by Mark Helprin
“Your what?” Faintingchair interrupted.
“Your tarpon,” Axelrod said, resting his chin on clasped hands like a country vicar.
“What’s that, a tarpon?”
“A muscular and silvery game fish that lives in the Atlantic Ocean off America. He had just come back from Florida and was. . . .”
“No no no!” Faintingchair shouted. “Can’t you see!”
“See what?”
“See that this is worth a hundred million pounds.”
“Because he wants to be her tarpon?”
“I didn’t hear it that way,” Faintingchair said.
“You didn’t?”
“No, and I print things as I hear them. Give this one to us.”
“You may have it if you wish, though I must say that I can’t see that it has any sensational value at all.”
“Live and learn,” Didgeridoo declared in a way that was trusting and proud, although he had no idea what Faintingchair had in mind. “He knows all about fish.”
“Go on,” begged Jerry Didgeridoo, now more interested in this than in his racing cars.
“We have,” Axelrod continued, pressing a button to close the curtains and darken the room, “a marvellous series of photographs taken by a former royal servant who shall remain nameless.”
“And rich,” added Psnake.
“And quite rich. She/he took them. . . .”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Jerry Didgeridoo. “You said he’d remain nameless.”
“Yes. She/he will.”
“Well, if his name is Sheehy,” Didgeridoo the younger said triumphantly, “he’s not nameless, is he?”
“Her/his name is not Sheehy.”
“Who’s Herhiz, an Iranian?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said his name is Sheehy.”
“No, I didn’t. I said she slash he.”
“She attack him?”
Axelrod had had students like this. Usually they had come in caravans of Rolls-Royces and urinated out the windows of their rooms for a week or two before they understood enough English to find the WC. He knew what to do. “She did attack him, Herhiz, that is. He’s dead, and she went back to Cork. You won’t let on, will you?”
“No.”
“Good. Anyway, as I was saying, Ms Sheehy has provided us with splendid photographs. She has now opened a portrait studio in Cork, where she is working her way up rapidly in the world of infant portraits.” He flashed a colour transparency upon a glass-beaded screen.
“Oh God, look at that,” exclaimed Didgeridoo the elder.
There was Freddy, covered in viscera and gore, pulling the innards from a huge stag and smiling like the Cheshire Cat.
“This was taken in Scotland a few years ago,” Axelrod stated. “We thought that, without mentioning that he was doing the job of a gillie who had been injured in the hunt, we would run it on one of our front pages, or all of them, above Freddy’s statement to the crowd at the reopening of the Children’s Zoo: ‘All my life, I’ve loved animals and children.’ ”
“It’s a gold mine,” said Faintingchair.
“What about these?” Axelrod continued. “We have no idea what he was doing, but with the right captions we don’t really have to, do we?”
The first in this series of pictures showed Freddy dressed in a deer costume, antlers and all. Then came Freddy lowering his head as if to charge. Then a speeding Freddy, legs off the ground. Then a dramatic collision with the side of the stable at Moocock. Then Freddy lying on the ground, apparently having lost consciousness.
“All those people in the back, laughing,” said Didgeridoo the elder, “make it quite obvious that he’s entertaining them.”
“My lord,” Axelrod said, “we will of course edit them out, and supply a caption such as ‘The Prince of Wales Atones for His Crime in Scotland,’ or ‘Freddy in Attempt to Reduce Demolition Budget During Moocock Renovations,’ or some such thing.”
“Have you got anything on the Princess Royal?” Faintingchair asked.
“Not really. She’s having another affair with a bull-fighter.”
“Which one?”
“Number ten. There’s no more juice in it, not even a drop. How many times can you run the banner ‘Sydney Takes a Bull by the Horn, Again’?”
“Every time we’ve done that,” said Jerry Didgeridoo, “we’ve sold another million papers.”
“If this programme is properly exploited,” Axelrod told him, “you’ll double, treble, and quintuple your circulation on good days, and move as a matter of course a million more papers than you do now. Permit me,” he continued, opening the curtains, “to show you a videotape taken by a member of a wedding party at Pestwick-on-Canal, a village near Moocock.”
At the end of the showing, the assembled conspirators were silent, and only after five minutes was the silence broken. “What could he possibly have had in mind?” Psnake asked, quite out of character.
“Is that,” asked Lord Didgeridoo, “what they call Tourette’s Syndrome?”
“No, my lord,” Axelrod answered, “it is what is called Royal Tourette’s Syndrome.”
“Are we really to go ahead with this?” asked Faintingchair. “It is the monarchy, and these things are like atomic bombs.”
“Buck up,” said Psnake. “The Americans dropped them on the Japanese, didn’t they?”
No one answered.
“Didn’t they?”
“Yes,” spoke Jerry.
“Then what’s the problem? I see no problem. I’ve been planning this all my adult life. I’m sure it will go smoothly. Why wouldn’t it? It’s history, after all, and history always works itself out.”
“Indeed, my lord,” said Axelrod, “history always works itself out.”
CRISIS OF THE ROYALS: THE PRIME MINISTER V MR APEHAND, LEADER OF HM LOYAL OPPOSITION
IT WAS FITTING that the House of Commons was packed, because London itself was packed, its theatres, restaurants, and hotels swarming like beehives in July. A dozen plays pulled-in English speakers and admirers of the language from the Continent and much woollier places all around the globe. Mongolians, Africans, and Javanese milled with the inhabitants of the former Axis powers, Texans in Stetsons, and Gulf Arabs in burnouses. They were everywhere, all the time. They were in chophouses and oyster bars; buying ski simulators, jewellery, and toupees at Harrods and ropes of pearls in the Burlington Arcade; riding about in buses looking exhausted; filling the lobbies of hotels while they read newspapers in eye-crossing alphabets; trying to take taxis from Trafalgar Square to Nelson’s Column; standing in the minor glare of theatrical marquees as lonely snowflakes came like scouts from the region of cold night, all in the days before Christmas.
Parliamentarians were eager to work through the dark evenings. How lovely it was to go from a division to a late dinner party in a house that sparkled and beckoned at the edge of a square emptied by December wind, and find there, among open fires and in candlelight, women gliding about like Milton’s angels. When in winter the natural world was inhospitable, by comparison the works of man shone like gold.
Winter beat MPs from their constituencies to London like grouse flushed before a gale or Teutons forced down to Venice by the action of the summer sun. It would have been even more excellent than it was, as Psnake could have affirmed, had a Churchill or Lloyd George been either in government or opposition, for then the House would have had irresistible allure. But without a crisis or crisis-in-the-making, without a threat to the life of the nation, and in any but a golden age, no leader could be great, and great men seemed out of their element on the green benches of the Commons, having no more place amid the saccharine boo-hoo-hoo-ing and bureaucratic chuckering than Moses in a tea room or Joan of Arc in an aerobic dance class.
It was a sad time for great men. Their day was over, and their customary positions were occupied by arrogant snot-nosed hacks who dreamed of being gods, by waddling adenoidal Morlocks full of studied indigna
tion, and by the always-so-reasonable middle, who spent their political lives offended by action, embracing indecision, and wooing extinction. The prime minister, Nigel Pimcot, was elected to his safe seat every year by the Conservative marble chewers of Beeton–St Bartholomew. His Labour counterpart, the beetle-browed V. I. Apehand, came from a constituency in the North Midlands that nobody quite knew the name of because there was too much smoke to see the signs. He coughed a lot. Hillary Lamb, his Liberal nemesis, was in perfect health, ate no fat, and could not understand how anyone could be so phenomenally low as to attend to self-interest.
Parliament seldom packed itself to hear these three or their variously semi-human substitutes. Not since Lady Hilda beat the potatoes out of the Bolivians in the Easter Island War had the House of Commons been a hot ticket. She had said of that war, “It is for Britain today a glorious victory. It would have been, for Britain in twelve ten, a glorious victory. But for Britain at any other, reasonably vigorous time, it would have been just a bloody blip, and you know it.”
Lady Hilda was the queen’s favourite, the favourite of Prince Paul, and Freddy’s favourite, too. Had she been younger, he would have married her, or he would have tried. When Lady Hilda was twenty-five, she was the most beautiful woman in England. She was upright, strong, and willing to cut to the quick, which was once the hallmark of the English woman before the whole island, according to Freddy, went soft, as its timbers rotted into what its intellectuals thought was the marsh of history. According to Freddy, only the moderns saw history as a bog. He thought it was quite the opposite—full of sharp lines, hard surfaces, and sparkling lights, like Lady Hilda.
When she had been the queen’s first minister, she and Freddy had often met at ribbon cuttings and receptions, and had appraised one another with a regretful non-Disraelian regard that telegraphed their sorrow over the two decades that stood between them. He imagined her as young, she imagined herself as younger, and in this was a tenderness that neither could express. Neither publicly admitted to anything but official thought of the other. She was, after all, the prime minister, and he the heir to the throne. Still, when he married Fredericka, her note had said, “Congratulations, but if only you could have married me,” and his, in answer, “For which God may forgive us but I cannot forgive Him.” And then not a word passed between them, ever, until no word could.
Fredericka had read Lady Hilda’s note and become enraged. It was one of the early artifacts of the war between them, which was what now packed the House as if it awaited not Pimcot, Apehand, and Lamb, but Disraeli, Churchill, and Pitt. No one was concerned, really, about the numbing particulars of government, even in a petty age when men feared above all the rapaciousness and terror of their own food. No one cared a whit if the cost-of-living allowance were to increase at a rate .003674 percent faster for civil servants than for council employees with less than five years’ seniority. The people sent gladiators to Westminster to argue about details that would otherwise bore them to death. Although they did not care, the predilections they had inherited for caring and for fighting were still partially intact, and they went through the motions in the same way that the comatose, when pricked with a pin, sometimes jerk a limb.
Now, however, along with a season of very good plays, the MPs had something to look forward to—a royal fire, fed with newspapers, that blazed over London like the flames of old. They felt alive again. Here was something, though not entirely serious, that they could fight over not like beetles but like bulldogs. Here was something, the fitness of royalty, the question of succession, the implications for representative government, that arose from a stilled sea like a great whale breaking mirror-smooth water into cascades of insolent foam. At Question Time the MPs were backed up through the halls and into the courtyards. They knew they would enjoy even the normal business that would come before everything about Freddy and Fredericka, because now even normal business would have a captivating edge. The speaker, a woman of hefty fortitude and original character, rose to invite questions for the prime minister. Pimcot walked to the dispatch box, put down a looseleaf notebook, responded to the first question with an announcement about his scheduled meetings, and then steeled himself for a battle in which he would defend his king.
“Number two, Mr Lovelace,” the speaker called.
Up sprang Lovelace of Spofford-Treacle, as nervous and eager as a greyhound. The prime minister turned to his right to receive the question from this friendly member of his own party, who could set down the lines without challenge, guiding the debate to come. Thank God for that. Lovelace was relatively new and could not fail to seek such an opportunity for his party and himself. In fact, even before Lovelace opened his mouth, Pimcot was trying to match him up with something for his reward.
“The prime minister must be aware,” Lovelace began, “of the tremendous importance of hogs in the economy of these islands. Even the Romans had hogs, and were very fond of them, actually, as pets, guard animals, and assistants. Every hog is covered with a great number of bristles, and these are the hog’s hairs.”
With tremendous but well practised irritation, the speaker rose to say, “Will the gentleman please put his statement in the form of a question.”
“Is the prime minister aware,” Lovelace asked, “of the tremendous importance of hogs in the economy of these islands? Is he aware that the Romans had hogs, and were very fond of them, actually, as pets, guard animals, and assistants? Does he realise that every hog is covered with a great number of bristles, and that these are the hog’s hairs? Does he possess the knowledge that hog bristles are highly valued in Japan as well as in other luxury markets around the world? Does he understand that the Japanese company, Kumato-Kuragai, has opened a brush factory in my constituency, in the village of Spotwich-Piggy? Does he consider that twenty-eight jobs have been created in the last month for a population of one hundred and sixty-seven souls? Is this not, proportionately, a record eight times better than that of the Labour government the last time ’round? And isn’t it true that this government encourages opportunity and job formation as none other before? And will the prime minister visit Spotwich-Piggy to inspect the Kumato-Kuragai factory?”
Much more smoothly than silk, for silk seemed smooth only to medieval people used to itchy fabric, Pimcot picked up the baton of speech and carried it with him as he floated. “I do value pigs,” he said, “this government values pigs, and very few civilised people in the world today are unaware of the value of the bristles on hogs or that these exist in great number. I hope that my travels take me soon to the vicinity of Spotwich-Piggy, in which case I will be eager to tour the Kumato-Kuragai factory. How many Japanese factories did the last Labour government bring to Spotwich-Piggy? How many to this country? I’ll tell you. None. They have not created wealth and jobs themselves, because they are too busy worrying about how much money other people have, and too busy trying to take it away from them. That is the difference between us and the party opposite. That is the difference.”
A great lowing and mooing arose from the Labour benches, met with a kind of high-pitched yodelling from the Conservative benches. But it stopped dead when a small voice from the Conservative side pierced the air like a javelin of weakness. This was the voice of Rupert Bertie Bethune, the oldest member of Parliament, a man of the previous century who not only listened through but spoke through an ear-trumpet, so that on those few occasions when he did speak it was uncanny: a strange centenarian feebly declaiming through a clogged tube. “Aren’t we at war with them?” he asked. “We don’t want their bloody factories! We should drop bombs on their factories!”
“May I respectfully remind the Right Honourable Gentleman from Snettisham that the war with Japan has been over for half a century,” the prime minister said. In Westminster, you could hear a kilt pin drop.
“It has?” asked Rupert Bertie Bethune, in the sweetest voice imaginable.
“Yes.”
“Oh,” he said. “Then I take it we’ve won. No one told me. I
didn’t hear any bells. Why don’t you go out and ring the bells?”
“Today,” the prime minister told him to his evident delight, “all the bells will ring at exactly twelve noon.”
“Mr Apehand,” the speaker said, and up rose V. I. Apehand, a Welshman with alarming eyebrows, sack belly, and a nose shaped like a loaf of bread. Many years older than Pimcot, he approached him always with a frontal attack, certain that, though this never worked, he would somehow pick up, on the other side of nought, all the votes he lost, because, as he was fond of saying, “Politics is redistribution, and no one ever thinks he has enough.”
Pimcot closed one eye as Apehand began.
“Is the prime minister aware of Mrs Fanny Albingle-Epworth, a pensioner in Leeds, who was, at her tragic and unnecessary death, eighty-seven years of age? Is the prime minister cognizant of the fact that Mrs Albingle-Epworth, a war widow who had been receiving the heat allowance year after year, was denied it by his government, and that she died ten days after she was cruelly cut off during the recent cold snap? Is this government so indecent as to allow war widows to freeze to death? To me, it’s like Mussolini putting babies on hillsides to die. What do you have to say for yourself . . . and for your wretched government?”
How could Pimcot possibly explain away such cruelty? The Conservative backbenchers who had pushed for cutting the heat subsidy were feeling rather queasy, sure that not even Pimcot could save them. They thought, Well, if he can—and we cannot imagine how he might—that is why he is the queen’s first minister.
Pimcot let a long time pass, as if he had no response or had not heard. He seemed utterly calm and even amused, which upped the stakes. From long experience, Apehand knew that all was not well.
“I am aware,” the prime minister recited gravely, “of the death,” he continued, pausing rhythmically, “of Mrs Fanny Albingle-Epworth, of Leeds. I am aware that, ten days before she died, Mrs Albingle-Epworth was denied her heating allowance by my government. For which,” he said dramatically, “I take full responsibility, and express no regret. Am I regretful? No, I am not. If Mrs Albingle-Epworth were to rise from the dead and walk before us now, and approach this bench with the words ‘Please, please, may I have my heating allowance?’ I would say, ‘No, no, and no again!’ ”
