Still, it was a meal whose effect, in terms of lack of flavorful input and lack of conspicuous output, could be predicted with unerring accuracy. It would be both tasteless and constipation-provoking. There was something comforting about being back in the world, where causes could be depended upon to produce the expected effect. And was there actually an aroma coming off of that chicken? She whiffed. No, probably not. But, in her nose’s mind’s eye, she could distinctly smell the unique perfume of Kennedy Airport in her future, and the malodorous scents were downright intoxicating. The Nose was definitely back full force.
Safely buckled into her seat, on the Virgin Airways transatlantic flight back to New York, Daisy found herself once again among her Russian forebears.
But this time, rather than Fyodor, it was the more verbose Leo whose hands she was trusting herself to.
As she hefted the tome—which she had picked up on Charing Cross Road for an irresistible song thinking that, if all else failed, it would make one heck of a doorstopper someday—she began to idly turn the pages. She wondered, as she ate her pretend meal, what force had impelled her to select this book of all books. After all, she had read this one before. It wasn’t as though the relentless march of history could be altered, could it? In capable Leo’s world—where the course of things took on an Aristotelian flow, such that each successive event was at once surprising and inevitable—it wasn’t likely that the expected ending was going to change, was it? Anna perhaps not throw herself under the train this time?
Highly doubtful.
But, before she knew what was happening to her, Daisy found herself turning the pages at a rapid rate, felt herself being sucked back into the fairy-tale world, a world in which a delicate foot might peek out from the bottom of a flowing gown, tapping out its impatience, a world where one might conceivably still be moved to dance the mazurka.
If only someone else were perceptive enough to ask.
32
Daisy was standing in the middle of Kennedy, hunting for an exit sign, when she felt the hand on her shoulder and heard the familiar voice.
“I doubt it, Daisy.”
“What…?” She turned. “How did you…?”
“The Concorde, of course. But that is neither here nor there,” Charles said, resisting the almost unconquerable urge to shoot his cuffs. Which was just as well, since he didn’t really have a jacket to shoot them from. Following the advice of Sturgess, he was traveling incognito and thus, was clad in jeans, long-sleeved T-shirt—bearing the legend Go, Metsies!—and a backwards-turned baseball cap. It was rather cold without a jacket, but at least no one was bothering him.
He took her hands in both of his and, looking down, gazed fondly at her feet. Even among thousands of people, he’d have known those neon-pink-laced trainers anywhere.
“As I was saying,” he said, “before I was so rudely interrupted, I highly doubt that my life was more interesting than yours; just different. This is, one would hope, an adequate response to a remark you passed earlier.”
Then his playful smile vanished, his facial features assuming a more serious expression. He cocked The Ear in her direction. “I promise: I’ll listen to your story now, Daisy.”
• • •
“Ooh, I love this smell!” Daisy cried, her nose immersed in a bag of French fries.
They were sitting in the airport McDonald’s a little while later.
“Here, let me try it,” the Future King of England asked, holding out his hand for the bag and taking a whiff. “Nope, I cannot smell a thing.” He tapped his own nose with his forefinger. “You know, considering the size of it, I hardly ever smell anything. But I can hear you, Daisy. And the sound is making me feel positively inebriated.”
“I think I’ll kidnap you,” Daisy spoke with her mouth full. “Take you back to Danbury with me.” She chomped away, merrily gazing into his eyes. “Oh my gosh!” she cried all of a sudden, French fry held aloft, mid-flight. “What about your boys? What about Gaston and Alonzo?”
He looked at her, puzzled for the moment. Then his brow cleared. “Ah, yes, you must mean Wills and Harry. Well, to tell you the truth, I think the move to Danbury might be too much for them.” He paused, thoughtfully. “And, besides, Wills would make a much better King.”
So that was that.
• • •
“Say, by the way, what will we be living on?” the Former Future King of England enquired, as he held open the door of the Connecticut Limousine station wagon for Daisy.
“Well, I’ve still got a few dollars left over from that paltry million or so that I won in another lifetime. Which should be fine for me, but for you will be kind of like trying to scrape by on Skid Row.” She regarded his designer jeans fondly, if a trifle ruefully. Those things probably cost somebody a couple of hundred big ones. “Maybe one of us will have to get a job.”
33
A few days later, in England, the Queen was delivering her annual Christmas message. Televised, the speech was traditionally more social than political.
“We look back upon this year with cement-mixer emotions…”
Christmastime at Windsor Castle was turning into a rather grim affair that year, the inhabitants all cast into a gloomy state of group depression. In fact, the whole of London appeared to be tired of itself, and even the Christmas Carol services, held at Trafalgar Square on evenings in December—great crowds gathering and singing beneath the giant tree that was presented each year by Norway—as well as elsewhere throughout the city, were not the rousing success that they usually were. Everybody’s ho-ho, it would appear, had already hummed.
No point in beating a dead horse, the Monarch decided, opting to keep this year’s message brief. One had to know when people were in no mood to be jollied and, besides, if one did not have anything nice to say…
“And in closing…” And, here, the Queen held aloft a seemingly simple milk carton, at the express suggestion of her newest best friend, the President of the United States. This, however, was no ordinary milk carton. For, on one side of it, rendered in blue and white, was a rather youthful picture of the Prince of Wales. The Queen dearly hoped that Bill’s strategy would work.
“…if anybody has seen this man, please, please do not hesitate to phone the palace.” The Queen paused, thoughtfully. “It is not so much a matter of wanting him back, per se, but we do sort of need him…”
Postscript
An Accident of Birth
Or
It’s All Down the Drain,
Part Duh
Cophetua sware a royal oath;
‘This beggar maid shall be my Queen’
from The Beggar Maid
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson
January
1
“I’m in the mood for love,
Simply because you’re near me…”
Alfalfa had never sung it so well, but then, Alfalfa had never used a yarmulke to keep his cowlick under control either.
As Charles Silverman, nee Windsor, leaned over yet another toilet bowl—Daisy’s Star of David depending down from the chain around his neck—he thought that perhaps American television wasn’t as bad as he had previously thought. One could do far worse than to model one’s love affair along the lines of Alfalfa and the beauteous Darla.
Charles had kept telling Daisy that he wanted to make himself useful, that all of his life he had been dying to know how the other half lived.
“Well, here’s your golden opportunity,” she had offered, turning over the reins to the cleaning bucket.
One week’s passage of time then found the former Prince, the Former Future Defender of the Faith, emerging from Mrs. Reichert’s toilet. In his left hand he carried the bucket. And on his right hand he wore a yellow rubber glove.
“Damn the Bottom Feeder,” he muttered under his breath as he slammed the door, rather ungraciously, behind him. That little hoyden should have warned him that this Reichert lady was completely starkers. The woman had kept asking him if h
e was sexually involved with someone that she referred to as the “Double Banger,” whatever the hell that meant.
Still and all, he figured, it was a funny old world and life could certainly be far worse. His ears twitched in delight. At least he had Daisy to go home to.
As he strolled down the street towards the waiting van, Charles whistled to himself, all the while thinking how Daisy had been right and how there was a certain Eastern-inspired religious quality to cleaning things, a kind of Zen and the Art of the Pristine Toilet Bowl. It was all so straightforward: you put a little elbow grease into it, and you came out the other end with a pleasant place to relieve one’s bowels. Lovely, really. And not all that much different, when one thought about it, from running a small kingdom, neither in input nor output.
Now, if he could only get the Bottom Feeder off of his back, Charles Silverman would be all set, in Schaeffer City, as it were. The synagogue, after all, was the perfect ruse for a life to be lived incognito. And those jaunty little yarmulkes were just the ticket for camouflaging that nasty bald spot that had been growing in—or growing out—of late.
2
When Charley arrived home, later on that evening, Daisy was already in bed.
“I got a letter from Bonita today,” she muttered, half asleep.
“Mm, what did she have to say?” he asked, nuzzling her neck.
“She’s remaining in London. She and Sturgess are to be married in the spring.”
“Mm… do you think we should go?”
“Are you crazy?” she laughed. Then she thought about it for a moment. “Well, I’ll probably be pretty big by then. And if we were to sneak in and be real quiet about it… between that and your yarmulke and my size… Oh…” She yawned, rolling over. “We’ll see.”
Charles spooned behind her, gently caressing the slightly swollen abdomen. The Silverman Succession had been secured.
“You were wrong about one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“People can change.”
“Turn out the light, Charley.”
3
Once upon a time, in a not-very-faraway place, little Daisy Silverman’s parents told her that it would be just as easy to fall in love with and marry a rich man as a poor one.
So, Nu? Do you think she listened?
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Falling for Prince Charles Page 25
