Lace II

by Shirley Conran

  “What’s it really like, working for Madame George? Do you still go for the old guys, Teresa?” Lili was dying to catch up with the only female acquaintance she’d had in her youth. Teresa had been kind to Lili, and had taught her the rough, street wisdom of a high-class call girl.

  Teresa said, “It’s a pity you can’t stay overnight, Lili, and have a look at the office. Très chic, alors, to fly to Paris just for lunch.” She slid an oyster down her throat with a flourish. “Working for Madame George is like working in a well-organized model agency. There are six girls in the office; they sit at desks, taking telephone appointments. We wait behind the office, in the pink salon, chatting, playing backgammon or watching television until we’re booked out.” Another oyster vanished between her glossy lips. “Madame George’s drivers are all built like tanks, so you never get any trouble, and the accounts are computerized, so we always get paid on the seventeenth of the month. There’s a fixed-fee scale for our services, and the girls are graded in categories.” Teresa carefully dripped Tabasco on the next oyster. “Ever since that business with the Minister, they all ask for me, so I’m in Category A—own chauffeur, own apartment, own maid and a Saint Laurent credit card.”

  “What are the men like?” She was genuinely curious.

  Teresa gulped her last oyster, checked her lip-gloss, grinned and called for a second dozen. “Madame George is a French institution, like the Louvre or the Crillon. Any cultivated man knows about Madame George, whether he’s a film star, a politician, a general, or a nuclear physicist. We see them all.”

  “But are they any different from the Johns off the street?” “A John is a John. Some are clean, some are dirty, some are trouble, some are not, some are fast, some are slow.” Teresa shrugged. “So long as they have the cash, they all get the same treatment—the best, and the most discreet—from Madame George’s girls.”

  “You weren’t very discreet when the Minister snuffed it. What exactly were you doing to him, you naughty girl?”

  “Poor Maurice always needed a little … assistance.” Teresa gave an explicit gesture and Lili choked with unexpected laughter. “Madame George said it served him right, he always paid late. If we hadn’t all been at a hotel, she could have hushed it up. However, every cloud has a silver lining. Did you see my picture in LeFigaro?”

  “Yes.” Lili leaned over the bowl of cream roses and lowered her voice. “That was why I wanted to see you.”

  * * *

  Lili couldn’t think why she had ever been frightened on the small Eagleton practice track, as Gregg drove round and round it in the commercial prototype Spear, muttering to himself nonstop. “Bit of understeer there … still running a bit lumpy at 7300 on the straight … don’t like the sound of third gear…” The high-pitched scream of the engine hurt Lili’s ears, the oily stink of fumes clung to her hair and clothes and the bucket seat gave her cramp. Lili did not care for the life of a racing groupie and could not understand why Gregg seemed to prefer driving round and round this track to being in bed with her. There was always some excuse. He wouldn’t do it for two days before a race, he was too exhausted the night after, and he seemed to spend every second night in the workshop, bent over some greasy hunk of malfunctioning machinery.

  “Why can’t I drive it?” Lili suddenly suggested.

  Gregg laughed.

  “No, I’m serious, Gregg. I can drive sports cars. I’ve got a Porsche in Paris.” She leaned across and lightly raked her fingernails down his inner thigh. “I’ll tickle you to death if you don’t let me.”

  Gregg wriggled and grinned. Lili added, “After all, the commercial Spear is supposed to be driven by ordinary drivers like me!”

  Eventually, Gregg agreed. “Go easy on the gas, the acceleration’s pretty fierce.” He demonstrated the controls and then they changed seats. Gingerly, Lili put the car in first gear. The machine leaped forward like a hunting leopard, then bounded down the drive and swooped into the green-fringed lane. At first, Lili felt as if the machine were a savage, living thing that was running away with her, but once she became used to the power beneath her foot, she felt exhilarated by the sense of danger and mastery that it gave her, as they hurtled between the pink-campion-sprinkled hedgebanks and wind tore through the prototype’s glassless side windows. Ostentatiously, Lili double-declutched as they plummeted down the sugar-loaf hill.

  Gregg yelled, “Go easy, this is a blind corner!” They were on it and round it before he had finished speaking; then, simultaneously, they saw that the road ahead was blocked with languid black and white cows.

  Lili swung the wheel over and boldly headed for the open gateway through which the cows had just passed. She hit the brakes too hard. The car skidded on the muddy road surface, hit the bank with a sickening crunch, turned on its back, skidded along the slippery road, then slowed to a halt within inches of the terrified, stampeding cattle.

  “Are you all right, Lili?” Gregg yelled as they hung upside down from their safety belts in the crumpled wreck of the Spear.

  * * *

  “Lili, you can’t be serious!” Maxine protested. “My butler tells me that you need another bedroom. Don’t you and Gregg … er … I mean, aren’t you…”

  “Not for two days before a race.” Lili pulled a face, picked up a silver hairbrush and turned to the mirror. “And as it’s in Le Mans, I’m to live like a nun all week. I had to promise not to seduce him, otherwise he seriously told me that he was going to share a trailer with the Spear team.” Gregg was affectionate, passionate, considerate, and inexhaustible—but he spent almost every waking moment in that damn garage, passionately absorbed by those damn cars.

  Men! thought Maxine, oddly comforted as she looked at Lili’s beautiful, resigned face. Charles was just as bad. It had been weeks since that bitch Simone had left, but Maxine’s husband still slept in his dressing room. Her bedroom had been redecorated in voluptuous shades of claret and a group of disheveled Fragonard beauties hung provocatively on one wall. But Charles had not yet seen them, and Maxine did not know what to do next; she and her husband were on speaking terms—overpolite, in fact—but the air was still unfriendly.

  “It’s because of the Spear that I met him and because of the Spear that I hardly see him,” Lili gloomed. “I just happened to turn up at the wrong moment in his life. Right now he needs every ounce of energy and concentration and effort for my rival, the Spear. And he’s still got the big excuse.” Lili slowly started to brush her black hair. “He’s still bruised from our car crash, and he’s supposed to rest his ankle. As the whole thing was my fault, I can hardly kick up a fuss, not when his whole future depends on this race at Le Mans.”

  A distant engine snarled over gravel; from the terrace below rose a cloud of agitated doves. Lili jumped up and dropped her hairbrush. “That must be Gregg!”

  * * *

  “What’s their verdict on the fuel, Jack?” Gregg asked anxiously. Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, the chief mechanic had just returned to the trailer after presenting the Spear in Le Mans town square for scrutinizing. He had been there for eight hours.

  “Last thing they worried about, but there was a long wrangle over the driver’s footwell measurements; bloody Frogs spent an hour crawling over her, taking measurements. In the end it came down to an interpretation of how the measurements were taken.”

  “They’re bastards about the regulations. Did you send in Johnnie Walker?” They didn’t want to be disqualified on a technicality before the race started.

  “Two cases. It did the trick.” Jack slapped him on the shoulder. The Eagle team’s equipment included three crates of Scotch whisky, with which to smooth the Spear’s path through the maze of pettily enforced French regulations.

  “Better not risk disqualification,” Gregg decided. “We can reshape the footwell overnight.”

  Lili drove back to the Chateau de Chazalle alone and Gregg worked through Wednesday night with his mechanics. By the following morning, the Spear’s wheel bearings and gearb
ox had been stripped down, checked and reassembled.

  On Thursday, panic threatened after lunch, when the clutch was discovered to be a millimeter off-center, which was enough to lock the system. The men worked fast, but not fast enough. At dusk they wheeled the car out. “Nothing to be done about it.” Gregg’s freckled skin was pale. “We’ll have to do the qualifying laps as she is, then work on the clutch overnight.”

  Lili managed to persuade Gregg that another broken night in the trailer with his team would leave him unfit to race, and reluctantly he agreed. So Maxine’s chauffeur delivered him, white and tired, to the Chateau steps, just before midnight Friday.

  “We did it!” Gregg called triumphantly, plodding up the staircase toward Lili. “Whatever happens now will be a bonus—we’ve qualified the Spear, we’re in the race, and that’s the main thing.”

  “What did you do about the clutch?” Lili asked as they both sat in the small yellow morning room. Gregg fell on the little pot of hot beef casserole and crusty French bread.

  “Jack realigned it,” he said, between mouthfuls. “He’s a rare bird, works for sheer love of precision engineering. So much garage work nowadays is being a fitter, not a mechanic. They don’t make anything and no real skill is needed. If something is wrong with a car, they simply take off one unit and put on another. But every nut and bolt on the Spear must be tightened to exactly the right torque. Do you know, I can take my hands off the steering wheel on the Muslanne Straight at two hundred miles an hour and hardly feel it?”

  Lili picked up one of his big, grease-stained hands and kissed it. “Why would anyone want to take his hands off the steering wheel anywhere at two hundred miles an hour?”

  * * *

  The moon cast black, calm shadows over the undulating silver sand. Beyond the flames that leaped from the huge campfire, King Abdullah could see the necks and swaying, supercilious heads of the camel herd, silhouetted against the sky. They had been couched for the night and their knees had been tied to prevent them straying. In spite of jeeps, helicopters, and light planes, the most reliable desert transport was still the camel, Abdullah reflected. A camel ate very little, only needed a drink every five days, could survive twenty waterless days if it found grazing, and could carry six hundred pounds of freight strapped to its back.

  The Hakem tribe had spent much of the day racing camels in the desert and Abdullah had won the main race. The King’s camel race win was now being celebrated by the poet of the tribe, a graybeard in black robes, who invented the verses as he declaimed them, around the leaping yellow flames of dried camel dung and dead wood. Whenever Abdullah’s name was mentioned, the men yelled and fired their rifles into the air in salute.

  Opposite the King, the firelight shone on the excited little face of twelve-year-old Prince Hassan, the King’s nephew and his heir. Abdullah had brought Hassan to the Hakem mansef, to present the boy to the tribe over whom, one day, he would rule. It was the fourteenth mansef that Prince Hassan had attended this month. Abdullah made these formal visits to only the most important sheiks in his domain and it was upon these trips that he recruited his soldiers. The freedom of his country depended on the loyalty of the army. Fighting was the price one had to pay for being a small, backward, oil-rich country that was strategically important to the Western powers.

  The poet finished and harsh, guttural voices barked loudly in the night, as the warriors started to reminisce of past fights, past camels, past hunts. The yellow flames cast shadows up into the men’s lean faces, long shaggy black hair and black eyes that glittered like the star-spattered, black sky overhead. Tonight they would sleep on the sand around the campfire, protected only by their black cloaks from the chill night. Bedouins such as the Hakem tribe scorned comfort.

  Thinking of his normal routine, the paperwork, the meetings with ambassadors, ministers, department heads and commanders, Abdullah felt a deep satisfaction at being among these tough, simple, courageous men who lived in the satisfying emptiness of the desert, where one day was pretty much the same as the next, and where time was not the master of men.

  The feast was announced and the desert warriors followed their Sovereign into the thirty-meter-long, black goatskin tent. At the entrance, Prince Hassan stumbled and nearly fell. Abdullah glanced at the tired child as a white-robed bodyguard helped him to regain his balance. Inside the luxuriously carpeted tent, young boys bowed and offered dishes of sticky dates and speckled figs. Bitter, black coffee, flavored with cardamom seed, was poured from intricately worked brass pots into miniature cups with no handles. Gravely, King Abdullah allowed his cup to be refilled thrice, as was customary, and then they brought him the ceremonial bowl of camel milk, still warm from the udder and tasting slightly salty. When Abdullah had drained it, the Sheikh of the Hakem tribe sprang to his feet and launched into the traditional welcome speech, spattered with overstated compliments, honey-flowered flattery and showy superlatives. He thanked Allah for the mighty Slave of God, which was the Arabie meaning of Abdullah, he praised all his deeds and wished him everlasting life. This took some time.

  King Abdullah looked across the tent at Prince Hassan. The boy never complained and obediently performed all his royal duties, but obedience was not a useful virtue in a future King. Will Hassan have the spirit to control men such as these? Abdullah wondered, as he glanced around him at the fierce desert-hardened tribesmen.

  Abdullah did not love his nephew. Since the death of his beloved son, Abdullah had loved no one and trusted no one. Abdullah had committed himself to no one and nothing except his country, the cause of his people, and his army. Abdullah’s mother had died when he was born; he felt her death as a wistful lack. The murder of Abdullah’s father provoked in his son only ice-cold anger. The knowledge that his own life was in constant danger left Abdullah feeling that deep involvement with any living person would render him too vulnerable to assassination.

  Inside the tent, richly-patterned carpets had been laid on the desert sand and heaped with tasseled cushions. Abdullah’s watchful eyes moved warily from side to side, although he held his head still; arrogantly self-assured, with tawny skin stretched tight over the bone, his winged black eyebrows met above a nose that curved like a falcon over the wide mouth.

  Boys in white robes carried huge silver trays into the tent, each one piled with a bed of rice, surrounding a whole lamb which had been roasted over a wood fire and stuffed with a mixture of cinnamon rice, plump raisins, pine nuts, and almonds. Eight men sat cross-legged around each tray, pulling off bits of lamb and dipping them in the silver bowls of yogurt, rolling the rice into small balls with their fingers, always using only the right hand, because the left hand was used for sanitary purposes.

  The boys served silver trays of kanafa, sweet cakes filled with white goat’s cheese and served with hot syrup. The harsh wail of a primitive clarinet, the pipe of flutes, the insistent rhythm of the drums started; it was a prelude to the dancing and singing of traditional songs that were quavering ululations with no pauses, no rhythmic or harmonic variations, only repetitions of the wailing tune pattern.

  Across the tent, General Suliman Hakem caught Abdullah’s eye, nodded and quietly moved behind Prince Hassan, ready to escort him forward for the presentation to the Hakem tribe. Gazing at Suliman’s lean, hard face, Abdullah suddenly realized how extraordinary it was that Sheikh Hakem’s son had accompanied Abdullah to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Together, he and Suliman had sat at those long, highly-polished mahogany tables, sparkling with crystal, silver and candelabra, with everybody togged out in full mess kit and the strings of the regimental band sawing through a selection from Oklahoma! Suddenly Abdullah was sharply aware of the dichotomy between his Eastern life and his Western life as he remembered bicycling with Suliman from one classroom to the next and drilling endlessly on the parade ground in heavy, black boots. Together, he and Suliman had learned how to handle an infantry platoon. Fully dressed in combat clothes, they had together jumped into rivers, bumped in Land Ro
vers over mountains at night and hurled themselves out of airplanes by day. Together, they had been acknowledged the best horsemen and the best shots at Sandhurst, which was hardly surprising, as they had both been riding and hunting in the desert for as long as they could remember. Both, at full gallop, could shoot a partridge on the wing, as could most warriors sitting tonight in this sumptuous tent.

  The music stopped abruptly when Abdullah stood up and made the ritual speech that asked the Hakem tribe to pledge their lifelong loyalty to his house and his heir. Abdullah then motioned Hassan to stand. As the boy got up, his eyes lost their focus and he tumbled forward onto the antique carpet.

  There was an instant cry of alarm. General Suliman pulled the boy upright, but Prince Hassan lolled against him, unconscious and moon-pale. Abdullah’s face was expressionless as he ordered General Suliman to accompany the Prince to the women’s tent.

  Sheikh Hakem flung himself at the feet of Abdullah to protest his loyalty.

  Nobody moved in the tent for ten minutes, until General Suliman hurried back to the King’s side and whispered reassuring news in his ear. Prince Hassan had merely fainted, worn out by the incessant traveling and ceremony of the past month.

  There was an immediate hubbub of relief.

  As Abdullah washed his hands in the proffered silver bowl, none of the tribesmen around him could have guessed how profoundly anxious the King felt. Prince Hassan had been constantly ill at Port Regis, his English school. Either the child was the victim of slow poisoning or else he was unfit to be a future King.

  * * *

  It was a blazing hot June day and the sun beat down on the concrete grandstand at Le Mans, as gendarmes made periodic sweeps to control the crowds of hangers-on who swarmed over the track. The roars and snarls of the finely tuned engines could be heard far away, in the flat forests beyond the circuit, as the cars took their places on the grid. In the noisy, crowded grandstand, an exuberant group waved Union Jacks and the black Eagle flag.