by Mark Helprin
“Fried Mars bars, pasties, haggis, sheep’s brains, sheep’s feet, sheep’s tail, sheep’s innards,” said Craig-Vyvyan, with an angelic look, “eggs, beer, toffee, and lard.”
“Spoken like a true Scotsman,” Bannerman declared.
To avoid ill-mannered mockery of his guest, Freddy went on earnestly about his own eating habits. “In the next five days,” he said to Craig-Vyvyan, “I’m going to walk the one hundred and seventy-five miles overland from Skye to Balmoral, with all the twists and turns. I’ll do thirty-five miles a day, carrying sixty pounds in weight. I will sleep in a sack, bathe in lakes, and keep off the beaten track. I’ll get water from streams, and berries from the bush. Other than that, I carry dried venison, salmon, and quail; dense Russian corn bread; lime juice, salt; a large tube of tomato paste; two pounds of pasta; five bars of chocolate; dried fruit; and a Dalvey flask of Laphroaig. I have yet to touch it, and will not until tomorrow at lunch. That, Craig-Vyvyan, is my favourite cuisine, what you carry on your back and what you take from the land when you walk. Thank God this is open country and I’m free to do that. The newspapers think I’m on Britannia, and will write that neurotic little Freddy never comes out on deck, and spends all the time in his cabin reading Schopenhauer and Popular Mechanics. To hell with them,” he said, raising a glass of Lafite.
Bannerman and Craig-Vyvyan did the same, Bannerman because he shared the sentiment, and Craig-Vyvyan because he was delighted to be a friend of the Prince of Wales. He did like Freddy, and would have liked him, had he not been the heir to England’s throne, perhaps even more, as would most.
“I shall probably never be king,” Freddy said, partly because of the wine.
“Yes you will!” Craig-Vyvyan cried, entirely because of the wine, with one eye on Freddy and one eye on the quail in their final sizzle over the smoky fire. “You’re the Prince of Wales, or whatever it is.”
“I am. It’s commonly accepted. It goes without challenge. Nonetheless, as I see it, it is a fact in brilliance that my head is too small for my mother’s crown. Do you know of this crown that on some sad and happy day is supposed to be mine?”
“You don’t have a whole bunch of them, like a bunch of hats dangling from hooks?”
“We do, in fact, but I speak of one in particular. It weighs three pounds. Mounted on it are four rubies; eleven emeralds; sixteen sapphires; two hundred and seventy-three pearls; two thousand, seven hundred, and eighty-three diamonds, including the second part of the Star of Africa; and the Black Prince’s spinel, worn by Henry the Fifth at Agincourt. Quite a hat,” he said, between claret and quail, “a hat for which I am not fit, because I am too fat.”
“You’re not fat,” Bannerman said, becoming familiar because he too had been free with the claret. “It’s only your father that calls you fat, and it’s an injustice. You’re in magnificent shape, man, and have been for twenty years. No one in England believes you’re fat except your father and you.”
“I am fat.”
“Be gone!” cried Craig-Vyvyan. “You’re lean.”
“No,” Freddy said, as if wine were truth, “I am obese.”
“He’s crazy, isn’t he?” Craig-Vyvyan asked Bannerman.
Freddy nodded gently, and Bannerman said, “In this.”
“Why does he think he’s fat?”
“Since he was a wee lamb,” Bannerman began, but was interrupted by his prince, who said, “Oh don’t start, Bannerman, about the wee lamb.”
“It was then that I told you, sir, the story of Wee Wee Ba Ba Sheep.”
“A hundred million times.”
“You begged for it, and you loved each telling.”
“I did.”
“I was there when your father would turn to you, a stripling as skinny as a thread, and tell you that you looked like a sumo wrestler. We laughed at first, thinking it was a joke. Bless the duke, but it was not a joke, and he kept at it. He and the queen would have terrible rows about it. He was and is the head of the household, but she is the queen of England, and she squarely contradicted him each time he suggested that you were fat.”
“I know that.”
“Though I address you, I’m telling him. The prince had a thousand ways of drilling into you that you were fat, and she had a thousand ways of drilling it out. He would call you a hog, she would call you a cat. He would call you a boar, she would call you a deer. He would call you an elephant, she would call you an ibex. He would call you a hippopotamus, she would call you an anaconda. He would call you a whale, she would call you an eel. It was very confusing to you.”
“Yes,” said Freddy. “Once, he called me a Javanese Opunga, and she called me a Bulgarian Mantis. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
“But I did. Although I couldn’t say it, as it was not my place, I knew that it’s easier to drill things in than to take them out.”
“It’s like a screw!” Craig-Vyvyan shouted in his cups, almost falling into the fire. “If you pull off its head, you never get it out!”
“Or a barbed splinter,” said Bannerman, “born and bred to flee from a needle or tweezers like a fax from hounds.”
“Did you say ‘fax’?” Freddy asked.
“Yes, Your Royal Highness. I’m trying to be contemporary.”
“Carry on, then.”
“You were always a good boy, good boys listen to their fathers, and your father did this to you. You were an anxious child, born after the war and soaking-in all that the grown-ups carried with them of it. You were so serious and grave. And you started each day with a Bible story. You are not fat, sir. No one who fences, runs, swims, rides, rows, and fights, not to mention the polo playing, the three-hundred-mile walks, the two thousand sit-ups, the Aikido, the bayonet. . . . You’re obsessed, aren’t you? You’re six feet tall, twelve stone, and as muscular as an Olympic gymnast. And yet you think you’re fat.”
“I would be fat if I didn’t do all that.”
“But you do, don’t you.”
“I won’t be able to keep it up forever.”
“Aye, not even for ten more years. Something happens to the body at fifty that at twenty you can’t imagine, at thirty you don’t suspect, and of which at forty you have just a hint, but cross that bridge when you come to it. You’ll be a different man then. You’ll forgive yourself. The chase will be over and you’ll have learnt to love the world for what it is and to see yourself for what you are. It happens to everyone, even to kings.”
“But, Bannerman, I will not be a king. Craig-Vyvyan on the perch has told me so four times. Though I always have thought that I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England, too, he says I don’t.”
“You’ve got one more try.” The sweet was almost gone and the water was boiling over the fire in an old battered military kettle that Bannerman had brought because he knew the prince was fond of it. “Who knows what will happen between now and then?”
TEN MINUTES of silence later, as they drank their tea before the storm would begin with stray shots of rain in huge droplets that could hit as unexpectedly as the darts of Amazon Indians, Craig-Vyvyan asked the question of his life.
“What about me?” he said suddenly. “Maybe you’ll be king and maybe you won’t, but what about me? I’m from the people who wave as you pass, who beat the brush with sticks to flush the birds you shoot with silver guns. You have palaces: we have roofs that leak. What about me?”
The Prince of Wales was silent in consideration. Ofttimes he was begged, but this was not begging. The lightning that approached may have sealed it, he did not know, but, remembering Henry VII and Lambert Simnel, he was determined to be generous in proportion. Henry had spared Lambert’s life even after Lambert had taken up arms against him. Craig-Vyvyan had done nothing, and his name was an omen from which the prince did not wish to be separated.
“Craig-Vyvyan, you’re right, and today you might have brought us luck had we been more generous from the start.”
At this, Craig-Vyvyan perked u
p, hoping that he would get not only the bars of chocolate but perhaps something like a five-pound note. After all, the prince’s mother was on each one, and they must have been extremely easy for him to obtain from the many free samples with which the royal family was provided.
“If I become king, much will be open to me. Of late the queen has been reserving some of the vacancies in non-hereditary peerages for my use later on, and today I promise my first.”
Craig-Vyvyan did not immediately understand the extraordinary thing that was happening to him. As he began to comprehend, he said, “Uh-oh.”
“In December,” the prince continued, “the Earl of Strathcoyne, who during the nineteen twenties was known for wearing party hats that were often mistaken for dunce caps, surfaced through the window of a Bahamian glass-bottomed boat, severing his carotid artery in the presence of a number of large sharks. His entitlements that have reverted to the Crown are several thousand acres, a house in Belgravia, and two hundred thousand pounds a year.”
Bannerman was breathless for a moment and Craig-Vyvyan thought he would never breathe again.
“Craig-Vyvyan Cockaleekie, if you are with me on Lochnagar when I next and finally try to fly the tiercel falcon Craig-Vyvyan, and if he takes wing, I will make you Earl of Strathcoyne—or something or other: you know there are always pitfalls. This I swear on the honour of my family.”
“Thank you, Freddy, but what about him?” Craig-Vyvyan added, at first boldly but then trailing off somewhat nervously in fear of compromising his luck.
“Bannerman?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry about Bannerman. He’s already an earl, a Knight of the Thistle, and a good many other things. I suppose the Garter is next.”
“He’s an earl,” Craig-Vyvyan wondered, “and he carries firewood, tosses salad, and serves the likes of me with dishes and puddings?”
“I served you,” said Bannerman, “first in your capacity as a guest of the Prince of Wales, and then as my guest. Believe me, for my sovereign and my future sovereign no task is too menial for me to perform. It is an honour to serve the queen in any capacity, and the honour is mine as well with the prince, who. . . .”
“Bannerman, please,” the prince interrupted. “In the face of such a storm, what does royalty mean? It means nothing. Let’s get going.”
As Bannerman began to pack up the Land Rover, rain and wind crossed the moor like an army. “Two hundred thousand pounds a year?” Craig-Vyvyan shouted over the wind not only to Bannerman but to the wind itself and perhaps even the whole world. “I’ve never seen more than ten pounds at once. Is it true? Will he forget?”
“It’s true, and he won’t forget. What will you do with the money, Craig-Vyvyan?” Bannerman asked. The prince, attending to his pack after having extracted his rain gear, was out of earshot.
“I’ll buy every single thing at the tobacconist’s,” Craig-Vyvyan proclaimed, “and keep the chocolate and penknives for myself and give my father all the tobacco.”
“That wouldn’t be good for him.”
“Why not?”
“Tobacco is bad for the health.”
“It is?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“Then I’ll buy all the tobacco and throw it into the sea.”
“And then what will you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I recommend,” said the prince in a voice that, to carry over the storm, he would have used in hailing someone across a river, “that you get educated. Arrange for tutors. Set up a household at Oxford or Cambridge. Study and read. Transform yourself.”
“Why?”
“So that you can be worthy of expectations. So that you can have children who, with no titles, will be great in their own right. So that you may balance the gift, and return fair service. For a gift that does not find balance and a service that is not returned are worth less than a curse.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because my family has been in the business for a thousand years. Now, give Bannerman your particulars so he can stay in touch with you. I look forward to when next we meet.”
Having finished the loading, Bannerman was standing by the driver’s door of the Land Rover in what was now a driving rain. “Craig-Vyvyan, do you want to come along? I’m going through Staffin.”
Craig-Vyvyan looked at Bannerman and then at the prince, who stood with hooded rifle and pack, a lonely figure in a landscape gone wild and dark. “Aren’t you coming in the car, Freddy?” he asked.
“I’ll be walking,” the prince replied.
“In this storm? Even the bird’s in the car.”
“Yes,” said the Prince of Wales, starting on his way, “give him my regards.”
. . . AND THE WOMAN WHO PREFERRED THAT HE WOULD
MOOCOCK, the country house of the Prince and Princess of Wales, was set upon a hill overlooking the Weald of Boffin, at the centre of an empty three-mile stretch between the villages of Brooms Hoo and Pestwick-on-Canal. Until Fredericka succeeded in allowing it into two dozen glossy magazines, it had been a secret. And then, although Freddy had been able to keep the photographers from his library, the green room, the tack room, the gym, and the baths, he had had to give up everything else. Thus, half the world had seen the pools, indoor and out; the reception rooms; the bedrooms; and, always the favourite, the kitchen. As a result, the security force had to be doubled, ugly electronics mounted upon the otherwise classical roof, and seismic devices embedded in the weald, like potatoes.
Freddy and Fredericka’s first theme argument, when Moocock was still unknown to the public, was occasioned by her insistence upon changing the name of the house and allowing it in magazines, and his determination not to do either. One weekend, having driven out unobserved, they had dismissed the servants and ordered the police to remain at the perimeter. Blissfully alone, they gravitated to the pool. For two days they stayed in an August sun that made them glow like roses. At night, though the lights were on in the water, which spoke back to a diamond-lit sky like a sapphire in a band of green, not an insect was in sight, and the sharply cut waves, like once-molten glass, went unblemished by gnats. The temperatures of water and air were perfect, and a slight wind warmed with its heat exactly as much as it cooled by evaporation.
Hanging on to one another while Freddy held fast with one hand at the tip of the diving board, they were breathless from intimate coupling beneath the surface in the glare of underwater lights. It had been like swimming through Champagne, quite a bit of which they had consumed before tumbling in. In fact, a used magnum rolled around the bottom of the pool like a mine. And of all the appeals to their senses that evening, the most memorable was the scent of flowers carried ceaselessly on the summer wind.
“Freddy, why is it called Moocock?” Fredericka asked in a voice that despite its aristocratic lineage sometimes veered toward the dialect of a refined Cockney shopgirl, which in her youth she had picked up first from her favourite nanny and then during her brief and disastrous career in the theatre. Freddy thought that these touches were like bright red poppies scattered across fields of gold. The queen did not, viewing them not as surprising colour but as constant irritation.
“The chap who built it called it Moocock,” Freddy answered.
“What kind of name is that?”
“English.”
“It doesn’t sound English.”
“Yes it does. Moo, and cock.”
“But what could that mean?”
“Cow penis.”
“What’s a cow penis?”
“I don’t know. What do you think it might be?”
“The penis of a cow?”
“Yes.”
“But, Freddy, cows don’t have penises, do they?”
“They don’t.”
“Then why would he have called his estate that?”
“Because he didn’t want anyone to find it, and a cow penis is non-existent.”
“If I had a name like that, I’d
change it.”
“So would I, although I haven’t changed my name from Freddy Finney, have I?”
“You might have changed it had it been Freddy Cow Penis.”
“I don’t think so. In fact, I might change it to Freddy Cow Penis.”
“Whether you do or not, let’s change the name of the house to something other than Moocock.”
“I’ve been at Moocock for fifteen years and never had a problem. Moocock is a splendid name.”
“But won’t it be funny when the television visits us and they say, ‘Here are the Prince and Princess of Wales at Moocock’?”
“No, because neither the television nor anyone else will ever know of this place.”
“But it’s so beautiful. It should be in magazines.”
“Never in magazines, Fredericka, never. It’s got to be a secret. But if you really want to change the name, perhaps we can.”
“That’s a start.”
“You see, when I first bought it, I had intended to call it something else, something magnificent and noble, something that, ever since I was a boy, I had wanted to call an estate in the country.”
“Nothing like Moocock, I hope.”
“Nothing whatsoever. Rather, it’s the name of what is supposed to be the mythical white rhino of Bechuanaland, which actually is real, although no one ever believes me. I’ve always been fascinated by it, and I see no reason why we can’t use it instead of Moocock.”
“What is it?”
“Mohoohoo.”
“Mohoohoo? Not really.”
“Yes, so elegant,” said Freddy. “I had wanted to name it Ostrich-hurst, but then I found out that this is the name of one of my father’s secret retreats, in St Mary’s Hoo. Mohoohoo is better anyway, more sophisticated.”
“Why not something like . . . Cliveden, or Hampton Court?”
“Those names are taken.”
Now rather tense, they were no longer touching, and had forgotten the smell of the roses. “I can’t live in a place called Mohoohoo,” Fredericka declared. “It’s ridiculous.”
“Then we’ll keep it Moocock.”
