But, as I say, I had to hand it to Larry. My family is dead into that sort of thing. Like practically everyone else in Cookham’s damp, moldy clime, they worship the Royal Family. They take Town and Country, they’ve lifetime subscriptions to King and Queen.
“I hope they won’t make a fuss,” he said.
“Old poo,” I said, linking my arm through his, “you’re their daughter’s fiancé, why shouldn’t they make a fuss?”
“I hope,” he said so vehemently I almost couldn’t stand it, “they don’t treat me like some pop star dropping in on the family as a favor to a character in a sitcom on the telly!”
“You sound so mean. You haven’t even met them. Or is ‘your kind’ just privy by birth to the type?”
Now I see I was only encouraging him, egging him on, pulling strings.
“This place smells of bridles and neat’s-foot oil,” he said. “It stinks of polished gun stocks and the ascot resins.”
“Excuse us, Prince,” I said, “if we’re too caught up in the English dream.”
He glared and fell silent. We were but a hundred or so yards from my parents’ house now. (Larry had left the car behind Cookham churchyard because he’d been reluctant to bring the crestless Jag along the damp, unpaved ruts of the wagon road.) Was it my imagination, or were those our neighbors crouched down behind or slouched to the sides of their French windows and peeking out at us like so many posted hosts hushing each other and muffling their hilarity at the approach of the guest of honor at a surprise party? I couldn’t actually distinguish anyone but had this sense of urgent bustle at the periphery. The Prince, like some fast feint artist who had perfected distraction, incorporated it into his bag of tricks, a juggler, magician, or ventriloquist, say, seemed never to lift his eyes from the road but directed a steady stream of questions at me.
“Who’s the tweedy type with the string of pearls? Do you know the gent with the plate-glass monocle? What is that creature? Are those really jodhpurs he’s wearing?”
He meant Amanda Styles-Brody, he meant Winston Moores-Wrightman, he meant Charley Narl. I hadn’t seen them, but it could have been they. They were my parents’ nearest neighbors, but how, from this distance, could he possibly have known that Major Moores-Wrightman’s monocle was ordinary window glass? Were we, indeed, types and phonies? Were all Englishmen, or all peoples really, viewed from the height of a throne, so categorical? And might not even the behaviors of princes, of kings and empresses, from God’s point-of-view, seem at least a little ridiculous? Is He fond of a dirty joke, for example? “Look what we’ve here,” would He say, “the empress is having her period!”? Is there, I mean, something petty about even our physical requirements, something inimical in Nature to nature, not just our renewable need to eat and sleep and move our foods along the degrading alchemical chambers of their digestion, converting not only red, gross meat into excrement but even grains and greens? If so, then I was a goner myself, a laughingstock of the universe, what with the itchings and urgings of my physical nature, my rut now (growing stronger as we came closer to the actual rooms where puberty had happened to me one afternoon between the time I’d been “Mother” to two or three friends at high tea, and the hour the last girl had been picked up by one of her parents and taken home) nothing more than blood in league with this intellectual masochism inexplicably programmed into my romantic, muddy, through-a-glass-darkly, sucker- punch imagination and glass-jaw heart.
(The gothic, girly inclinations, Sid, that do me every damn time!)
Not once feeling anger, no matter I’d teased and quibbled with him, at the Prince’s disdain for our Cookham ways, so much as a heightened sexual desire. So that, despite Daddy’s carryings-on and the fuss he made, his almost maniacal blather as he poured sherry into each of our glasses, giving in some exaggerated chivalric parody not just my mother the wine before he offered any to the Successor, the Prince, Duke of Wilshire, future King of all the Englands, but to me as well, probably saving the Prince till last not just out of manners but so he could pay him the steadiest attention. Meanwhile, as I say, keeping up this incredible monologue about French antique furniture, at one time actually raising his glass in a toast to the Royal Collection!
“To your rooms, Sir!” proclaimed my mad father. “To the seventy-three excellent fauteuils, forty-one vintage ber- gères, and thirty-five folding pliants in your family’s palaces. To all the capital chaises in Wilshire House. To the master chairmakers: to each extraordinary Boulard, Cresson (I sat in one once!), and Gourdin. To your luxurious Jacobs, Senés, and Tilliards on the important Savonnerie carpets. To all the cylindrical, tabouret stools like so many upholstered drums, and all the beautiful banquettes along Balmoral’s, Buckingham’s, and Windsor’s walls. A toast to all cunning, exquisite finishing touch— your splendid accessories, the fire screens, gilt candlesticks, Imari bowls, Houdon marbles, and soft-paste porcelains. Your snuffboxes studded with gemstones like pimientos in olives. Clocks, chenets, bras-de-lumières, silver chandeliers, Kändler birds, girandole centerpieces.”
“‘These are a few of my favorite things,’” the Prince remarked darkly, wryly, but if Father even heard him, let alone understood him, he gave no indication. Me, he had me jumping!
Meanwhile, Dad continued his absurd toast, rattling off names like Caffiéri, Duplessis, Saint-Germain, Gouthière, Meissonnier, Thomire. I was not his daughter for nothing. I hadn’t heard him carry on in years, but the names of these classic metalworkers had been familiar to me since we’d first moved to Cookham when I was twelve and my father had taken up the eccentric conversation of the natives.
He was into the heavier pieces now, going on about commodes, chests of drawers, consoles, escritoires, Beneman’s famous games table where Marie Antoinette lost so much money one night that Louis XVI abandoned his plans to add another wing on the palace at Versailles and thus, through inadvertence and his wife’s bad luck at cards, put back the revolution and delayed his own beheading by perhaps three years.
He proposed toasts to the great cabinetmakers represented in the Collection— to Carlin and Canabas and Cressent, to Dubois and Leleu and Riesener.
I don’t know, maybe he was nervous. Maybe everyone in Cookham is nervous and they talk this way to cover it up.
He got round to the beds, the parquetry cradles in the nursery, the tall, sculpted, fabled four-posters in the King’s chambers, the Queen’s, the Princes’ and Princesses’, reeling off their inventory numbers in the Journal du Garde-Meuble. He toasted their dozen gorgeous canapés.
“How I should enjoy to spend a night in such a bed! A night? A nap! What dreams! I would exchange a year’s reality for the visions that might visit me in such circumstances!”
“Really?” said Lawrence. “Me, I’m a seafaring prince, I sleep in me ’ammock.”
Oh, he was wicked; oh, he was cruel!
Father looked as if he’d been slapped. Indeed, a red mark appeared to rise like a welt on his cheek just as if that were the place the Prince had stung him. Mother, who’d been quiet, who’d not once mentioned her garden or her work with Oxfam, who’d hardly moved, who’d hardly moved even as she curtsied when I introduced her to the son of a b-tch, and, in a way, whose silence and lockjaw paralysis of being was even more fawning than poor Father’s helpless logorrhea, quite suddenly appeared to slouch, to crouch, to squeeze in upon herself almost as if she’d been that tweedy, string-of-pearls neighbor effaced behind the closed French windows, muffling not hilarity but a horror so complete it might have been its counterfeit.