‘Off course I haff been here before,’ I heard him say to the Buckingham Palace equerry, in that remarkably harsh and unattractive voice that the Princess had mentioned to me. ‘I voss here many time viss my late vife. Yes, indid. London holds many unhappy memories for me!’
He laughed a hollow laugh, like the scraping together of rusty knives, and disappeared through the station arches to the waiting world outside.
Me, I got into a police car and made my way through all the cordoned-off side streets, and three-quarters of an hour later was standing outside Buckingham Palace as the carriage procession arrived, in a Mall moderately thronged with observers — for even minuscule royalty gets a better turn-out than important Presidents. One by one the carriages, with their waving figures like models in mechanical clocks, turned into the Palace. The Princess Helena was talking animatedly to her young Prince, who was obviously planning to marry her when he got older. She nevertheless kept up her quota of waves, and even gave a special one for me when she saw me by the gates. The old heart missed a beat again. Clever girl. Then the coach disappeared round the side of the Palace, and I knew she was safely cocooned in all that plush and gilt until it was time to go to the Gala.
Normally the first evening of a State Visit would have been devoted to a State Banquet. But that evening was the only one on which Covent Garden could produce a suitable gala opera, and since the Prince had especially expressed the wish to see an opera (and the Queen had had perforce to grit her teeth and bear it), the banquet had been postponed to the second day. The Prince had spent his young manhood in post-war Vienna, had worshipped at the feet of Ljuba Welitsch, Lisa Della Casa, Hilde Gueden. Liechtenburg did not run to an Opera, though it did have a cinema show on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The opera was to be Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine — hardly the obvious choice, since it is one aria surrounded by five acts of padding and lots of pretty scenery, but it happened to be what the Royal Opera were performing at the time.
So I spent the afternoon at Covent Garden, familiarizing myself with the place and the security arrangements. I had been there before, of course, but of late years only in the upper reaches, and that seldom. The Royal party was to occupy the central section of the Grand Tier, where they could both see and be seen. At interval they were to go to the private room behind the Royal Box, where they would mingle with the Covent Garden top brass. No possible danger there. Operatic people get more than enough sublimation for their violent impulses. The security arrangements at the Garden were supervised by the Palace, and they were, of course, impeccable. After I had got the lie of the land in that part of the house, I asked about the arrangements for Lady Glencoe’s party. The official whom I questioned seemed to be suppressing with difficulty raised eyebrows and lewd innuendoes. He pointed out to me three boxes where Lady Glencoe’s intimate party would sit. After the performance they would go back to the Crush Bar, where they would be joined by the rest of the invitees, by the directors and by the odd critic and performer, for this was an official House party. Most of those attending would have been sitting in other parts of the house, or in some cases (Jeremy Styles, for example), would not have attended the opera at all.
‘Does she have this sort of party often?’ I asked.
‘Not infrequently,’ sniffed the functionary. ‘After the House’s more social evenings, as a rule. She is on the Board to help with such things: the social side is considered important, and Lady Glencoe is very good at gathering . . . notables.’
‘So that’s why she’s on the Board?’
‘Yes. The workings of the Board are as mysterious as those of the Masons. Lady Glencoe is rumoured to be tone-deaf, which must make the evenings she is forced to spend here a considerable trial to her.’
‘Would you have a list of her personal guests tonight?’
‘Naturally. We wouldn’t let just anyone into those areas of the House. Would you like to see it?’
The list, of course, confirmed the suspicions of Jeremy Styles, who obviously knew his Helena very well indeed. Invited by Lady Glencoe herself to the after-the-performance party were Henry Bayle, MP, the Honourable Edwin Montague Frere, and Mr James McAphee (better known as Jimmy), whose name I recognized as that of a roustabout Charlton Athletic player whose reputation for violence and foul language rivalled that of your average English supporter. Also gracing the occasion would be Prince Rupert of Krackenburg-Hoffmansthal, and of course the Princess Helena herself.
Well, forewarned is forearmed. There was one thing I could do, and I did it: I rang up McAphee and made it clear to him that if there were any trouble at the party I would not only arrest him, but also oppose bail, and he would be out of the Cup qualifying game on Saturday. I won’t burden you with what he said to me, which is the sort of thing that gets books banned in Home Counties libraries, but I’m no mean hand at that sort of thing myself too, and in the end we came to some sort of unamicable agreement.
So there we were, all prepared. At half past six I was in attendance at Kensington Palace, and the journey to the Opera House was uneventful. The Royals arrived one by one, and gathered in the room behind the Royal Box. At five to seven the Queen and the Duke and the Prince and Princess arrived, and at seven (Meyerbeer provides an awfully long evening’s music) the Royal party took their places. This time it was quite literally a glittering occasion: you’ve never in your life seen so many diamond tiaras, shimmering dresses, bosoms weighed down with the family emeralds, portly chests sporting decorations for services in the field or in Whitehall. The opera definitely took second place as spectacle to what was to be witnessed in the front of the house. I suspected that ninety per cent of those there wouldn’t, in fact, have been able to tell Tristan from The Tales of Hoffmann, but they certainly woke up and became lively at interval.
I won’t burden you with details of the performance. I stood at the back of the dress circle and watched bits of it, and the story made The Pirates of Penzance look like a masterpiece of realistic theatre. The music had stirring bits, jolly bits and totally ludicrous bits. The Queen succeeded in looking interested. She did not succeed in looking as if she were enjoying herself. The audience was more interested in what was going on in the Grand Tier than in what was going on on stage. At interval, as I said, the Royals did not go into the Crush Bar to mingle with hoi polloi (though that is hardly the most apt description, since tickets sold for about £25 a pop), but went instead to the private room, and chatted with the operatic bigwigs. I attended them in my security capacity — there was nothing to fear there, but lots to overhear. The Princess talked to the Prince of Liechtenburg’s eldest son, on whom she seemed to be having an effect even more striking than that on his younger brother. I had read my evening papers. They were speculating (undeterred by the fact that the two had never clapped eyes on each other before today) on a romance between the pair. I was quite sure that Helena had read her evening papers too. This was the sort of speculation she fed on, greedily, unashamedly, and which in her turn she liked to feed.
I managed to get close to Prince Rupert, bending his height proprietorially over a rather delicious specimen of our minor royals. He looked like a stork waiting to gobble a tasty morsel of sea-food. Funny how eating and drinking images seemed to cluster around Helena’s father. Perhaps Helena’s mother felt she had been sucked dry and then cast off. Prince Rupert was saying:
‘Helena, off course, takes after me. That is something they could not rob me off. She hass a romantic nature, a poetic soul. She stands out against theess bourgeois, mercantile soulss. You too, my dear, haff a romantic soul. I can see it . . .’
It was all too Franz Lehar for words. I could see the delectable lady (recently married into this bourgeois, mercantile family) cast a nervous glance in the direction of her husband.
As they all trouped back for the second act, I heard a Very Distinguished Lady Indeed remark to Her Husband that so far it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected — a judgement she probably had to revise drastically before the end of a
very long evening.
But end it did, eventually. The audience applauded dutifully (it made more sense when, after the lights went up, they applauded the royal party). There was one royal duty to be gone through before the evening was over: most of the occupants of the royal box went backstage to shake hands with the performers, dutifully lined up, paws at the ready. The press got some splendid photographs, including one of Prince Rupert gazing ravenously down into the cleavage of the buxom black mezzo who had sung Sélinka. It made a very good cover for the next issue of Private Eye. At last all the official stuff was over, and the royal party could slope off home for a cup of cocoa and some well-earned shut-eye (I imagined them all curled up around their hotties, superlative, royal hotties stamped with a monogram — corgi rampant against a gules background).
Me, I had left Joplin to look after the Princess in the last minutes, and had slipped into a greasepainty loo, where I had changed into a dinner-jacket. Then, some way behind the Princess, and leaving Joplin on guard in the corridors, I went back into the front of house and towards the Crush Bar, my valley of Glencoe, with something of the same emotions that Miss Blandish must have had when she entered the hideout of the Grisson gang.
CHAPTER 14
Lions’ Den
In the plushy grandeur of the Crush Bar, in an area roped off specially for the occasion, the party was already in full swing. The arrival of the Princess Helena had created the expected stir, with the usual accompaniment of gush and fawn. By the time I got to the top of the stairs she was already the centre of an admiring group, which included Harry Bayle — taking time off from egalitarian politics, and looking, in his tuxedo, holding his cut-glass tumbler of Scotch, every inch the Establishment’s choice of future Prime Minister. The Princess smiled, ogled, giggled discreetly and was somehow regally provocative, and in all these ways she contrived to raise the sexual temperature in the room. Which, apart from those guests who were directly attributable to her, was not high.
I had hoped to be able to slip in unnoticed and go about my business of doing all in my power to avert Helena’s intentions to create well-orchestrated brouhaha. But it was not to be. As I entered the roped-off area I was hailed by a fruity, gin-laden voice.
‘Perry Trethowan, isn’t it? How good of you to come. I knew your Uncle Lawrence, you know. And your mother. I’m dying to have a talk with you, dear man . . .’
And here I was being commandeered by a strawberry-coloured woman, showing an unsuitable amount of puffy shoulder, who seemed to be assuming rights of property over me. Who could it be but Edwina, Lady Glencoe?
I had gathered by now the basic facts about Lady Glencoe. Nothing in her life had been particularly secret. She had had her first taste of notoriety in her debutante year, when she had followed the example of Nancy Cunard and taken a Negro pianist as her lover. So popular were Negro pianists at that time that there were not enough of them to go round, and I have the impression that boatloads of them must have been shipped over from the States, with Society Ladies standing on the wharf at Southampton and making bids. It was one way out of the Depression, I suppose. Because this was the early ’thirties, when the Prince was dancing with Wallis at the Embassy Club and the Labour Government was trying to reduce the dole from seventeen shillings.
When Negro pianists went out, the lady had taken a succession of lovers — energetic peers of the realm, a left-wing poet waiting to be killed in Spain, an Indian patriot in exile, a chargé d’affaires at the German Embassy, and a Welsh boxer. She had driven an ambulance for both sides in the Spanish Civil War, until they begged her not to. She had run a hostel for exiled Poles in the war, and later extended her charity to exiled Frenchmen, Belgians, Norwegians and Czechs. At the end of the war she was decorated, with an ambiguously worded citation. By then she was Lady Glencoe, and had produced an heir for the uncouth laird who had been hypnotized by her already matured charms. By the hard winter of 1947 he had hurled her out into the snow, he to go on to other Lady Glencoes, she to become hostess to the less hidebound younger lights of the Conservative Party. She claimed all the credit for making Macmillan Prime Minister, and played a walk-on part of a discreditable nature during the Profumo affair. Now, when the party had fallen into the hands of grocers and grocers’ daughters, she was a spent force, reduced to charity do’s and operatic gaieties. But she carried herself with the air of one who had done a thing or two in her time, and might tell all, if only the Sunday papers would up their miserable offer for her life story.
‘Lady Glencoe?’ I said nervously, because the figure, like a barrel of wobbly lard, was wobbling uncomfortably close to my midriff. ‘Yes, I’m Perry Trethowan. I don’t know how you know me. I’m only here in my official capacity.’
‘But darling! I won’t let you blush like a rose unseen, or whatever flower it is. You’re so famous! Your picture in all the papers! So jealous-making! At the time I marked you down, so let’s have no shrinking. I knew you the moment you came up the stairs. And Dorothy confirmed it.’
I cast a look of ingratitude in the direction of the lady-in-waiting, who was chatting to a feeble-looking relative with a receding hairline and chin to match.
‘You’ll have a Scotch. Waiter! Here!’
‘I’ll just hold one — ’
‘No, drink plenty, dear boy. It’s on the house. In these dreadful times that’s the only way to drink really sufficiently. Oh, there’s darling Davina. I must fly. But I expect you to stay to the end, so that we can have a gorgeous chat over the dregs about your daddy’s going. Have fun, darling!’
Oh dear. Ripeness is all, said the poet, and I confess I could have dumped Lady Glencoe and all her dated daring on to the poet without a moment’s regret. She certainly wasn’t what I would have chosen for a tête-à-tête at the end of a long and tiring day. But with a bit of luck it might be avoided. I made for a quiet oasis where I might inconspicuously see and hear.
‘You do get around, don’t you?’ said an unpleasant voice in my ear, as I was sliding my bulk through the throng to a corner which hadn’t got singers or critics or upper-class nincompoops cluttering it up. I turned round into the vapid, discontented face of the Honourable Edwin Frere.
‘Oh well,’ I said, with hastily assumed bonhomie, ‘I try to live it up while I’m here, you know.’
‘Don’t give me all that stuff about being just back from the colonies. I know who you are. You’re what I believe is nowadays called the fuzz. I should have guessed by your size. I don’t know what you were doing at the Wellington the other night . . .’
‘We’re entitled to our moments of relaxation, you know.’
‘Hmmm. Well, it seems odd. Because you couldn’t have known I was going to invite the Princess. I suppose you’re guarding her tonight?’
‘Something of the sort,’ I agreed.
‘Pity you don’t try guarding her from some of the types she encourages.’ We had come to rest in a corner near the bar, and he surveyed the room with undisguised contempt.
‘Look at them. That little actor fellow I gave his comeuppance to. What a jerk! That MP she’s always going about with. He’s an out-and-out Communist, you know, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him. And look at that one over there: he’s a footballer. My God, just imagine — a footballer mixing with this mob. As far as I’m concerned, they’re really off types, the lot of them. I’ve half a mind to tell her so.’
‘You’d be a fool to,’ I said. He looked at me bellicosely. ‘Can’t you see, you’re the one with all the cards. However she may play around now, you’re the only one that’s remotely acceptable. Can you see her walking down the aisle with a Northern Ireland footballer?’
‘Who said anything about marriage?’ muttered Edwin Frere, but I could see the idea wasn’t a new one to him.
‘You’ve only got to sit still and be a good boy, and the apple will drop into your lap,’ I went on.
‘It beats me why all these jerks are here, then,’ he said, after thinking it over.
‘Wasn’t mine either, come to that,’ grunted Edwin Frere.
‘The best thing you could do would be disappoint her. Don’t get involved with anyone, just talk to your own people and ignore the jerks. It would teach her to stop playing little games.’
‘I might, at that,’ said Edwin Frere. And he loped off to his own people (of whom there were plenty), leaving me modestly pleased with the hope that I had neutralized one of the threats. I remained there by the bar, holding my drink but not drinking, and tuning in to one after another of the conversations around me.
• • •
‘If I had my way,’ came the thick Ulster tone of Jimmy McAphee, immaculately dressed, and indistinguishable from the upper-crust mob except by the greater force of his personality, ‘I’d deport the bleeding lot o’ them.’
‘What a good idea!’ said the witless society beauty he was talking to. ‘I mean, they do say they want to be Irish, don’t they? Why not just shunt them down over the border? You really ought to have a word with the Secretary of State about it!’
• • •
‘My dear,’ said Prince Rupert, to the delectable young thing with whom he was sharing a canapé, he nibbling one end, and she the other, so that their rather long aristocratic noses rubbed in an almost Eskimo ecstasy, ‘if you don’t now, you vill regret it for the rest off your life.’
Death and the Princess Page 13
