Who Guards a Prince?

by Reginald Hill

  She shivered under her robe.

  He saw a girl in her mid-twenties, frowning and unsure, not frightened, but standing with shoulders hunched like a boxer pondering tactics. She had too much of his own solidity of jaw to be truly beautiful, but she was a fine, handsome girl, and in her soft dark eyes and her long dark hair he saw his wife again as she had been when first they met and suddenly the distance between them was too much.

  Two paces took him across it.

  “Flora,” he said again and folded her in his arms.

  She accepted the embrace though she did not return it, letting him bury his face in her hair for a long moment before gently pushing him away. The robe fell open and as his eyes took in her body, for a second he was seeing his lost Mavis again. Almost instantly he turned away but not before the longing and the guilt had shown in his face.

  Flora pulled the robe shut, went to the mantelpiece and lit a cigarette.

  “This is a surprise, Dad,” she said calmly. “Have a seat. Tell me all about it.”

  “What’s to tell?” he said, in control again. “I promised a visit. Here I am.”

  “That simple? OK. I was fixing some coffee. Would you like a cup?”

  She sounded very American he thought as he nodded. Though doubtless to the Yanks she still sounded awfully British, just as his own Scottishness was only recognized in England now.

  He sank into an armchair, leaned back and listened to her clinking cups in the kitchen. The fatigue of the journey was heavy upon him but when he closed his eyes it dragged him down into fantasy not sleep. He tried it again now. The images were still there; fire leaping and a whole queue of dead faces peering through the corroding flames; to them now Mavis, rearing high like a serpent and twisting so that he could see her body, now waxy pale and wasted as it had been at the end, now full and luscious as in her youth.

  He forced himself back to reality. Flora was standing over him with a cup in her hand.

  “You look awful,” she said.

  He took the coffee gratefully. Aware of the shortcomings of her robe, she had found a frilly apron and tied it round her waist to hold it closed. The effect was slightly ludicrous. Like a Bunny girl.

  Or a Mason.

  He sighed and drank his coffee. To be here alone with his daughter, to have time ahead of them to teach and to learn about each other, to reshape their relationship—these were luxuries he would be willing to pay much for. Barely a week ago, they might have been his for free, if he had obeyed his own instinct and the urgings of the Davisons.

  But now his mind was fragmented among a myriad concerns and ill-equipped to deal with any of them—a crippled woman asleep in a hotel by the airport, an unformulated threat to the Prince, an awareness of his own peril both from within the Law, and outside it.

  He had come here first because he had to come, because he owed it to them both, to his daughter and his wife; but also, his irrepressible honesty of self-analysis told him, because there was at the moment nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. The fever of flight, in every sense, was over and arrival had brought with it neither the feeling of refuge nor the power of decision.

  “I’m OK,” he said. “Really I am.”

  “Good. So tell me, why have you come?”

  “You sound like immigration control,” he tried to joke.

  “If you want, we can pretend, Dad,” she said seriously. “I’m your loving daughter who lives abroad. You’re my doting dad, come on a visit. We can put a week in seeing the sights, meeting the citizens. Then a kiss at the airport, a tear in the eye, a wave of the hankie, a long goodbye. Perhaps that’s how we should play it. Perhaps there’s not time for anything more.”

  “Not for that anyway,” said McHarg with a sense of dramatic irony. “I’m here to find out if I have to settle for being a permanent stranger with my child.”

  “Forget the child bit,” she said. “Dads grow older, children grow up. What’s really brought you here? Guilt, is it? You want to be absolved?”

  He leaned forward now, making himself uncomfortable so that his tired mind would not be spilling its remaining energies into the seductive upholstery.

  “Absolved from what?” he said harshly.

  “You say it, Dad. Come on. You really can if you try!”

  “I’ll say it because there’s no time for games!” he cried. “For your mother’s death. You think I’m responsible. Worse, you think I prevented you and her from being together when it happened. Is that what you want me to say?”

  “I knew you could do it, Dad,” she applauded with bitter mockery. “Are you beginning to feel better now?”

  “She was incurable,” he said softly. “You must know that. You’re not stupid.”

  “Incurable, perhaps. But not inconsolable, not un-helpable, not unlovable!” she flashed back. “While you were touring the fucking empire protecting your precious fucking prince, who was looking after your proper concerns back home?”

  He nodded, not seeing her but regarding the past.

  “You,” he said. “Yes, I begin to see. You.”

  “Yes, me,” she said fiercely. “And when you did finally take notice, when you did finally make the big sacrifice which won such universal admiration, what’s your first step? That’s it. Move away, separate us. King bloody Douglas wants no rival near the throne!”

  “Rival!” said McHarg. “Flora, please…it was your mother’s wish…to take pressure off you…and for herself, she so loved the sea, the air…”

  “Did she now? And you? How did you love it, Dad? What did it feel like for you, big hard Duggie McHarg, the royal defender, to find himself out in the sticks? Oh, the time must have stretched away ahead of you dreary and dull as those empty winter beaches. Did you start looking for the signs then, start hoping just a little that it might be next week rather than next month, or next day rather than either…”

  His hand snaked out, it was pure instinct, the only control left to him being that which unclenched the fisted fingers. The slap cracked against her face like a dry branch snapping.

  “Hey you! What the hell’s going on here?”

  There was a naked man in the doorway, gingery hair bed-tousled, astonishment warring with sleep in his half-closed eyes. He was fortyish, beginning to get paunchy.

  McHarg ignored him, concentrating all his ebbing energy on his daughter.

  “Understand this, if you understand nothing else. I wanted her to live forever. And I wanted you to be with us. If I’d had my way you would have been. It was your mother, always your mother, worrying about you, protecting you. Exams! I said to hell with the exams! But your mother, she said…she said…”

  He dried up, like a tyro actor not yet strong enough to carry on in the face of a totally inimical audience.

  “My mother said,” she echoed. “Not once did you pay her any heed living. And you expect me to believe you heeded her dying! One thing I know for certain is, I didn’t see her before she died because you didn’t want me to see her!”

  “You must believe I hate you,” marvelled McHarg.

  “Hate me? No, that’s not true, I never believed that. But resented me, misunderstood me, perhaps feared me.”

  “Feared? What, for God’s sake?”

  She considered. She was completely in control. It was indeed fearful to observe her.

  “In general terms, it’s too complicated to go into. But I often remember something Mum said to me when she was having a bad turn. She said that the pain was bearable because she knew you would not let her bear more than she could. That gave me a laugh at the time. You were in Hong Kong or somewhere. But I’ve thought about it a lot in the past couple of years. How do you stand on euthanasia, Dad? And who’s to care if you jumped the gun a bit?”

  McHarg rose. He felt numb but his face must have shown something for the naked man stepped forward to put a protective arm round Flora’s shoulders. At the same time the movement made him conscious of his nudity and he dropped the other hand to conceal his
privates.

  His mouth opened and he said something but McHarg did not hear. He went out of the door leaving it wide behind him.

  “Was he your father?” said Christie. “Jesus.”

  But Flora, staring through the open door, did not hear either.

  Betty was awake when McHarg returned to the hotel. She took one look at him and without a word put a small tablet into his hand and made him wash it down with a glass of Scotch.

  He kicked his shoes off, let his jacket fall to the floor and collapsed on to the bed.

  “You’ll ruin your trousers,” were the last words he heard.

  The sleeping pill was strong enough to hold him in dull blackness for about four hours but as its effect wore off, the flame and the fearful images began to reassert themselves. Once again mingled with them were images of Mavis, now skeletal and now with Flora’s ripe heavy body, and McHarg responded in his sleep with the hot feverish lust of an alcoholic orgy. Once he dreamt he awoke but the awakening was so strange that he knew he still slept and he turned feverishly on the disordered bed, which seemed to open between his thighs and become soft moist flesh, warm indeed but cool by comparison with the pulsating burning rod he thrust inside in search of relief. It came quickly and violently and for a little while he slept peacefully once more.

  Then he awoke and this time knew it a true awakening, though beneath him he found not the tangled sheets he expected but the warm body of a woman.

  “God, you’re a weight,” said Betty breathlessly.

  He rolled off.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  He looked at his watch. It was mid-afternoon. “What happened?” he asked.

  “There’s gallant!” she said. “You slept, I managed to get your trousers off and put a blanket over you. A wee while ago you threw it off and began tossing around something awful. I thought you were ill till my world-famous powers of observation spotted the root of the trouble. To diagnose was to understand the cure. With true Hippocratic altruism, I offered myself.”

  “I’m sorry,” said McHarg, still only half awake.

  “Thanks,” said Betty. “I’ll tell you something, McHarg. From my experience you’re a damn sight better asleep than awake.”

  He rubbed his eyes and sat upright. “Why’d you do it?” he asked.

  “Farewell present,” she said briskly, beginning to dress with that mechanical ease which he found so disturbing. Every movement was precise, economical. Within less than a minute she was easing herself off the bed into the wheelchair alongside.

  “Farewell?”

  “Yes. In about ninety minutes, I’ll be leaving Boston, a city which forever may remain to me as nothing more than an airport and a quick screw. I’m off to Cal-i-forn-i-a. I fixed it all while you lay sleeping.”

  “But why?” he protested. “Why so soon, anyway?”

  His voice faded away. He was being absurd, he realized. He had protested against her insistence that she should travel with him on the Boston flight, told her that she would be a drag on him, commanded her to go directly to California.

  Now here he was on the brink of begging her to stay.

  “I spoke to my brother-in-law on the phone. They’ve got the result of my tests,” said Betty, her voice controlled and unemotional. “There’s some hope, they say. Even without some lunatic trying to kill me, there’s some hope I’ll be able to walk, McHarg.”

  “That’s grand,” said McHarg dully; then, trying to infuse a proper enthusiasm into his voice, he repeated, “That’s grand. Really grand.”

  And finally, ashamed of himself, he said, “Oh Jesus. I’m sorry. I’m not in a jumping-for-joy mood, but that’s the best news I’ve heard in a long while. I mean a long while. Years. In years.”

  She searched his face with unblinking eyes and said, “I almost believe you mean it.”

  “Lassie,” he said attempting a smile, “when I say the best, I mean it. Even if the competition isn’t up to much.”

  “That’s better,” she said. “That’s the real McHarg. Listen. What I’d like very much is for you to come with me. Forget this business, whatever it is. You could be safe out there at my sister’s. Sink from view. I’ve got a bit of money and I’m sure you’re a man of vast resource. That’s what I’d like to suggest. That’s what I’d like to persuade you to do. But I don’t think I’ll even bother to try, McHarg.”

  “Why not?” he asked gently.

  “Because I’m finding out about you, McHarg. And I’m certain you wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. So why go through the hassle? I don’t know what you’re going to do. Jesus, if a couple of hours leaves you in the state you were in when you got back here, then God knows what a couple of days may do! But whatever you do, I can only be a hindrance. Fit and upright, there’d be no shaking me off. Like this, well, I may be OK for farewell presents but not much else. Besides, I’ve killed my one man for this season. So, I’m off in search of a cure. Isn’t it nice when altruism and self-interest just for once happen to coincide?”

  She was weeping, though her words came out as determinedly merry as ever.

  McHarg sat on the edge of the bed and put his arms around her.

  “What will you do?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But you’re right. I have to stay.”

  “I’m never wrong about a half-wit,” she said. “Now help me pack.”

  As he pushed her through the airport concourse later that evening neither made any attempt at talk. Suddenly, however, he diverted the wheeelchair into the slight shelter of the angle of a magazine kiosk and kissed her long and passionately.

  “What did I do to deserve that?” she gasped.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just a mad impulse.”

  Betty laughed disbelievingly. McHarg laughed too, but his eyes were fixed on the retreating back of the man whose emergence through the arrivals channel had been the cause of the sudden detour.

  It was Stanley Partington, his open, weathered face concealed by large sunglasses and disfigured by several bruises.

  McHarg watched him out of sight and was just about to push the chair back into the mainstream of pedestrians again when he realized that more familiar faces were in the process of passing.

  “Hey,” said Betty. “Isn’t that Hunsingore and his New Vision lot?”

  “I think it is,” said McHarg, standing very still.

  “Come to save Boston probably. Well, at least you should be all right with him in town. He’s always on the side of the criminal.”

  It was good to hear Betty joke. And he was glad she hadn’t seen Partington. She had enough worries of her own already.

  Later at the embarkation gate, she said to him, “I’m not going to let myself fall in love with you, McHarg. Not till I’m back on my own feet and I can see that you’re still on yours.”

  “That’s wise,” he said. “Take care.”

  “You too,” she said.

  She didn’t look back.

  CHAPTER 3

  After her father had gone, Flora McHarg had retreated to the bathroom. Christie heard the sound of the shower running a few moments later, but when he tried the door it was locked.

  His broad amiable face creased with worry, he washed himself in the kitchen sink before returning to the bedroom to get dressed. To some extent he had become anaesthetized to his own family worries, but this was different. Perhaps it was his awareness of how little Flora pressurized him with regard to Judith that made him so sensitive to her own hitherto unsuspected problems.

  She was still in the shower when he had finished dressing, so he sat with a cup of coffee and a cigarette and waited.

  When she finally emerged she said, “Hey, it’s after nine. I thought you had a seminar?”

  “You know me. I always tell them, you think you’re so damn clever, if I’m not there you’d better start without me! Flora, are you OK?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be? I should have thought the Connollys of all people would have recognized
a normal healthy family relationship.”

  Christie shook his head.

  “The Granda’s a bit obsessed, true. He thinks you Brits are bent on knocking over all his family one by one. But he doesn’t think the family are knocking over the family!”

  Flora went into the bedroom and emerged a moment later fastening up a pair of jeans.

  “Me neither, not really. Not that he isn’t capable of it. My father’s capable of anything, Christie. I’ve always known it. When I was a little girl, I was proud of it. But when I became a big girl, I got afraid of it.”

  “And now you’re a woman?”

  She looked at him, trouble clouding her normally serene, wide-spaced eyes.

  “I don’t know. Something about him this morning worried me. Even touched me.”

  “Christ, you’ve a queer way of showing it!” he laughed.

  “When a McHarg’s uncertain, he strikes out,” said Flora.

  “But I’m OK, really. Don’t neglect your class.”

  “All right. Want a lift?”

  “No, not this morning.”

  “Lunchtime then. Will you be in the refectory?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got a date with Dree,” she said. “So it’ll be tonight?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “There’s a campus reception I’ve got to attend,” he said. “There’s this gang of your fellow countrymen, the New Vision they call themselves…”

  “You mean Hunsingore and his lot?” she asked, surprised.

  “You know him?”

  “Not personally. I was once into that sort of thing a few years back. In and out. It’s pretty yucky. Why are they getting the treatment?”

  “Boston dearly loves a lord,” said Christie. “And besides, he’s quite a scholar in his own way. Tomorrow I’m hosting the lot of them at lunch. They feel they relate to my department more than to the moral philosophers somehow.”

  “I’d watch that,” said Flora. “Will you be bedding down here again tonight?”

  “That’s an odd way of putting it,” said Christie.

  “All right. Try this. Since your wife’s away for another four days, do you propose to spend another night screwing your mistress?” she said with uncharacteristic vehemence.