Harrison begged me to move into the house: it was convenient to the campus; it was big enough so that I need endure his company no more than I wished; his own library was as good as the college’s; I wouldn’t need to bother with marketing, cooking, housekeeping. Even the masquerade would not be very tiresome (no costumes required!), since we could freely discuss anything so long as he could speak of me as Lady Pembroke: I could leave it to him, as he left it to his madness, to do the complicated translation. From London, Jane seconded the motion. I consulted Andrews, who warmly approved.
If I never loved His Majesty, I truly liked him, and never simply pitied him. I meant to move out as soon as Jane returned, but she stayed on, somehow managing Mack Enterprises by remote control. In the first half of ’68, especially, Harrison was a delightful companion: witty, generous, thoughtful. In my absence, so the house staff reported, he gave free rein to his follies: that we must fly to Denmark to escape the deluge; that we were aboard Noah’s ark; that it was not too late to undo the fiasco of the American War. Directly I returned, the George/ Elizabeth business became little more than an elaborate (if unremitting) way of speaking. Somewhere along the road our good friendship came to include sleeping together: my memory is that one snowy night in January, as I read student essays and sipped brandy by the fire and Harrison played Jephthah’s lamentation on the harpsichord, he suddenly said: “Let’s redo history, what?” And then proposed that, since the king and Lady Pembroke never did get to bed together, and since we weren’t really they, we improve the facts by doing what they didn’t.
“Dear Germaine,” he concluded, “I should enjoy that very much.” Had he not used, that once, my real name…
My person and modest competency never so gratified a man, before or since. You will want details: there are none, particularly. Seventy is not impotent, except as alcohol, illness, or social conditioning have made it so; it has no stamina, loves its sleep, will not stand without coaxing, draws aim more often than it fires — but it will go to’t, smartly too, with the keener joy in what it can no longer take for granted. Harrison relished each connexion as he relished fine days and dinners, knowing he had not a great many left. Jane had put sex behind her years since; the chap was starved for it, and knew what he was about. I have made sorry choices in my life: becoming Harrison’s Lady Elizabeth was not one. A pleasurable semester.
During the which, whilst I waited word from André or a fair glimpse of our son, and endeavoured to impart to my Marshyhopers some sense of what is meant by the terms Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism (but how, when almost nothing their eyes fall upon was there the day before yesterday?), and watched poor embattled Morgan yield at last on the misbegotten Tower of Truth, and confirmed my addiction to oysters in any form, I tried in vain to mend the old quarrel between Harrison and his son, whom I came to know and rather like. (The daughter Jeannine—“Bea Golden”—was another matter: between drying-out visits to that Fort Erie “sanatorium,” she was busy divorcing her third husband out in California and — what we didn’t know at this time — attaching herself to Mr Prinz.) On this subject my friend was truly deluded: he believed his son an unprincipled weakling and Reg Prinz, for some reason or other, a scrupulous fellow, when from all I could observe Drew Mack was, if somewhat gullible, the very soul of moral principle, pursuing ardently what he believed just and good, whereas Prinz (whom too I saw once or twice more that year) has I daresay no principles at all except cinematographic, and even those he seems to improvise on the run. Suffice it as illustration of their scrupulosity that Drew — who had no salary, worked without pay for his liberal causes (to which he also donated his trust income), and frankly coveted his parents’ wealth for the sake of these same causes — never to my knowledge imputed mercenary motives to my liaison with his father, whom he was gratified to see so happy in my society. Whereas Prinz, in a rare burst of sustained verbality, advised me one evening in June, just after Harrison’s great seizure: “If he leaves you a bundle, put it into the flick. Double or nothing.”
I had thought to travel that season; north from the Chesapeake at least, whose muggy summer nights I had sampled in September. Perhaps to France, to visit “Juliette.” But word came from Jane, of the most unexpected and circumlocutory sort, that “interests of a personal nature” were holding her in Britain; apprised that her husband of some forty years had taken a turn for the worse, she satisfied herself by transatlantic telephone that he was not dangerous or dying, authorised me and Doctor #2 to take whatever measures we thought necessary to provide for his comfort, hoped we would inform her at once of any crises, and begged me to stay on at Tidewater Farms at least for the summer “in my supervisory capacity,” at a salary of, say, $500 a month “over and above”!
I declined the salary for myself, looked about tor someone else to hire with it, found no one even remotely suitable except Yvonne Mack, Drew’s wife, who refused unless her father-in-law, “crazy or not,” recanted his racism and fully reinstated his son and herself in his favour. Alas, Harrison was beyond doing so. To him she was the cast-off Princess of Wales, “hot for the king’s John Thomas, what?” No lucid side to his hallucinating now: Harrison believed us seventeen years old and immortal; he declared he’d raised his daughter Amelia from the grave (and conversed touchingly with the ghosts of Drew and Jeannine Mack when they were babies); he dressed in white robes and let his beard grow. He took his bed to be “the Royal Celestial Electrical Bed of Patagonia in the Temple of Health and Hymen on Pall Mall,” and guaranteed me a healthy child if I would make love with him in it. Dr #2 (whom I fetched in, who could do nothing) became “Dr James Graham, M.D., O.W.L.” (O Wonderful Love), the inventor of that same bed, a Scottish quack who claimed to have learnt electricity from Ben Franklin and herbal medicine from the Indians; “George III the First” had declined his offer of treatment in 1788, but by charging £50 a night for the use of his famous bed and attracting to his temple such worthies as the Scotts of Edinburgh (who brought young Walter there in vain hope of restoring his withered leg), the good doctor had earned almost as much as our #2. I declined: he seldom knew me now even as Elizabeth.
I “supervised” Harrison through the fall — no labour, only a sadness — when too, after Morgan’s departure, I assumed the real labour of the acting provostship at Marshyhope. This for the reasons set forth in my first letter, plus one other, which you will now understand: unbelievably, on Guy Fawkes Day, beyond Hubert Humphrey’s defeat by Richard Nixon… nothing happened! I had scarcely doubted that this was the date André had waited for; was cross in advance with his damned rituality. Schott had won the field at Redmans Neck; had already made his unexpected offer (perhaps at Cook’s inscrutable prompting?), and I’d asked for a week to consider it — actually to learn whether André wanted me elsewhere. I had no other invitations or income. Lyndon Johnson had vacated the presidency, Robert Kennedy and Martin King had been assassinated, the Democratic convention in Chicago disrupted; the Left was everywhere in disarray; it was past time for André to make whatever grand moves he had in mind. We’d even cancelled our fireworks (Harrison no longer followed the calendar anyroad), lest they be mistaken for a premature Republican celebration on the one hand or an armed student rising on the other. I sat up past midnight with the dreary election returns on the telly, waiting for the phone, the doorbell, a special-delivery letter at the least — His Majesty beside me clucking his tongue at what his mutinous colonies had come to.