“Oh,” I said, dismissively, “compromising positions. Fa la la, tra la la.”
Just then the car phone sounded its rapid sets of twin, paired, ringing gutturals, a noise peculiar to the British telephone system that always startles me, reminds me, no matter how often I hear it, of the signal for emergencies in the engine rooms of ships.
“Yes?”
“Larry, Alec. I rang up your Bentley and tried you in the Land Rover, but no one was home. Where are you headed? Is Louise with you? Give me your coordinates, I bet I beat you there, vroom, vroom.”
“What do you want, Alec? This phone isn’t secure.”
“Mary and Robin are with me, Cousin Anne is.”
“How are you, darling?”
From the way he reddened each time her name was mentioned, I’d long ago realized Anne must have been one of the cousins my intended had fondled and whose frocks he’d looked up as a child.
“Hello, Anne,” he said, “I should have thought you’d know better than to get into a car with my brother.”
“Well, you never take me anywhere.”
“She’s teasing you, Prince,” Alec said. “She’s told me of just incredible places you’ve been together.”
“Traffic is quite serious today,” said Larry. “This phone is not secure,” he hissed. “I’m ringing off.”
“No no, wait,” Alec said. “It’s about your wedding. Hallo? Louise? It’s about your wedding.”
“Hello Alec.”
“Hello Louise.”
“Hello Mary.”
“Are you still sore?”
“Hello Robin. No, no, I’m not at all actually.”
“I didn’t mean any harm. I was drunk.” He paused. “I was drunk as a lord!” he said, and laughed heartily at his obscure little joke.
“What do you mean it’s about the wedding?” Larry broke in.
“Why the Royal Wedding. Your wedding.” Mary was my favorite among Larry’s siblings. Indeed, she’s the only one with whom I’m still in touch. I say this without much fear of jeopardizing her situation since she’s always been pretty open about our friendship, treating me kindly in the press, the only one of them, in fact, to have stood up for me and gone on record that she never thought I was “working” the Prince. Mary certainly doesn’t need my endorsement. Probably it would go better for her if I kept quiet about it, but in my view loyalty begets loyalty — though wasn’t it, in fact, loyalty to my idea of the Crown that allowed all this to have gone so far in the first place? — and, for whatever it’s worth, I think, though it’s untrained, Mary has quite a nice voice and, except for the fact that rap might not be the material to which her sweet little instrument is best suited, I see no reason, though she’s a Princess, she shouldn’t make a perfectly decent career in show business.
“What about it?”
“Well, we were thinking.”
“Alec and me.”
“Me too. It was my idea.”
“It was Robin’s idea.”
“But it’s your wedding.”
“We’d have to clear it with you first.”
“Absolutely.”
“Of course.”
“No question about it.”
“We’d never go behind your back.”
“He’ll never go for it.”
“Oh, Anne, we don’t know that.”
“He’ll never go for it. You’ll see.”
“This isn’t a secure phone.”
“Would it be all right, do you think, if we wore, well, jeans, to the wedding?”
“Jeans? To a Royal Wedding? In Westminster Abbey?”
“I told you he wouldn’t go for it.”
“Well, not jeans, or not jeans exactly. Regular morning coats and top hats for the boys, actually.”
“And gorgeous gowns for the ladies. With these ravishing big hats and really swell veils.”
“Just cut like jeans.”
“From stone-washed denim.”
“Oh, it would be such fun! The Sloane Rangers would just die!”
“Hello, Denise.”
“Hi, Louise,” she said, and I had this image of Britain’s Royal Family stuffed into Alec’s Quantra like so many circus clowns. If George and Charlotte, preparatory to standing down, had not been off on what they must surely have thought of — the Nöel Coward King, his Nöel Coward Queen — as their final farewell world tour — after our initial meeting, and with the exception of a few subsequent appearances with them at the house of this or that duke or marquess or earl, I seldom saw them — taking their last curtain calls in Tonga and Singapore, Belfast, New Zealand, and other Commonwealth ports of call, I could comfortably have thought of them back there with the rest of the zanies.
“You’re wasting your time,” Anne said, “he’ll never go for it.”
“Not so fast. Give him a chance. Let him think about it.”
“No,” Larry said. “I don’t want to think about it. It’s out of the question.”
“You see? What did I tell you?”
“You never know, he could have said yes.”
“The child is father to the man,” his cousin said.
Larry rang off.
“What did she mean, Larry?”
“What did he mean?”
“What did who mean?”
“What did he mean are you still sore?”
“Robin?”
“What did he mean?”
I didn’t want to quarrel with him. So I made something up. I don’t even remember now what it was. Just some harmless white lie I passed off. To keep the peace. (Probably I picked up on the word “sore.” Because that was mostly how we spoke to one another in those days— in all love’s thrust-and-parry, in all its stichomythic Ping-Pong tropes of engagement. Each hanging on the other’s words as if love were some syntax of Germanic delay. Because this wasn’t as it had always been with me, Sir Sid. Accustomed as I was to arias, soliloquies, lectures, speeches, promises.) Let’s say I said, “I don’t know, Larry, you know how Robin is. He probably thought he offended me.”
“Did he?”
“Well, yes, I suppose he probably did.”
“He drinks too much. He isn’t kind when he’s drunk. He forgets who he is.”
“He forgets what he is.”
“Hmn. “Yes,” Larry said, “he forgets what he is.”
I always thought of Prince Robin as the pie-faced one, of his strange, vaguely rubbery features at once sullen and cheerful like the pressed pug nose and big puffed eyes on a victim of Down’s syndrome. He reminded me rather of that actor Charles Laughton.
Two or so years ago, when I first saw California, I remember how very surprised I was that it looked exactly how I thought it would look, and seemed, it seemed, just how I thought it would seem. This wasn’t déjà vu or any mystic sense of Tightness; the sense, I mean, that California was some fate I’d been preparing for. Often it’s nothing more than, oh, the availability of the world through all the telecommunication satellites that are constantly orbiting it, sucking up and spewing out geography across incredible distances so that nothing, not its poles, or rain forests, or the deepest trenches in its oceans, is unfamiliar to us. It is, I think, some salient hallmark stamped in perception and stuck in the blood. In the event, my years in America had largely cut me off from the hype from home, yet I knew before knowing him what Robin was like. He was a type, but we are all of us types. How could we be in the same rooms with each other if this weren’t so? We should want bars between us, the protection of cages. Robin is Robin, neither mischievous like Alec nor playful like Denise, and of course he has none of Mary’s sweetness or Larry’s sense of responsibility. What can I say? I wanted bars between us, the protection of cages.