The crimson and gold carpeting of the Green Drawing-Room had already impressed Daisy, on her previous visits there, as being a little bit too far over the St. Nick top for her own tastes. Thankfully for the guests who passed through—before crossing the Picture Gallery and entering the Music Room, there to see the waiting Queen—Daisy Silverman was not piloting the tour bus.
Of course, just because Daisy wasn’t piloting the bus, didn’t necessarily mean that one could prevent her from obsessing about poor interior design choices—at least, not at this stirringly stimulating juncture in her life. And so, as she sat in the Music Room, listening to some somnolent musical interlude or other, she found her mind drifting across the hall and into the Green Drawing-Room; found herself thinking that the décor choices expressed there represented a clear case of overkill, as though someone had slipped The Russian Tea Room a whole handful of ’ludes. True, the effect of the complementary colors was striking, but, then again, while the odor of horse manure was striking too, that didn’t necessarily make it something worth aspiring to. As Daisy leaned across to Princess Anne, however, thinking to pass a whispered comment to this effect, she caught a strong whiff of that Royal personage, and found herself biting her own tongue, having formed a lightning-quick reversal of opinion. Obviously, for some people, certain odors were worth aspiring to.
Sitting there, her own tongue firmly held between her teeth as Anne looked back at her, patiently waiting for word or thought to emerge, Daisy took in the full effect of the Princess’s chosen attire. Clad entirely in pink frou-frou, it occurred to Daisy that she looked more like a confection than a person, like marzipan only with walnuts, or a giant petit fours. Thinking to offer some advice—something perhaps along the lines of women of a certain type not being temperamentally suited to certain styles—she opened her mouth, and began the process of unleashing her tongue. Thankfully, before she got the opportunity to find out if she could, in fact, fit her entire foot into her own mouth, the doors to the Music Room were flung open, the hordes began to descend, and it was time for the Royal Party to rise and greet its guests.
A few moments later—as she stood as part of the official receiving line, shaking hands, and using the kind of warmly firm grip that would have made Herbert Silverman proud, at any rate—Jodie was wondering just how one would go about shooting the scene before her; how to convey the idea of hundreds of potentially interesting people, all doing potentially interesting things, all having lives outside of this room where events were (potentially) constantly occurring; how to, finally, convey all of that, while keeping the real focus of the cameras, and, thus, her audience, firmly on the activities of a very small handful of a few of the (crazier than most) characters. When she got back home, she resolved, she would check to see if Joseph Manckiewitz had left any liner notes from Cleopatra. And then she would divide by twenty.
Jodie was, in fact, as she stood at Prince Edward’s side—her ruby-red lips looking as though nature had painted them that color; as she parted them regularly and with ease, only to reveal the perfect smile beyond—proof positive of woman’s (and man’s, one guesses you might say) ability to go on to achieve great success as an adult—in spite of and because of the occurrences in one’s youth—and that life was sustainable inside of the fishbowl, if one only had the right set of gills. (As a matter of record, the only other individual that Hollywood had managed to raise successfully to majority, without throwing it out with the bathwater, was Ron Howard. But, unfortunately, the former Opie was already otherwise engaged when Edward rang him up, leaving the Prince with no other recourse but to resort to the second choice on his list.)
Jodie was also proof positive that one could express, in one’s wardrobe, the dizzying heights of impeccable taste—tonight being clad in a money green satin sheathe, and, thus, refinedly combining wealth and sex in such a way that no man present, including Edward (who usually did not let himself become bothered over such things), would get a wink that night—while, at the same instant, conducting oneself with such an air that it was impossible for the world to ever accuse you of caring a fig about such a banal thing as the world’s impression of one.
Meanwhile, a few paces up the line, the Queen Mother reached into the folds of her ermine-trimmed robe, producing a flask from which she took a surreptitious slug. Replacing it in her pocket, she reached up a hand, dearly hoping that she was straightening her tiara as opposed to knocking it further off-kilter.
The Q.M. looked around the room with a slightly skewed vision, taking in the twin chandeliers, the eighteen columns, the candelabra ringing the room. In its present capacity as Music Room, there were few furnishings to be found in the oval room, the domed ceiling being its neatest architectural trick, and the red-and-gold curtains providing its strongest splashes of color. In fact, as far as the Q.M. was concerned, the Music Room still was the Grand Saloon, as it had been called in Victorian times.
Shaking hands with some pasha or another, she took another furtive swig. As she attended with one ear to the fascinating problem of the falling price of palm products, she cast an eye across the room at the brass-inlaid walnut piano. Perhaps, if they were lucky—or, not, depending on one’s perspective—Princess Margaret might be prevailed upon, following dinner and a few nice glasses of wine, to give them all a treat by tickling the old ivories.
And, speaking of dinner, the Q.M. wondered, where the hell is it, anyway? The rumbling noise in her stomach chimed off the hours like clockwork. Surely, it must be drawing nigh on nine o’clock. No?
• • •
The entire party had bypassed the State Dining-Room, making a beeline for the much larger Ballroom instead.
Which was something of a pity, Daisy thought, herself preferring the smaller room, what with its string of Gainsborough portraits lining the walls. It was always fun when gazing at these to attempt a chicken-and-egg analysis: had the artist left off painting horses just long enough to do these portraits of the Queen’s ancestors? Or had the inspiration process been worked the other way around? Either way, Daisy liked the Spanish mahogany table at the room’s center, liked its relative intimacy when compared with some of the others in the palace. Unfortunately, however, the room only seated sixty comfortably and the Ballroom, being far more spacious and crowd-friendly, was the only answer for it.
Over one hundred feet in length, sixty in width, and having a ceiling that rose a full five stories overhead, there would indeed be ample arm space at the table such that Edward needn’t worry about Mrs. B.P.M. poking him in the eye with her shrimp fork, or his aunt engineering a moat around his foie gras if she chanced to knock over her wineglass.
The room contained six chandeliers, each the size of a planet, and was entirely decorated in crimson, gold, and white, with the inevitable red carpeting covering the parquet floor. In honor of the holiday season, however, slight alterations had been made. The room was festooned with faux snowflakes, suspended—through the artful use of carefully placed wires and by even more carefully managed lighting—as though by magic. This created the impression that the party was taking place inside of a snow globe.
Of course, there had to be a Musician’s Gallery in the room. Not to mention, enough Footmen—attired in scarlet and gold livery, white breeches, stockings and buckled shoes—to populate a whole book of fairy stories. And, since tight and short ponytails for men had sprung back into fashion after about two hundred years, a number of these Footmen were sporting appropriate queues. In fact, the whole scene put the President—who, quite naturally enough, was seated at the top table, in front of the throne dais, which stood out in bas-relief against a background of red hangings—uncomfortably in mind of indentured servitude, the single word “slavery” not being very far behind it in his thoughts, as the word began to flash on and off in his brain like the red “petrol low” warning light on an Aston Martin.
A few places down from where the President was seated, and on the opposite side of the table, the Q.M. winked at Mr. Clinton as thoug
h to reassure him that things were not as politically dire as they seemed or, at the very least, to goose him into lightening up. Under normal circumstances, the Q.M. would have been seated to the left of the President, her and her daughter forming a Windsor sandwich around the American leader. But Charles, just prior to the onset of the evening’s festivities, had pulled her aside, convincing her that he needed her by his side at dinner for moral support.
Her assent, which had evinced the trademark equanimity that she liked to bring to all of life’s little curveballs, had thus left Charles free to gaze across the table into the eyes of his beloved. It also left him free—if he could only find a way to slouch down in his seat low enough—to stretch his piggies out under the table, and play footsies with her as well.
From a more practical standpoint, however, what this playing of musical chairs meant was that Daisy was seated smack between the President of the United States of America and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of the Church of England. This positioning, placing her as the woman to the right closest to the Queen, was quite an honor. It also meant that—since everybody who was anybody was in attendance, as well as everybody who wasn’t—she would be on such conspicuous display for the entire evening, her prominence impossible to ignore or deny, and that anybody who wished to, or anybody with eyes in their head to see, might bear witness to The Beginning of The End.
• • •
The Leader of the Free World and the Leader of the Commonwealth (kindly note the layers of meaning—like a peeled onion, blah, blah, blah—that a mere comparison of titles can take on) had already raised their traditional toasts to one another.
The Queen—resisting the temptation to reach up and adjust her diamond tiara, which was digging a ridge into her forehead—had toasted the President on his performance, saying how nice it was to have them there, and commenting on how equally nice it must be to “always be able to feel so certain concerning one’s support from the public,” to which he had responded with a quizzical, if gracious, smile.
He, in his turn, trying to maintain status quo or achieve quid pro quo or some such thing, had said how nice it was to be there, and returned her other compliment by stating that, “It must be just as nice not to have to worry about the public’s support.”
And it really was nice, having the Clintons over for dinner, the Queen thought to herself, as she took a healthy serving of the first course. From the options that the Master Chef had presented her with, she had elected to serve the forty-second President of the United States and his wife Quail Vol-au-Vent; and, for the main course, a dish that she had recently christened Braised Bush Stag.
Whenever possible, the Queen liked to inject her own brand of mischievous wit into what might otherwise be tedious proceedings, and sometimes, the nightly menu was really the only place where she could exercise a free hand to do so. Little did the ninth President to dine at the palace under the Queen’s reign suspect—for, while there would always be more presidents, there would only be but one Queen—as he enjoyed eating his quail, that someday (if she lived long enough, God willing), the Queen already planned on serving his successor a preposterous dish called either Gored Game Bills or Bill-less Gored Game Birds. She couldn’t quite make up her mind yet on which.
Yes, it certainly was nice having them, in spite of all of that Irish stuff a few years back. And why, if The Other Man had won, then someday they would have all been subjected to some odious dish using tinned pineapples as a base. (The Master Chef, on the other hand, had secretly been hoping that The Other Other Man would change his mind and run. There were ever so many—no longer called for—recipes for newts that he would have liked to try out: Newt Stew, Boiled Newt Legs, Newt en Croute… the list of the ways in which one could cook that particular goose were seemingly endless.)
And the President, for his part, really was glad to be there. If one needed to run to a monarchy for a pre-holiday retreat from getting relentlessly bashed by Republicans back home, so be it: hold the fries and pass the tea. A boy from Arkansas could certainly do a lot worse.
• • •
Meanwhile, at the President’s right elbow, Daisy had thus far been successful in heeding Herbert’s old edict: her legs were crossed and her mouth remained shut. And, if this meant that Charles’s evening was not turning out to be quite the rip-roaring good time that he had dreamt about, at least nobody had been offended. Yet.
As a matter of fact, Daisy was too busy listening to the voices in her own head, as she pushed her food around her plate with her fork, idly wondering if she was using the one that Sturgess had taught her to; too busy trying to figure out just how in heck life had managed to pick her up at Point A and deposit her at Point B; too worried about being caught out as being the fraud that she was, to be able to string two words together out loud. It was all she could do to keep up with who was who, never mind what was what. Why, the complicated structure of the workers at the Court alone was enough to give one mental pause.
Take the Yeomen of the Guard, for instance, the men in funny costumes who were lining the room. What was the difference between one of these guys and the Warders of the Tower? For their supposedly different Tudor uniforms looked remarkably the same to Daisy’s untrained eye. Her head was beginning to spin. And what were the differences, in duties, between the Lord Chamberlain and the Air Marshall—and who really cared? She would never get this stuff straight.
“But… does it matter?” was what she would have liked to cry out. She was stopped, however, by her most recent recurring waking nightmare, the one in which she was walking through a forest and somebody drops a pin—not only does it make a sound loud enough for the entire world to hear, but it also manages, though being only one of those skinny straight pins that come back with your shirts from the dry cleaners, to drive a hole in her head like a stake. Vivid, maybe, but to each her own flirtation with psychosis. So, instead, as she continued to listen to the voices, she merely kept smiling and nodding idiotically at all that was being said around her—all the while hoping that she wasn’t smiling about famine, or agreeing to go eat hippo in Australia.
In all of her readings about the R.F., she had never given the matter any serious thought, not along the lines of walking around in the other guy’s shoes for a bit, Daisy realized, as she smiled idiotically at the British Prime Minister, who neglected to smile back. (Oh, dear, Daisy thought, perhaps he was shouting up the table to Hillary something about a national health program for the poor.) As she took in the scene around her—the plumes, helmets, the tiaras, swords—she had to ask herself: Were any of these people for real? Was this the product of a modern country keeping pace with the rest of civilization? And, the most burning question of all, as she returned Andrew’s half-leer with an idiotic half-leer of her own, why? Why any of it? As the much-maligned daughter of Lear—the King, not the American TV producer—had quite rightly said: What need you one?
Why pay any attention at all to who was who? Daisy thought, raising a goblet of wine to her lips, thankful that the color was a match to her dress, so that when she undoubtedly spilled some wine on her person, nobody would be the wiser.
And was that Bonita over there, hiding out under that ridiculous Tudor costume and fraternizing with the Yeomen?
No, it couldn’t be. Surely, it was a trick of the wine.
Oh, yeah, she suddenly remembered, seeing everybody around her at once, as if pulled by strings, swivel their heads to one side. She was supposed to be doing this left/right conversation trick. She turned her head decidedly to the left, gazing up into the eyes of the President of the United States. You’d think that somebody would have realized ahead of time just how short she was, and given her a cushion or a dictionary to sit on. But nooo. She felt positively Lilliputian. So she opted for overcompensation, injecting an extra dose of personality into her words. Coals? Newcastle? Ayup, but somebody had to do it.
“Great job you did with Ireland!” she gushed, raising an approving toast to the Leader of the
Free World, thereby earning a glower from the Duke. “(Hic!) My parents (hic!) (hic!),” she hiccupped, “they definitely would have voted to reelect. And while they both might have (hic!) (hic!) reservations—oh, you know— (hic!) Paula, (hic!) Monica and a couple of other minor details, they were uncategorically post-Nixon in their political mindset.”
Mr. Clinton, whom Rachel would have deemed “such a handsome man,” really did cut a fine figure in his tux (although Rachel’s daughter would have amended that he needed to see Sturgess before making all fashion choices with regard to color in the future). He slouched, in a politically correct fashion, towards his dinner companion, the better to see the world from her perspective. “You know, Miss Sills, I do believe that you’re right. We, as Americans, must take responsibility for the drinking problems that exist on our fine reservations…”
(?)
“…and that are going on, probably, even as we speak.” Then, perhaps deciding that he had been serious for long enough, he allowed what was intended to be an evanescent smile to flash across his face, but then second-guessed himself, thus granting it the hang-time of a Michael Jordan hook shot or the aft play of a first-term election victory. “Still, it is always nice to feel that I have the support of our older citizens.”
And Daisy, of course, failed to fill him in on the fact that both of her parents—staunch constituents though they might have been—were now dead.
What she couldn’t quite bring herself to overlook, however, was his evident decline in fashion savvy.
“You know, you really should see Sturgess before you head for home.”
Falling for Prince Charles Page 21
