Lucy Holliday - A Night In With Grace Kelly

‘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.