“I bloody well can, it’s you who can’t.”
The queen was near tears. “We had thought that during your trip you might have straightened things out somewhat, mentally.”
Freddy held up his left hand, like a constable stopping a stream of traffic. “Wait a moment,” he said. “Our trip where?”
“Pah-kiss-tahn,” the queen stated.
“Not Pah-kiss-tahn,” Freddy told her. “America.”
“Yes, Freddy, we are aware that you stopped in America on your way home. I hadn’t wanted to bring this up, but you know it’s worse than bad form to use our position to interfere in their politics.”
“It wasn’t position, it was ability. They thought I was an Indian.”
“Let’s not get on to that again. Whatever it was, you should have come directly home, over the Pole.”
“Mummy, we almost succeeded. It’s hard to believe that you won’t credit us for that. We almost did it.” He looked at Fredericka affectionately.
“Did what?” asked Philippa.
“Reacquired the lost colonies.”
“In two weeks?” the queen asked.
“In more than a year, and what a year it was.”
Paul leaned forward. He was very serious. “Freddy, you haven’t been gone a year, you’ve been gone two weeks. You went to the hot springs in Bush Nalore. You were to take the cure after you were thrown from your horse at Windsor. Don’t you remember?”
“Merlin put you up to this, didn’t he.”
“Merlin?”
“Yes, Mr Neil. It’s a simple anagram. What was that all about? The meeting in the chapel at Windsor, the sex toy factory in Naples? Quite frankly, I didn’t like him. He was presumptuous.”
“Do you mean the gardener, Frederick,” the queen inquired, “Mr Beal, who found you after you’d been thrown?”
“Mr Beal? What did he do?” Freddy asked.
“He brought you in, in his hay wagon.”
“Was he in the chapel?”
“No, Freddy, and neither were we.” When the queen said that, it was clear that she believed she hadn’t been.
Freddy didn’t know what to do. He looked at Fredericka, who shuddered slightly, in the universal gesture that means “drop it.”
“Oh!” said Freddy. “It must have been . . . the wind.”
“Yes,” Fredericka added, speaking for the first time since dinner began, “it must have been . . . the wind.”
“Perhaps it was the wind,” said the queen, as resigned as a queen can be. “And it is the wind that must lift the wings of Craig-Vyvyan.”
LATE THAT NIGHT at Moocock, Freddy and Fredericka took refuge in themselves. They locked the door of the bedroom, turned off all the lights, closed the curtains, stripped, and lay under the covers pressed one against the other, hearts racing.
The wind whistled outside, their breathing seemed to echo in the room, and in the cool of the pitch black, things that had once been lights seemed to turn like galaxies. He did not tell her about his suspect infancy, having decided to wait until morning, and she did not tell him about Philippa, having decided the same. All they had was their strong embrace. “I don’t know which is you and which is me,” he stated.
“You never do,” she replied. And then, after a pause, she said, “We’re insane, aren’t we, Freddy?”
“Yes.”
“Both of us.”
“It appears that way. At least we both think that we’ve been in America for more than a year, even if the rest of the world thinks we’ve been in Pah-kiss-tahn for two weeks eating shish-kebab at a hot spring.”
“I hate shish-kebab,” she said, kissing him.
A minute later, he said, “I don’t mind it, but we were in America.”
A very long time later, in a trance of heat and darkness made all the more lovely by the cool air above the coverlet, she said, “Even if we are insane, we keep on coming closer together.”
PHILIPPA
THE QUEEN FAILED to confound her doctors and live on into the spring as she had hoped, and made good on their prediction that she would not see the end of November. To hear a death sentence pronounced with helpless certainty by someone clearly on the side of life was a sad and crippling thing, and when they said that she would not survive, for her husband and children the words were like blows to the face or arrows in the heart.
She was the queen of England, and she had the best possible care in even the tiniest detail. Not only was nothing done that should not have been done, and everything accomplished that was necessary, each action or abstention was decided not instantaneously but in long debates in which the pursuit of exactitude was exhausting and reassuring. Her physicians checked and rechecked. They spent days and nights in medical libraries and at their computers, determining as far as possible the best dosages and most likely outcomes. They spared nothing in their attempts to make the imprecise precise, to attend to the patient, and to defend her from death, their duty not only as her physicians but as her subjects.
As covertly as anything had ever been done in England, a suite in the palace had been converted to a laboratory and treatment facility. The medical personnel were sworn to secrecy, as were the palace staff, and the chemotherapy was administered at night or during household shift changes. Despite all their efforts, not one of the specialists believed that the sum of what they did or any part of it would allow her a single extra day.
She was used to the throne and comfortable as monarch. Even the prospect of death could not pry her from that. As gracefully as a leaf upon surface tension, she floated through diplomatic receptions and tedious ceremonies. Though she had always hated the vapid conversation of royalty-struck interlocutors whose hearts beat as fast as hummingbirds’, now she seemed to appreciate every meaningless word, every notification about the beauty of this or that city, every stupid curtsey and bow, every pronouncement that “You wouldn’t remember, ma’am, but we’ve met before,” to which she now replied charitably, and as sincerely as if it were true, “I do remember. I remember your face. How kind of you to consider how many people I must greet.”
The ambassadors, so often people ill equipped for their role, seemed most interesting to her, and she would ask them all kinds of questions about the sunshine in their countries, the flowers, the birds, and the waters. More often than not, this would put them at ease, and as they spoke she would see every bird, every flower, the mountains, and the surf—especially the surf. A beatific expression would come over her such that for the rest of their lives the ambassadors would remember—and tell their children and grandchildren of—her exceptional tranquillity.
Though the queen’s grace in public increased to the point where it seemed unimaginable that she would depart, she knew that she would, and it made her more graceful yet.
IN ONLY WEEKS, she came fully to terms with what awaited her. Very little that people seek and value seemed to please her, but what they pass by and take for granted she fastened upon not to savour but, as a child does, in discovering it. In late October she ordered the gardeners to burn leaves. They protested, warning about the certain fine. “Pay the fine,” she said simply, “but burn the leaves.”
As the smoke rose she walked about the palace gardens in hope of collisions with its ribbons and clouds that drifted through hedges and trees, and when she did disappear in white smoke she would breathe in, close her eyes, and return to her girlhood, when she was very young and did not expect to become queen. The scent of burning leaves took her back to gardens where she was loved, before she understood the concept of royalty, and when she presumed that what she had and what she knew would go on forever.
The gardeners, who did not know of her illness, were struck by her slow walk, by how often and how long she walked alone, and by the extraordinary sight of the queen of England, on her knees, thrusting her hands into a flower bed, lifting the loam close to her face, and smelling it as appreciatively as if it were tea. They even saw her cup her hand, draw some water from the fi
shpond, and taste it. To them this seemed insane, but, to her, to taste the brackish, dirty water full of life of all kinds was a better thing than to taste Champagne.
She stared at objects closely; not as if seeking answers but rather as if she were learning the new vocabulary, new shapes, and new colours of a new world. It was apparent that she was beginning to cast off her lines, that this was something that had come to her as a gift of nature, that she was indeed preparing for another world or the lack of it, and had changed. Her family suspected that she was coming to know things they could not even imagine, or at least they hoped so. She seemed pleased and tranquil so often, and would relaxedly stare at clouds and sky, or at a pool of light beneath a lamp, or a vase of moist red roses, not merely to help her by association to plumb the past, but for a reason more wonderful. The things that made her happy when she looked at them, and filled her with a secret joy, she took not merely as signs and symbols everlasting, but as emissaries.
Needless to say, no one could follow her to such places and in such spaces as she went, but she elevated everyone around her, not least Freddy, who despite his fear was forever changed by the fact that she was not afraid.
“You don’t fear,” he observed, when they were alone together on a surprisingly warm day early in November, and the sun streamed through the high windows.
Slowly, she turned her head, and smiled.
“How can you not?”
“Freddy,” she said, “the water has risen and the painter has slipped. All is lost, but everything is buoyant. I feel much as I did as a small child—close to something that gives me absolute comfort.”
“God?” asked Freddy.
“Yes,” she answered. “Not the God I have come to know, but the God that I knew before I knew what God was, before I knew language, before I knew His name.”
HAVING A GREAT DEAL of jewellery, perhaps more than anyone in the world, Philippa was aware that lucidity and transcendence must be set in a foil that is opaque. It was important to her to carry on, to take care of her affairs, and to prepare Freddy for the responsibility to which Craig-Vyvyan’s flight might set the seal after Freddy had become king and before his coronation. This involved many hours of practical advice concerning what was in the dispatch boxes, dealing with foreign heads of state, and the extent of and necessity for royal influence on the governance of Britain.
Freddy had his own ideas, and most of what the queen said slid right by. This was the way it had to be and always had been. Were he to be king, he would have to be his own king. His reading of history would bring him—indeed, had brought him—general principles. Her particular experience as a monarch was unprecedented, but being particular, it would not be repeated. Besides, almost since his birth, he had been studying how she got along. Because her life had been exemplary and clear, he saw no need for further instruction.
He was curious, however, about mysteries. What had really happened to the princes in the Tower? Did monarchs hand down the secret from one to another? Yes, they did, and she let him in on it. Other secrets, too, astounded him. Mrs Thatcher had not been the first woman to be prime minister. Amazingly, Harold Wilson was actually a woman from a small village in Romania. And Britain had discovered a scientific principle that enabled it to build weapons of a power many magnitudes greater than that of nuclear weapons, but the secret had been purposefully suppressed. However, a coded key to it was in a bit of microfiche in the setting of a particular jewel in the sceptre. Even then, one had to know an elaborate series of numbers to release the information. This was written on the back of a floor tile in Paul’s bathroom. Yet another code was necessary, which could be teased from the arrangement of numbers on the licence plates in the garage of the royal dollhouse at Windsor. And the proper sequence of these numbers was to be found written in invisible ink on page ten of Philippa’s first edition of Nina Salaman’s History of the Potato. Freddy went to page ten with an ultraviolet light and discovered that the motorcycle plate was first, and then he deliberately shut his eyes. A lot of this kind of thing went on in the last few weeks. It was then that Freddy asked her again about Merlin. The way he brought it up was neither original nor diplomatic.
“What about Merlin?”
“What of him?”
“Either he cast a spell to make you forget what happened, or he cast a spell to make me imagine that it did.”
“Merlin the magician?”
“He.”
“I don’t think so, Freddy. He’s been dead a rather long while, you know.”
“No he hasn’t. He’s always about. He was John Dee of Mortlake. He was Isaac Newton. He was Professor Lindeman. Churchill, of course, was Arthur. And Merlin has been God-only-knows how many countless others. We met him, you and I. He sent me to America. He has simply made you forget. Or I’m insane.”
The queen had the look of distress and anguish that she had whenever Freddy had done what he called “unconventional things.” He had known it even as a child, when, for example, he had had unstoppable fits of laughter on serious occasions. One newspaper headline of the nineteen fifties had read: “St. Paul’s Filled with High-Pitched Simian Screams for Ninety Minutes as Prince of Wales Laughs Uncontrollably Through Investiture of Archbishop Spatoola.”
“Perhaps,” he said to his mother, “it’s the Ignatz.”
“The what?”
“The Ignatz.”
“What is the Ignatz?”
All the while as he told her she shook her head in contradiction. “I’ve never heard of an Ignatz,” she said. “You were never bitten by an Ignatz. We never took you to Africa. Who told you all this?”
“Father. He was also bitten. He also has Motta Motta’s blood flowing in his veins.”
“Freddy, listen to me. Your father was never bitten by an Ignatz. He has had no transfusions.”
“Are you sure?” Freddy asked.
“I’m positive.”
“Perhaps it was just he who was bitten?”
“No.”
“Why did he tell me, then?”
“He probably wanted to make things easier for you, to give your vexations a physical cause so you might better control them.”
“But he showed me in the encyclopaedia.”
“You do know,” Philippa stated, “that he has a special encyclopaedia that he has been altering for decades. Using the printing press and bindery in the basement, he has remade the world according to his likes and dislikes. De Gaulle was never a chorus boy at the Folies-Bergère, and Ted Heath did not work for a decade as a Maori gigolo on the South Island of New Zealand. Horses do not talk, Eisenhower’s real name was not ‘Dr Feelgood,’ and your father has not won the Nobel Prize, neither the one for physics nor the one for the protection of hunting dogs.”
“I don’t understand anything any more,” Freddy said.
“Freddy, a son never can understand his father. He isn’t meant to. You’re a man now. Soon you yourself will be a father, and a king, and we hope you will remain so. Don’t worry about things that you simply cannot know. Let them fall back and recede like the foam pushed aside by the flanks of a ship. Leave them behind and let your heart power on.”
FOR FREDDY, as long as she was alive, anything was possible and everything was bearable. It was as if he were protected from the coldness of an open sky by the great overhead vault of a cathedral. It was she who had been steadily fixed between him and the iciness of the stars, and had sheltered him from the heart’s knowledge of what could not be borne. No matter what he knew and what was apparent, he could not imagine that the woman who had brought him to life would actually die. And then, one day, she did.
It seemed inappropriate that it was a soft, spring-like day. Although the flowers were not in bloom, the gardens of Buckingham Palace were a rich green and filled with sweet smells and warm breezes. The sun burned hot and yellow, a disk of brass revolving in the wind. It was the kind of day, few and far between, when the world is given the chance to start over, when the sick are healed, th
e weak made strong, and the cowardly made unafraid. What sadness, then, that on this day the queen was not allowed to begin anew, and had instead to leave forever the earth, air, and sea.
By her deathbed her elder son sat or knelt, overcome with grief and fear, occasional glances at the mild blue sky filling his heart with the incorrigible and regretted happiness of being alive, unbelieving that his mother, whose hands and arms were already as cold as the chrome rail of the bed, was going to leave him.
She no longer spoke, but when she could she had told him that they had at last come to the garden wall, beyond which only she could glimpse the world in which she would float up to the light, no longer a queen, no longer imprisoned by the fact of being royal, and that on this day they would be just a family, their privacy finally granted. It would be the second time she would surrender her life, the first being when the crown was lowered gently upon her head. “It had the effect,” she said, her frailty slowing her speech as it did her breathing, “of freezing me in place. They will never understand, as they will never be us, that we live like soldiers who sacrifice their lives for king and country. They have granted us our privileges so that they need not be troubled by this sacrifice, and these we have accepted purely from distraction. You’ll be a better soldier than I’ve been, Freddy. Men are harder by nature, born for this. When I understood for the first time that someday I would be queen, I cried. When they told me that my father had died, and I would be queen from that moment, I cried as well. And when I was crowned, I cried again. I wanted then to get on a boat and drift away—and now I have my chance. All our lives, we are held apart from others. But there comes a moment when we are not. Royalty is a contrivance of man, and I have lived within that contrivance for most of my life. Though I have always wanted to leave it, I must admit that at times I did love it, such as when the rain washed the stains from the gold on the gates of the palace, and they blazed back at the sun as if to say, This is the house of a queen.”
Being inexperienced, Freddy thought that she was about to die. He looked at her for a long, breathless moment until he realised that she was only sleeping, and doing quite well. In dying there are long declensions and there are stretches when one is not dying at all and the body seems to strengthen, until a message from somewhere most compelling bids it look over the crest of a heart-dropping hill and start down once again out of control and despairing of equilibrium.