Lace

by Shirley Conran

  So Mrs. Post was seventy-six years old in 1949 and unlikely to have been pregnant. But perhaps that was the first name that jumped into the mind of a frantic, pregnant girl who wished to conceal her identity? If you choose a fictitious name, you try to choose one that is in no way connected to yourself and yet is easy to remember.

  By Friday, Maxine Pascale’s birth certificate had been traced and by the following Tuesday he had a photocopy of her marriage certificate. Also on Tuesday afternoon, Monsieur Sartor had received a telephone call from London. Pagan Trelawney (christened Jennifer) was born at St. George’s Hospital, London, in 1932. Married twice, presently Lady Swann, living in London, photocopies of birth certificate, second marriage certificate and current address upcoming. Her first marriage was thought to have been in the Middle East.

  There were dozens of Catherine and Kathleen Ryans born in England and hundreds in Ireland. The agency was ploughing through them, narrowing them down by date. South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America were also compiling great lists of baby Ryans, but Washington cabled NEW YORK JOURNALIST KATE RYAN BORN BRITISH FITS DATE NO BIRTHCERT USA SHOULD PURSUE? ACES.

  On Wednesday Sartor put through another call to Washington and asked for a check on whether Jordan or Ryan had been at school in Switzerland in 1949 and if so, where? He carefully didn’t suggest a possible location—that would be his check on the accuracy of the information he received.

  By Friday he had further information on Emily Post. It seemed that the etiquette writer had not only been heard of, but also admired, wherever English was spoken. One had to suspect that some of the Miss Posts had been deliberately named after her. There were seventeen in the United States, one in Canada, six in Britain and two in Australia, although none had been registered during that period in New Zealand or South Africa.

  On the following Monday, three weeks after he had been assigned to the case, an overnight cable from Washingron awaited him. JUDY JORDAN KATE RYAN NOW WORK TOGETHER STOP BOTH IN GSTAAD SWITZERLAND 1949 ACES. Sartor telephoned Lili and asked to see her as soon as possible.

  At six that evening, the doorbell was answered by Simon and the three of them sat around the log fire as Monsieur Sartor reported to them.

  “I am of the opinion that the mother was one of the four girls we have located, and that if we are successful in tracing the Emily Posts, they will be found to have no connection with this matter.”

  Sartor gave his little dry cough. “But there is another possibility. If our Emily Post exists, all four of the women we have tracked down will know about her. Do you wish my agents to attempt to interview them?”

  “No!” Lili sprang to her feet. Her face was flushed from sitting by the flaming logs and her dark hair was disheveled.

  “No!” she repeated violently. She thought of the screaming row she had had with Judy Jordan; the article that Kate Ryan had written about her; that terrible scene in the orangery with Maxine. She didn’t know about this Pagan woman, but she never wanted to have anything to do with the other three.

  Simon gently took her shaking hands in his. “My darling, you must realise that one of these women might be your mother.”

  “No!” Lili’s wistful yearnings for vraie maman, for the quiet, kindly and gentle madonna of her dreams had, in an instant, turned to rage. It looked as if Lili had not been abandoned for pathetic and forgivable reasons by a humble peasant woman. It looked as if Lili had been dumped by some rich little bitch who’d been unable to get an abortion. She choked back her fury.

  “I know three of these women, and if they have anything to hide, then I don’t believe for one minute that they will see one of your agents. And if they do, I very much doubt that they will give away any information they don’t wish to divulge.” She thought for a moment. “I would like you to let me have a dossier on all four of them.”

  “No problem, madame. It would be easy, they’d all have c.v.’s.”

  “I will decide what to do after I have seen the dossiers.”

  Lili carefully read the dossiers that Monsieur Sartor provided on Pagan, Kate, Maxine and Judy. Her mother was almost certain to be one of those four women. She hoped it was Pagan, since she had never clashed with her. But regardless, Lili was determined to discover which one was her mother.

  For some reason these four women had covered up Lili’s birth, had kept it a secret. If one of them was approached, she would probably contact the others immediately and then they’d all clam up. None of them was a stupid woman; they were all brilliantly successful. Lili reasoned that the only chance she had of finding out the truth was to confront them together, to surprise or shock them into telling the truth. She would watch their faces, watch their eyes and their reactions. Surprise was her only chance of getting them to reveal something.

  PART

  TWELVE

  60

  OUTSIDE, THE TREES of Central Park rustled in a warm, October breeze. Inside the hushed, creamy opulence of the Pierre suite, Lili harshly repeated her question.

  “Which one of you bitches is my mother?”

  Pagan, Judy and Maxine had regained their composure after the surprise of seeing each other. Kate, however, standing just inside the door that led from the hall to the suite, was still too astonished to understand what was happening. She couldn’t connect the world-famous Lili standing before her in a white silk gown to that remote incident in Switzerland or that little girl who had been killed while trying to escape from Hungary in 1956.

  Lili tried again. “Which one of you bitches is Emily Post?”

  This time Maxine flashed a quick look at Pagan. None of the three looked at Judy, Lili noticed.

  “Unless you can really catch them off guard they’ll either deny it completely or say it’s Judy,” Simon had prophesied. “She’s the only one who isn’t married. She’s the only one who wouldn’t have to explain anything to a husband. She’s the only one whose life wouldn’t be complicated by the sudden addition of an adult daughter who’s a celebrity.”

  Lili took two steps toward the apricot velvet couch, clenched her fists and hissed, “Which one of you had a baby delivered by Doctor Geneste?” She spun around to Kate, still standing by the door in her smart mulberry suit. The memory of the vicious article that Kate had written about her flashed across her mind.

  “Was it you who had the baby?”

  Kate’s eyes slid sideways as she looked toward the seated group. Thinking fast, she tried to counter Lili’s verbal attack with an equally aggressive one. “Why have you brought us here? What are you trying to do? What’s your game? What makes you think that one of us is your mother?”

  “Because I know that one of you is my mother. I know that one of you four had a baby on October 15, 1949.” Lili swiftly twisted around to Maxine. “Was it you? Did you have a baby in the hospital at Château d’Oex? Did you farm me out to Angelina Dassin?”

  The coffee cup rattled slightly in Maxine’s hand and a few drops spilled on her pale blue silk dress, but her face remained impassive and she said nothing. She was not going to be bulldozed into blurting out whatever Lili wanted to hear. Besides, the whole thing was impossible. That poor child had been killed. There had been official proof of it, that letter from the Swiss consulate. How dare this fornicating bitch bully them. No, this infamous gold digger, this seducer of children could not possibly be that little waif whom they had left with Angelina.

  “Is Lili your real name?” Pagan suddenly asked. After all, Lili had mentioned Emily Post. How could she possibly know about Emily Post? She’d got the correct date, the correct place and the foster mother’s correct name.

  “No, my real name is Elizabeth, but Felix always called me Lili. Felix was married to my foster mother and it was he who saved me from the soldiers in Hungary. He threw me over the barbed-wire fence and told me to run.”

  “What happened to you then?” Pagan asked gently.

  “I was taken to a refugee camp in Austria, then on a train to Paris where I was adopted.
I don’t really remember much about it, I was ill and only seven at the time.”

  Lili did so hope it was Pagan! She desperately didn’t want to discover that her mother was Maxine, Alexandre’s mother. The possibility that she had committed incest was too painful to consider.

  Lili moved swiftly toward Pagan and crouched down, grasping the arm of the apricot couch as, yearning, she looked up into Pagan’s face and murmured in a voice that trembled with hope, “Are you my real mother?”

  Pagan looked desperately at the other three women in the room. Lili had a right to be told. Couldn’t the others see that she probably was little Elizabeth? Pagan looked down into Lili’s upturned face. All the sophistication and poise had vanished: Lili suddenly looked eager, trusting and very vulnerable.

  Then suddenly Judy spoke. “No, Pagan isn’t your mother,” she said. “I am.”

  All heads turned toward Judy.

  “I had a baby girl in Château d’Oex on that date. If you really are that baby, Lili, then I suppose—I am your mother.” Judy felt confused and exhausted. She had thought her daughter dead, she had almost pushed her baby out of her mind. Yet now this notorious little prima donna was claiming to be that daughter! But it was impossible to think of Lili as the gentle little girl whom Judy had cherished in her mind and read about in Angelina’s letters, which she still kept hidden.

  Upon hearing the answer to the question that had tormented her ever since she could remember, the pent-up pain and accumulated fury of twenty-nine years exploded in Lili.

  “Why didn’t you keep your child?” Lili cried. She sprang up, beating her fists against her thighs in impotent rage. “Why did you give me to somebody else? Why didn’t you ever come and see me? Why did you abandon me?” She leaped toward Judy, and as she did so, Maxine threw down her cup and saucer and Kate ran forward with apprehension. But it was Pagan who thrust herself swiftly between Lili and Judy, who still sat slumped in her brown velvet suit on the edge of the apricot couch.

  “My dear girl,” said Pagan, “you must let us explain what happened, you mustn’t jump to conclusions. We can all guess how you feel, but please listen to us because, you see, you were frightfully important to all of us. It could have happened to any of us.” She paused. “Any one of us might have been your mother, and so we decided that we would all be responsible for you. In a way you had three godmothers, Kate, Maxine and me. We all wanted you, we all worried about you, we all hoped for you and we all loved you.”

  “And we all paid for you,” said Maxine. “In every way we felt that you were our joint responsibility.”

  “Then why didn’t you keep me with you?” Lili threw at Judy through clenched teeth.

  “My dear,” Pagan tried to explain, “you can’t imagine what the moral climate was at that time. Things have changed so utterly in the last thirty years. Then, nobody ever even admitted that they had slept with a young man before marriage—even if they were engaged—and, in fact, very few girls did. You must realise that your mother was only fifteen years old, still a child herself. Please try to imagine how we felt. We were at our wits’ end to know what to do. Certainly your mother couldn’t take a baby back to America with her. She refused to abandon you, so we arranged for you to have a foster mother until Judy could get a home of her own for you to live in—and we all knew it would be years before she would be able to do that.”

  Pagan put her hand on Lili’s shoulder and her voice softened. “But we didn’t abandon you, we did what we thought was for the best. Don’t you see, it was a frantic attempt of four schoolgirls to save one of us from disaster? We never, never intended to abandon you.”

  Gently stroking Lili’s shoulder, Pagan was mildly surprised to find that she felt so maternal toward this tempestuously glamorous creature. Pagan had felt a twinge of jealousy when the newspapers had started to report Abdi’s love affair with Lili, when she saw photograph after photograph of them together. She had to admit to herself that one of the reasons she had wanted to meet Lili was to get a good look at the only European woman whom Abdi had ever taken to Sydon, the only white woman with whom he had lived openly.

  “The alternative would have been adoption,” Kate broke in, “and Judy wouldn’t hear of it. She couldn’t bear to give her own child to someone else. She loved you. We all did. You must believe that, Lili.”

  Maxine said gently, “If it had happened today things would be different. Your mother would probably have an abortion at an early stage, but such an alternative was rarely possible in those days. And if your mother had had an abortion, you would never have existed. You owe your life to her, you know. She carried you in her body for nine months, and she had to work hard all that time.”

  Lili felt a sudden pang of guilt as she remembered that she too had been pregnant when still a child. But Lili had gone to an abortionist. The life had been scraped out of her body, and until that minute she hadn’t felt a moment’s guilt. In fact, what she had felt at the time was a flood of relief; Lili could still clearly remember sitting in that café, listening to the jukebox, sipping milky coffee and thinking that her troubles were over.

  But Judy had not had an abortion. Judy had had a baby.

  Pagan advanced her arm farther around Lili’s shoulder. “We all wanted you and we are all happy to meet you at last,” she said, still unaware of Lili’s disastrous encounters with the other three women, all of whom were remembering one of those unhappy clashes.

  There was a moment’s silence and then Kate walked up to Lili and said earnestly, “Lili, I’m really sorry I was so unkind just now. There’s no excuse and I can’t say anything except how deeply I regret it.” She took a deep breath. “But Pagan is right, you mustn’t condemn your mother. Couldn’t you perhaps try to admire her decision, as we did? She was young and alone and we were proud of her. And we still are. She did the best she could. In fact, we all did.”

  “In that case, why didn’t you look for me after the revolution?” cried Lili. She was still resentful and agitated, though she felt less hurt. She was starting to understand what had happened, starting to lose her resentment.

  “We did,” said Maxine. “Why don’t you sit down again, then I’ll tell you.”

  Lili sat with her back to the window, next to Kate, and Pagan sat beside Judy on the adjoining couch.

  “Judy telephoned me as soon as she heard the news on the radio,” Maxine began. “She knew you’d gone on holiday to Hungary, and she knew you should have been back at school, but she wanted to make sure. Angelina had no telephone so Judy phoned the manager of the Hotel Rosat, who told her that Felix had injured his leg in Hungary and hadn’t yet returned. We were pretty sure you were on the other side of the Iron Curtain, so Judy caught the next plane to Paris and I met her at Orly. We went straight to Austria on the night train. When we eventually got to the border, we found that the situation was chaotic. Refugees were pouring out from Hungary—over a hundred and fifty thousand escaped, you know—and most of them were being sorted out in temporary camps. The weather was terrible, the camps were disorganised and everything was muddled.” She shuddered. “We visited every single camp. We checked every single list, we talked to everyone we could and we checked every child we saw. But nobody had any news of Elizabeth Dassin.”

  Every night during their search at the Austrian border, it had been almost impossible for Maxine to drag Judy away to bed. Judy felt that if she left the frontier, she might miss some tiny clue, some pointer.

  Maxine remembered Judy’s frenzy and self-accusation as they waited in the snow outside a hut, hoping to see yet another refugee committee official.

  “If only I hadn’t left her, Maxine.”

  “You had nowhere to take her.”

  “I should never have left her.”

  “You could do nothing else, Judy. Stop blaming yourself. What’s happened is terrible, but it’s not your fault.”

  Months afterward, Judy had received a short formal letter from the Swiss consulate in answer to hers, informin
g her that a family of Swiss origin called Kovago, formerly Dassin, had been shot and killed by Hungarian border police while illegally attempting to cross the border near Sopron.

  Heartbroken, Judy never ceased to blame herself for Elizabeth’s death. She almost managed to control her mind, but in her heart Judy had often felt the sudden, chilling pain of bereavement, a silent sense of loss, endless yearning and constant regret for what might have been.

  Hesitantly, Judy tried to explain this in the unnatural quiet of that luxurious hotel suite. She found it difficult to find the right words. Her habitual self-assurance had deserted her and she was unusually deflated.

  Lili listened. What was important was not that she should be placated, but that at last she should know the truth.

  Lili knew she had to double-check the answer that Judy had given her—and she knew exactly how she was going to do it. Whomever the women now looked at would be her true mother.

  “In that case,” Lili said, “who is my father?”

  61

  OUTSIDE IT WAS still snowing hard. If it didn’t stop, there wouldn’t be much point in going with Nick to Saanenmoser tomorrow, thought Judy. The 1949 ski trials would probably be postponed, so they might as well stay in Gstaad. Midnight had just passed; it was officially February 7, her mother’s birthday. Judy had sent her a card and beautiful cream lace blouse. It must be awful to be thirty-five, she thought, thirty-five and stuck in Rossville forever! “Happy Birthday,” Judy murmured as slowly she bent down outside the bedroom door, picked up a tray heaped with the debris of a meal, then hurried along the dim passage of the Hotel Imperial. In another hour and a half she could get to bed. She was almost asleep on her feet; she’d never felt so exhausted.

  Eight months of too little sleep, tough physical work and the effort of concentrated study in a foreign language were starting to whittle away her youthful resilience. Longingly, she thought of her iron bed in the partitioned cubicle under the attic roof. She was lucky to have a room to herself. She drew a deep breath, puffed it out and straightened her back.