He walked down Magnolia Drive, letter in hand, and turned into Forsythia Way, which itself led into the High Street in which was situated the post office. The time was fast approaching, of course, when he would no longer have to perform himself such menial tasks as posting a letter: there would be footmen, secretaries and chamberlains to do the like. But such had been the success of the Usurpation – another capital letter – that he had been deprived of his most elementary rights and privileges as a royal person. That was why he forgave people in the street for their failure to bow or curtsey to him as he passed. They had been deliberately kept in ignorance, as indeed had he until very recently. The Usurpation had been cunning, ruthless and thorough. It had infiltrated its lies and falsities everywhere and so the people were not to be blamed for their lack of respect.
For the moment, however, it was probably best not to enlighten them, and to let them go on thinking that he was Reginald Smith, librarian and wearer of a worn tweed jacket with leather patches. There would be time enough for them to render him the due homage and to regret their previous over-familiarity and impudence towards him. How embarrassed they would be: but he would be gracious. He would rise above his anger at their previous insolence.
The lady at the post office counter took his letter as if it were just any other rather than an historic document that would change the country’s history. Naturally there was no way she could have known this but even the address, Buckingham Palace, London SW1, did not raise her eyebrow. As someone who himself had long had dealings with the public, however, His Majesty was fully aware that some of his subjects were not quite twelve pence to the shilling and in effect sleep-walked their way through life.
There was nothing further to be done now that he had posted the letter, other than to wait, at least for a time. Although he was a sovereign deprived of his rights – and that since birth – His Majesty did not want to appear impatient, unreasonable or over-eager. Noblesse oblige, after all.
But how many days would it be reasonable to wait? If he didn’t want to appear hurried, as a parvenu might, neither could he afford to let things slide as if unsure of his rightful claim, as if he were just trying it on. Were not the words Dieu et mon droit inscribed on his coat of arms? He decided that four days was long enough before he sent something more strongly worded, like successive warnings over library books not returned on time.
The four days were now up. All that had come through the letterbox in the meantime were offers of cut-price insurance for his water-pipes and drainage, and a flyer for the Liberal-Democrat candidate in the forthcoming local elections, promising to build a youth centre for the youth of Forehampton who had nothing to do, thereby preventing them from smashing bus shelters.
It was time for another letter. His Majesty would have now to harden his tone. Some people – usurpers among them - did not listen to reason. It was all very well for the Bible to say that a soft answer turned away wrath, but had it ever been known to persuade a usurper to desist and repent?
‘Dear Mrs Windsor,’ he began again, ‘It appears that you have chosen to to ignore our previous letter demanding your evacuation of our Royal Palace.’ (He was not quite accustomed to using the royal first person, and realised that he would have to maintain his vigilance in order not to slip back into the singular, which his enemies might use to dispute his claims). ‘We therefore require and command you on receipt of the Royal Instruction, without further prevarication or procrastination, to vacate our Royal Palace, and all our other Royal Palaces, within twenty-four hours. Given this day under our hand, Reginald R.’
It was true, thought the King, that at first sight such a letter might seem surprising addressed from 23, Magnolia Drive, Forehampton, but had not Charles II taken refuge in an oak tree and was not 23, Magnolia Drive, somewhat grander and more commodious than an oak tree? A king is king by virtue of his birth, not by that of his current residence; it is possible to be regal in a pigsty. Nor is a king a king by virtue of what he does or how he behaves, though of course it is better if he behaves well. One is either born a king or not, and Reginald had been so born. His only regret was that his mother, the late Queen Mother, Queen Doris, had never lived to see the day of her restoration. His first act would be to remove her remains from Forehampton Municipal Cemetery to the Royal Chapel at Windsor.
His Majesty waited another three days: again, there was silence. Real firmness was now required.
King Reginald, the First of that Name, had not slept more than fitfully for the last four nights, kept awake by making plans for his coronation and how to evict the Usurpers by force if it were needed. He might have to go to the palace in person to arrest them all: for if a mere citizen were entitled by the law to make an arrest, surely a rightful sovereign had the same right?
‘You, Elizabeth Windsor,’ he next wrote, ‘are hereby commanded to vacate our Royal Palace forthwith, or face the consequences. We remind you that the death penalty is still in force for the crime of treason.’
This time he sent the letter both express and recorded delivery.
The following day, at two o’clock in the afternoon, there was a knock on his front door. His Majesty opened the door himself and saw a policemen standing in front of him. He assumed that he had arrived to escort him in glory to the Palace, his rightful home: the policeman looked a little surprised to be confronted by His Majesty himself instead of a footman.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said the policeman, politely enough for the ordinary citizen, but hardly appropriate for his sovereign.
‘Don’t you mean Your Majesty?’ asked the King, with a faint touch of asperity.
The policeman gave no sign of having heard.
‘Are you Reginald Smith?’ he asked.
‘That is the alias by which I have long been known,’ replied the King, again with a faint hauteur.
Another policeman appeared from behind the thriving leylandia that grew between His Majesty’s front garden and the road.
‘I arrest you on a charge of…’
The King did not quite catch the nature of the charge – or rather, the so-called charge. Obviously, the Usurpers would stop at nothing, no depths they would not descend to, in the attempt to preserve their position.
‘You are committing treason,’ His Majesty said, as one of the policemen, in a swift movement, clamped handcuffs round his wrists so that they came together almost as if in an act of prayer.
‘Now we don’t want any trouble, do we?’ said one of the policemen.
The King decided that regal dignity would be best, even if it were injured. Did not Shakespeare himself say that the whirligig of time would bring in its revenges? Did not Charles I go the scaffold with such grace that the people who saw it fell to their knees?
It was also necessary to be realistic. What chance did a man who had spent years as a branch librarian have against two policemen? There had sometimes been awkward customers at the library, but never any requiring physical force to remove, which he would have been unqualified and unable to apply in any case. Again, there would be time enough to punish those responsible, among whom (he thought, pleased with his own magnanimity and largeness of spirit) were not the policemen, who thought they were only doing their job, under the ultimate direction of the Usurpers. When you looked into their faces, you saw that they were not very intelligent; and His Majesty had always thought that the dictum that ignorance was no excuse for breaking the law was unduly harsh.
Still, there was no reason for them to bundle their sovereign so roughly into the waiting white police van. His Majesty, no aficionado (yet) of motor vehicles had never been in one so uncomfortable. It was a strange introduction to royal luxury. He was pushed down on to a cold metal bench that ran along the inside of the windowless rear of the van, with the two policemen on either side of him restricting his movements. His Majesty thought that this was no way to treat anyone, let alone him, and he made a mental note of it as the first reform to be undertaken in his reign.
&nbs
p; The van, driven by a third policeman who had been waiting all along, seemed to careen and career through the streets, for reasons that he literally could not see. He began to feel slightly seasick (not that he had been to sea). The van was obviously speeding at the top of its capacity, to judge by the engine noise; but what was the hurry? Although he could see nothing, a blue light flashed rhythmically though the semi-gloom of the van’s interior. It was as if it were an emergency, which perhaps for the Usurpers it was. His letters must have frightened them into taking counter-measures before their content leaked out and caused unrest. People did not like to have been duped, especially for so long a period.
The van arrived at the police station. It had not been a long journey because nowhere in Forehampton was very far from anywhere else. The back doors of the van were thrown open with what seemed like violence.
‘Out you get,’ said a voice roughly and without any ceremony.
His Majesty stood, but though not a tall man he hit his head on the ribbing of the van’s roof.
‘Careful!’ said the voice. ‘Watch where you go!’
The voice was not solicitous, at least not of him. It implied that any accident that befell him would be his own fault. As he reached the van doors, now open wide, his forearm was suddenly gripped and he was hauled down a couple of steps stumbling as he emerged into the light. He was led into the station via a back door. Until then he had not known there was a back door to Forehampton police station.
The custody sergeant behind the desk was clearly a cut above the other policemen. The King was relieved to discover that not everything malfunctioned under the Usurpers, that some men were still promoted on the grounds of merit.
‘Are you Reginald Smith, of 23, Magnolia Drive?’ asked the sergeant.
Should he reveal his true identity? One should not tell lies.
‘That is how people know me,’ he replied, pleased with his own deftness in avoiding untruth while reserving his position.
‘How do you feel, all right?’
Not suicidal, if that’s what you’re thinking, thought His Majesty. King’s may abdicate, but not by suicide. Before he could say anything, however, a crackly voice came over a radio, indecipherable to His Majesty, but not to the sergeant.
‘I better see to that,’ said the sergeant, and turned to the other policemen. ‘Put him into number three for now,’ adding that he did not think that the suspect needed to be cuffed.
One of the policemen stepped forward and released his wrists.
‘Come along,’ he said.
His Majesty was led along a stone corridor, painted chocolate brown up to knee-level and dirty cream above, and shown into a cell. A steel door with a judas-window clanged shut behind him, echoing down the corridor.
Ahead of him, affixed to the wall, was a concrete slab the size and shape of a bed. High above it was a small rectangular window with bars, which gave out on to the grey sky. Scratched on to the paint of the wall were the words of a previous occupant of the cell: Fuck the police, fuck the world!
His majesty sat down on the concrete slab. From another cell nearby, echoing, came the voice of a detained drunk pounding his fists on the steel door: a mixture of rage, levity and demands for release.
A policeman opened the cell door bearing a chipped enamel mug with sweet milky tea. He held it out towards His Majesty.
‘Here you are, mate,’ he said.
Mate! Was that any way to address a reigning monarch, let alone one’s own? But His Majesty swallowed the insult because it was not intended as an insult and was the product of ignorance rather than impudence. Besides, once he was settled on the throne, the story of how he had so meekly borne the treatment to which he had been subject would emerge, and his subjects would regard him with all the more affection and loyalty. The unexalted like the modest.
The policeman withdrew – without bowing, of course, but nevertheless proceeding backwards. This may have been because one should not turn one’s back on prisoners who are still unknown quantities.
The tea was disgusting, proletarian: but again, it was probably to His Majesty’s advantage that he should be able to say that he knew about, had experienced and survived the conditions in which so many of his subjects lived.
Shortly afterwards he was brought a sandwich of sliced white bread whose edges had curled up and dried at the corners, containing a cold sausage sliced lengthways down the middle. This, too, was valuable experience for a future monarch to be able to say that he had had, for it would refute the allegations of malcontents that he had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and did not know how the common people lived and ate.
After the sandwich, he was brought a rough prickly blanket, a little like a hair shirt, and told to try to get some rest, as if a siesta after a sliced sausage were the most natural thing in the world. And indeed, the noisy drunk in the cell nearby, began to snore stertorously, though not because of the sandwich, which he had thrown through the judas-window when it had been briefly opened, and not because it disgusted him but as a matter of principle.
His Majesty did lie down, but only because there was nothing else to do. Before long, however, the cell door was unlocked (was it really necessary to make so much noise about it?) and a policeman entered.
‘The doctor’s here to see you,’ he said.
The doctor? His Majesty was not ill and had not requested to see one, let alone the early middle-aged man in badly crumpled blue suit who followed the policeman. Besides, he had not yet had time to appoint the Royal Physician. What were the Usurpers up to now? And how was he to know that this man – this undistinguished-looking man – was a doctor at all rather than, say, a poisoner? Perhaps the situation was coming to a head.
‘Mr Smith?’ said the alleged doctor after the policeman had left. ‘Mr Reginald Smith?’
He had had to glance down at a piece of paper on a clipboard that he held to check that he had got it right.
‘We’re His Majesty King Reginald, the First of that Name,’ said the King, suddenly having tired of this charade.
‘Ah,’ said the doctor.
‘Yes,’ said the King, ‘and we’re getting a little tired of this pretence that no one knows who we really are.’
‘Was it you who wrote the letters to… to…?’
‘Mrs Elizabeth Windsor? Yes, it was we,’ he said, minding his grammar. ‘And if we may say so, we have shown remarkable patience and restraint. So far,’ he added ominously.
‘So you are the King?’’ said the doctor (if that is what he was), whose tone was neutral, neither rude nor deferential. In the context, however, any tone other than deferential was insolent.
‘Of course.’
‘Since when?’
Since when? What an absurd question! ‘Since the death of our mother, Her Majesty Queen Doris, of course.’
‘When was that?’
‘Ten years ago.’
‘And when did you first realise that you were king?’
His Majesty thought for a moment.
‘About four weeks ago.’ He described the passage of the Rolls-Royce past his window as he was looking out.
‘Could it have meant something else?’ asked the doctor, or Usurpers’ spy.
‘What else could it have meant?’ His Majesty looked puzzled by the question.
The doctor (or whoever he was) wrote things down on the paper on his clipboard. After a couple of minutes he said, ‘I would like you to come into hospital for a while, for a rest.’
The King was taken aback.
‘Why? Whatever for?’
‘You’ve been overdoing it lately, not sleeping, not taking care of yourself and so forth.’
‘And if I don’t agree?’ The King had detected a hint of menace or threat in the supposed doctor’s manner.
‘Well,’ said the latter, as if deliberating as he went along, ‘then I would have to ask one of my colleagues to come and see you.’
‘And then?’
‘And then�
� well, if he agreed with me, you’d have to come into hospital anyway.’
‘So either I agree or you force me?’
The doctor – clearly now the Usurper’s pawn – made no answer. The Usurper was using Soviet tactics, but in the end they would do her no good, the truth would out. He might as well go along with the charade for the time being: another few days would make no difference. In fact, it would only add to his subjects’ outrage when they learnt the truth.
‘All right, I agree,’ said the King. The Usurper’s pawn let out a sigh of relief, or like a balloon releasing some of its air. ‘On one condition,’ the King added.
‘What’s that?’ asked the pawn nervously.
‘That I am addressed by my proper title.’
‘I can guarantee that,’ said the supposed doctor. ‘We address everyone correctly, I hope.’
On this understanding, the King agreed to go to hospital, that is to say the C. G. Jung Ward of the Nelson Mandela Mental Health and Wellbeing Centre in Much Frampton, the town next to Forehampton on the main road to the north.
He was taken there by the police, who assiduously, almost pedantically, returned to him the contents of his pockets when he arrived at the police station. They were removed from him again when he arrived at the Mental Health and Wellbeing Centre.
His subjects in C. G. Jung Ward were a strange and unattractive group. There were the nurses, so-called, who sat much of the day in a kind of glass cage with a locked door, in which they chatted and drank coffee, but rushed out whenever there was a commotion outside. They were mainly very fat, especially the women among them. What went on inside the glass cage was like a silent film to those outside it, who assumed that the nurses were hatching a plot against them.
Those who were called clients were mostly young, who either lay on their beds smoking illicitly or loped round the day-room like caged animals, though with earphones through which excitatory music was relayed. A large screen, constantly illuminated, broadcast chat shows to which no one paid any attention. The clients wore tracksuits and half of them baseball caps, as if expecting rain or blinding sunlight. To speak to them – not that there was a reason to do so – you had to make yourself heard through their music and self-absorption. Their main reason to talk to one another was to obtain cannabis or other drugs, smuggled in by their visitors by a variety of means.
The Proper Procedure and Other Stories Page 14
