Freddy and Fredericka

by Mark Helprin

  “ ‘Thor: But doesn’t he know?’

  “ ‘Princess: Of course he knows. He knows bloody well, but he’s crazy. He was just screaming and screaming. It frightens me so. Then he said I have five bosoms. Really. I mean, obviously I don’t have only one, and obviously I don’t have five. Where would I put them? What would I do with them? How can he think such a thing? I tried to convince him, I even held my two bosoms up for him to count. And what did he do? He started to call me things. He called me a mealy-mouthed worm, a cyclops, a tart, and a strumpet. And then he threw that big blue book at me. He said it was a book about bosoms. That’s what he reads. He reads books about bosoms, bosom books. I’m frightened and I’m angry. You know, it runs in his family.’ ”

  Lamb sat down, assuming the pose of Rodin’s Thinker to show that he was thinking. In the House as it was constituted, this was a magical gesture, as if he had snapped his fingers and become invisible, rendering him immune to counterattack. It was also a signal to Apehand, who shook his head to and fro in exaggerated pity.

  Pimcot jumped up. “The charges as delivered, Madam Speaker, even if true, serve only to vindicate the Prince of Wales, for, indeed, as everyone knows, the Princess of Wales, and every other woman on earth, has only one bosom, as has each man.” He sat, thinking this would be indisputable.

  But on the Labour side, mouths hung open in disbelief. Then there was sniggering, which quickly turned to derisive laughter. Apehand assumed his post. “Now we know,” he said, anticipating a cheer from his own benches, “what is wrong with the Tory Party!” The Labour benches rose as one to cheer. “Does the prime minister, or does he not, stand by his remark that men have bosoms?”

  Pimcot rose in amazement. “Of course I do,” he said to a storm of mockery from the Labour side. “And I would like to edify further the member for Rhode-on-Tyne. A man, like a woman, has only one bosom.” Astounded by the hilarity that ensued, Pimcot screamed, “Look it up! Look it up!”

  “Where? In the Prince of Wales’ bosom book?” Apehand asked, completely overpowering the Conservatives, who were too shocked to protest. “Would the prime minister next be throwing such a book at me, as the crazed, overprivileged, spoilt, ungrateful, and unnecessary Prince of Wales throws blue bosom books at his wife?”

  Pimcot was now enraged, so he took the kind of trapeze-artist’s leap that had made him famous. He had kept his eye on the Labour benches during their mockery, searching out Swindon Michael Worry, a university member and Marxist lexicographer so thin he might have been mistaken for fishing line. Swindon Michael Worry looked embarrassed. Even if Labour was his party, words were his life. Which would he choose if put on the griddle? Pimcot remembered his own Oxford days, when, for principle and truth, most of the people he had known would have died (and the rest would have died for an invitation to the right dinner party). He hoped that some of this great quality, that had held the planes aloft until victory in the Battle of Britain, still ran in the veins of those such as Swindon Michael Worry, who could not rise in the House without including in his remarks the words principle and fairness. “Would the member for Rhode-on-Tyne put the question to Mr Swindon Michael Worry, the renowned authority on all things lexicographical?”

  At first a chill ran through Apehand’s round body, but then, when he saw Bracken Hornwood, Pimcot’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, overcome by a sudden grimace of pain at the prime minister’s gamble—speaking without words the question, How can you gamble the monarchy on a Marxist?—he turned with an easy look about him, full of hope, to seek out Swindon Michael Worry. The House was so silent you could hear the throbbing engines of tugs far up the Thames, the little beeps of horns that carried on the wind from Marylebone, and the cry of Dutch seagulls shocked that the winds had borne them from Leyden to London.

  Swindon Michael Worry rose, in agony. Many of the MPs understood this agony, and not a single hardly breathing one of them would have been unwilling to give him an hour or more to come to terms with himself. It was the kind of decision some men could not make in a lifetime, and he had less than a minute. The Conservatives hoped that he would simply tell the truth, but their own memory and their hearts told them that he might not. Most of the Labour members assumed that he would say that, obviously, a woman has two bosoms, a man hasn’t even one, and that would be that. The Lambs, as they were called, were tortured. Some of them had eyes more dewy than usual.

  “Actually,” said Swindon Michael Worry, “words are continually evolving, and they mean what we want them to mean. After all, we invented them.” Pimcot felt the fall of a kind of inner guillotine. “And in the modern usage, which is the controlling usage, I think it is rather clear, is it not, that men have no bosoms and women have two.” And then he sat down to the kind of cheers that once had come for the victories in North Africa and the crossing of the Rhine.

  “The world turned upside down,” said Pimcot bitterly as he and his ministers departed from the front benches. As they came into the quiet of the halls into which they customarily strode as the first wave out, they heard a boisterous chant from the House chamber.

  It rose, and then, when the chanters had got it right, it thundered. For the first time in years, Pimcot felt that his government was in danger. “What are they saying?” he asked. All stopped to listen. Through the baffle of the halls, stronger and stronger, came the swelling chant: “Cyclops! Cyclops! Cyclops! Cyclops!”

  TO TRANSFORM impending crisis into crisis itself, that night Canal Didgeridoo ran the wedding-party tape both in its original version and in a computer-enhanced edition in which focus was sharpened, light amplified, and close-ups provided of Freddy’s face. A man running full speed at the camera while shouting obscenities might be something of note. Certainly it would command attention, but it would be put in context by the action of his body. With context deleted in a skilfully executed close-up of the royal person hustling along, his face became an emblem of madness. The odd expression, concussive breathing, fixed and horizon-skewering eyes, and the flesh of the cheekbones and jowls vibrating inexplicably up and down, were absolutely arresting. Accompanied by the bellowing of an apparent obscenity and aired seventeen times in one evening, it was the beginning of a constitutional crisis.

  The queen was not amused, and neither was her consort. They were, as always, unflappable—given their perspective and protections, they never needed to flap—but they did want to see Freddy right away. In fact, Freddy, who was merely annoyed, grew anxious after opening the note that the duke had sent to his office via a page of the back stairs. Freddy had known his father to use idiomatic expressions quite often. To be colourful in language is a soldier’s prerogative. But this was the first time in Freddy’s experience that his father had made use not only of colourful Anglicisms but of a strange Americanism. The note had read: “Freddy, get your bloody fat arse over here, pronto.”

  “Pronto?” Freddy had actually said out loud.

  When he saw his parents the next day, Queen Philippa smiled her gracious smile, as she could not help but do when her children came into her presence. Prince Paul scowled the vacant scowl of the county aristocrat, something he had adopted merely as a class tribute. He was sitting with legs crossed (a dangerous sign), his left hand grasping and hanging from his right shoulder (also a dangerous sign), and his right hand resting limply on a marble side table, fingers drumming (a very dangerous sign). It was just before Christmas, the cold had slipped down England’s spine after shattering off its hooks above the polar sea, and a fire was burning in the fireplace. This was all the more lovely because of a mass of yellow roses in the background, and snow falling flake by flake past the long Palladian windows.

  “Good God, Freddy, what have you been eating?”

  “Me?” Freddy answered, not like a prince but like a park squirrel pointing its little grey fingers at its little white chest.

  “I see no other pachyderms in the room.”

  “He’s not a pachyderm, dear,” said the queen, “he’s a pinwor
m.”

  “Pinworm like hell. He’s a cetacean.”

  “No, dear, he isn’t a cetacean, he’s a crustacean.”

  “Whatever he is, he’s peeled the wrappers off a thousand too many Violet Crumbles.”

  “I don’t even like those,” Freddy protested.

  “That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t eat them, does it? You eat anything that moves.”

  Freddy looked at his father with puzzlement. “They don’t move—they’re not game, they’re manufactured sweets—and I haven’t had one in twenty years.”

  “Would you stake your existence on that?”

  “When I say I haven’t had one in twenty years, it means approximately twenty years.”

  “Yes, and when I say you’ve gained weight it means you’re a bloody hippopotamus.”

  “He’s not a hippopotamus,” said Philippa, crisply, “he’s a hummingbird.”

  “I’m in excellent shape for someone of middle age, as you very well know. I could go right back into service without adjustment.”

  “No, Freddy, the last time we used fuel bladders was in the Normandy Invasion.”

  “Really,” said Freddy, “you’d think I was fat. Because I exercise all the time I have to eat a lot, but that doesn’t make me fat.”

  “You look fat.”

  “I have a different body type than you have.”

  “That’s right, you’re fat. You’ve got a fat body type.”

  “No, I’m not fat. My body type is somewhat like Mummy’s. What’s wrong with that?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that. Mummy is a woman. . . .”

  “Yes,” the queen said.

  “And you are—that is, you are supposed to be—a man. Sydney looks like Mummy. Sydney is a girl. That’s good, because Mummy is a girl. You, on the other hand, are a boy. You are supposed to look not like Mummy but like me, who are a boy.”

  “Who are a boy?”

  “Who am a boy?”

  “Who am a boy?”

  “You and me, that’s who.”

  “But I’m different than you. If I were the same, I would be your clone.”

  “Freddy,” said Paul, who understood this as the proper pronunciation of clown, “you’re not my clone, you’re Fredericka’s clone.”

  “Fredericka’s clone? I am?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not physically.”

  “Yes, physically.”

  “Do you think so?” Freddy asked, feeling his hips and looking at his sleeves.

  “Precisely, Freddy, exactly. Big shoes, red nose, plucked eyebrows, the works.”

  Freddy stared at his father, not knowing how to respond. The queen leant toward her husband and whispered in his ear. Whatever she said, it contained the word circus.

  These things happened, and with Paul they happened every day. Once, for example, Freddy had absent-mindedly rounded a corner in the private secretaries’ corridor as his father absent-mindedly rounded it at high speed in the opposite direction. Colliding like two jousting knights, they knocked one another to the floor. The duke then lunged ferociously at his son, grabbed him by the lapels, and shouted, “Who the hell are you? Why are you here? And where the hell are you going?”

  “I’m your son,” Freddy had said, “I live here, and I’m going to breakfast.”

  Now, Paul said, “Sit down, and take off your cloak.”

  Freddy, who was not wearing a cloak, felt a shudder of fear. Could it be that his father, like Wolf Larsen, the captain of Sea Wolf, was blind, and had been fooling everyone all along? Not likely, as his father played polo, shot well, and read books about horses, dogs, and ducks, all without assistance. But one could never be sure, so Freddy walked up to him, as if the duke could not see, and waved a hand in front of his face.

  Using only the muscles of his neck, Paul drew back his head in irritation and disbelief. Then he waved his hand before Freddy’s face, and said, “What! Monkey see, monkey do?”

  “No,” said Freddy, relieved that his father was not blind, “it’s the new way of saying hello.”

  “Sit down, and shut up!”

  Freddy sat down, and began to drum his fingers.

  “Don’t do that,” commanded the queen, “it reminds me of Mussolini.” She sighed. “What are we to do?”

  “I’ll tell you,” her husband answered. “You, young man, will have your things brought from Moocock, St James’s, and Kensington, and stay here until it blows over.”

  “Until what blows over?”

  “Until what blows over?”

  “What?”

  “Do you think all you’ve done of late has gone unnoticed?”

  “I don’t see that what I do in private is anyone’s business,” said Freddy. “After all, I don’t go around sticking video cameras in other people’s faces. I suppose if I did, it would be a scandal: ‘Prince of Wales Invades Privacy of British Subject.’ ”

  “What exactly were you doing in that film?” the queen asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Paul repeated. “Were you not shouting obscenities at an innocent wedding party and a shrub? Were you not lying on the ground and rubbing cheese on your face, all the while screaming, ‘Fuck you’?”

  “I can explain. Do you know Fredericka’s horrid little dog?”

  “That horrid little dog,” said the queen.

  “His name,” Freddy began, and then he held up his index finger to signal them to wait, took a pen from his jacket, and wrote on a card the dog’s name, passing it to Paul.

  “Ah, I see,” said the duke. “Pha-Kew.” He passed the card to the queen.

  “Pha-Kew,” she said. “Who named him that?”

  “Fredericka,” Freddy answered. “She named him after one of her nutritionists, who died of malnutrition.”

  “Not surprising,” Paul said. “Nutritionists don’t know anything about nutrition. They’re prejudiced against meat. Five pounds of meat a day is what I say. But what of all this other stuff? What were you doing in deer antlers?”

  “Viscount Baring’s fourth birthday party. The children loved it.”

  “Are you in Fanny Baring’s knickers?” Paul asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Why did you let them videograph it?”

  “It would have been impossible not to: it was a birthday party. The Omelette air-brushed out everyone but me. I can’t fathom any of this. Fredericka goes to a children’s hospital, poses for photographs with some poor child for less than a minute, drops him like a hot rivet, and all over the world she’s lauded as the new Albert Schweitzer. I put on a deer costume and suffocate for an hour so a bunch of four-year-olds can ride on my back, bite me, kick me, and spit on me, and then I knock myself out against a brick wall to make them laugh, and who am I? The Marquis de Sade.”

  “Did you throw an encyclopaedia at Fredericka?”

  Freddy laughed. “Yes, the Britannica. It took eight minutes.”

  “Why was it stated in the House?”

  “I slammed The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary down on the table be-cause I was enraged that she thought she had two bosoms. I was trying to get across to her the point you asked me to make, but I couldn’t because she doesn’t really understand English.”

  “Has she at least made less display of her bosom?” the queen inquired.

  “Oh God no,” Paul answered. “I just saw her on the television. She had everything hoisted up in front of her as if she were carrying a plate of uncooked grouse. Does she imagine this to be aristocratic?”

  “I think yes,” said Freddy. “She doesn’t understand how much better we are than aristocrats. I haven’t been able to explain that to her, because, you see, she herself is just an aristocrat.”

  Philippa addressed her son. “Freddy, as a woman, I must ask this question. Are you doing anything that might alienate her affections? Sometimes one’s woundedness can be manifest in outrageous behaviour.”

  “I’m not wounded,” Freddy answered. />
  “I want to know if Fredericka has been wounded by anything you’ve done.”

  “No.”

  “Think, Freddy.”

  “No. I haven’t done anything.”

  “What about Phoebe Boylingehotte?” Paul asked.

  Freddy put his hand over his mouth so the queen could not read his lips, and said, silently, “Does she know?”

  “Of course I know,” said the queen. “In time I know bloody everything.”

  “Oh.”

  “From this moment forward,” the queen declared, “speaking not as your mother but as your sovereign,” and Freddy always knew the difference, “you will not see that woman. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Ever,” the queen said, holding her right index finger bolt upright and moving it as if quickly signing a document.

  “Ever,” said Freddy.

  “Good.”

  “Ever?”

  “Get it right!” Paul insisted.

  “I understand.” Freddy thought of Lady Boylingehotte’s intense desire and total lack of self-consciousness, which would never be duplicated, even by Fredericka, who, though voluptuous, was not Boylingehotte.

  “What are you thinking about?” Paul asked.

  “Mozart,” said Freddy.

  “Well, get off that and consider this. You have been giving every antiroyalist in the world succour and sustenance, and I don’t care how it happened or how blameless you may be, it’s got to stop. Get Fredericka here. Stay on these grounds for as long as it takes, and keep low.”

  “But she likes to go out.”

  “That may be,” said Philippa, “but I’m fond of the throne.”

  “She’ll go mad. You know, it isn’t as if she can amuse herself by doing quadratic equations. I don’t think she’s ever read a book.”

  “We’ll see,” said the queen. “It may be too late, anyway. Apehand has this in his sweaty palms, and you cannot predict what he’ll do with it. We need quiet above all. No more disturbances, or for the first time in my reign I shall have to call upon Mr Neil. Bring Fredericka to the palace. The both of you must drop out of sight.”