fix it for you—or at any rate, I’ll try. . . . At least if you found your real parents, you might stop looking for substitute parents in almost everyone you meet. That’s why you’re so vulnerable to these exploiters you inevitably attract.” He drained his own bowl of coffee, put it down and said, “A man has only to say something in a reassuringly avuncular voice and you think he’s Santa Claus; you’ll sign any paper he puts before you. But Santa Claus doesn’t exist, so stop looking for him, Lili.”

  “I can’t help this . . . yearning.” She hugged her knees tighter, laid her cheek against her knees.

  “Then for heaven’s sake, let’s try to trace your parents instead of vaguely hoping they’ll pop up ou
t of nowhere,” Simon urged. “We’ll hire detectives. Your lawyer can recommend a firm. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. But you must realise that you might not like what you find.”

  Lili moved her knees and the coffee tray lurched dangerously toward the edge of the bed. Simon stood up and stretched. “I think your mother was probably a young, unmarried girl who worked in town but who came from a country peasant family. You know how practical the Swiss are—a middle-class family would probably have tried to arrange an abortion for the girl, even though it was illegal and possibly against their religion.”

  He wandered over to stare at the little picture of the river. “Another thing—your father may have been married to someone else. I can’t help thinking that if your mother had stayed unmarried and if she were alive, then she would have claimed you, or at least visited you. So my theory is that there was a mountain village girl who came down to the valley to earn money for her dowry, had a baby by a married man, then went back to her village and married some peasant and never dared confess about the child.”

  “Oh, I don’t care, I just want to know,” Lili exclaimed.

  The following afternoon a detective called Sartor visited Lili in her apartment. He had thin, gray hair, parted in the middle, and wore rimless spectacles that somehow rendered the rest of his face invisible. He was neat, dapper, polite and expressionless. Lili’s lawyer had recommended the Sartor Agency because of its international connections. He had explained that Sartor had contacts with a well-known detective agency in each of the biggest cities in the world so he could simply subcontract any work in that country to the local agency.

  Sartor sat in Lili’s sitting room taking notes on a pad that fitted into his left hand. No, she knew nothing about her birth except that she was supposedly born in Gstaad or Château d’Oex, Switzerland, on October 15, 1949, and that she was not the natural daughter of her foster mother. Her foster mother had at that time been Angelina, widow of Albert Dassin, a guide who lived in the village of Château d’Oex, Switzerland. No, she had no proof that Madame Dassin was not her natural mother. Yes, that was a possibility, but she would have imagined that Madame Dassin, a widow, could not have disguised her own pregnancy in that small village. Lili’s real mother was definitely a mystery to the village—she had been teased at school about that. That Madame Dassin was her foster mother was generally accepted, although Lili was called Elizabeth Dassin. Yes, Madame Dassin had remarried in 1955, a Hungarian waiter, Felix Kovago. Yes, it had been definitely established by the Swiss consulate that both the Kovagos and the child, Roger Dassin, had been shot and killed by Hungarian border guards in 1956. Certainly she would like Monsieur Sartor to check that. No, she could think of nothing to add to those details, except that Madame Kovago had arranged for her to take private lessons in English and French elocution, and Lili felt that it would have been out of character for her to have done this of her own accord. No, the son, Roger Dassin, had not been given such lessons, neither had any other child in the village school. No, Madame Kovago had not given her any photographs or jewelry that might have had any bearing on her birth.

  “We’ll check the birth certificate straightaway,” said Monsieur Sartor, pushing his tiny notebook into his inner breast pocket and standing up. Simon saw him to the front door and handed him his beige raincoat, still damp with melted snow.

  Three days later he telephoned. Lili answered. Simon was away on a promotional tour for two weeks.

  “Our Swiss contact has checked with the registry office. The Gstaad area is in the region of Saanen, which has a population of around 6,000. Two baby girls christened Elizabeth were born there on October 15, 1949. We have already traced and spoken to one of these young women, who is unmarried and still lives in Gerignoz with her widowed father. The other child was born in the hospital at Château d’Oex to a woman called Post—Emily Post. The Swiss birth certificate always gives the name of the obstetrician. In this case, it was Doctor Alphonse Geneste, who unfortunately for us died on November 4 last year, but our man in Switzerland has spoken on the telephone to his widow, who lives at Siedenstrasse 9, Gstaad, and they have arranged to visit her tomorrow.”

  “Goodness,” said Lili, “Emily Post. That sounds English, doesn’t it? Not Swiss-French, not German or Italian—which is what you’d expect of a woman having a baby in Switzerland.”

  “There is, of course, the possibility that it was a Swiss, French, German or Italian woman who assumed a false name—perhaps the name of a foreigner, perhaps the father of the child.” A dry cough. “On the birth certificate the father is listed as ‘unknown.’”

  Another almost apologetic cough. “But if the name is genuine, then certainly the mother might be English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. Or she could be Canadian, American, South African or Australian. Or perhaps she came from some other part of the British Commonwealth—Kenya, for instance—or even from some of the smaller English settlements—Hong Kong, perhaps. I will telephone as soon as there is further news.”

  “You’re the policeman, aren’t you?” The man nodded, untruthfully, to the shrivelled old woman who had opened the door of Siedenstrasse 9, Gstaad. Her thin, bouffant hair was dyed an unnatural shade of blue. She wore blotchy makeup with blue eyelids and uneven patches of heavy rouge on each cheek. Her sagging neck was encircled by a thin, scarlet velvet ribbon and she wore a bright red jersey trouser suit. She looked terrifyingly decrepit as, with bent back, she shuffled slowly into an overheated, unfurnished living room.

  “I don’t know whether I can help you, young man, but from what you said on the telephone, one thing is lucky. As you know, under Swiss law, one must keep one’s account books for ten years. My husband’s go back to when he first started out here in his own practice in 1927. I kept the old books up in the attic and never bothered to move them.” Blue eyelids blinked before him. “I was his bookkeeper, you know; that’s how we met. I married the boss!” She gave a dry cackle and the agent smiled encouragingly. “I can get them down from the attic if you want, officer, although not today, it’s one of my bad days today. Now you say you want to trace a missing person . . . a baby that my husband delivered. You said on October 15, 1949? A baby girl, you say, and the baby was fostered by a woman in Château d’Oex, a Madame Dassin?”

  Again, the wrinkled blue eyelids were lowered, then suddenly lifted to reveal surprisingly bright black eyes. “Well, I don’t need to refer to the books for that. I remember it very well because the girl was so very young—she was still at school—and because she didn’t pay her bill.”

  “She didn’t pay her bill?”

  “No, the bill was paid by four other girls. I think they were all at l’Hirondelle, a school that closed about ten years ago when the headmaster died. Anyway, you’ll find all those details in the documents books. I seem to remember that one of the girls paid cash. Those girls were very good to the young mother, and my husband also helped her a great deal . . . too much. But he had a kind heart and an eye for a pretty girl.” She smiled. “Anyway, the payments will all have been noted in the accounts book. No, we couldn’t go up there today—and tomorrow is Sunday—but Monday morning, perhaps? I’m better in the mornings.”

  On Monday morning the detective stood again on the snowy doorstep. The old lady let him in and, after a few moments of conversation, led him upstairs to the attic where the old records were stored in dusty piles.

  At a snail’s pace, the old lady moved up the stairs to the landing, where a steel ladder hung down from a ceiling trapdoor to the attic. “I can’t manage that thing, young man, but you go up with the flashlight. You’ll find the account books in the thirteenth file from the left, right at the back. You’ll want the ledger, it’s a brown cloth book and the year slip is pasted on the spine. You said 1949, didn’t you? Yes, well, up you go.”

  Prepared for a difficult, dirty search, the agent gingerly clambered up into the cold, unheated attic and picked his way over the dust-laden ceiling beams to the back. To his surprise, he foun
d the book he was looking for almost immediately, exactly where the old woman had said it would be. He blew the dust off the book, hopped back over the beams, carefully descended the wobbly ladder, then pushed it back to the ceiling.

  The old lady turned the pages until she came to the right one. “Here we are, young man. The first entry is in mid-June, you see, under Post. That was the girl’s name. And here are the payments, you see. To start there were three checks signed Trelawney and Ryan—and big checks they were—then a small cash payment from Mademoiselle Pascale.”

  A series of erratic payments were listed as being paid by J. Jordan, P. Trelawney, M. Pascale and K. Ryan but—according to the immaculate account book—never a sou was paid by Miss Post, the young mother.

  Strange.

  Madame Geneste couldn’t remember what Miss Post looked like. She had never seen her.

  On Tuesday the agent telephoned Monsieur Sartor in Paris, who immediately delegated to his chief assistant a search to check all Swiss finishing-school archives in the Gstaad area. He also wanted to locate the birth certificate of Maxine Pascale, probably born between 1928 and 1932, possibly in Switzerland, Belgium or France. Sartor then placed telephone calls to the detective agencies that he dealt with in London, Washington, Montreal, Canberra, Johannesburg and Auckland. That would do for a start. He wanted routine birth certificate checks on

  Emily Post, Pagan Trelawney, Kate or Catherine or Kathleen Ryan, Judith Jordan—probable dates of birth between 1930 and 1935.

  On Wednesday morning an overnight cable from Washington lay on Sartor’s varnished desk.

  JUDITH JORDAN EASY STOP BORN ROSSVILLE VIRGINIA 1933 STOP RICH NEW YORK BUSINESSWOMAN DOSSIER FOLLOWS AIRMAIL STOP EMILY POST ARE YOU KIDDING BORN BALTIMORE MARYLAND 1873 PARENTS BRUCE JOSEPHINE LEE PRICE MARRIED EDWIN POST 1892 TWO SONS DIVORCED 1906 WROTE MAGAZINE ARTICLES THEN BOOK ON ETIQUETTE PUBLISHED AUGUST 1922 IMMEDIATE BESTSELLER REPRINTED 99 TIMES IN 47 YEARS EMILY FAMOUS AMERICAN LEGEND DIED PNEUMONIA 1960 STOP PURSUING BIRTH CERTIFICATE DATES GIVEN ACES