by Mark Helprin
“Well, governor, we’re taxis,” one of the taxi drivers said.
“Yes,” said Freddy, laughing, “but have you seen Taxi?”
“No, sir.”
At that moment, Freddy saw Taxi disappear behind a dustbin, and he shouted, “Taxi! Come here! Taxi! Come!”
The taxi drivers cleared their throats, and said, “Here we are, Your Lordship.”
“No, not you, him,” Freddy said, pointing at the dustbin.
“Would you like us to take you somewhere, Your Majesty?” they asked, hopelessly.
“No,” said Freddy, who then bounded toward the dustbin and, as he rattled it violently to dislodge the dog (who had already left), yelled, “Taxi, Taxi! Damn you! Taxi! You never come when I call!”
The taxi drivers, terrified by now, approached Freddy and asked, most meekly, “Aren’t our taxis good enough for you sir? We can wash them?”
“Look,” said Freddy, turning to them with great irritation, “I’m not looking for a taxi, I’m looking for Taxi.”
“Oh,” they said. This went on for at least another hour, but they never gave up.
Now, in Pestwick-on-Canal, two old men were standing in front of the Post Office, trying to think of something to say, when they saw him coming. “Oh, look. It’s him,” one said. “Not this again.”
The other replied, “You know what I say, I say, royalty or not, give him as good as he gets.”
“Excuse me,” Freddy told them, “I wonder if you’ve seen my dog, Pha-Kew.”
“No, I haven’t seen your dog, and fuck you,” was the answer.
“No, no, no,” Freddy said. “You don’t understand—Pha-Kew!”
“But yes, yes, yes, we do understand. Fuck you!”
“The name of my dog,” Freddy said, laughing, and then pausing, “is . . . Pha-Kew.”
“If you don’t want to tell us the name of your dog,” the other man said, “then fuck you, too.”
“But I do want to tell you the name of my dog. I’ve been telling you the name of my dog.”
“Oh, really? What is it?”
“Pha-Kew.”
“Fuck you too, and you can go to hell, you royal bastard!”
Just then, a wedding reception surged out of the White Louse, spilling onto the pavement in good suits and fine dresses. Freddy and the two men turned to see. It was lovely. The women’s voices carried through the night like bells. Anyone beholding the scene would be drawn to it, as were, indeed, the two men and the Prince of Wales. But for Freddy it was more than just an attractive bevy of women, it was deliverance, for Pha-Kew poked his head from behind a bush just beyond the wedding party.
Freddy was off, running toward the bush and screaming at the top of his voice, “Pha-Kew! Pha-Kew! Pha-Kew!”
One of the old men turned to the other, and said, “Just pray that the old lady hangs on.”
Meanwhile, the men in the wedding party stepped forward to protect their women. Freddy was very big, and he ran like a commando. Though they were scared, they were prepared to do their duty. But he ran right past them, screaming, “Pha-Kew! Pha-Kew!” and stopped at the bush, into which Pha-Kew had receded, like a moray eel, before anyone had seen him. “Pha-Kew! Pha-Kew!” he said to the bush. “Don’t do this to me, Pha-Kew. Not again.”
“Is that the Prince of Wales?” one of the women asked, “or have I had too much to drink?”
“It can’t be.”
“But it is. It is.”
“Oh, look,” the bridegroom said, “look what he’s doing.”
Freddy had lain upon the ground and put the cheese on his face. “Cheese!” he said. “Cheese! Cheese!”
And then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Pha-Kew darting onto the towpath beyond the Post Office. Pha-Kew disappeared in a white blur, which befit a 125-pound horseradish travelling in the moonlight, and Freddy realised that the dog would be halfway home in a trice. Still, he was so worked up that he rose, yelled “Cheese!” and began to run after the elusive Pha-Kew, calling his name many times.
As he passed the wedding party he felt strangely uncomfortable, and stopped. “What’s that?” he asked a small blond woman who was pointing something at him. When she failed to respond, he asked, again, “What is that?”
“It’s a video camera, Your Royal Highness,” was the reply. She kept on shooting.
“Oh,” said Freddy. “I see. Oh. Oh my.”
The last scene on the tape was of Freddy running off into the darkness, shouting, “Off with his bloody head!”
THE LORD CECIL PSNAKE AND THE LORD ALFIE DIDGERIDOO
THE LORD CECIL PSNAKE’S MONCAY HOUSE had been a royal palace. That was why he bought it. Ten acres in the middle of London, a Palladian villa of forty rooms, a mews, gardens as if from paradise, and a sports complex with two pools, tennis, squash, and half a million pounds’ worth of chrome-plated muscle machines that Lord Psnake was no more likely to touch than he was to take out the rubbish or clean the bathrooms. And Moncay House was not even his home. Most of the time he lived either in Switzerland or on Cap d’Antibes, and when in London he stayed in a twenty-thousand-square-foot triplex penthouse perched over his offices in the Media Royal Building, headquarters for the holding company that owned half of Britain’s newspapers and private television channels.
The others were the property of the Lord Alfie Didgeridoo, an Australian who drove himself in an ordinary ten-year-old car with stuffed dice dangling from the windscreen mirror, who dressed in rumpled off-the-rack suits, lived in a small terrace house appropriate to a young professional and his family, ate unrecognised in workingmen’s pubs, and who, partly because he had neither yachts nor Swiss nor African estates nor Moncay Houses nor retinues nor aeroplanes nor entourages, not to mention mistresses, former wives, and business interests outside those he understood, was worth five thousand million pounds.
Didgeridoo’s papers and television stations ran neck and neck with Psnake’s, but Didgeridoo could watch the race from atop an electrifying mountain of cash. Psnake, less single-minded, had motives more complex than building such a mountain. This, Didgeridoo knew, and thus he was apprehensive when he received from Psnake an invitation to dine at two in the morning at Moncay House. “Why such a time?” Didgeridoo had asked, having made the call himself, of Psnake’s aide-de-camp. The answer was because Lord Psnake had wanted to make absolutely sure that their meeting would go unremarked.
“HOW DO YOU DO?” asked Psnake of Didgeridoo, at the door of Moncay House, as the wind blew through, and the moon was anchored over Hyde Park like a barrage-balloon.
“Quite well,” replied Didgeridoo. “A bit tired.”
“I apologise for the late hour, but I have something of immense importance to discuss with you, and no one must know. Please come in.”
Lord Psnake, a counter-eponymous hippopotamus, slowly led the way. His little feet and little legs smoothly moved his immense bulk, as if on wheels, into a cavernous reception room only one corner of which was lit, and that hardly at all. No whippet himself, but svelte by comparison, Didgeridoo followed, wondering on account of Psnake’s seeming ability to glide if underneath his purple satin dressing gown were more than just two legs and feet. Didgeridoo imagined there a mechanism comparable to the action of a piano—something busy, bony, complex, and spindly. Psnake’s thin hair was matted as if he lived on the street, a sign not of bad hairdressing or inadequate hygiene, for he undoubtedly had the best of both, but of ill health.
Didgeridoo felt that he was in some sort of wilderness den, and yet this room in Moncay House was splendid even when shrouded in darkness. Out from the corner fled a ballroom-sized floor of ancient reddish-brown planks that seemed to glow of their own accord. The air was perfect in its temperature and refreshed by banks of rooted flowers beneath the windows, while Ming vases holding cut flowers stood watch like sentinels of white light subdued in nets of Pacific blue.
The lighted corner was rich with browns and gold, and a hypnotic Persian carpet soaked up
the light of the single lamp in a muted Technicolor so vivid it seemed to move. In Moncay House the shadows were sharp, the chairs leather, the trays upon which refreshments waited actually of gold. “Eat if you like,” said Psnake. “I’m past eating. It’s edema that has given me all this horrible gravity. I eat, but I don’t enjoy it.”
“Thank you, but I’ve already had dinner.”
“It’s there,” Psnake said, sitting down and breathing hard, “if you want it.”
The lateness of the hour and the goldenness of the light made for trust, which led Didgeridoo immediately to suspect a trap. Psnake, after all, who before his elevation to the peerage had been Cecil Birdwood, was his constant rival. The circulation of one set of papers varied inversely with that of the other, as did the viewership of their television channels. What could he be up to?
“As you know,” Psnake began, “we’ve never met. We’ve been in the same room from time to time, and perhaps in the early days we were introduced, but I don’t recall it.”
“Nor do I.”
“Knowing of our rivalry, people have assiduously kept us apart, which I have always thought to be silly.”
“So have I.”
“After all, if we’re rivals it’s only because we seek the same prize. I’ve observed among those who work under me that disdain is only as intense as similarity. Why shouldn’t the two of us admit it? I don’t suppose a foreigner could tell the difference between our papers, could he?”
“Can you?” asked Didgeridoo.
“Never could,” he said, “and who wants to? Tell me, how are things coming along?”
“In business?”
“What else?”
“They’re excellent, as usual. And I know that you, too, are doing quite well.”
“Yes,” said Psnake, “but our hill of cash is as flat as the lawns at Hampton Court, whereas yours is the height of the Matterhorn.”
“Do you want me to buy you out?” Didgeridoo asked, in shock. The thought had never occurred to him. If such an arrangement were to go forward, 80 percent of Britain’s newspapers and private electronic media would rest in one hand, a Didgeridoo hand.
“Did I say that?”
“Not yet.”
“Nor will I.” Psnake leaned forward as best he could, and in the light his lips looked neither red nor pink but alarmingly vermillion. “I don’t want you to buy me out, and I wouldn’t want to buy you out even if I could.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want”—breathing hard, he looked like an old lion about to make the last kill of his life—“to give you something.”
“To give me something?” Now Didgeridoo had all his defences up.
“Yes. Don’t worry about Trojan horses. Everything will be entirely transparent, as I will explain.”
“Please,” Didgeridoo replied, realising that Psnake obviously had not many years left, if even a single one, and was about to make something like a deathbed confession. Didgeridoo had always been able to sense opportunity. For him it was like smelling the scent, blown out to sea, of orchards and grasses. He could be tossing on the waves far from sight of land and suddenly he would be aware of the whereabouts of a great garden. Others would have no sense of it and smell nothing, but he would be in the Garden of Eden. “Please,” he said, “do go right ahead. I’m interested in what you might say.”
Cecil Birdwood, Lord Psnake, leaned back in his leather seat and looked up into the darkness before he began to speak, as if to infill with ancient desire.
“WHERE SHALL I BEGIN?” he asked not Didgeridoo and not even himself, but the unseen presence that drives accomplishment and is the goad of genius. “It’s always hard to begin, because every story begins at the beginning of the world.
“Leaving out a bit, then . . . on the twenty-first of February, nineteen seventeen, I was a boy of seven in a Midlands town that, although the twentieth century had begun, was fixed in the nineteenth. If you looked about, you might have thought that it was eighteen seventy-five. Those years, which I had never seen, left their calling card in the things we had, which were battered and familiar; in what we believed, which was reassuring and unchanging, or so it seemed to me; and in what we said, how we felt, and how we treated one another. I imagine it was much the same for you.”
“It was,” said Didgeridoo, remembering Australia.
“Toast made on the rack in a wood-oven,” said Lord Psnake, “coal heat, no piped water, marmalade and tea our most extravagant luxuries, steam trains and steam whistles, and great politeness, especially to women. Things moved slowly and we hadn’t much, but when things moved slowly they were lovely, and because we had so little, what we had seemed like a great deal.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“My father, who had married my mother in nineteen ten, was a pressman. In ’fifteen, he was called from his steel cylinders and inks into the artillery. He became a shell handler, which was appropriate, I suppose, for a man who had lifted steel all his life. When they took him, when I was five, he could, without assistance, lift and mount above his head (one end at a time) a five-hundred-pound roller. In those days, after he had run a mile down the beach with me on his shoulders, he breathed as lightly as if he had been stirring tea and reading a newspaper.
“But when they sent him back to us, on the twenty-first of February, nineteen hundred and seventeen, he had neither his feet, nor a right hand, nor a lower left jaw. For twenty years, until he died, we fed him mush through a tube, and he was sick every day. It’s a mystery what was wrong with his innards, but from the time he returned until his last I often could not sleep, because of his screaming.
“He had been a man of dignity and unerring grace, which, for a poor man, he had in surprising abundance. ‘What I did,’ he used to tell me, ‘I did for king and country, and I do not regret it.’ And then I would say, be-cause I loved him, and because I was young, ‘But if you did it for king and country, why doesn’t the king visit you, to thank you, and help you along?’
“He would just pull me to him, and kiss me with the side of his face, which was all he could manage because of the way he was, and say in speech that sounded like the speech of someone drowning, ‘You’re a good boy, and all I want in this world is for you to be happy and safe.’
“Of course, the king never visited or sent a card, even when my father died. And look what my father had done for him, suffering without complaint.
“What was the king doing while my father took twenty years to complete the process that had begun with the explosion not even of a shell but of a fuse? What was he doing that he could not visit, or even send a note? I saw that he was on holiday a lot, enjoying himself. And he went from palace to palace, and raced his yacht. Being young, I envied him, and could hardly blame him, as I would have done these things myself. But I did blame him for not knowing about my father.
“How could he have known? There were so many men like my father, and only one king. But, as I saw it, there was only one of my father, and so many kings that they had to have numbers after their names. Still, I understood why it was not practical, and because I did I wondered why things were arranged in such a way, how they had come to the point where they were so hurtful.
“My mother thought of kings as gods. In this country in those days the common people sometimes found it difficult to breathe in their presence. Why was this, and who were they, and how did they get to be that way? My curiosity was driven by the presence of my father. I was not moved by hatred, but by love. So I read history, and I found out how these kings got to be kings, and who they were originally.
“When I discovered that they had become kings mainly by killing whoever stood in their way, or, if that did not suffice, by trickery, plots, and manoeuvre, I realised that not only are the kings of today ordinary people floating upon the habitual deference of other ordinary people, but the bloodlines to which they refer as the only justification of their state are as black as pitch.
“Despite this, and
although I believe that all men stand equally before God, I believe as well that England needs a king. But which king? Or which queen? The throne is an institution and a prize. It has always been in play, it always will be in play, and it is in play now. The most riveting moments of our history have been those moments when it is contested. And, I ask you, why should history cease to be interesting?”
“You mean to say,” said Didgeridoo, rapt and amazed, “you mean to say that you, Psnake, are contesting the throne of Great Britain?”
“I am.”
“Not really!”
“I have worked all my life with that hope ever present within me. It has kept me alive and driven me forward. I haven’t always done well, but am now in a position to begin.”
“To begin what?”
“One of two things.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Didgeridoo, agitated not so much by the prospect of what he heard as by his intuition that the opportunity he sensed for himself was real enough, but dangerous.
“Look here,” said Psnake, “the queen is immutable other than physiologically. She will remain on the throne for as long as she pleases or until she dies. She is a brilliant and faithful woman and a great queen. I would no sooner try to unseat her, or want to, than I would wish to blow off my own leg. The weakness in royal lines, as in everything else, is at the joint, during the transition.
“In the Second World War, in which I fought for king and country with luck greater than my father’s, I learned in stupendous battles that the place to strike an enemy formation of any size is at the seam. Military echelons are arrayed so as to protect their centres rather than to interlock and overlap, and the more mobile forces are, the less they tend to blend with those adjacent. The seams, Didgeridoo, the joint: that is where I shall strike, at the younglings, who are spoilt and confused by the long and just reign of their great mother. They have not been tested, and for me that is all the advantage in the world.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Didgeridoo, “have them murdered like the princes in the Tower?”
