After Zenda

by John Spurling

  Still, they took comfort in the thought that she couldn’t last all that long and it certainly wasn’t the moment, as her elderly Prime Minister, Fritz von Tarlenheim, had hoped, to reveal the existence of an heir to the throne. Charles Gordon Rassendyll, therefore, who was now about forty and had survived the War by serving in some staff job behind the lines, was left to get himself a job as a school bursar and marry a middle-class Scottish lady called Mollie.

  ‘Did Charles Gordon know who his mother was?’ I asked.

  ‘I think not,’ said Colonel Danzing.

  ‘He never went to Ruritania?’

  ‘He would have been too recognisable as his mother’s son.’

  ‘Didn’t they ever see each other after the war?’

  ‘In Switzerland, no doubt, but he was probably not told their true relationship or that she was Queen of Ruritania. Your grandfather was not very wide awake, I’m afraid, nor a very reliable or trustworthy person to entrust a secret to.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound the right sort of person to be a school bursar.’

  ‘That was soon evident. I believe the school had to close and your grandfather became unemployed at the time of the Depression - at about the same time as your father was born. I have always tried to see your father’s political ideas as forgivable in view of what his childhood must have been like.’

  ‘I don’t remember my grandfather. I suppose he was dead before I was born?’

  ‘Long before. My own father, General Danzing, who had become Prime Minister of Ruritania in 1926, after the death of Fritz von Tarlenheim, told me that the Queen, in the late 1930s, became determined to recognise her son and bring him openly to Strelsau. Nothing would dissuade her, not even the obvious personal disadvantages of her son, which included by then chronic alcoholism. As a last resort my father could think of no better plan than to employ an intermediary to offer Charles Gordon Rassendyll a lucrative job in Australia. He was told that the job had to be secured without delay and he went by flying-boat, ahead of his wife and children. The aircraft disappeared somewhere in the region of Sumatra. Your grandfather was always accident-prone.’

  ‘Was it an accident?’

  ‘Do you suggest that my father, the Prime Minister of Ruritania and a royalist to his fingertips, would have deliberately arranged the death of the Queen’s only child?’

  ‘It seems to have been convenient.’

  Colonel Danzing wore his sour expression again and looked about for another ball of horseshit to kick.

  ‘For men of honour convenience is never a primary consideration.’

  We had left the rose-garden and stopped beside a curving bed of flowers somewhere in the area of the Open-Air Theatre. I shall always remember that bed - the flowers were mostly blue, of different sorts and shades. It was here that Colonel Danzing told me that although there had been no Ruritanian monarch since the death of Queen Flavia in 1939, he believed a restoration was desirable and feasible and I was the only suitable candidate. I looked him in the eyes and noticed for the first time that they were pale blue as if they had strayed from the flower bed and faded on the way.

  ‘You think I am suitable?’

  ‘In the context of monarchy,’ he said, ‘suitable is not a question of character or attainments, which it must be said you lack, but of birth. That is the essence of hereditary monarchy - it leaves the choice to God rather than men.’

  ‘A bit dated, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘If our century has demonstrated anything, it is that progressive political ideas are no more likely to work than the old ones. In the history of mankind I should say that monarchies have generally proved more successful that democracies, especially in small, backward countries.’

  ‘Is Ruritania so backward?’

  ‘It has been shut up inside the Soviet Empire for forty years. You cannot get much more primitive than that.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Agree in principle that you are willing to claim your inheritance. Say nothing for the moment of what I have told you, not even to your brother. Wait patiently until I approach you again and in the meantime read everything you can find about your country, including those two books I mentioned. And study to be . . .’

  He stopped, looked at me gloomily, looked away again.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you willing?’

  ‘Why not? I haven’t got any other particular projects in view at present.’

  ‘No other particular projects in view,’ he said, spreading out the words like a hand of cards which he hated the sight of.

  ‘What do you want me to study? Court etiquette - that sort of thing?’

  ‘That would be premature.’

  He paused again, waited for two lovers with their arms wound round each other to pass and then said, quite angrily:

  ‘Do you want to be King of Ruritania or don’t you?’

  ‘Is there any loot in it?’

  ‘I shall find sufficient funds, but there will be few luxuries, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘A King without luxuries seems a bit pointless,’ I said.

  ‘What is your answer?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘O.K.’

  ‘I will call you, then, in a week or two,’ he said and immediately turned to go, as if he suddenly couldn’t bear any more of my company. Then, over his shoulder:

  ‘Study to be more dignified, for God’s sake!’

  And he walked briskly away without looking back.

  3 Zenda Airport

  It was a month or two before I heard from Colonel Danzing again. My brother and sister-in-law became increasingly sceptical about the job they thought I’d been interviewed for.

  ‘Don’t be so passive!’ said Jennifer, as she stuffed dirty clothes into the washing-machine. ‘Give them a ring! They must have made a decision by now. They just haven’t got around to writing to the unsuccessful applicants.’

  ‘Then if I’m one of them, why waste a ‘phone call to save them the trouble?’

  ‘Don’t you care either way? Perhaps if you’d shown more enthusiasm, you’d have got the job.’

  ‘Enthusiasm isn’t one of the qualifications they asked for,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I wonder if you’ve got the other ones either. Unless they just wanted someone with red hair, like the people in the Sherlock Holmes story.’

  ‘More or less,’ I said.

  ‘Do you have to leave all your shirts and socks inside out?’

  ‘It saves trouble.’

  I’d begun to have doubts myself about the reality of that encounter in Regent’s Park. Was I really on hold for a kingdom? On the other hand, I had now read The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau and my name was undoubtedly Rassendyll. Also I’d started to read the foreign pages of my brother’s newspaper and occasionally found a paragraph about Ruritania and its problems. They looked terminal: a catastrophic economy, an ethnic split between Germans and Slavs and a political vacuum rapidly being filled by the same old communist party hacks now posing as democrats. Perhaps a King was the only hope. The Serbs and Romanians, with similar problems, were at least giving their ex-royals entry-visas. It was impossible to conceal my new area of knowledge and interest altogether from my relations.

  ‘Eastern Europe is reverting to pre-First War,’ said my brother, as we sat watching the news after supper.

  ‘Further than that,’ I said. ‘Pre-Hapsburg Empire.’

  ‘What would you know about it?’ said my sister-in-law.

  ‘So this new job is in Eastern Europe, is it?’ asked Freddy.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I said. I was afraid they’d start trying to pin me down to a particular country.

  ‘It’s not like you to take such an interest in current affairs,’ said Freddy.

  ‘For a City man,’ I said, ‘it’s always worth keeping an eye on where the international aid is flowing. Whenever governments are involved, there’s always a lot of overflow.’

  ‘By which you me
an the taxpayers’ money gets diverted to a lot of con-men and corrupt officials.’

  ‘Paying tax is voluntary,’ I said with a mean smile, immediately closing my eyes and bowing my head as I waited for the blast from Jennifer.

  But nothing came and when I opened them again I found she hadn’t even noticed my provocation. She was gripped by the latest news on the screen.

  ‘What a macabre affair!’ she said.

  It was only a short item and I’d already missed everything but the pay-off. The BBC’s girl reporter - young and pretty but media-aggressive - was standing in a cobbled square in front of a large church.

  ‘For the present, then,’ she was saying, ‘people seem to be more bewildered than shocked by the revelation that their principal tourist attraction is not all it seems. It remains to be seen what, if any, effect this will have on the uneasy balance of power here. Clare Studebaker, reporting for the BBC, from Strelsau.’

  ‘What was all that about?’ I asked, as casually as I could.

  ‘You and Freddy were chattering,’ said Jennifer, ‘so I didn’t catch it all. They’re digging up some grave in East Germany and transferring the corpse to the royal vault in Strelsau Cathedral. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, the corpse they’ve got in there already isn’t a corpse at all, but a waxwork. And it isn’t even one of their kings, but an Englishman.’

  ‘Why are they bothering?’ I asked.

  ‘It seems to be a political move, but the reporter wasn’t very clear about who was organising it.’

  ‘Attractive girl all the same,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘She looks nice, but of course looks aren’t everything in a journalist.’

  ‘You’re suggesting a man could do the job better?’

  ‘It was you who criticised her performance.’

  ‘Sexist pig!’ she said.

  The state funeral in Strelsau was widely reported, especially in England because of the English connection. The Earl of Burlesdon was interviewed and said he was delighted that his great-great-great uncle was being brought back from the dead, as it were, and admitted that the secret of his survival and marriage to Queen Flavia had been known to the head of the Burlesdon family all along, but never divulged to anyone else.

  And now, of course, Jennifer and Freddy woke up to the fact that the corpse at the centre of the ceremony was that of Rudolf Rassendyll- It’s not a very common name and Freddy got teased about this at work. He was full of it at supper.

  ‘I do believe we must be related,’ he said, as he helped out the sausages and mash. ‘Rudolf Rassendyll was the younger brother of the Earl of Burlesdon and I remember Mum trying to get Dad to admit that he was related to the Burlesdons.’

  My sister-in-law was excited too.

  ‘Why don’t we take a holiday in Ruritania?’ she said. ‘East Europe’s said to be incredibly cheap because of the exchange rate.’

  ‘We’re already booked for the Loire in August,’ said Freddy.

  ‘Couldn’t we go at Christmas?’

  ‘There’s no way we can afford two holidays in one year,’ said Freddy. ‘The exchange rate may be good, but what about the fares?’

  ‘I could go,’ I said. ‘I’m not booked for the Loire.’

  ‘What would you use for money?’ asked Jennifer. ‘Or do people on the dole get an annual foreign holiday thrown in?’

  ‘I’ll ask the nice people at Social Security,’ I said.

  In fact I knew by now that I was going to Ruritania. Colonel Danzing had ‘phoned and invited me to meet him on Primrose Hill. We kept moving round the paths, as before, though there was no cover at all for communist spies, and the Colonel told me that the state funeral and the revelations about the survival of Rudolf Rassendyll and his secret marriage to Queen Flavia were indirectly his doing. The state funeral went off reasonably well. People were amused and intrigued rather than shocked to learn of the waxwork in the royal vault and the local newspapers thought the story would be good for tourism rather than the reverse. But the Colonel and his friends inside Ruritania had hoped for bigger crowds and more excitement. The affair had curiosity value rather than glamour and that was disappointing. Without the glamour factor there was little hope of arousing people’s enthusiasm for the restoration of the monarchy.

  The next stage was to reveal that the secret marriage of Queen Flavia and Rudolf Rassendyll had been blessed with Charles Gordon Rassendyll and that his descendant was alive and available, but Colonel Danzing wanted this to emerge more gradually.

  ‘The sense of history is even weaker in the East than it is among your generation in the West,’ he said. ‘We have organised an exhibition of the life and times of Queen Flavia in the Palace of Youth in Strelsau, but the attendance is poor. Most of the visitors are tourists - still rather few in Ruritania - or old people who remember the pre-war period before Nazism and Communism. The main exhibit is the waxwork of Rudolf Rassendyll exhumed from the cathedral vault, but there is still not enough interest for our purpose. It’s as if people are content for the past to lie buried.’

  ‘Perhaps you chose the wrong approach,’ I said. ‘You should have started with me and then revealed the back history.’

  The Colonel looked at me with surprise.

  ‘You are taking more of an interest,’ he said. ‘You may be right. At any rate, what we need now is an event, a news story with implications for the present rather than the past. I am proposing to send you to Ruritania.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘And when I come down the steps from the aircraft I’ll kiss the runway like the Pope and claim my inheritance.’

  ‘No,’ said Colonel Danzing, ‘You will go incognito and will first acquaint yourself a little with the country and some of the personalities and interests involved. After that we will decide whether it’s opportune for you to throw off your disguise.’

  ‘What disguise? A black cloak? A big hat?’

  ‘A hat would be advisable, since otherwise people might mistake you for a waxwork or think a dead hero had come to life.’

  ‘People of my age don’t wear hats.’

  ‘I am aware of that.’

  The Colonel paused. I had the impression he was stringing me along.

  ‘A baseball hat and dark glasses?’

  ‘The simplest solution,’ he said, ‘would be to shave your head completely’

  ‘Ah. Let’s think a bit harder, then!’

  ‘You are vain of your hair? It will grow back.’

  ‘I’d look like a neo-Nazi.’

  ‘It would be the simplest solution,’ he repeated. ‘And historically apt. Your great-grandfather shaved off his beard and moustache in order to resemble the King more closely. More than a hundred years later, you who are the King, need to avoid resembling your great-grandfather.’

  ‘You, who are the King . . .’: that clinched it, as the crafty old sod knew it would. As I was beginning to discover, if you know you are a king, your outlook changes drastically and you can put up with almost anything in the short term. Colonel Danzing would get me a ticket, fix me a passport in another name and arrange for me to be accredited as a journalist for an obscure business magazine. That job, he said, wouldn’t be a hoax and they’d want some copy out of me.

  ‘I hope you’re capable of writing joined-up prose,’ he said.

  ‘No problem,’ I said, ‘but when are you going to start treating me with proper respect? Calling me Sire and walking backwards - that sort of thing?’

  ‘Your saving grace, Mr Rassendyll,’ he said, ‘is your sense of humour. You will appreciate the name I have selected for you to assume in Ruritania. It is Edwin Fenton .’

  So I flew into Zenda airport as a skinhead journalist called Ed Fenton. Zenda is the nearest city to Ruritania’s most accessible border and about fifty miles north-west of the capital, Strelsau. Both cities are built on hills and separated by a flattish area which, in my great-grandfather’s time, used to be mostly forest. It was somewh
ere in that forest that King Rudolf V - after being murdered by the villainous Rupert of Hentzau - was incinerated in his hunting-lodge. The original airfield made by the Ruritanians in the Thirties was much smaller and closer to Zenda - hence its name - but when the Nazis occupied the country in 1939 they cleared a lot of the forest, moved the airfield nearer to the capital and added an autobahn in order to keep a tight grip on both cities.

  My plane from Warsaw docked directly on to the airport building, so I didn’t encounter any Ruritanian soil I could have kissed until we got to a scrubby bit of waste-ground - mainly dogshit and dandelions - round a tower-block on the outskirts of Strelsau. But going through passport control I seriously wondered if I’d make it even that far into my inheritance. Nobody seemed to have told the officials that the Iron Curtain had gone and the Soviet Empire with it. The plane hadn’t been all that full, but most of its passengers were foreign - Germans and Americans looking for business opportunities, I guessed - and the passport people in their bullet-proof glass booths spent about ten minutes per person, examining them front, side, and - with the help of a large mirror hung on the wall - back. By the time they got to me I was really pissed off- mixed with a bit of worry, of course, about my alibi - and I suppose they were trained to pick up any signs of stress. After the usual close examination from all angles of my shaven head, the bloke in the booth sent for his superior.

  ‘This photograph is your’ the superior asked in English, with a tone of complete disbelief.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ I said. The photograph showed a smirking axe-murderer, but I’d certainly sat for it.

  ‘You have come for the football?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘On business.’

  ‘What business?’

  ‘Actually to write about business opportunities in your lovely, friendly, prosperous country.’

  ‘What are your racial views?’

  ‘I prefer the Welsh to the Irish and the Scots to both. I’m a bit indifferent to Canadians and I can never tell Belgians from French. I loathe Japanese cars but I’ve nothing against individual Nips as such. Have you got a race-problem here?’