After the birth of the Princess Victoria, Henry’s lovelife no longer looked to the calendar and the lunar cycle: now it looked to the appointment-book. This duty-roster approach became a habit. It was, of course, a bad habit. Love was by royal appointment, just like everything else. And the male, even the royal male, the most brilliant edition, cannot do this. He cannot master it: expectation – the appointment with expectation. On top of all this, Pamela, as she got older, looked more and more unmistakably like a man.
One afternoon, at five past three, the Queen Consort said, with gruff puzzlement: ‘What’s the matter with it, Hotty? Oh come on, this is hopeless!’ … And that was all it took. Not a single second of his waking life had a thing in common with anyone else’s, but Henry’s vulnerability, at least, was universal; here he came down from the mountain and took his chances among his fellow men. What was the matter with it? Good question. From this time forth, whenever the King saw a ‘3pm: Pammy’ on his schedule, he felt a force settle on his chest, like a harness; and it wouldn’t slacken until the rendezvous upstairs had somehow been survived. He searched his memory for a precursor of this apprehension, for he knew it to be there. Yes. The hours leading up to an earlier rendezvous, also by appointment: when he went to the housemaster’s study to be thrashed.
But the negative epiphany – his life’s cur moment – was waiting for him up in the Kyle of Tongue.
Brendan Urquhart-Gordon listened. The ringing stopped, and there were sounds of effort; and then – expressing no more than mildly hurt feelings – came a whimper of canine protest.
‘Pepper, get off. Beena. Is that you, Bugger? The bally – the bally phone got stuck under Beena and General Monck. And now there are hairs all over it, and some … disgusting flux or other. General! Get … Where are you, Bugger?’
‘I am being driven north-east from the Cap to Nice airport, sir. Rather fast.’
To his right, beyond the forecourts of the supermarkets and hotels and petrol-stations, the modest lapping of the Mediterranean; to his left, not seen but sensed, the villa colours, the spotlights and crickets and sprinklers. Beside him sat compact, handsome, ageing Oughtred.
‘Well, Bugger?’
‘We have a crime-scene, sir. Much follows from this. We also have very compelling deductive evidence that the motive or the intention could not possibly—’
‘Don’t jabber your conclusions at me, Bugger. And stop sounding so pleased with yourself. I’m ill with this, Bugger, and it’s not funny.’
Brendan reproached himself: he had failed to dissimulate the pep of forensic success. He said, ‘How insensitive of me, sir. Forgive me.’
‘Forgiven. Now get on with it, Bugger. Oh a bottle of rather good red wine, if you would, Love? And one of your savoury snacks?’
‘We’re on the tarmac now, sir. Can you hear the plane? … We’re begin break up.’
‘Hello? Hello?’
‘Sir, this is need to know. The motive, intention, not possibly pecuniary. Media nor blackmail. Talk to.’
After tapping it and shaking it, Henry slid the telephone back under General Monck; and, when Love returned, he asked him for a pack of cards.
Imagine: the kings and the queens. And what are we? Tens, twos?
Celibate himself, Brendan Urquhart-Gordon was an abnormally observant friend. And Henry, in any case, presented no challenge to the imaginative powers. He was legible; he was easy to read.
On a ‘Pammy’ day – or a day featuring ‘another bally three-o’clocker’, as Brendan had heard him put it – Henry would be quite useless all morning (incapable of consecutive thought), and would start yelling for brandy at about half past twelve. At five to three, up he trudged, returning at a quarter to four … If things had gone reasonably well, then Henry would assume a put-upon but stoical air (interestingly, there seemed to be no dividend of relief). If things had gone badly, then the King’s parched face bore the skullshadow of mortality.
So one evening, in the library at the Greater House, Brendan looked up from a preselected report by the British Medical Association, and said casually,
‘A giant step forward for mankind, wouldn’t you say, sir? Potentium. The cause of so much male insecurity banished by the wand of physic. There will be no more wars.’
‘… What are you banging on about, Bugger?’
‘Sir, Potentium. A male-potency drug. Tested and patented and freely available. You take it on an ad hoc basis, sir. A single pill and Bob’s your uncle. There will be no more wars.’
Henry stared into space for a good five minutes, blinking slowly and numbly, like an owl. Then he turned away and said, ‘No no. One can’t be doing with that monkey-glends business.’
And that would be that. And who was Brendan to carp? He used to tell himself that he thrived on his own inhibitions. But perhaps that was personal propaganda; and the obverse would never be tested. The fact remained that the bed he spent so much time trying not to think about had an occupant, and that occupant was a passive male. No, there never was a case more pusillanimous than his own. Given the choice between chastity and the reification of his schoolyard nickname, Bugger chose chastity. So it was all over very early: when he was eight.
‘After four hours in the Château, sir, I was saying to myself, “Hello, this is a bit of a frost.” We’d done all twenty-seven bathrooms. No shortage of white bathtubs, and no shortage of soap. But the alignments, the background colours, wouldn’t match. Then I remembered the Yellow House, sir.’
‘Indeed, Bugger.’
‘Where the Princess often … bathed and changed after tennis before going on to the swimming-pool. And that, sir, was where the intrusion took place. A slat on the top section of the airing-cupboard facing the bath had been partly excised. On the shelf above the boiler we found a Vortex DigiCam 5000. The videodisc had of course been removed. Oughtred, who is still there, unsurprisingly reports that there are no prints and the registration numbers and so on have been scoured smooth.’
‘So are we further for’ard, Bugger? I don’t quite …’
The two men were in a security vehicle outside the Mansion House, where Henry was due to attend an anniversary dinner of the British Architectural Association (and where he would later ‘say a few words’: keep up the good work and whatnot). For a moment the King seemed to submit to the oppression of his surroundings: a mobile granny-flat littered with display screens, transmitters, earphones. Right in front of his chin there hovered a poised mike, with what seemed to be a leather condom clipped to its shaft. There was a jar of Bovril on the counter and, balanced on its lid, a smeared tablespoon.
‘We have more, sir. But already we can make certain deductions. The unlikelihood of any pecuniary motive. At first I thought, well, the DigiCam 5 is worth about three thousand pounds – they got it in, why didn’t they get it out? And this rather handily exonerates all the staff, as I realised when I was about to corral them for questioning.’
‘I don’t quite follow.’
‘The servants simply can’t have known about it or they’d have reported it or stolen it. This was rather spectacularly confirmed by Oughtred, not an hour ago. The DigiCam 5 is amazingly portable – but not this one. The camera, sir, is inlaid with gold …’
Henry eructed liverishly behind his hand. ‘How perfectly vile all this makes me feel. My tummy’s in ruins. I shall have to give my speech with my legs doublecrossed. What are they telling us, Bugger?’
‘They’re telling us that they’re rich already and that they want something else. Not money.’
‘What else have I got but money? I am a constitutional monarch and by definition I have no power. Glory, yes. But no power.’
‘Is glory power?’ asked Urquhart-Gordon. And he added to himself excitedly: is it negative power?
* * *
The next morning, as he cautiously overcame a cup of lemon tea (he would normally have a proper English breakfast: all the usual stuff plus lots of chops and pies), Henry IX received a communication fr
om his private secretary:
FYI, sir. Copied out while hunched over the Château visitors’ book. Please forgive informalities. Present during the Princess’s stay (chronology of arrival):
Henry R; Bill and Joan Sussex; Brendan Urquhart-Gordon; Prince Alfred and Chicago Jones; Chippy and Catherine Edenderry; the Sultan and Sultana of Perak; Boy and Emma Robville; Juliet Ormonde; Lady Arabella Mont; John and Nicola Kimbolton; Joy Wilson; Prince Mohammad Faed (and wives); Hank Davis; the Emir of Qatar (and wives); He Zizhen. NB: at one point there were 47 minors at the Château, including 15 teenage boys.
Ah, He, He, He Zizhen … Just over a year after the Queen’s accident, Henry found himself dining alone with Edith Beresford-Hale. However easily explained (and graciously excused), the straining, trembling, wheezing fiasco that followed was enough to convince the King: all that was all over. Edith was still a widow, or rather a widow once more, and there had been other changes. For example, she was sixty-three. But Henry made no allowances, and was quite prepared to tiptoe from the scene with his slippers in his hand. ‘That was a last,’ he said hurriedly to himself. ‘What’s the matter with it, Hotty?’ the Queen had asked, giving Excalibur a rough tug or two before tossing it impatiently aside. ‘Oh come on, this is hopeless!’ Well indeed. What was the matter with it?
Then came He … ‘May I tell you a secret?’ she said in her accentless English, joining him as he smoked a cigar on a balcony of the Chinese Embassy in Paris. Henry turned (and noticed the sudden absence of his escort, Captain Mate). His universe was a gallery of strangers, and here was someone doubly other: the lavish black quiff, the fractional asymmetry of her lidless eyes (one eye happy, one eye sad), the strong teeth rather carelessly stacked into their prows. He inclined his sandy head at an avuncular angle … Now, to be clear: world-historical beauties (women perpetually dogged by tearful trillionaires) had come at him fairly steadily during the past twelve months. Many talented tongues had scoured – had practically drained – the royal ear. And the King might have flinched but he always leant willingly into it, hoping for an answer in himself, which never came … He Zizhen stood on tiptoe. Then there was contact. It seemed as if a butterfly had taken up residence in his tympanum – no, make that two butterflies; and they were mating. At once his collateral heart (so torpid, so workshy, so decidedly valetudinarian) felt like a length of towel-rack.
Subliminally, in his dreams, it worried him. The sexual coincidence: himself, in the Château, with the otherness of He in his arms; and, across the lawn, the Princess surprised in the Yellow House.
February 14 (11.20 a.m.): 101 Heavy
First Officer Nick Chopko: If it’s designed to do it, it’ll do it. God I’m tired. How about it, Cap?
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Guy was telling me he was so tired coming into Honolulu it was like he was drunk. Not just drunk but totally smashed.
Captain John Macmanaman: I was reading in AUN, both pilots on a commuter fell asleep about two minutes after takeoff. Now with a sealed cockpit you don’t want to …
Chopko: The attendants were screaming and banging on the door. They were practically in space when they came to.
Macmanaman: Not where you want to be today … You know what the Aztecs called comets? ‘Smoking stars.’ Because of the trail, I guess. You’ll get your nap, Nick. But you’ll have to excuse me for a second. I want to say hello to a passenger.
‘Takeoff rough enough for you?’ he said.
‘Ah I trust you, John,’ said Reynolds.
In the surplice of his uniform, hat in hand, he bent to kiss her. The man in 2A briefly ogled the Captain, but then kept wrenching his head around and staring back through the porthole to monitor the performance of the wing.
‘Welcome to widowworld. How are you bearing up, Rennie?’
‘Good. No, I feel wonderful. There’s a gap, and the end was horrible, but let’s not kid ourselves. You knew him.’
In the hold, the corpse of Royce Traynor (full of wax and formaldehyde) was waiting with its teeth bared.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. The thing which is called world
‘“So-called ‘Renaissance Man’ Xan Meo, attacked and hospitalised in late October,” ‘read Russia, ‘“may have been the victim of his own past, which is mired in criminality and violence.”’
Xan listened, on this his first day home.
‘“His father, Mick Meo, was a prosperous East End gangster who served numerous jail terms for armed robbery, theft, fraud, tax-evasion, extortion with menaces, and affray.
‘“In 1978, while in his sixties, Mick Meo was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for attempted murder, and died in jail. His victim was his own son-in-law, Damon Susan, the husband of his daughter Leda. Himself an ex-convict, Susan was confined to a wheelchair after the incident. He never recovered from injuries described at the time as ‘unusually appalling’, and is now in a hospice in West Sussex.”’
‘You know all that. There’s nothing new here.’
Russia inhaled. She seemed to be sucking colour into her face …
‘“Xan Meo’s first wife, Pearl O’Daniel, a theatrical costumier” – oh, sure – “emerged from a similar background. Her father and all three of her brothers have served time for crimes of violence, and she herself has two convictions for possession of cocaine.
‘“Keeping up the family tradition of injuring close relatives, Meo himself attracted the attention of the police after an incident with Angus O’Daniel, his wife’s eldest brother, who declined to press charges. And in his youth Meo was convicted of a litany of minor offences, including Actual Bodily Harm.” What’s the difference between Actual and Grievous?’
‘Uh, extent of injury. Grievous is worse. Actual’s bullshit.’
‘“While there is nothing to suggest, as yet, that the recent attack on Meo had any direct connection with his past, we do know that violence tends to double back on itself. Violence begets violence. However lucrative Meo’s background may have been in shaping his portrayals of lowlife characters, on the screen and on the page, he may find that he is now paying for his past.”’
‘It’s not a “past”. It’s a providence. I mean a provenance.’
‘“Meo’s marriage to O’Daniel was dissolved five years ago on grounds, among others, of physical abuse. Within months he married again. His second wife is dah dah dah …”’
‘No, go on. Who’s my second wife? Remind me.’
‘“Dr Russia Tannenbaum, who teaches at King’s College, London, and is the author of a university-press bestseller about the children of tyrants.” Remarkable.’
‘Remarkable how?’
‘No errors of fact.’
Russia pushed the bulky, frazzled tabloid across the sofa towards him. Xan saw that the piece was illustrated to shore up its theme. The photograph of Pearl belonged to a set she had circulated during one of the more regrettable spasms of their divorce: her left cheekbone was bruised and the eye above it was swollen shut (and Xan, in the same desperate struggle, had received a broken nose). As for Russia, she’d been taken by surprise in the street somewhere, and looked as though she was about to be mugged. Xan was represented by a still from a TV movie called 99 Stitches, in which he had played the part of ‘Striper’ McTavish: he had a broken bottle in one hand and a claw-hammer in the other.
‘Well you can’t say you wasn’t …’ said Xan. ‘You can’t say you weren’t warned.’
She contemplated him. His face now seemed to wear a coating, a cladding – the hospitalic subtraction of vigour and light. It was also, again, oddly leonine: something top-of-the-food-chain in the contented wreath of the mouth. This face feared no predator.
‘I’ll come back at them. In the press. I’ll get on to Rory,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell my side.’
Billie entered, without escort. In the last couple of months she had established her right to glide unaccompanied round the house – much to the profit of her inner life. Increasingly often you saw the eyes give a freshene
d bulge: new acquisitions, new annexations, in the forming brain.
‘Get a book, darling,’ said Russia, ‘and Daddy will read.’
‘Look at the size of this lousy rag,’ said Xan as he let it slip from his lap to the floor. ‘I’m on page eighty-six. That’s one good thing about being in the papers these days. If you’re on the news pages up front then they’ve got you. If not, you’re okay. Because you can’t fucking find it.’
Russia was certain: he had never done that before – sworn in front of Billie.
‘Want it this one,’ said the child.
And Xan turned his attention to a family of well-dressed elephants awaiting sustenance in a palatial dining-room.
‘I’m that one,’ said Billie. ‘And Mummy’s that one. And Baba’s that one. And Lada’s that one.’
Xan pointed to the head of the table, where the father sat. ‘Who’s that one?’
‘… No one.’
That one wasn’t anyone. It was just an elephant in a blue suit.
Deficit-denial, energy-debt, fatigue-management: they knew the kind of things to expect. And they went about it like sensible people.
Russia’s maternity sabbatical was coming to an end (and there was that conference in Germany), and Imaculada’s trip to Brazil was imminent and unpostponable; but Xan, in his condition, wasn’t going anywhere: so it seemed obvious. He would spend his days lolling and idling with the girls, and would make himself useful, as lackadaisically as he liked, about the house.