‘You’d be better off having another round of sticky buns, my darling — and never mind about Mecca …’
Brendan turned his frown on the Princess, who wagged her head with a look of contented inanity. Then the smile she gave him: how it decanted itself upwards, from the mouth and through the frame of the nose and into the eyes, where it lingered in the folds of the orbits … Brendan was devoted to Henry; and yet Henry sometimes made him feel as if he had kissed his life away for some evanescent frippery — for a monogrammed butter-pat, in a deadly dining-room full of the ghosts of sweating placemen. But with the Princess it was love. What kind of love he didn’t know, but it was plainly love.
‘The sands of time, sir,’ he said, tapping his watch with a fingertip.
‘Yes yes, Bugger. Sorry: Brendan. What about the women then, eh, sweetheart? I expect you’d go a bit blank, my precious, if I told you to wear a uh, a black tepee for the rest of your days.’
Victoria sat forward, rubbing her hands together as if in ablution, and said, ‘But think of the agonies that Western women go through because of their looks. The constant worries and comparisons. It’s forced on you too. This stupid vanity is forced on you. What bliss it would be not to have to think about it ever again. Oh, the privacy of it!’
‘Well we can talk about that another time. My dearest, I have some rather unsettling news.’
Within a minute Brendan believed that the whole of terrestrial existence was just a breath away from cardiovascular collapse. He stared at the King, and thought: can you not feel it, man? Can you not hear it?
Though never as hurtfully as in the present case, Victoria’s integrity had of course been pierced and breached many times before; and, since childhood, she had always reacted with the same robust indignation. There was nothing regal in it — on the contrary, there was something severely republican and every-woman in her steep frown, her straight neck. It was for a version of this that Brendan had more or less unthinkingly prepared himself. And now? While her father, gazing resolutely ceiling-ward as he writhed around on his cushion, delivered the agreed preamble (‘it appears that the vultures are up to their old tricks’), Victoria did no more than sigh and stiffen. But as soon as Henry meandered in on the particular (‘the Château’, ‘the Yellow House’), she bared the teeth that were still too broad for her face, and her head dropped, by degrees, like the resilient jolts of a second-hand. Now Brendan could feel the heartbeat of the Princess, pressing in on his exterior ear. And soon the sound of her pulse — the slow, gonging throb — was entirely subsumed by his own.
‘Well it’ll soon blow over, my dear,’ said Henry, writhing around in earnest now, like a man playing footsie with a moving target. He was practically flat on his back.
‘We’ll just have to get on with it,’ he managed to add. ‘Storm in a teacup, all hands on deck.’
Brendan thought: she wants to disappear. She wouldn’t want the nails and the bolts and the shrapnel. But that’s what she wants to do. She wants to disappear.
‘Perfectly decent little place,’ said the King as he strode through the mountain tunnel of the Abbey archway — saying it as if Brendan, and Victoria, and everyone else, kept maintaining otherwise, in tireless error. ‘I don’t know about you, Bugger, but I thought she took that fairly well.’
He couldn’t answer … During the last half-hour, in the Oak Gallery, the ambient air had made steady gains in clarity, as if a succession of blankets were being removed from an exalted skylight; and now the actors had stepped out into a blue thaw of dripping glitter. At the foot of the cliffside lay the town, waiting, palpating like a dog that has just shaken itself dry. There was an invitation to the spirit — rise up; and all this, he knew, all this was only mist and rain to the Princess …
She was standing with her back turned, and slightly apart, to one side of her own entourage (the forecourt was now a millpond of Security), on a strip of lawn between the path and a bed of pink flowers. Looking at her hunched shape, he knew again what it was like to be fifteen: when you suffered, your every cell suffered. She was wearing black jeans and a short leather jacket, and he wondered why, with the young and indivisibly wretched, it was the tensed buttocks that best expressed all this strength and pain.
Brendan marched forward. As he came round in front of her he was prepared to see tears but her eyes were their normal blue. Yet clogged with chemicals, as was her mouth, chemicals of distress, and giving off a sour breath.
So he did something for which there was no precedent. He embraced her, saying,
‘He will forgive you anything and everything, you may be sure. Without a second thought. And so will I. He will always protect you. And so will I.’
‘Forgive me?’ she said. With the words evenly stressed, he thought, as he dropped her hand and backed away.
In the Royal Rolls the King, with a showily dexterous flick of the wrist, activated the television and sat back with a contented grunt to watch the snooker for the rest of the drive. ‘Oh, perfect weight … They make it look so … Now. Has he got the angle on the yellow?’
After about an hour Brendan started to think logically, or at least consecutively. If one used one’s imagination (he told himself), Victoria’s reaction could probably be readily explained. What do we do in bathrooms? Nothing we’re very proud of. A bodily function, perhaps. The use of a tampon, conceivably. Or something rather more intimate. Which woman friend had informed him that young girls referred to the hand-held shower as ‘Rain Man’? And she was fifteen. Remember that: the outlandish disproportion of being fifteen, when you were waiting to find out who you were.
‘Shot. Now he’ll come down for the blue … Oh no, he’s gone too far … Foul stroke!’
That embrace: a startling impropriety, never to be repeated, but none the less an unalterable fact. He recalled the tragic sourness of her breath. And the rigidity of her body — and the answering rigidity of his own ancillary heart. All the blood within him: all of it.
‘Here we are. Well I’m pleased to have got that out of the way, Bugger. I won’t pretend it hasn’t been playing on my mind. In a week or two I expect this’ll all be a thing of the past.’
Brendan spoke with only an instant’s forethought. You fool, you fool, he said to himself. Didn’t you see that her fear was waiting for it — for this day, for this hour? He said,
‘I disagree, sir. In fact I suggest that I turn this car round and go straight back to St Bathsheba’s. The Princess must be taken out of school at once and then secluded — I suggest Ewelme. If the illicit material is indeed made public on the thirty-first, then I suggest also that we take the advice of uh, our mole and insist from the outset that the material is faked. It’s a ghastly gamble, I know, but the chance won’t come again. Meanwhile we must work out a strategy of damage-limitation with Downing Street. Sir, this isn’t going to be a storm in a teacup.’
‘Steady on, Bugger. Do you know something I don’t?’
‘It’s only a deduction, sir, but I think it’s sound. The Princess was not alone in the bathroom of the Yellow House.’
This is going to be a storm in all the oceans of the thing which is called world.
And the thought: God how she needs her mother.