This was fresh information. It meant that he had named his enemy in something he had written. And so, with fluttering fingers, he wrote that down too, in the notebook they’d told him to keep about the details of his day: visits to the bathroom, food eaten, words exchanged with Billie, the whereabouts of his keys.
The significant name was in Lucozade.
He now switched to Shitheads, and for a little while he felt very happy and proud.
With its moodswings, its motor-failures (its slurrings and staggerings), its weepiness, its vaulting lechery, its encouragement of words and actions that sowed the seeds of regret, Xan’s posttraumatic condition reminded him of something: drunkenness. So after a few more drinks in Hollywood it occurred to him, rather drunkenly perhaps, that drunkenness, in his new world, might give him a clear head. Intending to explore the hypothesis, he lit out for the savage pubs of Camden High Street and Kentish Town Road.
‘Now in London it’s the congestion, the congestion,’ said the slender young Irishman crushed up against the bar in the Turk’s Head. ‘Everywhere. Now back home: go a mile out of Dublin and you won’t see a sinner all day.’
Wedging his whole forearm across his breast, Xan bent his head, and lowered his underjaw, to gain access to his third quart of London Pride. We all sin. What else do we all do? There were many sinners in the Turk’s Head, many breathers, thinkers, dreamers. Not everyone can walk or talk or hear or see, but we are all of us drinkers, micturaters. Eaters, excreters, everywhere. Xan got another quart of Pride off the feeder behind the wooden slab.
He fell in with a group of fuckers round the pool-table. And it was good. The female gobblers didn’t stir him, and the male platers didn’t scare him. There was fellow feeling: they were all in this together. Some shitters left – but new pissers took their place. Every farter bought a drink. This went on for a long time. Then he bade farewell to the assembled wankers, and moved on.
Later, as he stood in the throbbing toilet of a jazz bar in Camden Road, Xan looked at his watch and was most surprised to see that it was two o’clock in the morning. But this did not undermine the spirit of squinting concentration he had entered into as he reloosened his trousers. His immediate objective? Having just consumed a very great deal of dun-coloured tapwater, Xan’s immediate objective was to find out whether he was man enough to piss his own shit off the back of the porcelain bowl. He wasn’t quite man enough to do that, but then this was very butch shit, this shit: mutton vindaloo, pork kebab, cajun pizza, jalapeñas relleñas. Coming out of his stall, and thinking with some focus about getting home – his luck turned. There was a machine on the wall which, on the insertion of a pound coin, dispensed a generous handful of rudimentary cologne: the very thing to kill the smell of pub. He had lots of pound coins and, why, he fairly soused himself in the sugary fragrance. His cigarettes had run out long ago but that didn’t matter because he’d bought lots of cheap cigars.
After a long search he found the exit and the fresh air. Pausing only to leave a stack of sick in the gutter (and chewing all the more heartily on the soaked butt of his last perfecto), Xan went home with a clear plan (he’d just fling on the light and spin round): the detailed exaction of his connubial rights.
And all this wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing had to do with Billie.
2. Storm in a teacup
‘Oh, before I go, sir. I was talking earlier today to some friends in Madrid. Do you remember a scandal of uh, five years ago or so, sir, involving King Bartolomé?’
‘Would you very kindly remind me, Bugger.’
‘Certainly, sir. There was in existence a video-recording, widely circulated at the time, of the King having some kind of session with the wife of the local polo pro.’
‘The local what? … Oh. Oh. I thought you were talking in Spanish. Well?’
‘There was a gagging order which the press pretty much obeyed, and the whole thing was forgotten in a year.’
‘A year? Is this meant to cheer me up, Bugger? Besides, Tolo’s not a real … He keeps up no kind of style at all. That business was just another … another suburban scandal.’
‘True in a way, sir.’
‘Victoria is the future Queen of England, Bugger. The eyes of all the world are on the Princess.’
‘True, sir.’
‘Oh God, Bugger, what am I going to say? No, don’t tell me now or I’ll toss and turn. And I take it you’ve chucked those mullahs for tomorrow morning.’
‘Absolutely, sir. You’re free until one. May I wish you a good night’s rest?’
‘A fond hope, but you may. And the same to you, Bugger.’
Henry IX sat slumped on the seat of easement. Every few seconds he drew his body up into a posture of acute enquiry, then slumped once more.
‘Steady on there,’ he said. ‘Yes, most painful. Have a heart, old thing. Oof.’
Henry VIII employed a man called Sir Thomas Heneage, who, in his capacity of Groom of the Stool, had the dubious privilege of attending every royal evacuation (with a damp flannel ready in his hand). But Henry IX was all alone.
‘Ow! Now I say. That was, that was …’
His tummy troubles had been complicated by an attack of ‘stress eczema’ in an optimally inconvenient site. The King hadn’t needed this assurance from the ennobled surgeon: ‘Secondary infection is of course unavoidable.’ It was already clear to Henry that, generally speaking, the arse was a disaster waiting to happen. How could you keep something clean when it was pegged out in the cloaca maxima? And you couldn’t rest the arse either, funnily enough; the arse was never idle, even when you were sitting on it. Walking was the worst: a frenzy of formication, right up the root of you. And to seek one’s bed only fomented heat, and the ants’ trail became a nest of hornets.
‘Now that’s just not on, do you hear? Out of court! Foul! Ah, here it—’
With a flinch that made his ears roar Henry ejected what might have been a medium-sized handgun; he then applied about a furlong of toilet paper, and made the exquisite switch from garderobe to bidet. The abominable tingle now subsided. It had at last been comprehensively scratched, from within. And it would be several minutes before he went back to wishing (not very constructively, true) that he was the prettiest prettyboy in an Alabaman prison … The garderobe was a genuine museum piece: with its scales and weights and pinions, it looked like an orrery, or an instrument of recondite torture. The bidet was a squat marble trough with varicose veins, and would have been perfectly at home in any old hospital or madhouse.
Now into the tub for a thoroughly good soak. Henry was near-brahminical in his hygiene, and this was unusual for an England: luxury, in the royal houses, never extended to the bathrooms, which were cold and huge and littered with washing-machines and badminton nets and basketfuls of kittens. He was his own man in other ways too, of course. Among the toiletries lined up on the slab beneath the mirror, for example, one would not find the fierce little gadget, like a pewter knuckleduster, with which Richard IV had tormented his tubes of toothpaste. Henry was an enemy of thrift: he was one of nature’s overtippers. Retiring domestics, after half a century of service, used to receive a monogrammed tea-towel, or a bathmat, or a free-visit coupon to the Rubens Room at Windsor. After Henry’s accession they got twenty cases of vintage champagne, or a nice new car. He also doubled all salaries – and then shruggingly halved them again, after the public revelation of his astronomical overdraft. The treats and bonuses he still hurled about were now being financed by secret sales from the Englands’ private Prado – a Titian here, a Delacroix there. Brendan Urquhart-Gordon could almost hear the creak of the tumbrels and the gnashing of the ringside knitting-needles when Henry said, with a pout, that ‘Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas’ if his gift-budget was confined to six figures.
When the King was at stool, it could be argued, he was mingling with his people. He was coming down from his castle and doing what everyone else did. First he mingled. Now he slummed, applying Lord Fletcher’s ferocious
lotion by means of a disposable glove. As he did so he was ambushed by an unmanageable thought: he could hardly ask Victoria – his ministering angel, the faith-healer of every little scrape and scratch and ache and pain – to kiss it better.
The recent days had passed with fell velocity. Now he had three clear hours before they came for him – a stretch of time that suddenly seemed almost geologically vast. Seated at his desk, drinking China tea, he played patience, and solitaire. Eleven o’clock came and went without making the slightest impression on his complacency, and so did eleven-thirty and eleven-forty-five – though it was ‘a slight blow’, he had to admit, when the minute-hand gave its tic-like tick and dourly advanced beyond noon. Still, fifty-nine minutes: an eternity. At about ten to three Henry was beginning his twenty-seventh game of solo. Ten minutes – no, eleven! Donkey’s years. The red queen, the black king, the red king, the black queen. Six minutes; five … He came close to protesting that he still had thirty seconds left when there was the knock on the door, and Love loomed.
Brendan was keeping his counsel. The Royal Rolls had barely taken its place in the convoy, and the King (after a curt good-day) emphatically produced from his side pocket a paperback booklet called Pastime Puzzles—24. He was now immersed in a cryptic crossword … It always filled Brendan with affectionate amazement: the amount of time his employer was capable of devoting – around blue Caribbean poolsides, on Alpine terraces – to the same edition of Pastime Puzzles. Over the course of one long summer (New Zealand, Australia, Africa, Micronesia) Brendan had reread the complete works of Henry James while Henry frowned at, doodled in, and frequently gummed back together his copy of Pastime Puzzles—19. An intensely ticklish moment had arisen from this, when, in some Kenyan treehouse, as they sipped their gimlets, Henry said,
‘Quite a good joke in that book of mine … Uh, there’s a young chap who goes to prison for a very long time. And he’s a bit worried about how he’s going to kill all that … time. Someone tells him there are jigsaws in the book trolley they wheel round. He gets a jigsaw. It’s the sort of jigsaw Tori had when she was – hang on, I’m giving it away. You know, wooden, with about twelve pieces. He uh, he finishes the jigsaw and says to his cellmate, “I’ve finished!” And his cellmate says, “Yes, you ass, but it took you ten months.” And our man says, “Ah, but it says on the packet ‘Three to Five Years’.”’
They both reached for their drinks at the same moment. They both looked down at the same moment: on the table between them, Pastime Puzzles—19, next to the soft pigskin of The Princess Casamassima.
‘What an extraordinary colour you’ve gone, Bugger.’
And there was Henry on the veranda the next day, flexing himself into a copy of Pastime Puzzles—20 …
Now Brendan attended to the two necks, glassed off like exhibits, in the front seat, one long and thin (Rhodes, the most senior chauffeur), the other short and fat (Captain Mate). Mate’s neck was also tanned and pocked; barely a pore had escaped corruption – it looked like sand after rain.
‘Oh I say, how fearfully clever,’ crowed Henry, filling in a four-letter vertical answer in the bottom right-hand corner of the grid. He had been applying himself to his crossword for over an hour. After another ten minutes he put it aside. ‘Can’t seem to get going’, he said, ‘on these bally cryptics. Let’s watch the news.’
Rhodes’s neck and Mate’s neck were now erased from sight, as the King, by the deft use of a dial, interposed a drape of black felt. He then took the clicker from the arm-rest and poked it towards the television screen while also skilfully engaging the power button – as if he was involved (thought Brendan) in a battle of wits. The screen fizzed, and awakened.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Now I have a notion that I deserve a drink.’
Henry sat back with it, his brandy, raising the balloon in both palms like a woman with a cup of something hot. For outside, beyond the treated windows, the blue morning had collapsed utterly, and the southbound motorway was a seething, sizzling mess of drenched metal and rubber, under skies the colour of dogs’ lips … When Henry came to the throne, about a quarter of the population still believed that he had been personally appointed by God; well, stress eczema, where he had it, surely exploded the Divine Right of Kings. It had first seized him, this condition, in the week after Pamela’s accident. Lord Fletcher drew the obvious conclusion; but Henry, still writhing from his epiphanic cur moment (‘Oh no, Pemmy. But at least this means … At least this means …’), suspected otherwise. It was not the accident so much as the inconceivably onerous task of breaking the news to the Princess. Henry, who could barely bring himself to be the author of the most trifling disappointment, who suffered for weeks if he denied her a final swim, a third lollipop, an eleventh bedtime story … There was a two-day hiatus (and news embargo) while she was spirited off a cruise ship in the Aleutians. Meanwhile, with tweezers and blowtorch, stress eczema was exposing the nerve ends of his nethermost fissures and faults. And when he told her, in the library at the Greater House, he additionally squirmed on his confidential nettlebed. Now welcoming the pain, now fully accepting it, he took her outside and walked her up and down the length of the stream for hours and hours and talked and talked and talked to her.
Brendan said: ‘By Christ, did you see that?’
‘He … disappeared.’
‘Hoo! They won’t be showing that again.’
‘He disappeared.’
On the television: a street scene, a loose group of shoppers, hurriers. And then one of them disappeared, leaving a hole in the world, with death tearing out of it.
After some moments Brendan said, ‘Horrorism. That’s what we’ve just witnessed, sir. An act of horrorism.’
Henry looked at him promptingly. The Royal Rolls, with its convoy of peoplecarriers, left the main road and entered the scalloped grounds of the Abbey.
‘Angst, anxiety, concern, worry,’ said Brendan, who recognised Henry’s tactic, his voodoo of deferral: no talk of Victoria until the car was quenched of motion. ‘You are being chased by a wild beast which you already fear,’ he went on. ‘That fear turns to terror as the chase begins. And that terror turns to horror when the chase ends. Horror is when it’s upon you, when it’s actually there.’
But they weren’t there, and, ahead of them, the grounds swept on.
‘Continue, Bugger,’ said Henry tightly.
Almost floundering, Brendan said, ‘The bomber … To the bomber, death is not death. And life isn’t life, either, but illusion. There is something called the demographic bomb – the birth bomb. The bomb of birth, the bomb of death.’
They pulled up.
‘A form of words, Bugger.’
‘… Well, sir, I suggest you confine yourself to what we may reasonably suppose will soon be the stuff of common knowledge.’
‘Spell it out, if you please.’
Brendan did so.
‘Mm. Perfectly decent little place. I shall need you, Bugger, at ten to five.’
Between the Royal Rolls and the double doors of the Abbey lay a gauntlet of umbrellas.
Dear Princess Victoria,
Or how about, simply, ‘Victoria’? I expect you must be fed up to the back teeth with all the endless pomp and circumstance in your life. There’s none of that nonsense round here, and I cordially extend an open invitation for you to pay us a visit any time you like. Don’t stand on ceremony! We don’t subscribe to ceremony.
We usually dine at a reasonably early hour. Good plain fare, such as has been enjoyed in England for centuries. Our caravan contains two totally separate rooms. Once Mother has gone to bed, privacy is virtually guaranteed.
We will then have the leisure to relax on the divan and get to know each other over a few beers. I’ll start by kissing you oh so slowly. So gently. So tenderly. Oh so lovingly. Then when you say the moment is right and not a moment before (this is totally your ‘call’ as they say) I’ll haul out my
Brendan yawned, and stopped reading (there were many pag
es yet to come). He was in the lounge, with his briefcase on his knees, going through another batch of the Princess’s restricted mail: mail she never saw. To begin with he had thought that the enemy might have shown its hand at some earlier point; he no longer thought it had, and persevered merely to give himself the feeling that he was getting somewhere. But of course these letters to the Princess were not from the world of pro-action. They came from the world of onanistic longing – and coarse sentimentality, and impotent sadism. Even at their most violent, and some were very violent indeed, they seemed to moan with inertia: a humiliated stasis. Nor would such men be going to France, bearing gold …
His wristwatch was cocked up on the table in front of him. He was ready. As he crushed the letters into their file (Restrained Correspondence) he asked himself why he had spent so long on such an obvious waste of time. He admitted that he indulged in fantasies of protection, of interposing himself between the world and the Princess. Was that his job, just now: a fantasy of protection?
* * *
With a show of capped teeth in his rubbery face, Captain Mate ushered him into the Oak Gallery – closed that afternoon, of course, for the King’s use. Henry and Victoria were on a chesterfield at the far end of the room, some sixty feet away. The remains of a substantial tea were being removed by Love and his helpers. As Brendan approached, and as the scene cleared, he found himself thinking of earlier times: father and daughter would spend whole days, whole weekends, lolling on a sofa like this, watching television or merely dozing and mumbling and occasionally rousing themselves for a game of I Spy. The King hadn’t changed; but she was older now, this autumn – more erect, and more inclined, it seemed to him, to maintain a distance between herself and her father.
‘How lovely to see you, Brendan.’
‘Always a delight, ma’am. I hope the Princess has had her fill of sticky buns?’
‘Oh yes. I had masses.’
‘And were they sufficiently “greedy”?’