Lace (85 page)

“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

O
UTSIDE, 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, informing 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
?”