Lucy Holliday - A Night In With Grace Kelly

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 …’