They entered a brownish parlour lined with straightbacked chairs. Ceremoniously Love now donned his white gloves, waggling his raised fingers into them, and Brendan gained the brief but comprehensive impression that he was about to be examined by a doctor of humble practice and increasingly uncertain skills. With a superstitious glance over his shoulder, Love indicated a low table which bore a telephone of recent design and an answering-machine of embarrassing antiquity and bulk.
‘You’re rather at the mercy of this contraption, sir. It’s the final message, I’m afraid.’
The white finger quivered down on the Start button, and Love backed out of the room.
It was not possible to skip or hasten, so Brendan, feeling the growing weight of Chippy’s impatience, had to sit through a series of yokellish instructions and enquiries from various caterers and vendors, plus three long and repetitive plaints from a bedridden relative, who hoped for Love’s help in a move from sanatorium to hospice. Then, suddenly, this voice, so heavily deepened and distorted that Brendan took it to be the final incapacity – the death-drawl – of the old machine.
‘For the attention of the King. On the last day of this month the material on the Princess joins that which is public and open to general observation. Note well: the Palace should insist, and should continue to insist, that the material is faked. Faked, faked. Mere digital fabrication. Mere light and magic.’
Brendan became aware of the petulant honking from the drive. He pried the twin spools from the machine, which gave its contents up to him, in all innocence, seemingly scandalised by what it had housed. Then he strode down the tepid passage. The flapped door opened, and let him out, and closed again.
Just before noon Henry England debouched from Chopper F1 of the King’s Flight, hurrying low across the striped turf of Millwall Football Ground. He wore a silk cashmere overcoat, a dark lounge suit, and a black silk tie – in deference to the memory of Jimmy O’Nione (Henry’s office had already lamented the death, in evasively universal terms: a life so full of energy, cut down even as it flowered – this, despite O’Nione’s great age). On foot and under heavy plainclothes escort, he crossed Lovelynch Road, and joined the assembly on the broad forecourt of the Juno Estate. There he was greeted by the parliamentary member, the representatives of the local council, various trembling beadles and burghers, and a squad of shrunken, bemedalled regimental pensioners in their frayed crimson tunics, ready for one final war. The crowd, the press, the police, the light presence of soldiery in camouflage gear, the battlement of His Majesty’s house of correction, which beetled over O’Nione’s shrine: all this lay round the corner, waiting. But every other car coming down Cold Blow Lane gave the prisoners its toot of encouragement and support, and was answered by a ragged wail from the chapel roof.
Hearing this, Henry said vaguely, ‘Why don’t they just … get them down?’
‘They were hoping the weather would do it for them, sir,’ said the parliamentary member. ‘Best policeman in the world, the weather. Best prison-guard too. But now of course, sir, it’s unseasonably mild.’
The King might have remarked that the word ‘unseasonable’ had lost much of its force. The days didn’t care what season it was. Above them now thrummed high-pressure blue; the sky was vibrating with it. Henry was accustomed to feelings of hallucinogenic expansion: the sense that he was the same size, the same thing, as the United Kingdom (and Canada and Australia and whatnot). Now – underslept and breakfastless, sexually wealthy but also bereft – he felt that the sky, too, was his colony, and that he was at the heart of its blue vibrations.
Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde, arrived in her hearse-like limousine. She wore a black suit and blouse and a black hat with pendant veil, which she lifted to kiss the King. They were standing apart, and Henry identified a sliver of moisture in the corner of his mouth; likewise her gloved fingers trailed meaningly across his palm. With a beseeching frown she told him how perfectly angelic he was being; and Henry felt the erotic component, the fractional overspill, in her gratitude. They had played doctors at the age of six; he had woken up thinking about her, for a while, during his years with Edith Beresford-Hale; and there had been an evening, not too long after the Queen’s accident, when something glazed and reptilian had settled on him between the second and the third course of their closeted dinner. Now he looked down at her muscular ankles, her chunky black shoes. She was so securely rooted to the earth, like Pammy. And Henry thought of the shoes of the greatgrandmother of He Zizhen. No, he didn’t want to see a woman wavering like a willow in the wind. But when they were so securely rooted … even in bed, with their feet off the ground: they just ‘got on with it’, in a mild kind of tizzy. They were never what He so often was; they were never lucid, never lost.
‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Best foot forward.’
‘Indeed. Prosequare.’
Brendan Urquhart-Gordon and Chippy Edenderry joined the procession just as it turned into Cold Blow Lane. And so there it was: the crowd-flanked arroyo and, dead ahead, the curved wall of the prison like the stern of a ship – and the inmates all over the rigging. In the hope of increasing its impact, Henry IX’s participation, on this day, had not been scheduled or canvassed, and there was, at first, a sudden caution in the burbly ruffle of the crowd, and brief desistance from the cat-calls and ear-hurting wolf-whistles of the prisoners – many of whom, after all, were technically dependent, for their release, on His Majesty’s Pleasure. It didn’t last. Brendan, as he paced behind Henry England and Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde, looked left and right and tried to individualise those gathered here: those whose hearts were hurting for Jimmy O’Nione. The dead man had had no family, no friends, and no known associates or even accomplices. It was the community itself that smouldered and smarted for him. Looking beyond the weary, gritty hatred of these faces, Brendan saw the terraced streets that curled and tapered off from Cold Blow: a corner shop, a barber’s writhing pole, an encaged headline at an angle on the pavement. Here, he thought, the dust-devils, the little twisters of rubbish, would spin the other way, answering to the prison and its gravity. The air smelt of cheap ghosts – those that had died cheaply: street accidents, bludgeonings, mattress fires.
They halted. The Duchess moved forward and steadied herself in front of a black-draped table which bore a microphone and a wreath. Thirty feet beyond, O’Nione’s stolen scooter, exceeding the speed limit when it was clipped by the swerving peoplecarrier, had slammed into the knee-high kerbstone at forty miles per hour; maintaining that velocity, its helmetless rider had torpedoed into the redbrick wall of Cold Blow Prison. It was here, at the plaque, that the Duchess would lay her wreath, in commemoration of the life of Jimmy O’Nione.
‘Good-day to you and bless you one and all,’ began Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde, steering her way into the fragile hush. ‘We are gathered here to bid farewell to a much-loved member of the community: Jimmy O’Nione … “He has outsoared the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again … Mourn not for O’Nione … While burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of O’Nione, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.” Thank you. I shall now lay the wreath. There will then be a minute’s silence.’
Oh no there won’t, thought Henry. You see: noise is all they have. Everything detachable from the chapel roof had long ago been hurled down into the courtyard; noise was all they had left; and they would use it … Even before the monkey-grunts began, the prisoners had reminded him of primates, more specifically the Barbary apes – tailless macaques – he had leerily eyed on the Rock of Gibraltar in the course of a recent cruise: the hopping and capering, the squatting and teeth-baring, the picking, the scratching … And these monkey-grunts, poundingly concerted, reminded him in their turn of an international football match he had attended five years ago: one hundred thousand voices had raised his hair and his flesh with the fanatic unanimity of their ‘God Save the King
’; but when play began, and the ball arrived at the feet of a black player on the other side? The noise made by the prisoners, now (like the vibration of a titanic double bass), was in connotation sexual merely, as the womanly Duchess bustled to the wall; her head was piously bowed anyway, of course, as she approached O’Nione’s shrine, but she seemed also to be shrinking under it, the carnal thump of it, beaten, beaten down. Reflexively Henry stepped forward in his cashmere overcoat and stood with his hands on his hips and his elbows outturned.
Brendan found that he had crushed his arms to his sides, antiakimbo, as he cringed for the King.
On the chapeltop there now followed a moment of hesitation, and of arrest. And in that moment Henry was confronted by the elementary fact that the prisoners were men, not chimps or baboons (no, nor the viciously jerked marionettes to which an alternative impulse had likened them). In their singlets and half-buttoned shirts, their scrawny flares of winded denim, they were men – men in power. It was a funny kind of power, but it was power: power enough to call forth the King. And have him stand to attention. Seeing their drunkenly childish delight in this, Henry smiled. Unreservedly and unforgettably he smiled – and was answered by a savage roar. But as soon as he composed himself and turned a priestly gaze on the Duchess, now curtseying before the cenotaph of Jimmy O’Nione, and the minute’s silence began …
Despite the unsettling discoveries in the vacated bedsitting-room (the stolen property, the forged passports and pension-books, the fantastic cache of female underwear, and the carcass of her missing budgerigar), Jimmy O’Nione’s landlady was among the crowd that had gathered that day at Cold Blow – largely, it was true, to see the Duchess (she had seen the King up close before, but what an unexpected bonus that was, him coming by …). And during the minute’s silence: such a torrent of filth you never heard in all your life. It was as if those men up there had rehearsed it. The Duchess shrank back as if she couldn’t believe her senses. Suck my. Lick my. Drink my. Eat my. And what did we get when the minute’s silence was over, and they stopped? A minute’s silence: we were all in pure shock. And then when she walked away, quaking on her heels:
Get your arse out, get your arse out, GET your arse out for the boys – oogh!
Well, I must say, that was a nice welcome they give her!
‘You see them elsewhere,’ said Brendan Urquhart-Gordon. ‘Alien moral systems.’
‘Yes, Bugger, but we did rather scrag one of their lot. As they’d see it. The chap who had the prang.’
‘… I thought the people were more for you than agin you today, sir. But the prisoners …’
‘Well, they’re prisoners, Bugger.’
It was a monarchical trait: the inability to disapprove of any of his subjects. The urge to correct them, and if necessary by hard means, yes; but not the urge to disapprove of them. It would be like disapproving of yourself. And yet the King had been confusedly thinking, as he ran low under the battering blades of Chopper F1, that sex was the opposite of torture (thinking, in particular, that the sounds He made were the opposite of torture). Both were exquisitely intimate; and both relied on carnal knowledge. And then the prisoners and their chant, which was also sex and also torture. The prisoners, who were the champions of the deed of Dean Bull, and of Dean Bull’s words …
‘From a different source you say, Bugger.’
Henry and Urquhart-Gordon were briefly occupying a private apartment in a gentlemen’s club off Pall Mall (where the King was due to host a luncheon). In the neighbouring room Oughtred was accepting delivery of a tape recorder from the BBC; only the national broadcasting corporation, it seemed, could be depended on for a sufficiently ancient machine. The second communication: Henry knew its gist. He had twice excused himself and tiptoed to the bathroom.
‘Who can be sure, sir, but it may well be a positive development. Ah. Thank you, Oughtred. I’ll be in touch.’
The two men left one room for another similarly appointed: an ambience of silver and crystal and deep-brown panelling, with an elderly rictus to it, like a mask of empire. Watched warily by Henry, Brendan approached the fat contraption and started poking at its buttons. They listened to the pleading farewells of Love’s stricken relative, and then: ‘For the attention of the King …’
Brendan addressed himself to Henry’s wondering frown: ‘If this isn’t a feint of some kind, sir, it may even be that we have a waverer, if not a friend, in the camp of the intruder.’
The tape spooled on. And they heard the metallic addendum: ‘Prepare. Prepare the press. Prepare the Princess.’
‘Oh, Christ, Bugger. This is really going to happen.’
February 14 (12.01 p.m.): 101 Heavy
Flight Attendant Robynne Davis: Anybody home?
Captain John Macmanaman: Oh, hi, Robynne.
Davis: Here you go. Robynne’s Fruitjuice Special.
First Officer Nick Chopko: Thank you.
Macmanaman: Mmm. What’s in it?
Davis: Secret recipe. Guess.
Macmanaman: Well … Orange juice.
Davis: You got that from the colour, right?
Chopko: And, uh, cranberry?
Davis: And?
Chopko: Lilt?
Davis: Close. Ting. Diet Ting.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Be even better with some dark rum in it.
Davis: Yeah, right.
Ward: A little vodka.
Davis: Yeah, right.
Ward: Or a little gin, maybe.
Davis: Yeah, right.
Ward: Or some light rum in it …
Davis: Yeah right.
Ward: Excuse me.
Macmanaman: … Where’s he gone, our wrench [Flight Engineer]?
Davis: To make a nuisance of himself with Conchita in Business.
Chopko: You can’t blame the guy.
Macmanaman: You can blame the guy. The radar, Nick? See the weather coming? Get permission to climb. Uh, three nine zero. Robynne? Put them down back there. The girls too.
Davis: You got it.
Air Traffic Control: I hear you, one oh one heavy.
Chopko: Request permission to climb to three nine zero.
ATC: … That’s a confirm. Three niner zero, one oh one heavy.
* * *
The plane revealed her silver breast to the sun. As she rose, a cross-wind jolted her fiercely to starboard: a beast of the upper air had tried to seize her, and then let her slip from his grasp like a bar of soap. The lateral motion was enough to free the coffin of Royce Traynor from the pair of mountain bikes that had lightly braced it. Royce fell flat on his face and was then shudderingly drawn towards the opening to Pallet No. 3. As the climb steepened another sideways lurch flipped him over the low partition. He rolled on his side and pitched up against a rank of canisters marked HAZMAT (Hazardous Material): Class B and Class C-3 dynamite propellants and rocket motors for fighter-aircraft ejection seats.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. In the master bedroom
‘Pearl? It’s me.’ There must come a point (he thought) when you couldn’t still say that – to your ex-wife: It’s me. There must come a point when me turned into somebody else. You had to abdicate. ‘Uh, is there a boy to hand?’
‘Xan. Xan, I was just chuckling over a misprint in a book I’m reading,’ she said warmly. ‘I was dying to share it with you because I knew it would appeal to your sense of humour. Have you still got one, by the way? I mean a sense of humour, because it says here you can lose that too. The book’s about crazy people and the misprint comes in the chapter called “Post-Traumatic Psychosis” under the subheading “Changes in Sexuality”. Ready?’
Both his sons owned mobile phones, of course. For a while mobile phones had seemed to make them safer. The boys were like electronically tagged criminals: you could trace them, monitor them, when they went out. But when they went out they were always being attacked – by criminals who wanted their mobile phones. When Xan went out, which he now obliged himself to do, most days, he was very regularly unnerv
ed by mobile phones – by the disembodied voices, moving up behind you or off to one side of you, testifying, with such iterative force, to the need of the human being for connection – or for self-dilution; these voices were the voices of the lonesome crowd, needing to come together … Never eager to face Pearl, Xan always tried his sons on their mobile phones. What you got was a beep for a message (rarely responded to), preceded by forty-eight bars of hate-crammed music inciting you to act like somebody crazy. As for people who talked to themselves and really were crazy, you should issue them with mobile phones; and then they could go around talking to themselves and no one would think they were crazy.
‘“The sexuality of the head-injured male” ‘, said Pearl, ‘– and most head-injured people are male, Xan, because men are generally more physical and impulsive … Yes: “The sexuality of the head-injured male may be affected by importence.” Im-portence, with an r. Don’t you think that’s incredibly funny? It says it all really, doesn’t it. I just screamed.’
‘Yeah, well …’
‘They’re both out. I’ll tell them you rang.’
He was the father of her boys, and Pearl was a good mother. She satirised his masculinity (he sometimes sensed) because she needed to know how much of it he had – and if he fell short, then so might her sons, which she wouldn’t want. More specifically Pearl hoped to enrich his desire for vengeance. On all questions of reprisal she was unreflectingly fundamentalist. And so was he, apparently; he thought he wasn’t, but he was. Pearl would understand – and Russia would not understand – that vengeance was something he had to have. All his senses wanted it, needed it. And even in his weakest moments, moments of flickering fragility, he was sure that vengeance would come. It could not be otherwise. And just by living, by lasting, by not dying, he was getting closer to it.