Lace

by Shirley Conran

  Surrounded by junipers, cypresses and silver-leafed olive trees, Dinada Palace was a quiet, informal retreat compared to the ceremonial formality of the imposing old palace at Semira. Semira was where Abdullah waded through all the paper work, where he conferred with his council and his commanders, where he gave audiences to foreign diplomats and tribal sheikhs. Dinada was where they relaxed, swam in the fishscale-silver sea or in the underground, heated swimming pool which had been carved from the rock. Dinada was where they rode horseback along the white sands of the bay, waterskied, fished and sometimes entertained friends aboard the royal motor yacht.

  Zimmer had visited them twice and was due to reappear shortly for a few days before he and Lili flew back to Paris. Lili had made no films during the previous year, but Zimmer had eventually tempted her with “The Jewels”, a classic story by de Maupassant. Lili was to play the modest, angelically virtuous wife of a government clerk who adores his wife, although he disapproves of her interest in the theatre and her passion for imitation jewelry. “My dear, when a woman can’t afford to buy real jewels,” the little clerk says sternly, “she ought to appear adorned with her grace and beauty alone.”

  “Not that anybody can afford just to be beautiful, darling,” Zimmer had murmured one evening, as he and Lili leaned over the terrace balustrade and watched the sun slowly fall into the sea. “A girl needs status, especially if she isn’t married and is involved with a very powerful man. Status is what they understand and respect.” He turned to look straight into Lili’s eyes with a seriousness that belied his mocking voice. “Status is what gets a girl mass admiration. A girl’s status can occasionally remind such a man how fortunate he is to have her—and how many other men would like to. In other words, my darling, status is what keeps him toeing the line and stops his eye from wandering when he’s bored.”

  Lili had thrown back her head and glared at Zimmer, but he was determined to say what was on his mind. “It might be as well for you to remember, my darling, that although you are as ravishing as ever, His Majesty is not exactly famous for his fidelity.”

  Unwillingly, Lili thought of Zimmer’s words as she moved slowly into her bedroom, a fifteen-meter-long room with three glass walls and a mirror-covered rear wall that overlooked and reflected the sea so that she felt suspended in azure space. Lili had already considered the possibility that Abdullah might tire of her, but she had shrugged it to one side. She would think about it only if it happened. In his strong brown arms, her face upturned to his kisses, entangled together in silken sheets, she could not believe that it ever would happen, that he would ever want such happiness to cease. But when, as now, she had been alone for several days, she sometimes felt a sudden dread, a twinge of panic.

  Slowly she shrugged off the gauze gown that glimmered with gold and silver thread and was embroidered with real pearls. She wandered naked through her second bedroom, where she slept when the weather was hot. It was an arched room of similar size, painted the soft peach shade of her powder compact so that the room exactly matched her skin. This second bedroom had a three-meter-square sunken bed that was covered with cushions of apricot silk. The only other furniture in the room was a French Empire chaise longue, upholstered in Abyssinian leopard skin, and a marble writing table with a white Saarinen swivel chair behind it.

  Lili threw herself onto the bed and forced herself to assess her situation. This carefree luxury was all too easy to accept without giving a thought to the future. But she was twenty-six and had to think of her future as she reviewed her past.

  Lili had been flung from her protected childhood to the harsh regime of the Sardeau apartment in Paris. She had survived her first lover’s betrayal. She had survived the world’s contempt when she was a porno star. She had even survived the shock of Jo’s death and his lawyer’s corruption and theft. After a struggle, Lili had started to regain her self-confidence and had worked hard at her profession, hoping for reason to be proud of herself. She had tried to direct her own life, to follow her own path and not be dragged down somebody else’s. And then she had flung all her endeavor aside for love.

  She knew that Zimmer was right; she could not rashly abandon her career or her new, hard-won success. This sybaritic life of love and luxury could not continue indefinitely, and Lili wasn’t even sure she wanted it to. Arab women couldn’t understand Lili, they were as contemptuous of Lili as they were jealous of her. Their menfolk kept the women away from Lili, with her dangerous ideas of freedom. A woman’s place was with the women, in the harem. Prudently, the men, too, stayed away from Lili; they wished no casual conversation with her to be misinterpreted by their King; few of them spoke good French or English. Abdullah’s days were filled with official business; Lili never knew when she would see him, so although her nights were exciting, her days were lonely. She felt an itch to get back to work, to lead a life of her own rather than this soft, confined life as the mistress of the King.

  The attraction that had lost none of its power to charm Lili was Abdullah. From time to time he would take her face in his hands and look into her eyes and then with one finger trace her eyebrows, her forehead, her nose, as if he were planning to sculpt her head or as if he were trying to imprint it upon his memory forever. When he did this he would smile at her gently with the same odd, infinite sweetness that she remembered from the first time she looked into his eyes. Then Lili without a doubt believed that he loved her. But at other times, when he was preoccupied by some political question, he treated her as if she were a tiresome puppy that exasperated him.

  He had never spoken to her of his wife or child. Realising the terrible loss he had suffered, how deeply it still pained him, and how private and agonizing were his thoughts about the tragedy, Lili never dared refer to it. But she knew there was no possibility that Abdullah would marry her. She was an infidel. It was his duty to his people to choose a pure-blooded Queen who would provide acceptable heirs to the throne.

  The painful part was that Lili longed to give him a son, she longed to feel Abdullah’s child stir in her body, feel it kicking, take Abdullah’s hand and proudly place it on her swelling stomach, watch her breasts grow big and heavy, ready to suckle his child. More than ever, Lili longed for permanence in her life and the things that most women seemed to achieve without difficulty—to settle down, to be married, and to have a baby upon whom she could lavish all her stored-up love.

  There was another reason why Lili could never marry Abdullah. In this land, where a girl risked having her throat slit by her father if she were suspected of being alone with a man, Lili was regarded as the concubine of the King, and she could sense the polite disregard in which she was held by the Court. She was the King’s whore.

  And there was still another reason why Abdullah could never share his life with her—a reason that was also uncontestable proof of his love for Lili. She was a Westerner and, as such, an enemy.

  The previous week, when Arab guerrillas had launched a seaborne attack on Tel Aviv, Abdullah had been sullen and preoccupied before granting an emergency audience to the American Ambassador.

  After an early breakfast, Lili, wearing jodhpurs and a white shirt, was crossing the turquoise tiled courtyard of the old Semira Palace, heading for the stables, when she heard her name called and turned to see a beaming face that she recognised. “Why, Bill Sheridan, how wonderful to see you again! Is Linda with you?” she called.

  The big Texas lawyer tumbled out of his official limousine, bounded over to Lili and enveloped her in a bear hug. Warmly, she kissed the old man’s cheek. “Of course Linda is with me—getting used to being an ambassador’s wife and rearranging every stick of furniture in the Embassy. We heard you were here, but I didn’t expect to run into you so quickly. Now when can you come and visit? D’you remember the barbecues Linda used to fix in that place we had in the rue Monsieur? That’s nothing to what she has in mind for Sydon. They’re gonna see real Texas hospitality!”

  He pumped her hand. “But you don’t have to wait unt
il we’ve got the carpets down! I’ll bet it’s been months since you had a good steak with all the trimmings! I have them flown over from the ranch. When can I send a car over for you, honey?”

  Lili considered. Abdullah was about to attend a mansef in southern Sydon and he’d be away for at least three days. “How about next Thursday?”

  “Fine, fine, Lili, around six o’clock? We’ll sure look forward to it. Now I’d better get in there with my briefcase.” He nodded toward the arched main entrance of the palace and lumbered up the bleu belge steps, as Lili continued toward the stable.

  When she returned from her ride, a white-clad servant was waiting for her. He bowed, then barked, “The King wishes you to attend him immediately.”

  Lili hurried into the palace, past a group of white-robed courtiers waiting outside Abdullah’s chamber of state: they shot her sullen looks of hate and resentment. What had she done now? Lili wondered.

  Abdullah was pacing the chamber like an enraged tiger.

  “What is this I hear about your consorting with the new American Ambassador?”

  “Why, Bill Sheridan is an old friend. I’ve known him and his wife for years!”

  “He is an uncultured millionaire lawyer who happens to know just enough about the oil business and to have contributed enough cash to the Republicans to get this position! If he wasn’t the U.S. Ambassador I wouldn’t sit down to eat with him. You will most certainly not see him, or his wife.”

  “I most certainly will see my friends, Abdi!”

  “I cannot allow you to associate freely with the Embassy, no doubt to be casually questioned over hamburgers by that ignoramus, the C.I.A. agent who calls himself the cultural attache! We know you never see or hear anything of strategic importance, but they don’t! And my men saw you being—embraced—by that American pig!”

  Lili suddenly realised the significance of what the infuriated Abdullah had said. “You mean, you have me watched! You don’t trust me, Abdullah?”

  Abdullah turned away from her, folded his arms and glared at the orange trees outside the arched window. “You must understand my position! My advisers resent my—consorting—with a Westerner, and they cannot afford to regard you as trustworthy!”

  Lili gave him a silent look of fury, turned on her heel, stormed out of the chamber and through the disdainful group of white-robed men gathered outside the door. Never had she felt so humiliated! Suddenly she wondered what she was doing in this heap of sand where she wasn’t allowed to drop into the American Embassy to meet an old acquaintance.

  By evening Lili had calmed down and she listened in silence to Abdullah’s heated attack on American policy toward Israel as they were driving to Dinada. But at sunset, as they walked barefoot along the edge of the sea, their caftans soaked at the hem, she suddenly said, “How long is this senseless fighting going to continue? Obviously not forever. Why can’t the Arabs make peace with Israel?”

  Abdullah swiftly turned and caught her wrist “For the last time, woman, I will tell you why war will continue in Palestine. In two words—land theft. In 1917, the British decided to make Palestine a home for the Jews.” He snorted. “But they didn’t seem to realise that ninety-three percent of the people of Palestine were Moslem or Christian.” In the dusk his face was bitter with rage as he took her by the shoulders and roughly shook her. “So those Arabs found themselves homeless, they were thrown out of their homes and their country—for the benefit of seven percent of the population and a lot of other Jews who had never seen Palestine, let alone lived in it.”

  Suddenly Abdullah saw Lili only as a Westerner, his enemy. For a long time he had refused to admit to himself that he had fallen helplessly in love with a European woman. Abdullah could only see this as a weakness in himself and a possible breach in his defenses. He was alarmed by the intensity of his feelings and he was frightened of loving another human being as deeply as he had loved his little son, frightened that if he loved again, he might again lose that love. Exasperated by these mixed feelings, he again shook Lili’s shoulders.

  Sharply Lili looked at him, silhouetted against the blood-red sky. She stumbled, felt him roughly push her down, then she was lying half in shallow warm water, half upon the beach. She felt his weight pressing her into the sand as his wet hands quickly felt beneath her sodden caftan and with a grunt he thrust inside her—hard, rough, heavy, male, with not a sign of imsak.

  Afterward, drenched and covered with grit, Lili sat up on the sand and scowled at Abdullah, who had flung off his caftan and was about to plunge into the sea. It was too much! Too much like one of those stupid films she used to make—and just as humiliating. Suddenly Lili was tired of being the wrong race, the wrong creed and on the wrong side.

  “This is never going to work, is it?” she cried. “Constantly I am made aware of the reasons that I am wrong for you, Abdi, but do you realise that there is a major reason why you are wrong for me?”

  She pounded the sand with her fists. “No matter how passionately our bodies are united you cannot give me your unreserved love.” Her voice shook. “We both knew your position makes that impossible—but I’m not sure that’s the only reason.” She took a deep breath. “The problem is, Abdi, that you can’t trust anybody—not even me—and you can’t love someone if you don’t trust her.”

  There was a pause. “It’s difficult to trust anyone,” he said, his voice imperious and sulky, “when you know that however well you do your job, there are many people who want to kill you simply because you have that job.”

  “I could have killed you a thousand times if I’d wanted to!” Lili cried, wiping a strand of wet hair back from her face. “You withhold the important part of yourself from me and I find that unbearably painful and humiliating.” Her voice trailed off, then she burst out again, “I’m ashamed of this part of you—the part that makes you deny me. I’m ashamed that I’m not good enough for you for reasons that have nothing to do with me. It makes me hurt and angry that you deliberately withhold your love from me.”

  “Your hurt and anger aren’t because of me,” Abdullah said, roughly pulling Lili to her feet and cunningly changing the point of the conversation, as men so often do when women get too close to the truth. “Your hurt and anger, Lili, are because—as you’ve so often told me—you don’t know who you are, and you’re relying on love to make your life worthwhile, to give it meaning.”

  She saw amused contempt in his eyes, as if he were listening to a child’s outburst.

  “You’re right,” said Lili, “I was.” She was astonished to find herself using the past tense.

  Abdullah was disdainful. “You Westerners, with your endless quest for identity, you never know who you are. If you really want to know, then why don’t you try to find out, instead of simply talking about it?”

  “All right,” said Lili, “I will.” She pulled her wrists from his grasp and ran away from him, along the lace-fringed, darkening sea.

  PART

  ELEVEN

  58

  AS SOON AS the press realised that Lili had returned to Paris, her apartment was besieged by reporters, the building opposite her bedroom sprouted telephoto lenses at many windows and her telephone had to be left permanently off the hook. She lived in a state of siege, grappling once again with her misery and humiliation, but this time Lili also felt the impetus of anger and indignation.

  “I know I did the right thing,” she said to Zimmer, as they sat in front of a log fire and she repaired his vicuna overcoat, the lapel of which had been torn as Zimmer forced his way to Lili’s front door. Lili bit the thread. “There, you’d never know it had been torn. . . . I suddenly realised the country and the people were hostile to me so that a break with Abdullah was inevitable and that the longer I stayed, the more painful the break would be.” She threw back her head as she added, “And I felt that for the first time, I was deciding what was going to happen in my life. Oh, Zimmer, you can’t believe what despair I felt, how miserable I was—still am—to be without Ab
dullah. I felt as if part of my body had been torn away, and I swear that sometimes I feel physical pain.” She pressed her left hand to her breast. “But the odd thing is that I’ve never once regretted what I did. I’m proud I had the strength to do it. For once I felt really proud of myself. I expected to feel a sense of psychic destruction—God knows I’ve felt it before—but instead I felt grimly determined never to be humiliated again.”

  “Aren’t you going to talk to the press? It’s been six weeks since you left Abdullah, but they’re still waiting outside—”

  “—like a pack of wolves! For once, my private life is going to stay private—I’m not going to talk to anyone about it, Zimmer. What I want to do is get back to work as fast as possible. It’s the one, never-fail anodyne for pain.”

  Dripping with fake diamonds, Lili shivered in the skinny clerk’s arms. She was wearing a tightly laced, burgundy satin evening gown with a bustle and had just caught a cold on her way home from the opera. She was about to die of pneumonia next week. The skinny clerk’s pince-nez fell off his nose, and he said, “Shit!”

  “Cut!” Zimmer said, as the crew started to laugh and the skinny clerk bent to pick up his rimless eyeglasses.

  “The spring needs tightening,” he announced, “but I can probably fix it myself if you give me a couple of minutes and a pair of eyebrow tweezers.”

  The actor’s pointed chin was covered by a short beard, required for his part as a Victorian government clerk, but Lili had nevertheless recognised his long, lean figure and the steel-blue flash of his eyes.