Unlike his numerical predecessor, who would habitually exhaust a dozen stallions in the space of an afternoon, Henry IX loathed anything that involved horses (with the single exception of Royal Ascot); but Pamela, of course, had been a lifelong equestrienne. Times beyond number he had shaken his head, from a seated position, and watched her trot off, seemingly about thirty feet from the ground … That September, at Tongue, the Queen Consort did not return from her second ride of the afternoon. Her mare, Godiva, returned; but Pamela did not return. The King seized a bicycle in the courtyard and, with much wobbling and wiggling … But now, on foot, in his overcoat, Henry moved from gravel to lawn, beginning to retrace these steps.
He remembered the way the colour of the day changed. At first he was merely very frightened, mostly for himself (the bicycle), and also rather bored (he could already hear the exasperating halloos of normality regained). On the cinder path he pedalled to the shoulder of the slope, and turned: Godiva, riderless in the stableyard. And then the colour of the day changed.
It was he who found her … Pamela had told him about the softened thump of the horse’s hooves as you approached the chalk quarry, and thither he rode — until, with a horrified lurch, he skidded to a halt and assessed the obscenity in his path. A fat snake, already dead, already putrescent: fat, moist, yellow, like the voided boil of some tutelary troll or Friar Rush … Yes, he thought: Godiva could be forgiven for rearing at such a sight. And there, down the brambly slope, Pamela lay, in her boots, her jodhpurs, her tweed jacket, her velvet helmet, arched backwards over a boulder with her eyes wide open. The bike fell with a clatter and a brief purr of spokes. He moved through the snow-scape, the moonscape, of the winter chalk.
‘Oh no, Pemmy.’ But he stressed it on the second and fourth syllables: he said it as he had said it many times before, when being reminded of some recurrent social chore, when interdicting a loud headscarf, or when she brought off a forceful roll at ludo or backgammon.
Then, rhythmically gathering air for his moment, his cur moment, Henry said, ‘At least, at least, at least — at least there won’t be any more bally …’; and it was then that his shoulders began to shudder: ‘… any more bally three-a-clockers.’ And the words enveloped him like an unrecognisable fart, saying: yes, oh yes, this is you, this is you.
Aboard the helicopter they found a faint pulse in her groin, and an hour later she was on the machine at the Royal Inverness.
That was two years ago. In his black suit, his black coat, Henry stood in the white land of the chalk field. It was time to awaken the Princess.
The patient looked like an enormous and ancient squaw, with the warpaint of death on her, but regally breathing.
Henry passed his hand down through the air.
‘Mummy’s …’ said Victoria.
‘But she breathes.’
Victoria pointed to the parallel lines on the screen.
‘But she breathes.’
And she breathed greedily, lustily. Could she still reach up and hold him and draw him in? And he smelt himself all over again — the smouldering smell of the male secret, like a fire doused in rivers of sweat.
‘That’s just the machine,’ said Victoria. ‘It’s the machine that’s breathing.’
‘Turn it off,’ he cried. ‘Turn it off. Turn it off.’
6. February 14 (1.25 p.m.): 101 Heavy
System Aircraft Maintenance: One oh one heavy, please repeat.
Captain John Macmanaman: Confirm engine number-two explosive failure. Number-two accessory drive system is blown. Secondary debris hit the horizontal stabiliser and severed number-one line and number-three line. These hydraulic systems are down. Copy?
SAM: Copy, one oh one heavy. You lost number two.
Macmanaman: No. We lost all three.
SAM: One oh one heavy. You lost number three?
Macmanaman: We lost all of them.
SAM: One oh one heavy. You still have number one, right?
Macmanaman: All three are gone. Repeat. All three are gone.
SAM: One oh one heavy. Copy, copy. You have emergency hydraulics.
Macmanaman: Affirmative. But the goddamned auto won’t disengage. It thinks one through three is fictitious. Extreme yaw. Extreme pitch.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Try it.
First Officer Nick Chopko: Yeah but …
Ward: Try it.
Chopko: … Auto disengaged!
Macmanaman: I feel it. I feel it. Auto disengaged. Hydraulic quantity returning. Now flying by direct law. Nose is coming up. Steadying. Steadying. Still yawing but no pitch. It won’t give us flaps.
SAM: One oh one heavy. I’ll clear frequency and give you Detroit.
Chopko: The backup hydraulics — where are they anyway?
Ward: Where they used to be, in the old days. Under the cabin floor.
Macmanaman: Come in!
Flight Attendant Robynne Davis: Is it over? Are we okay?
Macmanaman: We’re coming out of it, Robynne. What’s it like back there?
Davis: Like a vomitorium in ancient Rome. They can take a yaw but they hate a pitch.
Chopko: We got the pitch. We’ll get the yaw. Now what?
Flight Attendant Conchita Martinez: Lucy says the floor’s hot. The passengers are saying the cabin floor’s hot. Left side. Between the wings.
Chopko: Christ. Any smoke?
Martinez: How could they tell?
Macmanaman: You know what we need? What we need is an airport.
No, you couldn’t tell — about the smoke. A lavish bonfire of wet leaves would have made little difference to the pall. In Economy, 314 people had cigarettes in their mouths (they weren’t giving up now), including the occupants of rows twenty-five to thirty, seats H and I and J, who, in addition, had their feet off the floor and tucked in underneath them.
There was smoke in the hold, too, under the port wing. But this was smoke of a different kind. With this kind of smoke (hot, thick, black), you wouldn’t be breathing it: you’d be eating it. And it would be eating you … Just discernible in the pallet facing the cargo door, Royce Traynor, mantled in ebony, stood upright, slowly steadying on his base as if to regather his strength. When the plane yawed to starboard, he sank back, waiting, against a column of stacked bags. Next, the port wing began its sharp drop, and Royce, after bristling for an instant like a wave before it breaks, dived forward to butt the diagonal handle of the cargo door … This door was not a plug door, opening inwards, and kept slammed shut by air-pressure. It opened outwards, to increase holdspace and revenue … He’s up again now, with the yaw to the right, and leaning back, in weary but determined contemplation. Then the tottering vertical and the piledrive into the handle of the cargo door, with all his weight. Which was the weight of what? Which was the weight of the past.
You could see why Royce had to do this. When the sprinklers came on, you could see why Royce had to do this. He couldn’t trust to fire. It was now his aim to go for the very throat of the aircraft. Decompression, explosive decompression, was what he wanted to bring about, and the collapse, the catastrophic strangulation, of the cabin floor, with all its tubes and veins and arteries. Most proximately, the blown door would mean his own escape (he would be the first to go), his martyrdom, after death.