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A perfect eyebrow arches. She looks distinctly unimpressed. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It isn’t a storeroom,’ I say, firmly. ‘You’re not in Monaco.’
Because this is what I vowed I’d do, the very next time this happened: cut to the chase and try to find out what the hell it is with this sofa. I never had the chance with Audrey – and, to be fair, I spent most of the times I saw her convinced I was talking to my very own brain tumour – and when I broached the subject with Marilyn Monroe she just thought I was telling her I was some kind of psychic … but now that it’s Grace Kelly I’m face to face with, my golden opportunity to dig deeper into this mystery has surely arrived. She’s cool, calm and collected, where Marilyn was daffy, breathless and – mostly – slightly squiffy. Admittedly Grace does seem a bit skittish beneath her ice-princess aura, probably down to the fact that, in her world at least, she’s about to become an actual princess tomorrow, marrying a man – in front of billions – that she doesn’t even know that well. But still. She’s Grace Kelly. She’s smart, astute, and Teflon-strong. If I don’t seize this chance, I know I’ll regret it.
She blinks. ‘I’m sorry … you did say you were English?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well, because you’re just not making an awful lot of sense. But it can’t be a language barrier … I’ll tell you what: I’ll just try to make my own way back to my room, and call for someone else on the prince’s staff. Then they can find my prayer book, and I can leave you to get on with … well, whatever it is you do here.’ She takes a step towards the door, as if she’s actually going to be able to get out that way. ‘Very pleasant passing the time with you, Miss … I didn’t get your name?’
‘Lomax. Libby Lomax. Look, Gra …’ I stop myself, just in time. ‘Miss Kelly,’ I go on. ‘There’s something you need to understand. Or, more to the point, I suppose, there’s something I need to understand …’ I point a finger towards the Chesterfield. ‘OK, you see that sofa? It’s magical, all right? Now, I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but people – Hollywood stars, to be more accurate – appear out of it. Audrey Hepburn. Marilyn Monroe. And now you.’
Her blue eyes, the colour of the sky on a sunny midwinter day, rest on me. She doesn’t blink.
There’s a rather long silence.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Her crisp plosives are crisper than ever. ‘You are aware,’ she goes on, ‘of what you just said?’
‘I know it sounds … well, absolutely impossible. Crazy. But it isn’t. I promise you. Well, it isn’t impossible. It is pretty crazy. But the sofa is enchanted. I got it from Pinewood film studios, and—’
‘Pinewood?’ Her gaze softens, just for a moment. ‘Is this … some joke of Hitch’s?’
‘Hitch’s?’
‘Alfred Hitchcock. Are you playing out some joke of his? It’s just like him to concoct some bizarre pre-wedding jape, now I come to think of it …’
‘No, no! Nothing of the sort.’
‘… and besides, I know he’s against this marriage in principle. Thinks I’ll never come back to work in Hollywood, now I’m a princess of the realm. Which he’s quite mistaken about,’ she folds her gloved arms across her slender body, ‘by the way. And you can tell him, the next time you see him …’
‘I won’t see him. I don’t know him. Honestly. This isn’t a joke. Everything I’m telling you is real.’
Grace Kelly frowns at me, her smooth forehead creasing. ‘You honestly expect me to believe in an enchanted sofa in the attic?’
‘Again, it isn’t an attic. I live here.’
‘You live in an attic?’ She looks rather alarmed, all of a sudden; her steely composure momentarily fractured. ‘I’m sorry to be so blunt, but … you’re not … some sort of palace lunatic, are you?’
‘No! Of course I’m not.’
‘It’s only that, well, I don’t actually know the prince all that well yet … I mean, obviously we’re very much in love – I’d hardly have agreed to marry him if we weren’t, not even to keep my parents happy …’ She clears her throat before continuing. ‘But one never knows, until one actually starts living with someone, exactly what sort of skeletons they have in their closet. Or in this case, I guess, what sort of lunatics they have in their attic.’ Something else suddenly seems to occur to her, and her bright blue eyes narrow. ‘If you’re making all this up to throw me off the scent because you’re Rainier’s mistress …’
‘Christ, no!’
‘Well, there’s no need to sound so appalled, dear.’ Grace Kelly looks, suddenly, more human than I’ve seen her look thus far. Just for a moment, her shoulders drift from ramrod-straight, and that crease in her forehead deepens. ‘He’s an extremely attractive man! And a prince, of course. I wouldn’t be marrying him otherwise …’ Then she stops. ‘Not that I mean … I’m not marrying him because he’s a prince, of course. I’m marrying him because I love him.’
‘Of course, of course …’
‘It’s just as easy to fall in love with a prince,’ she goes on, somewhat defensively, ‘as it is to love a more ordinary man. Not to mention the fact that … well, it’s all very well everyone thinking I have men falling at my feet, but what use is that when all the good ones are already married?’
‘Yes, it’s OK, you don’t have to explain anything to me. I mean, I’ve never been in love with a prince, and the guy I’m in love with is just an ordinary man … but that’s all getting off the subject.’ I take a deep breath and step closer to where she’s standing, slightly less regally than before, in her princess-perfect dress. ‘Look, I can prove it to you, OK? I can prove that what I’m saying is true. You think you’re in the palace in Monaco, right? The pink palace, up on a cliff, overlooking the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean Sea …’
‘Overlooking the marina, actually,’ she says, sharply, ‘and I don’t see what the view has to do with—’
I take one step closer to the window and pull up the blind.
‘Look out there,’ I say. ‘Look out of the window and tell me what you see.’
She opens her mouth – I can tell – to object to my instruction.
‘Just one glance,’ I plead. ‘Look out there and tell me if you can see a marina, filled with bobbing yachts, the moonlight dancing on the water. Or –’ I peek out of the window for a moment myself –‘tell me if what you can actually see is an ordinary street, a load of parked cars, the rubbish bins all put out for the bin-men tomorrow morning and … oh, I think that’s a fox rifling through one of the bins over there.’ The streetlight is bright enough for me to see the scrawny, bushy-tailed animal wrestling with what looks, at least from this distance, like a Domino’s pizza box and a Tropicana juice carton. ‘Please, Miss Kelly,’ I say. ‘Just look.’
For a moment, I think she’s not going to move.
Then, with a well-disguised air of curiosity, she takes one step closer to the window so she can peep out.
Her eyebrows shoot immediately upwards, in absolute astonishment.
‘I don’t understand!’ She glances over her shoulder to look at me. ‘Where has the marina gone?’
‘Exactly! That’s what I’m saying!’ I perch on the window-ledge and look right at her. This close up, the scent of her perfume is stronger than ever, and I can see the faintest lines around her eyes that make her – oddly enough – seem more real, somehow. Well, if not real, then more down-to-earth. More vulnerable, perhaps. ‘You’re magical!’ I continue. ‘Not just Hollywood magic, but real magic. You pop up out of the sofa and into my world and then … well, actually I have absolutely no idea where you go when you go back into the sofa.’ I think about this for a moment. ‘I mean, I have no idea whether you go back into your own world, or whether you just cease to exist for a bit … the only thing I am certain of – at least, I think I’m certain of it – is that it’s not a two-way thing. I don’t get to go into your world, as far as I know. This is more like … Alice in Wonderland, I suppose …’
‘I see. I see.’ Her voice is low, and she’s talking to herself more than to me. ‘I … I think I get it.’
‘Oh, thank God! OK, so as far as I can tell, from what’s happened before …’
‘It’s a dream. That explains it. It’s not a joke. It’s a dream. A very vivid dream, but only a dream.’
‘What? No, no, that’s not it at all!’
‘Don’t be absurd, dear.’ She stares down at me, with a thrilling return to her regal froideur. ‘Quite apart from the fact that what you’re saying cannot possibly be true – I mean, a magical sofa? – it simply cannot be the case that I’m the one who’s come into your real-life existence.’ She lifts her rather strong chin. ‘I’m Grace Kelly. Magic may happen around me – movie stardom, an Oscar win, marrying a prince and becoming a princess – but I am real.’
‘Yes, OK, I can see why you think that, but—’
‘I don’t think that. I know that. I am not some bit-player in your life! Some magical being in a world where you’re the real one …? No. It’s simply not possible. Things happen to me, after all. I do not happen to other people.’
I blink at her. ‘So … you’re telling me I’m the magical one?’
She lets out a rather delighted, excitable tinkle of laughter. It sounds like musical notes on a scale, and would probably be enchanting if she weren’t trying to tell me I don’t exist.
‘Oh, no, no, I’m not telling you you’re magical! Isn’t it obvious? You’re in my dream!’
‘No, I—’
‘It’s perfectly apparent to me, now.’ She paces, in a very dynamic way for someone wearing yards and yards of lace, over to the Chesterfield, and sits down. She seems to be thinking aloud. ‘I’ve been under a good deal of stress, the last few days have been frankly exhausting … I’m sleeping in a strange place, and I really shouldn’t have tried that rather pungent French cheese at supper this evening … so although I’ll admit this does all seem remarkably vivid, it’s obviously a dream. Now, if I were in psychoanalysis, the way everyone else I know is – in fact, I probably should have been in psychoanalysis, back home, but Mother and Father have always made it so clear they think it’s nothing but snake oil and codswallop – well, then I’d probably be able to glean all sorts of things from this dream that might help me in my real life.’ She looks up at me, fixing me with that penetrating, blue-eyed gaze for a moment. ‘Perhaps you’re supposed to represent some other version of me? Ooooh,’ she suddenly breathes, ‘are you my alter ego? The person I’d be if I didn’t look the way I do? If I hadn’t made it in the movies and met the prince? After all, you do look so terribly downtrodden and, well, ordinary.’
‘Hey! I’ve just had a bad night, that’s all.’ I give her a pretty penetrating gaze of my own. ‘You try looking anything other than downtrodden when the man you love doesn’t love you back.’
‘Aha!’ She seems to seize on this, actually clapping her hands together as if to capture the thought before it dares to sidle away again. ‘This is the second time you’ve mentioned this man you’re in love with! What message are you trying to convey? What inner truth are you trying to wheedle out of my subconscious?’
‘No message! No inner truth!’
‘Because obviously, I’ve had my share of love affairs …’ Quite suddenly, she lowers that cut-glass New England voice, worried that somebody in the ‘palace’ might overhear her, I suppose. ‘What I mean to say,’ she goes on, ‘is that perhaps I might, in the past, have fallen in love with a man who didn’t feel the same way as I did. And obviously, the night of one’s wedding, one’s thoughts start to turn to all that sort of thing … I won’t say I was deliberately thinking about Clark earlier today, when I was getting ready for the civil ceremony, but I certainly did find him popping into my mind—’
‘Clark Gable?’ I can’t help blurting. ‘You were in love with Clark Gable?’
Her pearlescent skin colours, ever so slightly. ‘Well! If you’re the manifestation of my subconscious, I’d think you ought to know about something like that!’
‘But I’m not the manifestation of—’
‘Anyhow, I don’t know if I was any more in love with him than I’ve ever been with a man. He was just the one that kept popping into my head earlier. And I suppose Rainier does look a little like him, with his moustache … I say: this fellow you’re talking about, the one you say you’re in love with, does he have a moustache? Because it would make a lot of sense if you said he did.’
‘No. He doesn’t have a moustache.’ I feel giddy with frustration though, to be fair, that could also be down to a combination of the lateness of the hour and the quantity of champagne I’ve drunk this evening. ‘Look,’ I try one more time, rather desperately, ‘I don’t know if you ever met Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe …’
‘Well, of course I have. They’re sweet girls … Oh!’ Grace gasps. ‘Is this another message? Because they do say that the prince was interested in meeting Marilyn Monroe, as a prospective bride, before he met me. Not that anything of that sort would have stood a chance of success, of course. Nothing against Marilyn, but I don’t think the people of Monaco would have stood for that.’
And then, quite abruptly, she stops talking.
She’s staring down at my coffee table.
More accurately, she’s staring down at the OK! magazine that Cass dumped on my coffee table when she was round earlier this afternoon. The one with Prince Albert of Monaco, his wife Charlene and their children on the cover.
‘Who is that woman?’ Grace asks, pointing a rather shaky finger at the magazine’s cover. ‘And why is she wearing my earrings?’
A terrible feeling of dread pulses through me.
I can’t tell Grace Kelly – even a magical Grace Kelly – that this is her adult son, a son who, as far as she’s concerned, hasn’t even been conceived yet. Can I? Even if she believes I’m a dream, some harbinger of her future, it’s just too close to her tragic reality, too uncomfortable for me to voice …
‘And who,’ she asks, in a much smaller, fainter voice, all trace of regal grandiosity completely disappeared, ‘is that man she’s with?’
I open my mouth to tell her … what?
I mean, really, what? Because it says, quite plainly, in the magazine’s block-lettered headline, that this is ALBERT OF MONACO AND HIS BEAUTIFUL FAMILY ON THE EVE OF PUBLICATION OF NEW OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY OF HIS BELOVED MOTHER, PRINCESS GRACE.
‘Miss Kelly,’ I begin. I take a very deep breath. ‘Grace …’
But she’s gone. Disappeared. Vanished.
Where she was sitting, just three seconds ago, is now nothing but thin air.
Thin air wafting, of course, with the rose- and violet-tinged scent of her Fleurissimo perfume.
Hangover or no hangover, I’ve tidied the entire flat this morning – and hidden the offending copy of OK! safely at the bottom of the magazine pile – ready for Bogdan’s arrival at ten a.m.
Bogdan (Son of Bogdan) is – as the name might suggest – the son of my former landlord, Bogdan Senior, and now one of my greatest friends. He’s a part-time handyman and a part-time hairdresser (secretly, because his Moldovan crime-lord father would have a thing or two to say about the hairdressing if he knew about it), and both those skills have come in very handy to me since I got to know him. This morning, he’s popping over to help me put up a little flat-pack IKEA desk in the studio, so that I can work properly out of there until I decide exactly what to do with the space.
And, although he doesn’t know it yet, to discuss last night’s mystical arrival on the sofa. Because Bogdan is the only person in my life who’s undergone the full magical Chesterfield experience. My memory is forever imprinted, in fact, with the image of him sitting on the sofa, chattering away nineteen to the dozen with Marilyn Monroe, and – always the hairdresser – attempting to persuade her to ditch her trademark blonde (‘too much cliché, Miss Marilyn’) and become a brunette. Bogdan’s sang-froid in the face of the mind-boggling was nothing less than astounding and, though we’ve rarely spoken about it since, it’s been a huge relief to know that he’s in on the whole bizarre situation too.
I’ve just put the kettle on for one of Bogdan’s strong cups of black tea when there’s a knock all the way downstairs and I head down to let him in.
When I open the front door, he’s standing on the pavement outside wearing his usual air of mild-to-moderate tragedy, along with a pair of (extremely brave) rainbow-striped cargo trousers, and a T-shirt that informs me that Harry Styles Is Cute … But His Boyfriend Is Cuter.
I still can’t quite believe that his father hasn’t noticed anything about Bogdan yet. Though I suppose it’s possible that Bogdan leaves the family house in the morning wearing traditional Moldovan dress, or whatever else his scary dad would approve of, and then puts on his rainbow-themed, Harry-Styles-appreciating garb when he’s at a safe distance.
‘Good morning,’ Bogdan informs me now, in his usual lugubrious manner. ‘This is most exciting occasion.’
‘It is?’
‘New flat,’ he reminds me. He uses a huge hand to wave at the street. ‘In tiptop surroundings. Are you meeting celebrity neighbours?’
‘I don’t think I have celebrity neighbours.’
Bogdan makes a tsk noise before heading through the door and closing it behind him. ‘Of course you are having the celebrity neighbours. Is Notting Hill, Libby. Am thinking you will be bumping into Claudia Schiffer when you are popping to Whole Foods for guarana smoothies and cashew nuts. Am thinking you will be exchanging the nod with Elle Macpherson when you are going for early morning run. Am thinking …’
‘Hang on,’ I say, leading the way up the stairs. ‘What makes you think that now that I live in Notting Hill I’m automatically going to become some sort of healthy-living obsessive?’
‘But this is exactly what you must be doing!’ He sounds appalled that I’ve not considered this. ‘You are very pretty girl, Libby, but I cannot be making words into mincemeat.’
‘You’re not going to mince your words, you mean?’
‘Yes. Am saying that if you are successful jewellery designer living in Notting Hill, you are needing to be looking part.’ He gives my outfit – jeans and a grey hoodie, which to be fair to me I only slung on because I was tidying up this morning – a disapproving once-over. ‘Come to be thinking of it, guarana smoothie and early morning jog may be too advanced for now. Perhaps we are needing to be focusing on grooming basics before we are worrying about this.’
‘Thanks, Bogdan, but I don’t actually need your help with grooming basics …’
‘Am begging to be different. You are being in very urgent need of help with hair, for starters, Libby.’ He stares, in a woebegone fashion, at my straggly mouse-brown ponytail. ‘Am not able to be punching the pulls …’
‘Pulling punches,’ I correct him, and then, because I can’t deal with too many more incidents of Bogdan mangling his English idioms this morning, I go on, ‘Look, we can discuss my hair later. Right now, I need to talk to you about something more important.’
‘More important than hair?’
‘More important than hair, Bogdan, yes.’ I go over to the sofa and put a hand on the over-stuffed back. ‘It’s happened again.’
‘What is happening again?’
‘The sofa. You know. The … thing it does.’
His impassive face barely registers this, but then to Bogdan a magical sofa isn’t anything earth-shattering. He takes these things in his rainbow-coloured stride.
‘Someone new is appearing?’
‘Yes.’
He gazes down at the sofa. ‘Is Elizabeth Taylor?’
‘No.’
‘Is Jean Harlow?’
‘No.’
‘Is Ava Gardner?’
‘No.’ I lower my voice, though I couldn’t really tell you why. ‘It was … Grace Kelly.’
Just for a moment, Bogdan looks impressed. ‘I am loving her.’
‘Right, well …’
‘Seriously. Am being in love with her. She is my … how are you saying? Perfect woman.’
I glance at his Harry Styles Is Cute T-shirt. ‘Er … are you quite sure you have a perfect woman?’
‘There is no need for the being snarky. Am I ever asking you the personal questions about your specific sexual persuasions?’
‘Well, OK, no, you don’t ask me questions about my sexual persuasion, as such, Bogdan, no. But you’ve never exactly been shy about digging for details on my sex life with Dillon.’
My ex-boyfriend Dillon is – along with Harry Styles, Harry Styles’s ‘boyfriend’ and now, apparently, Grace Kelly – another person Bogdan has a heartfelt crush on.
‘Am falling in love with her,’ he goes on, lyrically, ‘from the moment am first seeing her in Mogambo. Was even trying to be growing moustache like Clark Gable, but is difficult as was only eleven at time.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought growing a Clark Gable moustache was difficult at age eleven. I’d have thought it was impossible.’
‘No, no. For me, this is perfectly possible. Is simply difficult as world is not ready for eleven-year-old boy with Clark Gable moustache. Am being on receiving end of the terrible mocking in streets of Chis¸ina˘u. Perhaps would have been different in London.’
‘I highly doubt that, to be honest with you.’
‘But Grace Kelly …’ Bogdan heaves a sigh. ‘Has ever there been such classical beauty? And such style! When am thinking of her in that wedding dress, am feeling—’
‘Yes, well, that wedding dress is what she popped up in last night,’ I say, hastily, before Bogdan can go any further down the route of the way Grace Kelly in her wedding dress makes him feel. ‘Right here on the Chesterfield.’
‘Right here?’ Bogdan murmurs, sitting down on the sofa and caressing, with one of his huge hands, the cushion beside him. ‘This is very exciting news, Libby. Very exciting indeed.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is exciting, kind of … I mean, she was a little bit bossy, to be honest with you. And she’s adamant that she’s the real one and I’m just popping up in a dream. As the manifestation of her subconscious.’
‘Is honour indeed,’ Bogdan says, ‘to be subconscious of Grace Kelly.’
‘Bogdan! I’m not her subconscious! Obviously.’
‘Of course. Am forgetting.’
‘And I don’t even know if she’s going to come back again, because she accidentally saw a magazine cover with her son on it and – well, I don’t know why, exactly – that made her vanish in a puff of smoke …’
‘Ah,’ says Bogdan, wisely. ‘This is very interesting Chicken McNugget of information.’
‘So, do you agree with me that we ought to try to find out a bit more? I wanted to ask you about that aunt you told me about the last time.’
‘Aunt?’
‘You told me once that you had an aunt who’s some sort of … I don’t know … mystic, or something.’ I feel foolish, to be honest, even saying the word. ‘And that she’s experienced this kind of thing before.’
‘The enchantment of the soft furnishings?’
OK, now I feel even more foolish.
‘Yes, Bogdan, the enchantment of the soft furnishings,’ I say, glad that it’s only me and him (and, possibly, the faint stirrings of Grace Kelly) in the room right now.
‘Ah, you are speaking of my Aunt Vanya. The sister of my father’s cousin’s second wife.’
This doesn’t sound much like an aunt to me, but I’m absolutely not about to get into a discussion of Moldovan cultural practices with Bogdan.
‘I was wondering if you could call her – this Aunt Vanya – and ask if she’d mind having a chat to me about it. Through you, obviously, so you can … er … translate.’
‘There is no need for making the call.’