And he was singing now, too. Anthems, sea chanteys, tunes to hornpipes: “Rule Britannia,” “Popeye the Sailor- man.” My astonished parents downstairs, staring up at the ceiling toward my room had to be; mother; my struck- dumb dad. Outraged, or humiliated, or even pleased as punch that Lawrence, Crown Prince of England, to whom, if all went well, he would one day be King Father-in-Law, might be up in her old room serenading and di-dl-ng his one-and-only daughter.
Which is when I opened my eyes. At the thought of my dad in the lounge. At the thought of me mum holding tea. I opened my eyes. Outraged, humiliated. But still into it (the sex act an annihilator of character, too, indifferent not only to time and space but also to circumstance), horny withal, I mean.
To see Lawrence watching me.
“Your eyes are open,” he said.
“Yes.”
It was his hang-up. All that old business about his inability to make even n-mber one in front of his mates at the Academy, his Prince’s shame in having to — art and s-it and pi-s like other men, the reason he nursed his own v-gin-t-, his Prince’s aversion to ever having to show his throes. It was probably the reason he’d resisted making love to me since that day in the wicky-up.
I was suddenly fearful. Though I soon enough saw I needn’t have been. Because maybe if you hide your throes long enough you forget you ever have them. Maybe all throes, even the most humble, lowly throes of the body, like having to cough, say, or sneeze, happen in what you think is a vacuum, in some almost unpopulated world of princes and kings. Because he never saw my outrage, didn’t even notice my humiliation. Only — I was still horny, recall — the remains of my pleasure.
“What are you looking at?” he asked, not unkindly.
“I’m looking at my Prince,” I said, Mother and Dad already forgotten.
“Why did you open your eyes?” he said.
“You opened yours first.”
“I wanted to see if love disfigured you.”
“Does it?”
He kissed me on my eyes. I loved him more than ever then. More than when I couldn’t read him, all those times he merely had me jumping. More than the time in Llanelli, in Wales, when he did the bravest, noblest, most generous thing I’d ever seen done, and had not so much lost as traded however many thousands of pounds it was, to Macreed Dressel at the Springfield.
But he couldn’t leave well enough alone. I guess no one can.
“You never opened them in Cape Henry,” he said.
“Oh, la,” I said with whatever modesty I have, “Cape Henry. I didn’t know you very well in Cape Henry.”
“What was it, Louise?” Prince Lawrence said, “You can tell me.”
“Lar-ry,” I said.
“No, really,” he said, “we’re to be married. Surely a princess may speak her mind to a prince. I supposed you were making the world go away. Please?” he said.
“The absolute truth?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“I’m not any ostrich,” I said. “I don’t shut my eyes and imagine the world anyplace else than it already is.”
“I’m no more ostrich than you are, Louise,” Lawrence said. “I know you weren’t a virgin when I met you. You’re a grown woman, for God’s sake. You’d been to California. You’d worked as an au pair. You lived on a beach in a tourist attraction and had a great tan. You think it bothers me you weren’t a virgin? It doesn’t, it doesn’t at all. You’re a commoner, you’re not to the manner born. You’re not held to the same standards. One supposed you could have been fantasizing.”
“What, making up a man, you mean?”
“Yes,” Lawrence said.
“I had the Prince of England on top of me. Why would I make up a man?”
“Oh, Louise,” he said, and kissed me on my eyes again.
But I saw that he had mistaken me, or that I had misled him. Like him, I couldn’t leave well enough alone.
“It was another man, actually,” I said.
“What, a man in the States? Not your employer?” he said. “The one that engaged you, whose child was entrusted to you?”
“No,” I said, “certainly not.”
“Oh, Louise,” he said, “not when you were in the hotel! Not for some man in the hotel where you worked turning mattresses and changing sheets? Like any common, comely chambermaid?”
He was grinning from ear to ear.
“I was perfectly faithful when I was in America,” I told him evenly.
“Ah,” said the Prince, “I was right. On that beach then.”
“No,” I said, “not on the beach. Not ever in exile.”
“In exile,” he said.
“For almost two years I had an affair with Kinmonth- Schaire, the newspaper publisher. I was never, in the conventional or continental sense of the term, his ‘mistress.’ He did not ‘keep me,’ he did not ‘provide’ for me. He did not even have a key to my flat. We were ‘lovers’ in the ordinary star-crossed ways of our times. He was twenty-seven years my senior, and married. At the time he was only penciled- in for his OBE. We knew that even the faintest whiff of scandal would have put the kibosh on that quick as you can say Jack Robinson. Plus, he had a daughter my age engaged to be married to a fellow a class-and-a-half up from her own, and a wife who was both delicate and busy with preparations for their daughter’s wedding.
“What can I tell you; we were star-crossed; our timing was off, our cusps and zodiacal signs. Our houses were in the wrong neighborhoods.
“He gave me the money and asked me would I lie low in the States for six months. In three he’d have his OBE, he told me; in four his daughter would be safely married; in five he’d tell his wife about me and ask for a divorce, and in six it would be both safe and seemly for me to come back from America.
“And do you know something? He was right on the money, and as good as his word, he really was. He became Sir Sidney Kinmonth-Schaire, OBE. The daughter married, and he told his wife about us and asked for the divorce. And do you know what? Do you know what she did? The delicate wife? Can you guess?”
Lawrence looked at me.
“She laughed at him. She laughed and petted him and gave him a kiss on his eyes and said he was a fool, dear, and supposed that she must be one, too, but she’d have to forgive him because when push came to shove she guessed that that was the only choice left fools, because didn’t one fool deserve the other, and if he could just manage to let her know next time he felt himself going off the deep end they could put their fool heads together and come up with a way out of their muddle that might just save everyone embarrassment. She didn’t see any way round it, she said; he’d probably just have to eat the few thousand pounds it had cost him to put me up in America for those six months, she said.”
“OBE?” Larry said.