Had the Prince been scornful I would have broken our engagement then and there, I swear I would. I would have demanded he leave our house, that he quit Cookham forever. But he reversed himself, was all charm and a noblesse oblige you could eat off of. He papered over his rudeness with a joke and a compliment to my father’s astonishing knowledge of the holdings. “You certainly know your onions, sir,” he told him, and promised to conduct them on a guided tour of the palaces any time Dad thought was convenient. He would send, he said, a car for them.
“An estate car,” Father joked. “I’m in the trade.”
“Of course,” Lawrence said. “In Richmond. Louise told me.”
I detected no scorn on the Prince’s face, though I knew his heart.
Still, I could barely distinguish my anger from my pure let-fly lust. Indeed, they seemed to feed on each other. (Which just goes to show you, don’t it, Sir Sid, that you can take the girl out of the country, send her to California, have her go for an au pair, or a housekeeper in a hotel, and even, when the really hard times come, for a sewer of houses, till her hands run with blisters, blood, and aloe; spring her, I mean, from all dependence and parasitical, female juniority; from all, I mean, the pretty, petty echelons of servitudinal, wide-eyed love, to the point where her arms and back run with muscle, but — WHOOSH! BAM! POWIE! — let one dark put- down or one sharp look be cast in her direction — provided, of course, it’s the right direction — and she’ll mewl like a lass in a story. As if California never happened, as if she never turned a mattress or ever swept sand.) What can I tell you, he had me jumping.
We were on the pretty upholstered bench in our large lounge. (Not even Father would have called it a bergère. Not even Cookham would have called it the library.) Mother explained it was Sheila’s day off and went to prepare tea. I reached for the Prince’s hands and took them in my own. I brought them down into my lap. I put this gentle pressure on them. I shifted position ever so slightly. And leaned my weight into the Prince. Pressing myself against his haunch. Imperceptibly, I parted my thighs and began swaying from side to side. I flexed my buttocks, I arched my back. Beneath my dress my body rose perhaps a fraction of a fraction of an inch above the bench. I relaxed and, settling my weight, started all over again. I shifted, I swayed, I flexed, I arched, I rose.
I came up against the Prince’s hands. By displacements so gradual they were almost infinitesimal, we exchanged momenta. He began to bounce my body like a ball.
As I’ve already told you, what can I tell you, he had me jumping. Push had come to shove. Aiee, aiee. I didn’t care where I was. I didn’t know where I was.
Poor Father.
I say “poor father,” but I couldn’t have said then, as I can’t say with certainty now, whether he even knew what was going on. “Ever so slightly,” I’ve said, “imperceptibly.” I’ve said “displacements so gradual” and “almost infinitesimal,” and implied that moment of inertia when we transferred momentum. So maybe he hadn’t seen anything really. (It was moldly old damp Cookham, after all. It was a gray Sunday autumn afternoon in Cookham. The lights hadn’t been turned on yet. It was dim in the lounge.) So maybe he hadn’t seen anything. (And me hoping the water would never boil and get transformed into tea, wanting to spare at least one of them, you see. Look, we honor our fathers and our mothers. For a time, for a time we do. Then for a time, when the blood sings, while it rushes like wind through the terrible chambers and glands of our change and necessity, we don’t. Or can’t. Then, when we can again, we do again.)
So maybe it was just the awkward silence that launched Dad into speech.
“Do you know, Sir,” he said, “something that’s always bothered me, something I took the trouble to look up in the library but couldn’t manage to pin down. Well, I’m a bit uncertain about a title is what it comes down to is all. If the living mother of a queen is referred to as the Queen Mother, well, once you and Louise are married, after the coronation I mean, well, would Mrs. Bristol be the King Mother-in- Law? Would one be the King Father-in-Law? It’s only a point of order, of course. It isn’t important. I’m only just asking.”
“What? What?” said the Prince, who was breathing heavily now.
“Well,” Father said, “it’s simply a matter of— ”
“I don’t know,” said the Prince. “I don’t know, I’m not sure, I shall have to find out. Look,” Lawrence said, catching his breath, “we’ve had rather a long drive down from London. I find I’m suddenly quite tired. Perhaps it was all that talk of beds. I should so like to catch a nap. Is there a place one might lie down? Louise, you could show me. Please apologise to Mrs. Bristol for me, would you? I should quite like some tea, but after my nap.”
Sunday February 16, 1992
How Royals Found Me Unsuitable to Marry Their Larry
We were in what despite the intervening years, and (from the presence of the abandoned giraffes and tigers, monkeys and bears, somehow come down in the world, reduced to memento, simple stuffed souvenir) recognizably, too, was still my room (which even without any fine antique French furniture, could have been any schoolgirl’s, even a French one’s, in any epoch, who, come fresh to her menses was come fresh to virginity, too, since without their onset she couldn’t have known carnal desire, not carnal desire, that queer, obsessive magnetism of the skin and heart and head as much as of actual breasts or mysteriously furred-over sexual organs) on what was (never mind it wasn’t a rare four-poster and boasted no gorgeous canopy) still (fourteen or fifteen years after that alarming high tea with those two or three childhood friends) my bed, though it was scarcely longer or wider than a cot.
Because there must be something about the act of sex that is indifferent to space. How otherwise explain how two full- grown people — and one a prince with all that that suggests of dimension and line — could manage not only to lie down together on what the full-grown woman distinctly recalled having outgrown all by herself fourteen or fifteen years earlier when she was four or five inches shorter and weighed twenty or twenty-five pounds less, but thrash about on it too? And something in the act of sex indifferent to time as well. Or anyway oblivious of it, of anything but some overwhelming, all-inclusive Now. Because how else can one account for that seemingly magical obliteration or at least smudge of each intervening sequence from how we met to how we got engaged; through how I was received, and how he courted me, and how push came to shove, until almost the very day the Royals found me unsuitable to marry their Larry (not to mention the half-dozen Sunday installments, January 12, 1992, to February 16, 1992, inclusive, in which I not only tell all but apparently lay bare the soul of the entire Kingdom)? I mean how else can it be both the morning after one of those somehow issueless, drought-inspired, all-night Pacific blows in the two-a-penny wicky-ups when we — Jane and Marjorie and I — swept up sand and shook out mats and rewove walls in my good old beachcombing salad days before I was ever an all-but-crowned Princess rolling about on the floor of a wicky-up in mutual, amorous lock- leg and lusty, heartfelt grabflesh with your Heir Apparent, the two of us g — sing the he-l out of each other, spreading one another’s but-cks, squeezing one another’s p-rts (and the Prince singing out at the top of his voice, too, so that I actually had to cover his mouth in order to restrain him, lay hands on him, on a Prince, lest the guests, many of whom were our employers, recall — Jane’s and Marjorie’s and mine — in the adjoining huts hear him, those who hadn’t already left for the Governor’s Palace to see if they might not still get a chair near the reviewing stand where he was scheduled to appear that afternoon with Lord Mayor Miniver, Lord and Lady Lewes and Anthony Fitz-Sunday, muffling his “Road to Mandalay” exuberance — and the Prince 1-cking the very palm over his mouth — sand in the high heels, aloe stains, patches of chlorophyll in the stockings and dresses on the frond-strewn floor of the unwinding wicky-up) one minute, and seven thousand something miles away and all that happened to us in between the next; push coming to shove, to pushing and pulling and thrusting and parrying, to all Love’s earth defying sexual acrobacy on that same astonishing, flexible, accommodate cot where fourteen or fifteen years previous I first came to my virginity due to the simple human fact of the onset of my monthlies?