Lace

by Shirley Conran

  “I’ve met you before, haven’t I?” she said when they met. “A long time ago on my first film—you explained what everyone did. You’re . . . Simon . . . aren’t you?”

  Simon looked a little wary. “Simon Pont,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d remember.” He’d already decided to keep his distance—to keep well away from Lili. He wanted no complications, no paparazzi, no PR-organised romance, just a nice, juicy, well-paid part in a quick film with Zimmer, and, please God, no trouble with Tiger-Lili.

  However, during the next few weeks, Simon found to his surprise that Lili was not the spoiled prima donna the media said she was. She seemed surprisingly quiet, almost shy. She hardly ever ventured from her dressing room, but if the door was open she could be seen sitting behind a large pair of tortoiseshell spectacles, reading a larger book and making notes as she did so. “And it isn’t a pose,” Zimmer told Simon over lunch in the cafeteria. “That’s what Lili’s really like, only I didn’t bother to tell you beforehand because I knew you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “But who’s going to read her notes?”

  “Oh, there’s always some teacher or professor creeping in or out of her apartment,” Zimmer said. He added, “You see she’s relatively uneducated and very much aware of it. I think her little self-improvement program is rather touching and charming.”

  “She’s very professional,” Simon reflected, “and I haven’t seen a sign of the famous temper.”

  “As a matter of fact, she’s not short-tempered,” Zimmer said. “She’s medium-tempered. But she does tend to overreact if she’s attacked, which happens quite often. Basically, she wants a quiet life when she isn’t working. She’s still unhappy about Abdullah, and she’s besieged by journalists trying to find out why they split up. That’s why she’s a bit remote—she’s wary, she knows that her most casual sentence might be misinterpreted, repeated and sold to a gossip columnist.”

  “What’s Lili like when she’s with her friends?” Simon asked.

  “She doesn’t have many friends,” Zimmer said. He wiped his plate with a bit of bread. “Look, I didn’t have lunch with you to discuss Lili. I want to go over tomorrow’s scene, once more. When she’s dead and you’re starving and you try to sell the fake jewelry, because that’s all you have left to sell, I want you to think what it means to you when the jeweler tells you that the stuff is all real. There are so many implications and I need to see them all on your face at that moment. . . .”

  “What would hit first?” Simon asked. “Incredulity . . . hope . . . relief. . . . Then the realisation that the wife he adored must have had a rich lover for years. . . . That their relationship was a farce. . . . But that also means that he is rich, free. . . . After all, he celebrates in a brothel, doesn’t he? Do you want them to laugh or cry, Zimmer?” Simon was an established comedy actor.

  “Both,” said Zimmer firmly.

  “Couldn’t I really swing from a chandelier in the brothel scene?” Simon asked hopefully.

  “We could give it a try.”

  Simon was agile and athletic and insisted on doing all his stunts himself when he was filming, which wasn’t often, for he preferred the legitimate stage and the reaction of a live audience to the impersonal tedious repetition of film work.

  “He’s doing this film strictly for the money,” Zimmer had told Lili, “lump sum alimony. He was married for years to a spoiled little bitch who’s really stinging him. He’s still badly bruised.”

  “Married for how long?”

  “How should I know, Lili? Long enough to have a little girl, maybe seven years, something like that. Just avoid the subject, darling.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll avoid every subject. It’s not difficult. He hardly ever says a word to me off the set.”

  On the second week of shooting Lili caught her fragile gold link bracelet on a door handle and tore a link. “I’ll fix it,” Simon offered, picking it up as he pulled out his red Swiss penknife. Lili looked horrified, but five minutes later the bracelet was back on her wrist. “Faster than Carrier’s,” she said with approval.

  “And cheaper.”

  Two days later Lili turned up with a bandaged thumb. “I nearly always burn the toast,” she explained. “I’m a rotten cook.”

  The following day a huge, shiny, beribboned box was delivered to her dressing room. Digging deep beneath the tissue paper, she found a small toaster and a loaf of bread. Laughing, Lili thanked Simon. “He might not say much, but he certainly listens,” she told Zimmer later. “Now, I’ll have to buy a present for him.”

  So the following weekend Simon accompanied Lili to the Paris flea market, where, unobtrusive in a mackintosh with a turned-up collar and an old scarf tied under her chin, Lili liked to browse among the curiosities, hoping to pick out an antique from the junk. She chose a teak chest inlaid with an elaborate mother-of-pearl design for Simon, then she saw a group of Noah’s Ark miniature wooden animal carvings—pairs of giraffes, elephants, monkeys and lions. “Oh, what a perfect present for a child,” she cried. “Simon, would you prefer these? You could give them to your little girl!”

  Simon scowled at her. “I have no a little girl,” he said roughly, and turned away.

  Afterward, driving Lili home in his Range Rover, Simon broke the silence. “Look, I’m sorry I was rude,” he said, with visible effort. “I used to have a daughter, but she died two years ago. Meningitis. She was only four. There was no need for her to die, meningitis is rarely fatal now, they treat it with antibiotics. But we were filming in Egypt and there was a hospital fuck-up. It all happened so fast. She was so small in that hospital bed, shrieking with pain and we could do nothing about it. Jean and I just stood there, clutching each other, although we hadn’t so much as held hands for years. Then they told us that she was going to recover but that night they phoned to say she’d had a relapse. We rushed around and she was lying there, very still and a horrible pale colour. She died almost as soon as we arrived. She didn’t move but we both knew. One moment she was lying there and the next moment she’d left us. . . .”

  Lili leaned across and pressed his hand in silent sympathy.

  Next Sunday they went to the zoo. Laughing, Lili was feeding a white goat in the children’s enclosure, when suddenly she heard an unmistakable click. Simon leaped over to the two men on the edge of the animal compound and said, “Please don’t photograph her. This is a private visit.”

  “For me, it’s business,” the photographer said. “Piss off.”

  He deliberately raised his camera at Simon. Angrily, Simon jumped forward and knocked the camera out of the man’s hand, then suddenly the back of Simon’s head hit the ground. “Plenty more of that if you want it,” offered the second photographer, as an anxious zoo keeper hurried up.

  Lili helped Simon to his feet. “Let’s get out of here,” she urged. “You’re going to have a nasty black eye. The faster we leave, the less there is to report.”

  Back at Lili’s apartment, she soaked a pad of cotton with witch hazel and the excess ran down his neck and soaked his shirt. “Oh, how silly of me!” Lili cried. “Look, take the shirt off, put on a bathrobe and I’ll dry it and mend the tear. No, no, as a matter of fact I’m proud of my sewing—I guarantee you won’t be able to spot the tear when I’ve finished. You’re not the only one who can fix things.”

  The maid brought a tray of coffee to the sofa, where Lili sat in front of the log fire, carefully stitching the shirt, while Simon, wrapped in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, examined the books on the antique desk. He picked up a well-thumbed Encyclopédie Larousse.

  “Zimmer said you were studying,” he said. “Do you read any philosophy?”

  “Good heavens, no,” Lili replied, laughing. “I’m not at all intellectual.”

  “Oh, philosophy isn’t only for intellectuals. Philosophers want to understand why the world exists as it does and what the best way is to live in it.”

  “That certainly interests me.” Lili bent her head and cut the
thread with her small white teeth. “Here’s your shirt as good as new.”

  “I’ll bring something amusing to the studio tomorrow. You’re right! I can’t see where the tear was.”

  “I was taught to sew when I was very young,” Lili said, suddenly sad.

  On Monday morning, Simon told Zimmer of the incident, adding, “Who’d have thought that Tiger-Lili was a seamstress!”

  Zimmer grunted. “She’s always yearning for the quiet domestic life. The child in Lili wants the nursery fireside—but that’s only one side of her, the underdeveloped part. Lili is a born actress and she’s stuck with it. That talent demands fulfillment; talent stifled is personality stifled. She’ll never be happy if she isn’t working in front of a camera, however well she stitches shirts.”

  “She’s amazing on camera,” Simon agreed. “It’s as if nobody else is on the set and she’s having an intensely confidential relationship with the lens. I know I haven’t got that magic.”

  “You don’t even like making movies, Simon.”

  “Right, that’s why I don’t often make them. I was twenty-four years old when I had my first movie success nine years ago, but I knew there were dozens of better actors who hadn’t achieved that instant fame.”

  “You’ve never wanted fame,” Zimmer said. “But of course you’ve always wanted success.”

  “I’d rather call it achievement. I’m still learning, but you don’t learn in front of a camera, you learn in front of an audience: you learn timing and boredom-tolerance. You get instant brutal reaction to what you do, and you have to edit yourself instantly according to that reaction—and without any help. So I consciously decided that my first ambition was to be a good actor—it was more important to me than making a lot of money, and the place to learn wasn’t in front of a camera, it was on the stage.”

  Later that day, as they ate canteen hamburgers, Simon read aloud to Lili from An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish. Naturally, Zimmer noticed and smiled with quiet satisfaction. Perhaps what Lili needed after two larger-than-life, powerful, destructive men was a quiet, intelligent fellow who wasn’t more interested in himself than he was in Lili—someone secure enough to handle her with firm indulgence and give her the reassurance she needed. Simon wouldn’t be jealous of Lili’s film career, and he would understand the strains and pressures of it, he would accept that as an actress she could be demanding and fiercely so, but not in her personal relationships. He would understand that she needed more protection and attention than most men are prepared to give a woman.

  Simon presented Lili with an antique orange circular tin music box. As they listened to the crystal tinkle of “Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot . . .” Simon stopped turning the handle when he noticed tears in Lili’s eyes. “What’s the matter, don’t you like it?”

  “Oh, Simon, it’s a lovely gift. It’s just that it reminds me . . .” She remembered Angelina rocking her to sleep as she sang the lullaby in the moonlight, while outside her little bedroom window, the pine trees rustled in the night.

  Then Lili gasped with pain.

  “What’s the matter?” Simon asked, alarmed.

  “It’s nothing . . . well, I hardly slept last night, it’s my back tooth. But an aspirin will fix it, it always does.”

  “Why don’t you visit your dentist?”

  “I hate dentists. It’ll go away.”

  “No, they don’t go away, they get infected.” Simon picked up the telephone. “I know an excellent dentist; he’s my neighbour and he won’t hurt you, I promise.”

  It was late afternoon in the Place Saint Sulpice and the little Parisian square with its overpruned trees and the beautiful old church had the dusky purple tinge of a Monet street scene. Since the 1968 student riots, this charming, quiet little square was where the riot police parked their vans.

  Leaving, Lili stood on the steps outside the dentist’s door. An hour beforehand the snow-covered square had been empty, but now it was a heaving mass of unruly students waving placards tacked on sticks. According to these, the students were protesting against the abrupt and forced resignation of a favourite left-wing professor, and they were all chanting “We want Boulin!”

  Nobody took the slightest notice of Lili, partly because she looked much as they did. When not in front of the camera, Lili rarely wore makeup and had the useful knack of being able to switch off her high-voltage glamour and walk down the street unrecognised, in a beige raincoat and a drab headscarf pulled well forward and knotted under her chin.

  The novocaine injection from the dentist had left her face feeling swollen and numb. She felt groggy and her eyes started to water in the wind as she gingerly moved down the steps, hanging on to the rail. Suddenly she found herself pressed back against the stone building she had just left as a young man with a megaphone started shouting slogans and the students’ chant swelled into a roar. Lili tried to push her way through to the street, but in the swaying crowd this was impossible and twice she was swept off her feet.

  As the police started to spread out around the square, Lili pushed harder, surrounded by the student yells of “A bas les flics! . . . enfant de putain . . . sale vache . . . salope . . . sale con.” Lili dropped her purse and found it impossible to pick up. Helpless and suddenly frightened, she tried to push harder toward the front of the swaying, shouting crowd.

  She was jabbed hard in the chest by an elbow and then unexpectedly found herself in the front of the picket line, facing a dark line of cops who were removing their capes. The capes of the Paris police force are weighted in the hem with several pounds of lead; judiciously swung, such a cape can break every bone in a man’s body and yet the agent cannot be said to be carrying a weapon.

  Suddenly the crowd behind Lili swayed forward then sideways, and she was thrown to the left against one of the banner poles; the rough edge of the wood caught her cheek, which started to bleed. Lili staggered and to prevent herself from falling she clutched at the banner, which read “Reinstate Boulin!”

  It started to snow again, lightly.

  The police charged.

  The angry, shouting crowd fell back and Lili found herself struggling with a furious cop. She was suddenly more indignant than she was frightened. “What do you think you’re doing? Stop hitting these kids!”

  “Shut up!” said the cop, flinging Lili’s banner aside as he roughly started to drag her toward one of the black windowless vans into which angry, noisy students were being pushed. Angrily, Lili fought back as a wail of sirens announced the arrival of the riot police, who tumbled out of their wired window buses wearing battledress, bullet-proof vests and gas masks. Carrying riot shields, cans of teargas and flexible rubber truncheons, they quickly formed a line and started to advance on the crowd to Lili’s left as she continued to struggle with the cop. “Vous faites une erreur,”she gasped. “Je ne suis pas une étudiante.” As she flung her head back defiantly and glared at the man, her scarf fell back from her head.

  “I don’t care who you are! You’re a pack of filthy scum,” he yelled, as Lili kicked him on the ankle.

  “Take your dirty hands off me!” she cried.

  “Merde! You little bitch,” he shouted, grabbing Lili by a handful of her thick black hair and reaching for his handcuffs.

  As he unbuttoned his fur-lined overcoat, Simon watched the scuffle from the windows of his apartment. The students had deliberately provoked the police and the police had reacted in the way that French police always react. What else did the kids expect? . . . Wait a minute, he thought. . . . That woman reminded him of . . .

  As she tossed her head and glared at the cop, her headscarf fell back and he realised that it was indeed Lili.

  Simon ran for the door, leaped downstairs and fought his way across the square to Lili. He managed to insert himself between her twisted body and that of the cop, who still had Lili by the hair. Above the noise of the crowd, Simon shouted, “Wait . . . there’s been a mistake, officer.”

  “Ah, non, alors! Fuck off or I�
�ll take you as well!”

  Simon knew that French cops are generally accommodating if you treat them tactfully and are careful not to provoke them, so he spoke to the furious policeman as politely as if they were both in a duchess’s drawing room.

  “I hope you realise what you’re doing, officer,” he said. “You do understand that this is Lili, the actress.”

  “Lili, my ass,” grunted the cop.

  “No, officer, look again,” urged Simon. The cop looked sideways at Simon, calm in his fur-lined vicuna overcoat. Then he looked at Lili in her torn raincoat, her black disheveled hair, her puffy face, swollen mouth and bleeding cheek, her nose and eyes red from the wind. She looked just like the rest of them, he thought. What the hell would a famous actress be doing in this mob? Nevertheless, he paused to consider, the handcuffs dangling from his right hand. He’d better make sure before he snapped the cuffs on her, because after that he wouldn’t be able to change his mind.

  Simon said, “I would be happy to accompany this lady to the police station with you,” and he whipped off his coat, revealing his immaculately cut, pale gray Cerutti suit. He draped the coat, minkside outward, around Lili’s shoulders. “Smile,” he managed to whisper as he did so. Reacting as if to Zimmer’s direction, Lili somehow managed to draw herself up six inches and flash a gracious smile at the officer who had been trying to put the handcuffs on her. Simon, still behaving as if all three of them were in the foyer of the Ritz, pulled out his visiting card and presented it to the officer, who looked at him again more carefully. Yes, he thought, this guy certainly looks like Simon Pont—he’d often seen him on television—and his clothes were unmistakably expensive. He’d better not risk it.

  He took his hands off Lili and muttered, “Well, you’d better get her out of here!”

  Left shoulder leading, Simon forced his way through the swaying crowd, protecting Lili with his body and leaving the puzzled-looking policeman standing with handcuffs in one hand and Simon’s visiting card in the other.