Lace (82 page)

“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 Abdullah. 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.

“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.