“Too right.”
“So how could I?” he said as if he hadn’t heard me. “Because except for the odd birthday party when I was a child and ran about doing naughty things to my cousins at the bottom of the garden, messing their frocks and playing silly games with them, playing Harley Street, playing Spin the Jar, playing Postbox, where would I have found the time? And I’m always so tired, and— ”
“So you do mean to tell me your troubles.”
“We can talk about anything you want, Louise.”
“Why did you say we were engaged? Why did you tell everyone you’d obtained Their Majesties’ prior consent to the engagement?”
“Not just their consent. Their encouragement.”
“They don’t even know me,” I said.
“Well, I was ripe,” he said, echoing the term I had used to describe him to myself only that astonishing afternoon.
(And I’ll tell you something, Sir Sid. For the first time I began to regard it as a possibility. Not only the engagement, but the possibility of the Royal Wedding, too. For the first time began to think it might not be a bad tradeoff— a life with a mad Prince and then another with a mad king. To be Princess of All the Englands. And he was handsome. Possessed, as I say, of almost a surfeit of beauty. And I would be one of the world’s richest women. And, too, I was starting to have these feelings for him. Tell me, my dear press lord, was he the only game in town or was he the only game in town?)
“Ripe?” I said.
“They too,” he said. “All of us.”
“Meaning?”
“They signaled their eagerness to abdicate. They’re ready to step down. It came in over the wireless. ‘Sparks’ passed on the message.”
“What are they like, your family?”
“Well, you know about my cousins.”
“Not your cousins. Your mum and your dad.”
“The sibs get their names in the papers.”
“You get your name in the papers.”
“The columns,” he said disapprovingly. “But you know that of course.”
“I’ve been in the States two years. They have their own distractions and preoccupations in the States.”
“Oh right,” he said. (You see, Sir Sidney? How our affair was proceeding? How at once whirlwind and old hat it must have seemed to the both of us? It didn’t seem possible to me it was still the same day. Larry had probably already forgotten those two years in the States I had told him about. We were like some old married couple. We couldn’t remember each other’s sizes.) “I love them. It’s not that,” he said. “It’s not even that they’re bad. They’re lively, they’ve very good hearts. But I’ll tell you the truth, Louise, they’re not fit children for the sons and daughters of royalty. I blame the parents.”
“You blame the parents?”
“Our crowd has a saying: ‘It starts in the castle.’”
He had me jumping. I couldn’t read him clearly. Now some girls will tell you the first thing they look for in a man is a nice smile, or a sense of humor; or they look at his hands, his teeth— if he keeps them clean. His nails, his hair. Or see can they tell if he’s vulnerable, say. Something physical, something spiritual, six of one, half dozen of the other. But the very first thing that catches my attention about a man is whether or not I can read him clearly. If he’s mysterious, inscrutable. Well, it’s in the tradition. In my tradition. He had me jumping. I felt like a nurse again, Sid.
“They’re irresponsible, Louise. If we weren’t merely symbolic, what I’m saying would be treasonous.”
“They signaled they’re ready to abdicate, you said. Step down, let you take over. You’re the conscientious one.”
“Make me Regent before my time, you mean.”
“You’re twenty-nine.”
“Damn it, Louise, it’s not even their fault.”
“What’s not? Whose fault? I don’t follow. I’m not reading you clearly.”
“Alec’s, Robin’s, Mary’s, Denise’s. It’s not their fault. It’s George’s, our father’s fault. It’s Charlotte’s, our mother’s. Who introduced them? Who taught them to run with a fast crowd, rattle about in all that loose company? Who do you think leaked their names to the columns? Who lazied them down from University? Who coaxed them away with those dubious seconds and thirds? Two years ago? They weren’t like that two years ago. How could you know?”
Sunday, January 26, 1992
How I Was Received
Of course we were expected. They knew we were coming. They must have been waiting. They must have prepared the whole thing.
They looked like sovereigns out of Noël Coward. He might have been the actor/manager of his own touring theatrical troupe, she his principal player— sixty if she was a day, yet still called on to do ingenue parts, sophisticated ladies.
Because it’s amazing how much can be kept from the public, how there’s spin on the spin control, these now-you- see-it, now-you-don’t arrangements.
There Their Majesties were, two conflagrant figures, Himself in a red silk dressing gown and seated on an honest- to-god throne with a yellow ring of gleamless crown perched light and rakish on the top of his head like the wavy concatenations on a suspension bridge or the points on the crown of some picture-card king; Herself in a gilt chair a few feet off to her husband’s side and chugalugging smoke through a long silver cigarette holder.
He didn’t even look like the King. Because this was the stuff that didn’t get into the papers. I was certain I was the only one not of their inner circle ever to see such a sight. There were what seemed like ancient props from the repertoire lying about— scepters and orbs out of Shakespearean history plays. Indeed, it looked more like the greenroom of a theater in the provinces than like a room in a proper palace.
“M’boy!” the King said, pushing down from his throne, spry for a man his age, embracing his son. “Welcome! Welcome!
“And is this your young lady? And welcome to you, m’dear! I must say I admire your taste,” he told the boy as he deftly let go his arms around Lawrence, placed one hand on my shoulder, touched my rear end with the other and, shielding us from the Prince’s view, pinched me. Alarmed, I said nothing, merely, in a nervous attempt to brush it off, curtsied in His Majesty’s direction where I was met by his palm cunningly there to catch my curtsy and which he pressed smartly against my breast. “Ah,” said the King, hamming it up, projecting, stopping the show, “You’re worldly! She’s worldly, Lawrence. Excellent choice, lad, excellent! Good! I don’t much care for priggishness in a man, and quite despise it in a gel!”
“Do let go of her for a moment, George,” said his wife, “so I may give her a whiskey. Have we such a thing as ice? Make yourself helpful, my darling, just would you? The poor thing has come all the way from the States and is almost certainly in need of ice.”
“There is no ice,” the King pronounced solemnly.
“My husband informs me that there is no ice. We were all a bit nervous that the ice would have gone off so of course it seems that it has. I do apologize. I am so very ashamed. But please don’t think too ill of our people, there are some quite civilized patches here and there in the Kingdom. Larry, you shall have to show your young friend — Louise, isn’t it? — that she’s not to judge by us, that not everyone does these blue, druidy things at the solstice. Of course you don’t have to drink that if it’s too despicable, dear. Should you not rather have one of those sweet, poofy drinks that don’t absolutely require ice — Louise, isn’t it?”