Royals

by Emma Forrest

  ‘Yes, exactly, he left her because she had cancer. Then she did it.’

  There was still mania in her voice, which might have registered, incorrectly, to an outsider as excitement.

  ‘Jesus.’ I said, without an exclamation at the end because I felt as depressed as I did surprised.

  ‘Anyway, you could have your lover’s initials studded into the case with diamonds right there in the store. And coral? You could choose diamonds, coral, turquoise, mix them up, give them something to differentiate themselves from all the other schmos in love.’

  ‘I always like opals.’

  ‘No opal. Never opal. It’s bad luck, right through the centuries, didn’t you know that?’

  I raised my hands in a Woody Allen gesture, which, as the years progressed and I came to dislike him, I would adjust to a Larry David gesture.

  ‘We only need a very small space, cigarette cases are so slim. The store should mimic that, just as you want a jewellery shop to look like a jewel box. Hmmm. We could really do this.’

  ‘Okay.’ At this point I was just agreeing with her, in a trance from the story she’d just told.

  ‘I want to talk to my father, have him sign on as a backer.’

  ‘Do we need him?’

  ‘We don’t, but I just think he’d be so excited, he’d want to and it is, technically, his money.’

  ‘I could put some money in, too.’ Obviously, I was not going to put in any of my money, a) because it was a pipe dream and b) because I had none. But I still smarted when she said, ‘Where would you get money?’

  She didn’t mean it how it sounded. Or maybe she did. She was so generous a soul, her occasional shards of anger or cruelty seemed to catch her as much by surprise as they did me. But the weight of words is like the weight of a fabric: if she’d have said, ‘Where would you get the money?’ instead of the emphasis on ‘you’, it would all have hung differently. She seemed to know, and hurried back to the idea itself.

  ‘It’s so out of time, that’s what I love about it. Don’t you feel that way about you and me?’

  ‘I feel that way, sometimes, often, and I can’t speak for you but yes, I see it in you.’

  ‘No, I mean us, as a couple.’

  ‘I suppose I don’t think of us as a couple.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and stubbed out her cigarette in the fried egg she’d added to her Welsh rarebit. ‘I do.’

  I’d have felt sad for her but she speared the egg so brutally through the heart of its yolk, I felt worse for her dinner than for her. I’m not sure if she did ever mention it to her father. We never talked about the couture cigarette-case shop ever again.

  ‘Oh, maybe after you’ve finished my dress, you could make him something. He’s got the funniest body, all sinewy and barrel-chested and all he eats is milk, gallons and gallons of milk.’

  ‘Like David Bowie in his cocaine psychosis era.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Then she thought about this and looked sad.

  ‘Do you want the dress I’m making you to be a deep scarlet red?’

  ‘Titian red. Have you ever seen a Titian up close?’

  ‘In books, at the library.’

  ‘Why haven’t you been in person?’

  ‘Art galleries are too romantic to walk through alone.’

  ‘But being by yourself is the most romantic! That’s what I think. Well. You must see one.’

  ‘Okay.’ I didn’t mention how often her thoughts on solitude changed.

  ‘No, I mean right now. You can’t get the dress right if you don’t see the Titian.’

  I told her all the galleries were closed. She agreed, but thankfully, she knew someone who actually owned one. A colonel in Belgravia, who seemed pleased to see her and not at all upset about being dropped in on at ten o’clock. He had an empty bottle of cognac on the table, but he offered us some of it anyway.

  ‘He was in the army with my dad!’

  ‘The navy.’

  ‘Oh, you’re an admiral?’

  ‘Of course. Why else do you think they call me “Admiral”?’

  ‘I thought it was a nickname.’

  The Titian looked down on us, warily, her red hair screaming ‘bed head’ and ‘I would like to be allowed to go to mine, can you fuck off, please?’

  ‘Steven is a genius and he can make you clothes.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Give him your admiral’s hat, to copy.’

  The admiral seemed doubtful.

  ‘It’s just to inspire him.’

  ‘But I already gave him a look at my Titian.’

  ‘Go on. Do it.’

  And, as soon as she said, ‘Do it,’ he did, handing the hat to me without moving from his chair, his arm appearing to extend like a novelty fork. I thanked him. The hat smelled, but was beautifully constructed.

  Then she hailed a taxi and took us back to hers where she tucked me in for the night in the bed her dad had slept in.

  ‘This room is only for very special people.’

  When I woke up she had a mug of tea before her and was wearing the dress-in-process.

  ‘I think you need a dart here, just beneath the bust. Don’t you agree?’

  I wiped my bleary eyes. She handed me some safety pins and I tried to make sense of the line without sticking her.

  As I pinned, she sucked in the air as if standing astride a mountain. ‘I think an artist reaches greatness when they start work before breakfast.’

  I nodded, not quite seeing or hearing properly as yet. She hovered relentlessly, hassling me to get on with the day. She’d obviously been up for hours, probably watching me sleep and making small noises in the hope that would wake me, without actually shaking me awake. She was wearing a denim all-in-one romper in the style of Farrah Fawcett, but she’d added a feather showgirl plume to her bun. It was a look I’d now call Charlie’s Angels meets Angela Carter.

  I got myself together as best I could and, as the world came into focus, so did my guilt. I knew I was overdue to call Mum. I knew she’d be worried by now.

  ‘Hi, Mum!’

  ‘Oh my God! It’s you!’

  Her tone spoke of a separation across generations, Odyssean in its stretch. I’d called her before I’d gone to bed, telling her exactly where I was, but in our dynamic I’d allowed her to drift into anxiety. Hers fed mine until I started worrying about where I was and whether or not I was safe. I promised I’d be home by dinner. Jasmine took the phone from me before I’d said my full goodbyes (my goodbyes to my mother taking the back-and-forth shuffle of someone who declares they’re leaving a dinner party and then doesn’t). I’d have made fun of Mum and my part in this dance, but I knew she was also, somewhere in her worry for my safe return, still the child of Holocaust survivors. That was there, even when it wasn’t.

  Jasmine got us out of the door and into a cab, and it was only when we were hurtling towards Mayfair that I saw the bag, at her feet, full of all the clothes she’d stolen at the charity shop.

  She went from boutique to boutique, placing an item on the racks, between £1,000 jackets and crocodile-skin handbags.

  As we left Chanel, I hissed, ‘This must be illegal! It’s like shoplifting, somehow.’

  ‘No. It’s not. We’re shop-dropping. I don’t see anything wrong with it.’

  ‘Then why are we being so secretive?’

  ‘Because that’s what makes it fun. Don’t you want to have secrets with me?’

  When the bag was empty she was very pleased with herself, a woman who’d put in a hard day’s work. The duplicity had made me terrified and her hungry.

  ‘I’m famished!’ she said, and guided me towards Claridge’s. Flags waved us towards the rotating glass doors, and I felt we were stragglers at the end of a long race. The hotel’s flag was draped alongside the flags of the UK and Ireland, as if the hotel were itself a country. Red brick, marble and wrought iron were layered against each other so evocatively they could have been parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. If you rubbed ag
ainst them, the cool of the marble, the brick dust, the metallic smell would stay on your skin for days.

  ‘Imagine this building when it’s dusted in snow!’

  Jasmine waited a beat to be certain I was imagining, and then she led me in, a man in a black top hat watchful as we entered the heavy revolving door. You can’t really hold a revolving door for someone, but you can be respectfully present as they navigate it.

  Stairs of gilded brass spilled across the black-and-white chequerboard floor, thick wood bannisters burst forth like beloved porn-star erections. Above our heads was the most elaborate plasterwork, which I craned my neck back to study.

  ‘It’s called crown moulding, okay?’ like she’d caught me staring at her arse and was snapping back.

  My eyes were wide at the sight of the hundred-year-old lobby, but she pulled me past the Fumoir, where men were smoking cigars, as if we were just dashing into Tesco’s for a sandwich. I thought I recognised Marie Helvin among the cigar smokers, lights proffered from all sides. ‘Yes, it’s her,’ said Jasmine, without my asking.

  ‘How exciting!’

  ‘Oh, that’s the least of it. As you know, this is where the West German chancellor negotiated reparations for the Jews, post-Holocaust.’

  I didn’t know, but I nodded, then started to ask where the toilets were. I am always desperate to see the toilets in a posh place (I still am).

  ‘And where are the…?’

  ‘Yes, I know what you’re asking: room 212 was ceded to Yugoslavia for one day so Crown Prince Alexander could be born on Yugoslav soil while his parents were in exile.’

  Sometimes she knew what I wanted. Sometimes not. I held my wee as she marched me towards the tea room.

  The great fashion illustrator David Downton was yet to be in residence at Claridge’s, but it already felt like the women around us at tea were elegant pencil sketches.

  I thought the hostess would be bothered by Jasmine’s punk make-up but she cried: ‘Jasmine! We’ve missed you!’

  Perhaps the flags waving as we entered the building had been waiting since she last visited, half-mast, for her return.

  You can do anything at all if you’re rich enough, you can wear anything. You can smell terrible, you can walk in with two different shoes. Oud, that killer ingredient, the most expensive component in the most luxurious perfumes, is made of whale vomit or elephant sperm, maybe fox shit, I forget, but I know it smells terrible yet somehow makes everything around it smell better. Because it’s rich.

  She settled deep into a tufted chair to admire her own childhood through rose spectacles. ‘I’ve been coming here since I was still a little girl.’

  I wanted to say, ‘You still are a little girl.’ Especially after watching the delight with which she greeted the eclairs and Battenburg. She squealed. And then she cut them up and arranged them into a tableau. The she scoffed the lot, offering me every fourth bite. Because of her, I know that beautiful girls can eat whatever they like; they just have to set their minds to it.

  She enjoyed pouring the tea, as if wrestling back the status of parent between the two of us, after my scolding her for misbehaving in the boutiques.

  ‘Milk in first?’ she admonished me. ‘Where were you raised? Bow?’ Then she giggled and tried to get me to sit on her knee. When the pencil-sketch ladies turned to stare, she engaged them in conversation.

  ‘I love your brooch!’

  ‘Thank you,’ the eldest, white-haired and wicker thin, said, disarmed. Soon enough Jasmine was trying it on and after that the lady had given it to her. I’ve never forgotten that: how to engage someone who’s about to take against you. It’s been useful in my career, because it isn’t just whether you’re skilled or not at your craft, it is how you handle people or, at minimum, find a way not to be around people you know you can’t handle.

  We finally went to the bathroom to pee and she insisted I come to the ladies’ room with her because I had to see the wallpaper. I was delighted. Gold on black, raised deco welts I couldn’t help running my fingers over. I’m not going to lie. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, London’s best toilet, something I’d covet for the rest of my life, and almost worth what happened next.

  As we returned from the ladies’ room, we heard the shout: ‘Everybody get on the floor!’

  She tugged me to the floor, landing us right by a table leg. I was very close to tears, thinking that not only would I die, but that my mum had been right to have sounded so worried for my safety. Was it her sixth sense? Or was it that if you worried about everything you would one day be right?

  Everyone dug in their bags for their wallets and got out the money they had. The old ladies. The romantic couple. The afternoon drunk. Even the maître d’ and the waiters. The robber had chosen the perfect venue at the right time of day to make a mint. He went around the patrons collecting their offerings one by one, like a very rude Underground performer.

  ‘This is so exciting!’ mouthed Jasmine.

  When the robber got to us, I was quaking in my boots and gave him everything I had. When Jasmine handed him the paltry twenty that was in her wallet, he looked at it, looked at her, double-checked her bag and then handed the cash back. ‘Keep it. You need this more than I do.’

  ‘But I’m rich!’ she said. ‘I’m really rich!’

  ‘She is,’ I concurred and he stomped me with his shoe.

  It did now seem like I might be about to die. I closed my eyes and thought of the gorgeous wallpaper in the ladies’ room. First, I had it fill the screensaver of my mind, and then I imagined myself inside it. I was flying on the back of one of the art deco egrets.

  Not wanting to be left out, Jasmine handed him the brooch she’d been gifted fifteen minutes earlier by the pencil-sketch lady. Then, while the man was counting up what he’d made, she reached an arm up onto a tea tray still on the table, and filched a Battenburg slice.

  ‘That’s a Battenburg slice,’ I whispered, not believing what I was seeing.

  ‘Would you rather the meringue? But I thought it might crunch and alert them to us.’

  ‘Shhh.’

  Then they were gone and sirens were ringing.

  ‘How can you be so calm?’ I asked her, barely able to stand.

  ‘Oh, I’m always dying. It’s nothing to me. I’m well prepped.’

  As we left, photographers were already on the scene and she smiled for them as if they were from the society page rather than the crime beat. The woman who’d given us the brooch was sobbing by the now deactivated revolving door, the doorman having removed his hat, the better to comfort her. Jasmine motioned to the photographers, pointed a finger at me and shouted, ‘He’s a brilliant young designer. Brilliant but troubled.’

  They were sensible enough not to ask us for our eyewitness account of the terror.

  I was breathing so heavily still, I just managed to say, ‘You were so calm. Claridge’s might think you were in on it.’

  ‘Only so much as I am aware that we live in a great metropolis and that this sort of thing is bound to happen. It’s the price we pay for freedom.’

  I think my mum might have spontaneously combusted at that statement, delivered like a cowboy balladeer drawling a love song through a dangling cigarette. I thought I might burst. My body was filled with the rushing sensation that alerted every nerve ending to one thought: I wanted my mother. The red brick, the cool marble, the wrought iron all now looked like weapons.

  ‘I think I ought to go home now. Thank you very much… for everything.’

  I wasn’t exactly sure what I was thanking her for, it was so expansive and I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I would owe her for. I thought she’d give me a big hug after all we’d been through together, so I primed my ribs, still sore from Dad’s kicking, when she squeezed me too hard. But she just said ‘De rien’ and gave me two air kisses. I knew what de rien means and even though I was unnerved by her casualness, I was glad she couldn’t intimidate me by the use of French slang. It was j
ust everything else about her that left me in awe.

  It took me an age to make it back because the IRA had called in another bomb threat. I tried to call Mum from a payphone to let her know my progress and that I was trying to return to her, but the line was busy. As if psychically connected to Mum, I felt terribly worried, already in trouble for trying her nerves after not having thought of her one bit until this, the very last hour and a half before I’d reach my front door. It felt like not being able to taste any of the chocolates in the box until you get to the absolute last and then the sorrow and terror of the ending just floods you, your senses and your taste buds.

  When I finally made it home, she was, of course, in a dreadful state and what really made me ill was that my father was comforting her. ‘There there, Mama,’ and turning to me, ‘see what you put her through? Isn’t she good to you?’ while she cried into a handkerchief she’d embroidered one weekend when recovering from one of his beatings. Having worked so hard to get home, I wanted to leave immediately.

  I was trapped by the places already set with their knives and forks and spoon at the top, by the mushy peas set in front of me, the pie and mash, by the fucking football on the television and my father and brothers cheering and shouting at the screen, interspersed by bananas and custard and me trying not to gag when I got to a lump. My brother saying I was putting it on and me saying, ‘No, it really is making me feel queasy. Why would I fake that?’

  ‘To taunt your poor mother,’ said Dad, and patted her hand.

  I looked him in the eye. I was still bruised and swollen on my face and holding his gaze would force him to see, to see how much I hated him and that I knew what he really was, that as much as he hated himself deep inside, it wasn’t enough. But he just looked down at his peas.

  During the robbery, I thought I was terrified, but I must have been slightly less afraid than I’d thought, because my brain had wandered, when the robber stomped me, to how horrid to be stomped by a mass-produced shoe.

  That night, I took apart the Titian admiral’s hat, and then sewed it back together.

  CHAPTER 11